Machine Man

As a boy, I wanted to be a train. I didn’t realize this was unusual—that other kids played with trains, not as them. They enjoyed the management. Constructing tracks and having trains not fall off them. Smashing them into things. I didn’t understand that. What I liked about playing trains was pretending my body was two hundred tons of unstoppable steel. A precisely tuned engine of pistons and valves moving at a hundred miles per hour.

“You mean robots,” said my best friend Jeremy. “You want to play robots.” He was right. Trains were just the closest thing I knew.

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