Being a cyborg is more--difficult--than most people think. Sure, you become a massive entity with insane amounts of processing power and an armature that allows you to do pretty much anything you want. But all those grafts come with a price, and that price is an amount of pain that would drive anyone homicidally insane if they weren't drugged and ( Read more... )

He signed on with the exo-army as soon as he was eligible, just to get out of his house and get a legit funding source when welfs came sniffing around. The realbody recruiter looked tired when he left, but every warm body to plug into the expansion mattered, and so he got a smile and a handshake and a signature authenticated with a retinal scan and ( Read more... )

The elephants were pink, that day. She had to explain to her son why the signs saying that detox was free were funny, but that's why you went to the artzoo. You went because it made you explain things and discuss things that otherwise might not come up. He didn't ask why the ostrich had a balloon tutu, which is just as well, since she had no idea ( Read more... )

The danger of drive-by downloads made most synced people stay out of the Downbelow Zone, but most synced people didn't have the security suite that she did, and most of them hadn't spent a previous life making drive-by download programs themselves. She wasn't worried about anything they could come up with--she'd be awfully impressed if somebody ( Read more... )

"Please sit nicely next to me. If you don't, I'll slit your throat. So won't you please be nice?" The young man stared at the grey-haired lady holding her knitting with a disturbed expression. That was not the order that this was supposed to go in.*He* held the knife, after all. He mustered up his courage and growled, "Hand over your purse, lady!" ( Read more... )

The bombs were ready when the dog walked around the corner. She felt her ruff rise as she crouched on the ledge above the alley. This was cat territory, and any dog that entered was looking for trouble. She turned her head and bared her teeth, flashing the embedded lights back to other watch cats to get the alarm sounded. The dog stopped and sat at ( Read more... )

Her life was hacked on a fine, sunny Sunday afternoon as she snoozed beside the pool. She didn't realize anything was wrong until a lot of the guys nearby started paying her *way* more attention, in a way more familiar way, than she was used to. When she gave one of them a cold brush-off, he complained that her profile wasn't like that--and he'd ( Read more... )

It was her turn at the wheel, and so she snapped the synapse leads into her temples, slipped her hands into the gauntlets that would keep the gears from crushing her tender bones as they rotated around (but wouldn't keep her fresh from bruising), and put on her game face, a silvery blank surface that would shine from among the black greased gears ( Read more... )

The signal went down and she slumped over sideways in her chair, abruptly disoriented from the cutoff of all the balance stabilizers and infodumps feeding her surroundings like another sense that she'd only gained once she was of age. She recognized the feeling, the isolation and the disorientation in a place without info overlays to make every/any ( Read more... )