Spare and Found Parts Read Online Free Page B

were hung in clusters, where she could change them in a moment as her projects dictated. Her lamp dangled from a thick redcord from the ceiling, a pool of yellow enveloping her workshop.
    Two pins, two wee ball bearings. Nell used tweezers to make sure they didn’t up and roll away into the crevice between the desk and the wall (it ate more good parts than she could spare). One fresh battery. Some springs, a couple of cogs, three inches of wire. Two buttons painted to look like eyes. Twenty-five minutes of Nell’s fingers pulling sense from the scrap, her whole mind empty but for the rising satisfaction of a tiny creature coming together at her hands. It was only a creature because of the eyes. Otherwise it was just a practical exercise in assembly and kinetic movement. She was running scales on the piano here, conjugating satisfying reams of verbs.
    The eyes were a tiny flourish, a vibrato on the high note. They were a perfectly rolled r . They made the tiny machine more than the sum of its parts. They made it look alive as she connected the copper to the battery, as the tiny pin legs moved one after the other. Alive, rather than simply logic. Just cause and effect. Nell looked down at the bobbly little battery with legs, a mess with no casing or style. She could see how every part of him worked—how every part of it worked. It.
    There was no magic here. Eyes didn’t make it anymore than coils and wire and hinge and metal. Scrap. Practice. The exercise of the steel sprite wasn’t enough for Nell anymore. She wanted more than button eyes. She knew that before the Turn machines could think. That . That was what she wanted.
    The sprite skittered clumsily across her desk. A whispered word for a thinking machine was computer . The word sent thrills down Nell’s spine. Forbidden, clever metal things.
    Computers had brought about the end of the world. Black Water City was so grateful to have survived—even if it was still sick and wheezing—that the very mention of computers was blasphemy. They were brought to life by reams of numbers that conjured thought, and impulse, and memory out of nothing. Whole tomes of language in numbers and oblique symbols that, when lined up just right, could bring consciousness to steel. She longed for access to it, for how huge it could be.
    Nell didn’t think there was any reason to be afraid of numbers and letters. She’d been raised with a wrench in her hand; there wasn’t a thing made of steel that could spook her. She spent her every waking hour listening to the ticking of a machine that kept her alive. She was sure that the rest of the folk in Black Water City were afraid only because they didn’t askquestions, because they believed what they were told. If all you’d ever heard about the history of your world was horror stories about gleaming boxes full of bad knowledge, of course you’d be afraid.
    Nell knew better than this. Her father had told her that the metal boxes full of magic had been fine. It was people, frightened, angry people, that had brought the world down. Was it just the boxes, she often wondered, that they were so afraid of? How easy it is to stuff myth and horror into a box. Haunted slices of clever steel, something with hard lines, something cold.
    Surely, if there was a way to make a computer look like something people trusted, there’d be a chance for a world full of clever machines again. Friendly-looking computers, full of knowledge, full of answers. Nell sighed. “Think of all we could know.”
    Her wish fell dead in the air, onto the desk. She watched her tiny motion machine dance across the surface and tapped her fingernails against the wood, matching the rhythm it walked in. It was almost endearing, its little eyes blankly staring out. She turned it around, and it walked back toward her, a kind of sweetness to its almost dance.
    She imagined it blinking up at her, moving of free will rather than