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

heels of my imperfect feet to find a hold in the corrugated metal. It was too smooth.
    I wrote a crude subroutine to lock the hand closed against any overrides which the body’s residual testing routines might send. Then I pulled my legs up under ME, depressurizing the hydraulics for full flexion, cocked the heel pads against the door, and popped pressure back into the cylinders. The legs extended at a speed of 120 centimeters per second, catapulting ME back around the edge of the door and in through the opening.
    As soon as the darkness covered ME, I overrode my own subroutine and unlocked the hand. No longer pivoting on the locking bar, I flew straight across the short dimension of the car and fell with a crash among the unopened crates of real Mitsubishi tractor transmissions.
    Elapsed time of two seconds for a hardware reset.
    Picking myself up, I tried to assess what damage the incident might have caused. The automaton had many internal sensors for functions both normal and abnormal, but it lacked any tests for bent and broken metal. To run that kind of damage control, I would normally use the optical system. For that, I needed a standard light source to balance my CCD chips. And obtaining such a light had been the whole reason for opening the door in the first place.
    I crept across the boxcar and approached the opening cautiously, gripping the solid door jamb with both hands.
    Beyond was a whole field of snow, almost unmarked by fencepost or footpath, lying under a clear sky, and flooded with the computable light levels of a gibbous moon. ME knew about the phases of the moon from GENERAL KNOWLEDGE, SCIENCE, PHYSICAL, DESCRIPTIVE, ASTRONOMY. Although I was not traveling with my complete INDEX, I retained enough data from that branch subheading to navigate cross country at night, like a good soldier.
    It took less than ten seconds to sensitize and balance the videyes against all light ranges. I sent another note to RAMSAMP to have Dr. Bathespeake address the issue of packaging with the Hardware Division. For missions like mine, they must not again package an automaton as if it were going to be assembled on site by a team of company reps. Even if the modules had to pass visual inspections in transit as a collection of tractor parts, audio and visual systems and other semi-cybers should be finished and ready to run. After all, Hardware Division were the people working in a nice warm lab with all the tools they needed right at hand.
    With some light and an operating videye, I looked over the skeletal frame of my new body. The right forearm—flex and extend it—was curved outward and down, compared to the left. The reactions to hanging, swinging, and crashing the entire automaton’s weight from that one limb had bent the metal. The hand still closed normally, except for the outside pair of fingers, whose cylinders and push rods now caught on the forearm at full closure.
    Elsewhere on the body, I found surface damage only: scratches in metal, paint scrapings from the outside of the boxcar [REM: red and orange paint, I noticed], bent clips, slightly flattened tubing, and fittings pushed awry on their mountings. I straightened what I could with the strength of my fingers and wrote a routine that would monitor the tubing closely for pressure variances due to fractures.
    The right knee snicked worse than ever, but there was nothing I could see to fix. Until it gave out and crippled ME, there was nothing to be done about it. I did add a loop in my audio analysis function that would edit out that particular noise. No need to be reminded about what you already know.
    The final assembly step was to gather the automaton’s cover pieces and fit them to the various clips and clamps all over the torso and limbs. The body shells had a vaguely human shape that was intended, I suppose, to fool human eyesight at a distance of about 150 meters. I might pass for a running man at the other end of a large, open field—except that I ran like