The Gingerbread Man

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Andrew Martin began his transformation on July 4, 2076. It might not have happened at all had he not been interrogating himself about the purpose of life. “The purpose of life,” he muttered, looking deep within, “is to avoid pain.”

But he was thinking of the pain inflicted upon the psyche by other people and how it would be better not to care what they said or did, or, indeed, to have anything to do with them. In any case, it started, as most things do in life, by accident. In fact, it was the rarest of rarities, an automobile accident. With automated roads and computerized controls, a car could collide with another, or with a stationary object, only by total malfunction, and even malfunctions were programmed to fail-safe. In Andrew’s case, however, a computer chip failed at a critical junction, short-circuiting the steering mechanism and the fail-safe devices, and allowed his vehicle to propel itself into and under the back of a computer-driven semi.

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