The automaton’s fingers dug through the metal blocks on my wrist, tearing several of them free. A strip of my wrist went numb as that spell died. I allowed myself to fall backward, raising both feet to my chest. The other automaton followed me down, and I kicked it in the neck with all of my strength. The automaton snapped away, spinning like a bicycle tire.

I fled, stalling as long as I could, trying to absorb every detail of the experience: the gentle pull of gravity; the way the dust dropped in a vacuum, every speck falling like a lead weight; the Earth hanging overhead, so large it gave the impression it could come crashing down on us at any moment. I scooped up another rock and held it as if it were more precious than gold.

They spread out to surround me. Two bounced through the air, while the third kept to the ground, looking like a slow-motion jogger. Interesting . . . different automatons adapted differently, suggesting they retained at least a little individuality and independence within their wood-and-metal shells. The fourth flickered into view to my left.

Ready for another ride?

How much time had passed since I arrived? Five minutes, maybe? It would never be enough. I stared at the Earth, mentally reorienting myself so that I was no longer looking up, but down. That was an awfully long way to fall.

The nice thing about this body was that I appeared to be incapable of experiencing vertigo. Fear, on the other hand, I could feel just fine.

I studied the Pacific Ocean, still shining in the sunlight. Another automaton flew at me. I jumped away, doing my best to estimate distances and calculate acceleration. I had to guess at both. The radius of the Earth was roughly 6400 kilometers. Using that as my guide, I picked a spot roughly 7000 kilometers up, activated the automaton’s magic, and disappeared.

Earth’s gravity began to pull me home from the moment I materialized. There was no air here, which meant I had no way to control my fall, and nothing to slow my acceleration.

For the first time, I noticed a significant design flaw in Gutenberg’s automatons: there was no way to close my eyes. I tried to lose myself in math instead. This high up, the pull of gravity would be fractionally less than 9.8 meters per second squared. Maybe eighty percent of normal?

The other automatons flickered into view around me, but I fell right past them. They vanished and reappeared, trying to get ahead of me, but each time they lost momentum.

I used my own magic to travel to a point just above them, shedding velocity in a brilliant flare of light. We weren’t quite close enough to touch each other. Light-speed travel didn’t allow for precision. One appeared directly below me, but I plowed through it like a locomotive, leaving it pinwheeling overhead.