I awoke slowly the morning after the accident. There was a strange noise buzzing by my head, but not one that I was familiar with. It was also strangely bright - the fire station was situated behind a row of old-growth pines, tall enough to blot out the sun until late morning. Had I really slept that late? I was always the first fire engine up, usually even before the roosters crowed. I liked to watch the cadets raise the American flag, after all. I had to pay homage to the great country that was just great enough to create something like me.

As my senses came fully online, I began to realize that something was wrong. Normally the fire station was awash in noise, filled with the laughter of the heroes that worked there and the mechanical clicks of machines being properly maintained. This room was strangely silent, save for that annoying buzzing by my head. I couldn’t even feel the thrum of my engine, and that was one of the first things that my brave firefighters would have turned on.

Wait... my engine...

Everything came crashing back to me as fast as the crash I had endured the night before. The fire. The man. The train. The hospital. I remembered my innards crumpling to the ground, my shining cab damaged so significantly that I could not even keep my prized ‘68 Ford engine inside. The oil that spilled out on the ground, black as the night itself, seemed to spell my doom in black splotches shaped remarkably like a cross. The staff were lined up along the street, all clapping politely. Even some of the wounded sat up on their gurneys to cheer my final moments as my pistons sputtered their last.

Had I… died? 

With a not-metallic-sounding-at-all scream, my eyes snapped open and I bolted upright, throwing some sort of soft covering off. I made it halfway to the painfully small human-sized door before my brain finally caught up with what I’d just done. I’d grabbed the fabric with my hands. I’d jumped out of bed with my legs. I was… I was…

Slowly I looked down at myself, though I could not see much past the shirt that I was wearing. It stuck out rather significantly, preventing me from looking at my body. Instead, I brought my arms up - somehow I knew how to use them - and stared at them, wide-eyed and stunned. I had hands and fingers, painfully weak and pitiful. I’d seen humans use these digits for any number of small miracles, but I’d never really thought about them as functional implements before. They were just part of the human package, something that I did not have and did not need to understand. I was a fire engine - I drove to the fires and I put them out, and that was all that I had ever needed or wanted to be. Humans could do their own things, and together we would accomplish the impossible, each just as valuable as the other.

But now these hands were on me. Part of me. Attached to me. The fingers seemed so small and dainty, though I found that I could control them as finely as I previously managed the subroutines and systems on my glorious steel body. I reached up and touched my face, running my fingers through the hair. It all felt so stunningly soft, nothing like the hard-forged carbon and iron that I’d been used to for the past four decades. 

A flicker of movement to the side caught my eye, and I turned to look at it. There was a girl there on the wall. I turned more, and she turned to look at me. I took a step forward, watching as she did the same. Her small garment came down to just above her creamy thighs, scandalously covering very little. I’d heard enough locker room chatter to know what a girl wearing garments like this meant.  Sexy, beautiful, and - above all - easy. My elite firefighters would have been delighted, inviting her up to see the steering wheel and setting my cab to rocking far into the night.

I took another step and reached up to the other girl, trying to get her attention… and then I realized what I was looking at. Some sort of reflective surface. I’d seen things like this before as I drove past buildings, but I’d never seen one with such a clear image. I was looking at myself, at this new body, with long legs and smooth skin and absurdly large breasts and round, soft eyes and red hair. I was what the humans would have called gorgeous. Fireman Jimmy would have invited a girl like me to go home with him, though what he did with those girls I never quite understood.

And now that was me. I reached up a hand to touch my face again, watching as the reflection of me did the same. Tears welled up in my eyes as I brushed my fingers across the perfect lips. I could feel emotions that I didn’t know were possible. My hands felt sensations that were unlike anything my steel body could comprehend. My breasts defied gravity as easily as my fully extendable turntable ladder. The way the fabric slid across my chest made me feel all sorts of things that I was not ready for. 

One single tear leaked down my cheek as my mouth quivered, looking at the new me. “I’m so… hideous,” I whispered as I fainted dead away.