Machine Man (serial)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Before I left to meet Lola Banks for lunch, I stopped by the Repository to get to dressed. I had a lot of legs in there, and some fingers, and a hand that wasn’t very practical but I liked too much to scrap. It could crush bricks. The impractical part was it crushed everything, whether you wanted it to or not. It was very twitchy.

After a few minutes’ deliberation, I chose Contour legs. These were a matched titanium set with a bucket seat I wore around my hips. You didn’t walk in them so much as sit there and let them take you places. They weren’t my favorites, but they had the advantage of a vaguely natural look, such that they might go unnoticed beneath my jeans. Most of my other legs didn’t fit under pants. Also they were heavy, and noisy, and vented gases.

As I clambered out of my Work legs and into the Contours, I realized the irony of the situation. The first time I met Lola, at the hospital, I told her I didn’t care about looking natural. But here I was climbing into a set of legs chosen precisely because they were least likely to make her recoil in horror. Thanks to Lola, I was beginning to care what people thought. I was becoming aware of social niceties. Soon I would be totally normal.

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