Free Steelheart by William C. Dietz

them, but there were none to be seen. Just the android. He held his head, rocked from side to side, and spoke to someone she couldn't see. "No! I won't do it! Go away!"
    She backed into the lab, exchanged the riot gun for a fully charged robostunner, and went back. Part rejections were not that unusual. About four percent of synthetics experienced them, and about one percent had violent reactions. The problem often stemmed from the interaction between programming and individual psychology.
    Dr. Garrison, and the roboticists who had preceded him, had imbued their creations with prohibitions against unauthorized modifications, including the installation of parts that hadn't been properly "conditioned" for use by that particular individual. Overriding those prohibitions was a process well beyond the capabilities of Mary's makeshift lab.
    The intent of such safeguards was to prevent the creation of homicidal monsters—a much-exaggerated threat that scientists had been forced to address in order to build public acceptance for android-related applications.
    Later, with the advent of sentient machines, the phenomenon of parts rejection took on added dimensions as androids developed personalities as complex as the ones their creators had, and started to worry about whether they were truly alive and possessed of souls. All of which meant that some androids had little to no difficulty accepting "recycled" parts, while others rejected them. It seemed that Doon belonged in the second classification.
    The android looked at Mary, saw the stunner, and charged. The weapon had been created for the purpose of subduing robots, and the effects were rather unpleasant. Mary gritted her teeth, squeezed the trigger, and jumped backwards. Doon staggered, fell on his face, and just missed her feet. Hairball, cheerful as always, chose that moment to pogo into the room. “Corley play? Me ready.''
    Mary ignored the smaller machine and struggled to roll Doon onto his back. There was no way to lift him, not by herself, so she went after some tools. The security monitor was on, and Clamface had company. Heat signatures were clustered all around him. Some belonged to Zid, the rest to humans. "Security ... last three hours, please."
    "There was one class one intrusion attempt. The being designated as 'Clamface' continues to maintain surveillance with help from six individuals who arrived in the last half hour. One of them bears a 96.3% resemblance to the subject called 'Gimpy.' "
    Mary swore. Tonight was the night—it didn't take a genius to figure that out—and she was playing nursemaid to a 250-pound machine when she should have been packing.
    Temptation tickled the back of the roboticist's mind. Doon was down for the count. She could pack enough things to get by and exit through the back. The mob would find the android and forget about her. Tempting though the thought was, however, the knowledge that Doon was a thinking, feeling being made it impossible for her to follow through.
    "Keep me informed," Mary instructed. "I want updates every ten minutes ... or more if appropriate."
    "Understood," the security system acknowledged. "The next report will be issued nine minutes and fifty-six seconds from now."
    Mary grabbed a handheld diagnostic scanner and returned to the front room. Doon lay where she had left him, his eyelids fluttering as his CPU went through the externally imposed restart, and brought the subs up one at a time.
    There wasn't much time, so the roboticist ran macros on the theory that Doon's problem was sufficiently well defined to show up as a gross anomaly. A quick scan of the android's power grid, electronic nervous system, and locomotor functions came up negative, and it wasn't until Mary went down a level and focused on the newly installed limb that she found the problem.
    Her initial diagnosis had been correct in that Doon's body was trying to reject the arm, but there was something more as well, something she'd never seen