Free Me, A Novel of Self-Discovery by Thomas T. Thomas

highest contrast—and thus the sharpest focus. Crude but almost foolproof, and it did not require my continuous monitoring. I could override the system—called a “manual” adjustment for reasons now lost to technological history—in order to focus for any bit pattern on the receptor chip, whether at the field center or not. Tuning the system required ME to establish a standard light level and balance the CCD chips’ sensitivity toward it. The litter in the packing crates included pattern cards for this purpose, but none of the Pinocchio, Inc., engineers had thought to include a light tube, diode array, lantern, flashlight, or other photon source. The inside of my boxcar, being intended for bulk freight hauling, was a rough shell. It contained no lighting system at all, much less a “standard” light source. Evidently, someone on the Pinocchio, Inc., team had thought it might.
    Up to this point, I had been working internally [REM: that is, inside my own logics], making calls on the cellular phone network, checking out the leg assemblies, sieving the RAM banks—doing it all by touch and logic monitoring. Now, just to find the pattern cards, I had to boost the gain on the CCD chips all the way to max.
    I could see only deeper shadows around ME.
    Switching over to infrared did no good: the warmest thing in that boxcar was my circuitry, with some glow on the floor at the four corners, where heat from the journal boxes was seeping upward into the car.
    It was now the middle of the night, so no sunlight was warming the top or sides of the car. If I opened the door, I might find some reflectance from cityglow, starshine, or even moonlight. My impaired calendar function made it impossible for ME to know what phase the moon might be in, or even what season this might be—although the total IR-blackness of the boxcar’s metal shell suggested it was the long, dark season that humans call winter.
    I rose, balancing against the sway of the train’s motion, and walked to the middle of the long side of the boxcar, where my three-dimensional map from TRAVEL.DOC said the door would be. The release lever was held down by a spring clamp, which I quickly figured out and sprung. I threw the lever up, over, and down.
    Now came a chance to test the strength of my new torso and legs against the inertia of the door’s dead weight. The plank floor of the boxcar would give a good traction to the rubber insets on my feet. [REM: I rubbed them back and forth at a one-millimeter elevation to gauge the surface.] The only solid point for gripping the door was the vertical locking bar attached to its release lever.
    I grasped it and pushed lightly with no result. Harder, and the door gave a centimeter. Harder yet, exerting a force of sixty joules, and the door suddenly leapt free.
    ME’s mechanical reflexes are fast, operating in the millisecond range, but before I can react to a situation, I must first observe, then analyze, then program a response, then initiate it. This sequence proceeds at higher speeds, in the nanosecond range, and yet I still can be caught by surprise.
    The door came unstuck and, in half a second, moved two meters along its grooved rails. Because I was pushing against its flat face from the inside, my force was applied at an acute angle cutting across the lines defined by the door and its guide rails. As the door moved back, my body moved outward, in the direction I had been pushing, across the plane of the doorway, and launched into the open space beyond.
    White snow. Lit by a lozenge-shaped moon. Cut by the margin of wet, black gravel along the roadbed.
    As I said, ME’s reflexes are fast, but sometimes not fast enough. The four-fingered, dual opposed hand failed to open in time. Anchored by its grip on the locking bar, I swung in a short arc, out over the snow, to crash against the exterior side of the door. And even that impact failed to jar the hand loose.
    For a space of two seconds I hung there, scrabbling with the