I got two of the major connections undone, and then was able to bend my hand forward all the way so I could grip my own wrist. I could feel the clamp at that point and tried to exert enough pressure to break it, but without the full connections to the heavy joints in the rest of my arm, I couldn’t do it. Ugh, this was going to be fun, in the not at all fun sense.

Now I separated my attention and made sure I had individual control of both my hand and the joint. I can control a lot more than two things via the feed simultaneously, but it was a lot harder doing it inside my own body, with parts that weren’t designed to be manipulated this way. The last connection in my wrist came apart, but I was able to keep my hand gripping the clamp. (Yeah, if my hand had fallen off at that point, I’d be screwed.) Using my fingers I started to climb my hand carefully down my lower arm, past the clamp. As it pulled the nerve pathways tight, I got them to detach, which, you know, ow, and the skin was stretching taut, peeling away off my hand. Now came the tricky part.

If this went wrong I was going to feel really stupid. The Targets would finally show up and be all “What the hell was it trying to do to itself?”

I wrenched my wrist out of the clamp and the skin broke. That quarter of my body swung free and I concentrated desperately on keeping my detached hand gripping my forearm. I carefully pulled the free arm in, pressing the detached hand against my chest. My organic parts were sweating like crazy. The swinging cable made a loud squeak. I froze for three seconds, then realized if the noise did attract attention, I’d better get this stupid hand reattached.

With the help of my still clamped left hand I got the right hand reattached to my right arm. That was easier, but the skin was torn and not all the nerve pathways wanted to get back in place. I flexed my right hand carefully, wiggled my fingers, and then broke the clamp off my left hand.

I managed to keep the cable from swinging so it wasn’t nearly as noisy. I curled up to free my feet. The Targets had actually made this easier on me by hanging me upside down. (Save for later: whoever had done this to me didn’t understand SecUnits or bots in general. They hadn’t known to look for the onboard weapons in my arms.)

Once I got my ankles loose I hung from the left hand cable. I could see more from this angle, that this was definitely a deactivated assembler. Shapes in the darkness looked like old pieces of scaffold, the thing like a looming tower was maybe a stack of large transport crates. This was somewhere underground, a huge shaft, maybe an excavation that had been intended for safe storage?