Machine Man

Each stride of the Contours, my neck stretched so far back my head felt ready to pop right off. When each foot slammed down, my chin hit my chest hard enough to crack teeth. Through eyes blurred with tears, I saw a busy street approaching and thought: Oh thank God now they will stop. But they didn’t. They ran into the traffic. A sedan whipped by so close its turbulence tore at my hair. A truck the size of a building loomed above me, and I heard a terrified shriek, and realized it was me. There was a clicking deep within the Contours, something I felt rather than heard, and they stopped. I was about to die, I realized. I was about to learn why you didn’t conduct the first live field test of new technology while strapped to the top of it. This truck would run right over the top of me, and when it stopped and the driver climbed out, he would find a long bloody smear leading to a gleaming, undamaged pair of titanium legs. It would be the ultimate vindication of my work, proving the superiority of artificial body parts. But also the need for comprehensive bug-testing.

The legs bent and sprang. I screamed like a child. The truck, traffic, and road grew small and far away. I let go of the seat to flail my arms, as if I could grab the air, or fly. My upward velocity slowed, and for the briefest moment I was flying, moving leisurely forward sixty feet above the ground. It was kind of beautiful. Then I began to fall. The world grew larger and more dangerous. As it rushed toward me, my brain reckoned my terminal velocity at forty miles per hour: that was how fast I would be going when I hit the sidewalk.

Below, a woman and her young son gaped up at me. At first it seemed a terrible coincidence, them standing at the exact point I was destined to intersect the sidewalk. Then I realized it wasn’t. It was calculated. My legs saw these people as cushioning: physical objects that could help absorb the shock of impact. I had programmed them to avoid collisions on a horizontal plane, but anything lower than they were was considered ground. It had seemed a reasonable assumption at the time, in the lab.

36.