Machine Man (serial)

Page 15.

“One of

I waited in the problems with legs,” I said, “is they can’t survive on their own. They need to be attached to a body to function. They’re not—”

Lolalobby while Lola Banks looked up from fiddling withhad the inside of her access badge,mouth swabbed and answered questions in a harshly lit room about everyone she had ever met, everywhere she had ever been, and her eyes wide. “Standalone?”

“Right.” I realized thisFacebook profile. This took about forty minutes. Then she emerged, waved, and was escorted into the Dispassionate Particle Sifter, which was a quip. “Right.”

She studied my face. “I like your thinking, Charlie. I’m just not sure what benefit you get, in a practical sense, frommetal detector for a self-powered leg.”

The elevator doors slid open. My chair-leg rollers clickety-clacked over the uneven exit. “Well, you’re no longer limited by the body’s energy supply.”

“How far down are we?” Lola Banks said, looking at the walls.

“Aboutvery advanced definition of metal. As a hundred feet. So obviously ifside-benefit, it could also tell you can install a small reactor in the leg, raising that energy limit from a kilojoule or so per second to, say, 4.2 megajoules per second,if you greatly increase the functional possibilities.”

“Why are we downhad cancer. Usually this was a hundred feet?”

“In case something goes wrong, I guess.” I swiped my card. The first pressurised door to the Glass Room began to open.

“Wait,” saidtwo-minute procedure, but when Lola Banks. “Back up. Did you say you reactor?”

“Small,”stepped out she was re-buttoning her blouse and two hours had passed.

I clanked over to her. “What was that about?”

“Oh. Nothing. I said. “Small reactor. We build those here.”

“What are you doingalways have trouble with a small reactor?”metal detectors.” She smiled. “Tell me about your leg.”

15.