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page0038.mm
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<p>Page 38.</p>
<p>My legs stopped at a busy intersection somewhere south of downtown. I
didn’t know where, exactly. All I knew was they had been
running for ten minutes and I had been hanging on, begging them not
to kill me. Like all my legs, the Contours had been subjected to some
pretty rigorous quality assurance in the lab, but some things you
couldn’t simulate. One of those things, apparently, was that
mortal terror interfered with the legs’ ability to interpret
mental instructions. At least, I hope that’s what it was. The
alternative was that they were wilful.</p>
<p>I had gotten a lot of alarmed looks over the last ten minutes, and
some screaming and fleeing, but now, as I stood swaying and sweating
on the street corner, passers-by barely glanced at me. A man put his
hand on his wife’s shoulder to guide her around me; that was
all. I realized that with my tie hanging over my shoulder like a
tongue, my shirt dripping with sweat, my pants almost shredded and my
jacket gray with concrete dust, I looked like a hobo. And I started
to laugh, because that was a very normal thing to be, and my legs had
stopped and I was still alive, and that had been the most
out-of-control freaking ten minutes of my life.</p>