After the fight was over, she took me away from the fighting, back to the Aegis base, sending me reassuring thoughts through our link as she went. She almost didn’t need to; I was happy enough no longer to be under the control of that nut case that I didn’t care what happened to me next. I just knew it could only be something better.

And so it was. She placed me inside some kind of device—an autofactory, she told me later—and did something to the controls, and it took me apart and put me back together in a completely different way.

When it had finished…I was still a gun. But this time, I could move! In fact, as I thought about arms and legs, I suddenly discovered that I had them. My gun body had unfolded and rearranged itself into something human-shaped!

I was still slightly larger than a human—about seven feet tall, and made of metal and rubber. I clanked and whirred when I walked. Nobody was ever going to mistake me for a living being again.

But at least I had some kind of body again.