20

  That night, after the walking session, when private in the dormitory of comatose humans and senseless bots, I managed to roll the body over, and got it out of its bed to crawl it to the door, where I grabbed hold of the door knob and pulled myself up on my feet.

  Thereafter, ensuring that cameras and microphones were turned off, I wandered around the room. It would have been a lot easier in a room full of beds, as I would have had support structures to hold onto throughout, but with the layout as it was, everything on the floor, I was obliged to stay close to a wall at all times, bracing against it, and switching to holding onto feeding chairs when passing them.

  I fell twice, fortunately without any damage to the body, each time able to crawl back to the door to find my feet again.

  Then, I had another idea, and, after laying my body back down on its bed, went and kicked a bot out, and took its body to walk around in.

  The bot began protesting, making noises about how it was lawfully in the body, as per the roster, but I picked it up by the scruff and threw it into the prison folder I maintained in the rehab computer system. The bot never knew what was going on, and had no idea who I was.

  It did, the next day, remember to complain to its trainer in the courtyard, but nothing it said made sense to anyone, causing it to be ignored and even told to shut up. None of the bots were expected to make ground-breaking progress overnight, and nobody would be bothered enough to investigate if they had been hard at work, locked up, or just plain absent.

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  In the courtyard, I still regularly entered into heads alongside the bots, keeping updated on the systems they were using, to see if they were learning as mechanically as at the start, or if they had begun understanding a little of what was going on, and developing methods to speed things up.

  I naturally never got involved in the action, and was planning to give up entering, for I had started becoming bored by that activity, or inactivity might be the right word for absolute lack of movement.

  The bots would eventually surely learn the ropes, and I was just as confident of that as the trainers were, but they would end up being mechanically trained operators, far removed from the completely integrated controller I was heading to becoming.

  Now, in the dormitory, I wanted to try out my skills at controlling other bodies, imagining that somehow a limitation might develop in my integration, if I conducted all my practice in the one body. Of course, I could not keep any bot as a companion in the head, because all of them making the same complaint would be deciphered as my interference.

  That, in itself, would not matter, and I would have been able to get out of it with absolutely any sort of explanation, but it was the walking itself that we wanted to keep secret.

  Our plan would eventually progress to the point where an unauthorized person would be wandering the rehab property at night, which person could be spotted, if not caught, and we did not want anyone suspecting that such unauthorized snoop was a bot from the dormitory.

  Keeping quiet about these new abilities developing in me, I went through the next day as usual. However, as I became more capable, I began imagining that the old physiotherapy routines also started becoming more useful than they had been before.

  Although sight had not arrived, I had all along been practicing eyeball movement, as it was one of the training exercises delivered in the courtyard sessions. Needless to say, the bots were proving useless in practically everything, and I was the only one able to move the eyeballs.