Gale, once a biocourier in the megalopolis of Bay City, has her world turned upside down when a delivery-gone-wrong lands her in a web of corporate espionage and organized crime. Long since alienated from her own body due to her former line of work, following the Matriach of a Family that deals black-market cybernetics gives her a new purpose in life. In a world where immortality is for sale, who pays for it?

Chapter 0: Preface

Each of these “chapters” was originally published as an independent short story, and they can still be read as such if so desired. The original prompts for each chapters were, in order: memory, contradiction, in-transit, message, and consumption. Minor edits have been made since the original publication of these works, mostly for slightly smoother grammar and timeline continuity. The works as they were originally published are still available on AO3.

Rating: Older teen (16+) for graphic depictions of violence and sexuality. Lime, not lemon.

Content warnings for dismemberment, depictions of depression and suicidal ideation, allusions to disordered eating.

Chapter 1: The Body Keeps the Score

It was a remarkable occasion to receive an unprompted request to meet with the matriarch of the Hoshi family. Even for Gale, who had often worked with the family under contract, meeting one-on-one with someone higher than a middle-manager was unusual– especially given her current standing with the family. She checks the message one last time, to make sure that she understood it correctly. With a degree of hesitation, she enters the office.

Through the window blinds, the Financial District shines in a golden glow. Scattered lights twinkle through office windows, a constellation of workers hunkering down for a late night at the office. Silhouetted in the sunset is a tank of a woman, seated at an old-fashioned wooden desk.

Gale swallows in apprehension at a feeling she knows all-too-well. Like an earthworm plucked from the dirt and placed on a microscope slide, she is out of her element and insignificant. The pressure of that gaze could cut her in two, leaving her upon the stage to regrow as a curious experiment. Even hunched over a desk in this subdued office, Tora Hoshi emanated the might of an empire. She waves an open hand.

“Please, my cherished guest, take a seat. The least I can offer
while we correspond is the reception of family.”

The large woman reaches down and removes a decanter and two glasses from a low shelf, the faceted crystal tinkling against itself as she easily fits all three in one hand. With deft precision, she removes the stopper and pours both glasses, sliding one in front of Gale.

A sealed plastic cup with a thick straw was thrust in front of Gale. “It’s gonna be a minute ‘til the boss is here. Take this, my buddy didn’t want it.” Gale stood in the mostly empty office. A scraggly man, Tora’s brother, offered the cup in his outstretched hand. The morning light filtered through the opaque brown drink. Gale wordlessly accepted it, the cold drink barely registering in the deadened hand. It would take a few more days for normal feeling to return there after the flesh had been regrown.

Gale had figured that it simply wasn’t worth it to make a ruckus by saying no to a friendly offer from this man. When she was first introduced to him, she had thought that “brother” was meant in the “sworn brother” sense, but no, this gawky man was that large woman’s blood relation. She mulled over this fact while she sipped on the straw until a gelatinous glob lurched down her throat, causing her to sputter and cough in surprise. A chuckle from the man. “Oh, never had boba before?”

Gale hurriedly shakes her head. Once the jolt of adrenaline from nearly choking passed, an impending gloom overtook her. There was no way those porcelain guts would be able to handle the solids in this cloyingly sweet drink. Later, she would have to find an excuse to visit the restroom and purge it.

Gale picks up the glass and swirls it in her hand (it weighs 326 grams when empty, her body helpfully alerts her) and she watches the amber fluid slosh around the glass. It’s a particularly leggy spirit, clearly an expensive non-synthohol brew.

“Oh Gale, my reliable subordinate. How
much has changed since that fateful encounter, where you were but a
doe in the headlights, tentative and fearful. Before me
now, you stand with the toughness and grit of a rock, a stable
foundation upon which can be relied on. It was true that
creeping attrition exhausted your flesh, but with our guidance
you were endowed with steel and chrome, such that your strength is
multiplied many-fold. In a way, it brings me pride.”

In another time, that praise might have rendered Gale into easily manipulated clay, but by now she knows that this give is always accompanied by a following take. A phantom pain twinges in her shoulder. She holds back the urge to massage it, knowing that no amount of heat or pressure would assuage the taut biosynthetic sinew.

She measures her response carefully. “Surely, you didn’t invite me here to compliment me.”

“I do not deliver this statement with guile, as I do
genuinely believe your work is excellent. But
in this trade there is no action without due recompense,
no favor without due obligation. Though I do not
come to you on this day to request a favor, so much as
to remind you of our storied business history.”

The light of the sun setting behind her gives her expression a brewing sternness, and a glint of light catches on the blade leaning against her chair. Tora always had that searing-edge saber within arm’s reach, though Gale couldn’t remember many situations where it had seen use.

Everything was on fire. Legs that struggled to keep pace seared from lactic acid buildup, lungs that desperately panted for oxygen burned from polluted city air. The frantic figure runs as fast as she can, skillfully dodging pedestrians with one stiff arm marring her otherwise textbook running form.

Something was desperately wrong with this delivery, and Gale was in immediate danger. There was no drop-off contact at the designated location, and the initial hand-off contact had gone AWOL. She’d been meant to hand over proprietary biological data, kept secure in a buffering colloid that was subdermally implanted in her forearm, but in the time spent trying to contact her client the buffering solution had soured. Whatever that payload was– recombinant proteins, DNA base-4 packed information, or something else entirely– it was something fundamentally incompatible with her biology, and her grade 2 regenerative abilities weren’t enough to keep up with the damage it was causing.

The body screamed that things were very wrong as a searing sensation crept up the arm, followed by a numbness. There hadn’t been feeling in that hand for some time now, and it had progressed partway through the bicep as well. Would it be lethal if it reached the heart? Was a rapid heartrate accelerating the process? Even if she slowed her running pace down, the adrenaline coursing through those veins would not. She repressed the thoughts and stayed her path.

Certainly, there must be someone familiar with her trade that would be willing to excise the package. She’d mentally cross-referenced her contacts at biotech companies in the immediate area, but she quickly realized that she couldn’t eliminate the possibility of foul play– they were in direct competition with the corporation she was meant to deliver to, and she didn’t want to waltz right into a trap. Exhausting that list, she’d settled on a different party, and although she didn’t like to tangle with organizations like this, given the circumstances–

WHUMP! Gale rounded the corner and ran face-first into the unbuttoned dress shirt of a broad woman in a suit. Gale was flustered and took a moment to recover, though she did her best to cover it up by backing up and stuttering an apology between ragged breaths. She paused her babbling when she noticed everyone in the other party was wearing a small lapel pin. These people were clearly from the office that she was en route to.

“The Hoshi family. Oh, thank god.” Panting, she rested her hands on her knees for a moment and cursed her failing flesh while she gathered herself.

The woman leading the party squinted, somehow wrinkling her deeply furrowed brow even further. Two suited goons at her sides shuffled and changed their stances, preparing to reach for their weapons. She gestured for them to stand down.

“You are not a woman who appears to be of our trade.
Tell me, what duress yields to meeting a don?”

If it wasn’t for the momentum and copious amounts of adrenaline, Gale would have frozen in that moment. Although she knew that she was turning to the mob for help, she hadn’t expected to run into their head. She was suddenly in the deep end. This woman was larger than life itself, and she was just a grain of dust on the scale.

“I’m carrying proprietary data from Telosgen on a gray contract. They went cold and I can’t contact them, but your organization should be able to fence it for a fair profit.” She takes off her jacket, revealing the arm. It was alarmingly pale. “I need this removed now.”

The woman appeared pensive for a moment.

“Though the flow of capital may strand those it deems poor, our
family was founded on outcasts working together,
duty-bound to protect and provide. Let it be known that
I accept this oblation, and will give to you what is
due in turn.”

The don produced her blade, the sheath knotted in the waistbelt of her overcoat, and drew it high. It was clear she planned to take the package, and she had the muscle mass to do it in one swing. The ailing arm, held out in penance, was surprisingly still. Was it out of numbness, or out of relief for this unexpected savior?

The glimmer of the live steel caught Gale’s eye, and when she looked up to inspect it she was instead captivated by the fiery eyes of her deliverer. Something between admiration and anticipation welled up in her chest as Tora swung the blade down and delivered the blow. Her world went white as her consciousness slipped and she spasmed in pain.

Gale forms her words cautiously, sure to keep her feelings covert. “I am still grateful for when you saved me in my time of need, and for sourcing my cybernetics.” She thinks over what she’s about to say twice before she says it. “But this was a business arrangement, and it always has been. I never joined the family, and I paid off my dues many years ago.”

Tora pauses for a moment to take a sip of her drink. As she holds the glass, Gale couldn’t help but notice how small and delicate the glass looked in Tora’s hands. Though the whiskey pour must have been a standard two fingers, next to those digits it looked like much less.

“Had you asked to join our association, it would
be accepted in a heartbeat. Though that is not what I
ask of you, but it does stem from the same cause. You are
someone that has proven time over time that you
stand with resolve, even-keeled, in the face of danger,
and who grows in strength from the encounter.
I am not asking of you as a family, I am
asking now as a feasible companion.”

As the full insinuation of the word “companion” sunk in, an old hunger Gale had long forgotten about gnaws inside her. She’d sworn to herself that she was past this, that she’d no longer pine for her own destruction. And yet here she is, ready to slip back into those old emotions at the slightest hint of those feelings being reciprocated.

Though Gale’s half-chrome face makes her emotions often difficult to parse, the cherry-pink of her cheeks and brow, her last remaining flesh, betrays her inner thoughts. “I can’t….” She trails off.

It was supposed to be a standard business meeting to discuss plans to expand the Hoshi Family distribution network of black-market mechanical cybernetics and associated drugs. One of the men in the meeting let his tongue slip, uttering cashflow numbers that didn’t add up. The group quickly realized that this man must have been the source of recent errant accounting numbers, and was skimming a part of the profits.

Tora practically growled,

“You dare to selfishly steal for yourself, taking from the
family plate to fatten your own. With this, you have not
only broken your sworn oath, but betrayed the ideals that this
family embodies. Your fate will be one deserving
of the dishonorable title you have earned.”

With that, Tora transformed into a ferocious beast, her strict and rigid stance swapped out for a fluid, battle-ready one. Within a second she vaulted over the table and was on top of the man, closing the distance between them with startling agility. She struck him with an open hand, a sharp crack ringing through the room. As if in slow-motion, the man began to turn and run with a look of abject terror on his face. Tora made no attempt to follow him.

The man did not get far. A series of popping sounds accompanied his left hand twisting around backwards at an unnatural angle. He stopped and grasped the bent wrist with his other hand, as though he could bend it back into place with his grip strength alone. As if in rebellion to that, the arm exploded, casting an arc of nuts and splintered steel. A chain reaction followed, violently contorting the man’s body as parts shed from it and the cybernetics slough off their owner. By the time the reaction stopped, all that was left was a confusing pile of fabric, splintered metal, biosynthetic tissue, and meat on the floor.

Though Gale had heard of Tora’s fabled anti-cyborg combat skills, by no means did she expect them to operate like this. Gale felt the flesh that others pretend is her churn. She couldn’t help but feel starry-eyed admiration at the way Tora carried herself, and her absolute poise as she executed her ideals. Something tugged at the heart, and a growing warmth spread through the body. On some level, Gale became acutely aware that she wished that that man was her.

At that moment, she wants nothing more than to be with Tora. Feel that meat pressed up against her own cold steel, feeding warmth into her. Oh, it’d be so easy for Tora to use her weight and strength to splay Gale across that desk. That meticulously curated appearance of hers slipping slightly, that long blonde hair, usually kept in a strict bun, loose and flowing over her shoulders. She imagines the pressure of Tora’s mouth against her own, just as domineering to a partner in the evening as it is to her associates during the day. Those gold-lined hands, ever-stained by the grievous damage they’d inflicted to cybernetics, caressing her gently but with dangerous potential. Gale’s absolute vulnerability while Tora has her way with her.

Her life had long been marked by repression, by holding back and cutting herself down to avoid causing problems with others. How cruel it is, that she is so close to something that she’d wanted for so long, and that she would have to hold this back, too.

“You call me strong, but…” She gathers herself. “I was just doing what I had to. It was the only way to keep moving.”

Tora nods knowingly.

“It does not matter the situation that spurred it, so
much as the end result. A diamond must be made in
surroundings of excessive stress; That does not
mean it is insignificant or unworthy.”

Gale thinks of the paths she had to cross to get where she is. She thinks of the rival gang who they’d waged a war on, and the Hoshi members they’d lost to it. She thinks of the woman couch-surfing in her studio apartment, and how she had everything close to her destroyed in this power struggle.

“That’s… not what I’m getting at. This may be hard for you to see, because you forged me into this.” She has a hard time making eye contact. “You value power above all else, and seek to condemn those who disagree with this. The only options are to become a machine or be ground into dust.” She looks anywhere but Tora’s face, eyes darting across several bookshelves until settling on a chaise to the side of the room. There is an impression in the leather of the seat, likely from the many afternoon naps that Tora’s brother took there. “This world you want to create… I don’t agree with that vision anymore.”

The room is quiet for a moment. When Tora speaks again there is a definite change in her voice, the confident gusto replaced with a somber practicality.

“It is true that many crack under dread stress, rather
then refine their strengths. I used to not care what happened
to such people, until my dear, demised brother
joined in their numbers.”

Tora takes her glass and stands up, as if to clear her head. Gale notices that her gaze is uncharacteristically misty and unfocused but before she can fully parse it, Tora turns to face the window. Her broad shoulders are framed in the light, weary and tired from carrying the weight of an empire. The sun is setting.

While still facing the window, she speaks.

“It is not my place to dictate what trail you walk. But
know that should you continue your current ambitions, when our
paths next intersect, it will not be as allies.”

For the first time ever, Gale picks up on hints of sadness in Tora’s words. Only then does she understand why she was summoned here today: Tora feels alone. In her meteoric rise to power she had only sought strength, reaching a solitary height as the matriarch of her own family. There was only one person who could remotely keep up with her and was allowed into that personal sphere, and he was no longer with us.

She remembers how alone she was before she’d signed up as a contractor to the Hoshi family. How she felt stranded and overwhelmed, drowning in a sea of quicksand, when she didn’t have anyone to turn to when things invariably went wrong. How having familiar faces she saw on a regular basis helped to break her out of her melancholy. She wants nothing more than to be that reliable subordinate for Tora now, to reciprocate the help that had dragged her out of rock-bottom.

But again, she thinks about that half-alive woman who she dragged into her apartment. How if it wasn’t for her actions, that woman would still have a home to return to. Gale clenches her fist, watching the actuators and synthetic tendons slide past each other. While she may have found internal peace after all she’d been through, no one should have to go through that in the first place.

It would be such an easy path to take, to obediently follow Tora and do as she was told, knowing that her actions would all fit smoothly into a larger machination. But she also knows that she is fortunate to even have a choice in what she chooses to do, to not be entrenched by loyal followers of a strict code she no longer wishes to follow. As she admires Tora’s back one last time, it somehow seems smaller than before.

“I have no regrets about the time I spent with you.”

She stands, the ceramic blades of her feet bowing and storing energy like a spring. Though it takes but a fraction of her physical strength to get up, her next steps require that she pull deeply from the strength of character that she internalized from her idol.

She places her glass down on the desk and leaves the room. The whiskey is untouched.

Chapter 2: Cost-Benefit Analysis

Ye gods, a dozen eggs go for how much these days? A hand hovers over the carton while Gale runs some numbers. The hand moves to a half-sized carton, where the forefinger then flips the carton open and prods each egg. After passing inspection, the carton is picked up and placed in her basket.

The basket already contains a few items: multiple soft-sleeve nutri-paks and a box of ginger tea. The store layout is compact yet labyrinthine, and it takes her some time to check off the remainder of her grocery list. She finds the instant ramen next, nestled beneath a display of tabloids covering the latest celebrity trends in plastic surgery. After going over her options multiple times, she selects a package that comes with cups to cook them in, chicken flavor.

She rounds another corner and finds a deli cabinet that has the closest thing to fresh produce in it. The bulbs in the cabinet are out, and she has to rifle around in the dark to find something that isn’t past its expiry date or visibly wilted. She tosses some pre-made salad kits into her basket, figuring that she can make use of the roughage and mushrooms in them.

Last, she plucks a bag of baby carrots out of the cabinet. She holds them up to the light, pinching the carrots through the bag and rotating them around. They still appear to be good, in no small part due to the chlorine applied to them to compensate for their lack of skin. Gale recalls how baby carrots are manufactured; the unsightly produce gets filtered out and cut into two-inch pieces, and then peeled repeatedly until they have a baby-smooth sheen. It is a notion that is uncomfortably familiar to her. She places the bag in her basket.

—

The man lunges at her with his blade. She moves quickly, stepping back to give herself distance and drawing her dagger at a diagonal, parrying the blow and causing the blade to bounce off with a sharp skkkkrt. Even with the live steel at a safe distance from her flesh, she can feel the heat from it. He’s going for the kill. The man moves like a professional, his arm returning to a ready position as he takes up the distance that Gale had given away. Her fighting skills aren’t going to cut it. She needs to get out of here, and quickly.

She scans her surroundings as best as she can while still keeping an eye on the man. Despite being in the open air, her options of egress were very limited. She’d ended up here because her usual rooftop route got waylaid, and the only ways to leave were to get to the stairs (which were behind this man) or to go back to the building that she had come from (which was slowly-but-surely being traversed by this man’s coworker). Her movement options were restricted, the rooftop punctuated by ventilation hoods in narrow rows, emitting a droning hum as they kept the building beneath them at negative air pressure.

Gale locks eyes with the man. Her route will be through him. As if accepting her provocation, he steps forward and lunges, trying to catch her off-tempo by accelerating his movements. Thankfully she knows his fighting style well enough to read his actions, and by the time his blade is within striking distance her dagger is already there. Her short blade puts her at a disadvantage for torque, but she positions the blade so that this man’s momentum is used against him and his sword slides up the blade to the hilt.

Got you.

She twists her wrist, which catches the man’s blade in a narrow gusset where the blade meets the crossguard. Before he can react and attempt to disengage from the lock, she throws her weight into twisting her blade and wrist further. As if in slow-motion, she sees the man’s expression change into one of bewildered shock, the dark circles under his eyes exaggerating just how much his eyes go wide.

A sharp shattering sound reverberates on the rooftop as the brittle blade, mostly made from ceramic with a thin metal lining on the sharp edge, shatters into multiple pieces.

Gale makes a break for it, leveraging this mental momentum to sprint forward and push the man out of her way. He is too shocked to do much in resistance, and by the time he thinks to reach for his backup weapon it is too late. She is already well past him and on her way to the stairwell down from the rooftop.

Just the tension was about to absolve itself from the chest– escape nearly in Gale’s grasp and the door handle practically in her hand– the door swings open violently from the inside and collides with Gale face-first. She is thrown backwards, skull landing on the ground with a harsh crack. The person who opened the door, a placid woman with an undercut, enters her line of sight just as she starts to pass out.

—

Gale places her basket of groceries on the checkout counter. The cashier, a middle-aged person in a baseball cap, starts making the maneuvers needed to scan each item and transfer them to the checkout bag. Their spindly arms bend at uncomfortable angles to make this possible in the cramped space.

The cashier tries to make small talk. “Buying something different than just tea today, huh?” Gale looks up and studies the cashier’s face. They appear deeply tired, with dark bags embedded under their eyes. Their facemask isn’t fitted properly and gapes beneath their nose, exposing the acne in their nasolabial fold. She doesn’t recognize this person.

Gale grunts affirmatively, preemptively putting an end to the conversation. The cashier scoffs slightly and puts the bag of baby carrots in the checkout bag with a despondent thud. Even if Gale wanted to talk with some stranger, which she doesn’t, doing so would aggravate the sore jaw. It always hurts when the weather changes. The cashier finishes scanning the remaining items in silence, accompanied solely by the hum of the fluorescent lights and refrigeration units.

“That’ll be 147.21 credits.” It’s Gale’s turn to scoff as she rifles through her pockets to find a credit chit. This is at least three times more expensive than her usual trip here. She taps her chit to the display, and after a pause the machine beeps a cheery jingle confirming the transaction. Gale picks up her bag and walks the five steps to the door as the cashier drones, “Thanks for shopping at Smiley Mart. Fast service with a smile.” She flips up the hood of her jacket and exits into the stormy night.

—

CRACK!

A sharp pain shoots from one side of the skull to the other and she spits blood, gushing out from some inner crevasse, onto the cellophane-wrapped floor. She coughs and sputters, some of it must have backflowed to the lungs. The flesh of the mandible stings as though every nerve ending was simultaneously being pricked with a firepoke.

It takes a moment, but the jaw starts to click back into place, an agonizing creaking that echoes through the eardrums as pattern-correction kicks in and regeneration restores her to her prior state. The lips purse as she mimes out several words, testing her ability to speak before she actually commits to anything.

“I already told you, I don’t know anything,” Gale utters again.

Only then does the woman interrogating Gale lower the hand that she’d been holding up after delivering her backhand. She turns to her accomplice. “How many times is this now?” she asks.

The woman, sitting on top of a desk and swinging her legs like a schoolgirl, holds up her metal thumb and forefinger in an L shape. Smiling from ear to ear, she chips in, “That’s three!” Gale’s memory is still foggy, but hearing that voice makes her realize that this woman is the one who had ambushed her on her rooftop run.

Gale takes this small interlude to try to look around the room. It seemed to be a fairly standard hotel room, where the only things that seemed remotely out of place were the handcuffs binding her to the chair and the plastic sheet on the floor for easy cleanup. While the furniture choices were fairly utilitarian, the sheets on the bed were perfectly pristine and the ivory walls had been painted recently. This hotel wasn’t the Ritz, but it also wasn’t some sleazy motel. Whatever group they were with had money. Corporate? That’d explain the suits.

As if to demand her attention, the interrogating woman grabs Gale by the jaw and angles it upwards. The rough touch of this woman’s hand catches Gale by surprise, and she has no choice but to take in her face. She is very well-groomed, the hair on the top of her head in a neat crop and the undershave on the sides exposing rows of silvery cybernetics. Under different circumstances she would have found this woman’s features charming, the contours of her nose and cheekbones coming across as somewhere between chiseled and pacific. Looking into this woman’s eyes is like peering across the surface of a calm lake, her own reflection looking back at her in the undisturbed surface.

The interrogator starts to speak, her tone steady in a near-mechanical way. “It takes your body on average 65.2 seconds to recover from a broken jaw, which places your native regeneration rate at about grade two-point-three.” Such precise numbers. Clearly she was some kind of cerebrat. “This means your jaw can be broken around 32 more times before reaching the Hayflick threshold.” She tightens her grip on Gale, an explicit threat. Some beating organ in Gale stutters. “I can afford to spend all day here,” her tone darkens to just short of a growl, “but at some point you’re going to run out of bones to break. The sooner you spill who you sold those Telosgen trade secrets to, the better off you’ll be.” Her eyebrows furrow slightly as she stares deeper into Gale’s eyes.

Something in that gaze unsettles Gale, and it takes her a moment to parse exactly what it is. She is used to being looked upon like a rat by corporate goons; somewhere between vermin that need to be exterminated and an expendable laboratory subject whose behavior needs to be documented. She finds neither sentiment behind these eyes. What she seems to find instead, buried deep beneath that tranquil surface, is… empathy. This woman can read her subject precisely, determining just how much information they’re holding back and just how close they are to breaking, and she can somehow compartmentalize this well enough to avoid disturbing her own psyche. This is what makes her so great at her job.

This woman wasn’t deriving joy from this interrogation one bit, and realizing this chills Gale down to the bone. She feels oddly grounded in her own body, each passing second making her aware of the mass and the meat of herself.

“Telo-who? I’ve never done business with them.” A bold-faced lie.

The interrogator’s face doesn’t flinch one bit as she brings her thumb and forefinger together, a loud cracking erupts as the bone of Gale’s mandible erupts through her flesh. The searing pain courses through her, rooting her to reality far more than she ever had been before.

—

Gale shuts the apartment door behind her, acting on muscle memory to turn around and flip and slide several locks to their secure positions. The room is dark, solely lit by a sliver of light cast underneath the partition to her roommate’s side of the unit. She wipes the blades of her feet on the welcome mat, squinting as she tries to make out the scene in front of her. Instinctively she reaches for the light switch, but she thinks better of it and instead reaches under the cabinets next to her and turns on a strip of task lighting in the kitchenette. Pushing aside assorted wrenches and screwdrivers, she clears off a portion of the countertop and rests her bag of groceries there.

She looks into the room. It’s mostly empty, save for a mattress and bedroll on opposing sides of the room and a desktop computer with screen and keyboard strewn across the floor. Neither bed is made, and on the mattress there is a noticeable lump concealed by the sheets. Gale finds this scene very familiar, although not usually from this perspective. She tiptoes to the bed as best as she can and nearly trips over her roommate’s packages, neatly stamped with ‘biohazard’ labels and left out for her to deliver later.

As she gets closer, she starts to make out the shape of a human in that lump on the mattress. She kneels down and pulls back the sheets a bit, revealing the head of her guest. She’s dazed and half asleep, watery rings lining her eyes. Her once well-maintained undershave has grown out into a shaggy, greasy mess. It still feels strange to Gale to see her like this, this woman’s once-formidable visage now wasting away and oddly vulnerable.

Her head lulls slightly, a motion that rolls like a wave from her skull down to the scalenes at the base of her neck. She had barely moved in weeks, only ever getting up to go to the restroom or grab a bite to eat from the fridge. Gale had been closely monitoring her bloodwork for several weeks, and although the results were now coming back normal, it was abundantly clear there was still something else ailing her.

“Just checking in,” Gale whispers softly. There is no response.

She wants to tousle this woman’s hair, to hold her close and tell her that everything is going to be alright. But Gale holds back, thinking about how the one time when she had done this had caused her guest to wiggle out of her grasp, muttering something barely audible in disgust. No, doing that again would be selfish. She needs to stick with what she can do.

Gale notices a pile of discarded nutri-pak sleeves and crumpled protein bar wrappers next to the bed. She gathers them in her hands and gets up to throw them away.

—

She shoves the door to her apartment open, the rattling causing the shoddy partition to her roommate’s side of the room to shudder. Framed by the light from the hallway, she shuffles into the dark room, weighed down considerably by the woman schlepped over shoulder. She hip-checks the door closed, once again slamming it at an alarming volume. Gale would get a talking-to about that later, but for now she has more pressing concerns.

The woman over her shoulder, for lack of a better descriptor, looked like shit. What was left of her clothes were barely decent rags, the once-pristine business suit torn beyond recognition. Her undershave was a matted mess of dry blood, likely her own, a pattern that continued itself all over her body. The exposed surfaces that had been the sources of that blood were now vexing complexes of meat. At one point her body had attempted to regenerate from her injuries, but somewhere along the line transcription factors had gotten crossed and tissue type differentiation had gone completely wrong; There was tendon where there should be muscle, blood vessels where there should be skin. Gristle and teeth and stoma threatened to gnaw and tear apart what remained of her clothes.

Even as she had alternatingly writhed and vomited and passed out in Gale’s arms on route to her apartment, this woman had clung desperately to a mechanical hand that she had acquired at some point earlier in the night. It seemed that even her subconscious would not let it go.

Gale sighs as she surveys the woman. Just what had she gotten herself into? She didn’t know this woman’s name and her apartment was a postage-stamp by most standards– she didn’t even have a couch for her guest to sleep on. She’d have to pick up a sleeping bag or something if she didn’t want to sleep on the bare floor. But here she was, doing what was needed to help save this woman’s life.

—

Gale cleans off a bigger stretch of the kitchen counter, moving aside a bottle of motor oil and tools for tuning mechanical digitalum tendons. After rifling through a few drawers and nearly stabbing herself on a glass pipette, she finds a thin sheet of acrylic. She spins the acrylic in her hands, checking the back of the sheet to see three rubber nubbins in the corners– she figures the last one must have gotten lost at some point between first moving into the apartment and now. Happy with her cutting board, she wipes it down and places it on the exposed countertop.

She recalls data from sectors of her brain that were rusty from disuse. Mise-en-place. Surveying the assorted goods that she’d brought back from the bodega, she asks herself what else she needs. She spends some time thinking before realizing that she was absentmindedly massaging one hand with the other, one thumb tracing the bumps and whorls of the scar tissue in the other hand. Both hands were much paler than they should be. She reaches for her jacket and pulls her gloves out of the pockets. Best to be pre-emptive about it.

She unsheathes her parrying dagger from her waist and weighs it in an open palm. It’s no santoku, but it’d do. Gripping the blade between the thumb and forefinger, she starts to get to work. Her movements are slow and choppy at first, but muscle memory perseveres and she quickly falls into a familiar rhythm. She chops off the blunted ends of the baby carrots and then cuts them in half. Placing the flat face of the carrot against her cutting board, she then cuts them vertically into narrow strips into an approximation of a julienne cut. Yes, that seems right.

She pushes the carrots aside and opens the pre-packaged salad, plucking out the broccoli, mushrooms, and spinach. The mushrooms are already cut– and they’re cremini too. Not her first choice for this dish, but she can’t be picky. She sets them aside with the prepared carrots. The broccoli gets pared down into smaller florets, removing the unappealing woody bases of the stems and portions of the greens that seemed suspicious. She’s at a bit of a loss as to what to do with the spinach, as they’re already a bit small to chop up further. She stacks them up, presses them down, and then stares at them. That’ll work.

She tears open the shrink wrap on the 6-pack of ramen and pulls out one of the cups. Conferring with the directions on the back of the cup, she starts keying in numbers to the microwave. Four minutes– no wait– she gives herself five. Start. After removing the noodles and flavor packet from the cup, she places the now-empty container under the spigot of a hot water dispenser (one of the few amenities she’d gone out of her way to procure for the kitchen) and fills it around two-thirds of the way.

First, she dumps in half the seasoning packet and sliced carrots, stirring the broth with a disposable fork from the prepared salad. She samples the broth and, deeming it to be more than salty enough, disposes of the remaining seasoning blend. Quickly, she glances at the timer, one minute down. Next she adds the mushrooms and the noodles to the cup, pushing the mass down with her fork so that it remains submerged in the broth. The remaining veggies will only want a quick blanch, so judging by the clock she has a bit of time to kill.

She looks across the unit into the darkness. Her vision had gotten used to the task lighting in the kitchenette, leaving the rest of the room a murky void. She didn’t need her eyes to know the scene that lay there. Gale thinks back to the last time she’d had instant ramen. At the time, she definitely hadn’t bothered to dress it up– she probably had just thrown hot water on it and then curled up on her mattress. It was unlikely that she had even finished the noodles before they went cold. She looked at the clock again to find that time had passed much more rapidly than she had expected. Moving quickly, she adds the broccoli and spinach to the cup, pushing them down and swooshing them around with her fork.

For her finishing move, she removes one of the eggs from the half-carton and cracks it into the top of the cup ramen, nestling it in a bed of broccoli. She folds the top of the lid back down and checks the timer on the microwave. The food will be ready soon.

—

“How’s she doing?”

Gale is hunched over and squinting at the LCD in front of her, a series of inscrutable graphs scrawled all over the screen. She recognizes some of the annotations between her work and her own doctor’s visits; They’re mostly protein and hormone names, but the meanings of the corresponding numbers elude her.

“On the mend, but she’s going to need more time to recover,” the creature squatting on the chair says. Their figure is enigmatic, face hidden in the shadows of their baggy hoodie and their torso oddly shaped by the number of articulated snake-like arms exiting the bottom of their jacket. They tap one of their fingers to the screen. “Cortisol is still off the charts. Manipulating this as a part of fight-or-flight response is a pretty standard aug for any combat goon, but this kind of behavior is usually lethal. Usually. Took me a few iterations of affinity assays to figure this out, but this over here,” they point to a plot on a different screen, labeled with what looks like a randomized string of letters and numbers, “is a proprietary biologic that seems to act as an inhibitor.”

A dull mechanical chorus fills the silence as Gale processes this information. She was accustomed to this noise from her side of the apartment’s partition, but it always seemed to overwhelm her when she was in the heart of it. “So that’s part of why she’s so zonked out?”

“Well, yes. Stress levels aren’t meant to be this high for this long, and feedback systems are clearly being deregulated.”

Gale nods. After the past few weeks, she was glad that her work had produced something tangible to point at, outside the immediately obvious. Despite all the times she had DIY’d her own bloodwork, it had been a struggle for those first few blood draws when her guest was still loopy and lashing out against anything that touched her.

“Can’t you just make do with a thumbprick? Do I really need to draw a whole vial?”

“Please, you can’t get granular enough information out of a sample that small. Low-abundance targets would get washed out! Biology is stochastic.”

Gale’s roommate starts flying through different windows on their computer rig. “There’s still a ton of agents here that I can’t account for though. Even outside the stress-response, there are at least a half-dozen mechanisms managing this high-grade regeneration that no one in my networks have seen before. Whatever corpo she worked for clearly tried to activate her killswitch to keep this from falling into public hands.”

It was a godsend that the killswitch wasn’t also some new trade secret. Gale had been able to source the cocktail to treat it from the same place that she acquired some her own medications.

Her roommate continues, “They never accounted for a prime sample to land squarely in the hands of a hacker like me, though.” Though Gale can’t see their face, she feels the smug smirk behind those words.

—

“Hey Kei, I made you dinner.” Gale places the cup of ramen down on the floor near the head of the mattress, delicately balancing the fork on the lid of the container. Her guest stirs slightly, inching slightly towards the warm food but without getting out from under the sheets.

Gale steps back and sits on her bedroll on the opposing side of the room. “You should eat it, it’s got real vegetables in it. And protein.” Gale pauses. Maybe she was expecting too much, but she felt like she had to do something. She mutters dejectedly, “Besides, it’s not like I can eat it anyways.”

“Why?”

Gale is taken aback. Her gaze snaps upwards and directly meets the gentle eyes of her guest, staring at her from under the sheets. This was the first time she had said anything outside non-committal grunts in a week. “Uh.” She measures her response. Normally she loathes to tell others about this, but she feels the need to be honest with her guest. “My digestive tract is cybernetic. I can’t eat most solid foods, aside from hyper-processed stuff like nutri-paks.”

“I see.” Kei starts to sit upright, shrugging off the sheets. She’s wearing an oversize band t-shirt, the only thing Gale could find that would fit her at a thrift store. “I was worried that…” She looks away, breaking eye contact with Gale to stare at the steaming cup of ramen. “Your jaw, is that because of me?”

Something inside Gale aches. All that this woman had been through, and yet she was so quick to help take up the burden of others. Her own problems must seem small when faced with other’s that were beyond her control.

Maybe that was a feeling that Gale was familiar with.

“Yes.” Gale subconsciously extends the gloved hand to the jaw, and starts to trace the extruded bumps of the scars that she knows are there. She can’t feel them through the gloves. “This is from before that, though. Those were the first cybernetics I ever got.”

Kei leans forward and picks up the cup of ramen, taking the fork in her other hand and using it to push back the lid. Her face is hard to parse, but she seems pleasantly surprised by the additions to the noodles. She spears a mushroom and starts to chew on it. “Do you regret getting them? The cybernetic guts.”

Gale sighs contemplatively. “No, I don’t. I mean, I miss food sometimes. And I miss eating food with people.” She gazes at Kei, who is heartily slurping up noodles. She seemed to be sitting more upright now. “But given the kind of pain I was in, it was absolutely worth it. And I can still drink tea, when I want to taste something aside from gritty-ass nutrition gels.”

Kei smiles lightly as she finishes one particularly long noodle. “Yeah, tea is good.” She continues to pick at her food when she thinks of something, and her expression returns to a glum mask. The mechanical humming from the other side of the partition suddenly feels oppressive. “If you had to do everything over again– not just the guts, everything– would you take the same path?”

The way she says this pierces Gale’s heart. The humming continues.

“Maybe if I knew everything I knew now, yeah I’d make some different choices.” She continues to watch Kei, who had stopped eating and was just staring at her ramen. There is a pang of guilt at the edge of her mind, but she pushes the feeling away. “I did the best I could with the information I had at the time. I think that’s the best anyone can hope for.”

Kei stabs at the egg in her ramen, causing its yellow guts to gush out into the broth. “Yeah, I guess.” She twirls the fork, mixing the yolk with the noodles and the broccoli. “It’s just so hard to see that for yourself.”

Gale thinks back to all the times that she had laid on that same mattress for weeks straight.

“Yeah. It is.”

Chapter 3: Severance

Gale triple-checks the message on her phone. Meet in pour coffeeshop off Pacific, downtown Bay City. 2120/11/15, 10am. She double-checks her watch. 9:58am. Right, that’s why she’s not here yet. Out of habit she takes a sip from the coffee she was using to nurse the cold hands, and quickly puts it back down in disgust. It still tastes like sea brine.

This hole in the wall café with routinely over-steeped drip coffee was absolutely not the kind of place that Gale would visit of her own volition, much less at a time that required her to get up as early as she did. Granted, she also wouldn’t have chosen to arrange a business meeting with the Family, but she was forced to admit to herself that she had surrendered control of the situation a few days ago. The best thing she could do at this point was to roll with it.

She shifts her weight uncomfortably as she scans the room again. Against her preferences, she had been forced to take up a table in the middle of the room where she had to covertly look over her shoulders to scope the whole room out. She greatly preferred to have her back to a wall. She hates how vulnerable this seat leaves her.

The room was subdued. Patrons kept to themselves, reading or working on portable workstations. One man with a prosthetic leg taps his foot with a metronome-like precision, keeping time to some tune only he could hear. Many slowly sipped at drinks, long gone tepid. A woman seated near the entrance with a mechanical hand and synthetic eyes drums her fingers on the table and repeatedly scans outside the front door. A few customers subtly smoke tobacco cartridges, despite being outlawed in public since Gale could remember.

She grips her drink tightly, bending the flimsy cardboard cup and nearly splashing the drink on herself. Gale checks her watch again, 10:02am. Late. She picks up the cup and takes a big swig, gulping back the overly-bitter brew without letting it linger on the tongue. A part of her wishes that it was actually battery acid, so she could just be done with everything already.

As if to break her out of her malaise, two raucous customers enter the cafe, causing all other activity in the room to die down. One of them is a slender man wearing aviators who has one mechanical arm draped over the shoulder of his associate. Both men’s suits stand out sharply compared to the rest of the clientele. Gale squints as she tries to get a solid look at them.

They approach the counter and start to chat with the person behind the register. It was more than she’d seen that person talk the entire time she was here– The only actual words they uttered to her were “cash only”, which had forced her to dig through her pockets for a wadded bill when the credit chit she offered didn’t fly. The slender man slaps the other man on the back and pushes him forward, ushering him to leave the conversation. He tips his head, saying goodbye no doubt, and enters a door behind the counter. The cashier bends down and pulls a tallboy can out of a minifridge, wait– that wasn’t on the menu– and hands it to the slender man, who Gale notes is still wearing his shades indoors. They exchange a few words and he walks away without paying.

When the man leaves the counter Gale starts to focus on the door again, waiting for her appointment to arrive. It catches her by surprise when that same man announces his arrival by placing his tallboy can down at the seat opposite her. “Gale, I presume?” She manages a surprised nod, and he flops down into the vacant seat.

“I’m Soma.” She starts to take in the details of his face that she couldn’t see at a distance– He has shoulder-length silvery hair which was partially matted at the top from a mesh of metal spiralling around half of his skull, like a crown of thorns. She locks eyes with him. His gaze seems kind and warm, but she quickly realizes he wore sunglasses to distract from his (clearly synthetic) bright-red pupils. He continues, “I hope you understand that Big Sis couldn’t make it, she’s a very busy person.”

Gale feels a pit open inside her. Of course Tora couldn’t show up. “I see.” It made perfect sense. That didn’t stop her from being disappointed.

Some shade of acknowledgement registers on his face. “You actually got to meet face-to-face with her on your first transaction with us, I understand.” He tilts his head a bit and meets her gaze directly. “Some would say you were quite lucky.”

She remembers how she’d turned to the Family in her desperation, and Tora seemed to block out the sun. “Is she always so….” That overwhelming presence seems to block out her memory, sucking all energy into itself like planets falling into a dying star. The words she’s searching for escape her mind.

“Larger than life?” Soma suggests.

Bile comes up the throat as she struggles to sort out her feelings and her memories. The feeling of insignificance haunts her, the embodiment of a roach that was half-squished, dismembered, and left on the pavement. She looks up to Soma and sees a faint echo of Tora in his face. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it.” Like the roach, she is too persistent to die.

He chuckles to himself, “She absolutely has that effect on people.” His face contorts to a sly expression, one that Gale would almost call it a smile if it extended to his mouth, and then he takes a swig of his drink. “She doesn’t tend to notice it though.”

The man’s watch starts to buzz and he flicks the screen towards his face. “Discussing our matriarch isn’t why we’re here today, though.” He issues a series of swipes on the watch’s surface. “We’re here to discuss compensation for the data you delivered to us.”

10:11am. They were meant to be at this point of discussion over 10 minutes ago.

“You cracked what it is?”

“Well, we haven’t.” He strokes his goatee thoughtfully. “Biologics aren’t in our wheelhouse, so we had to outsource it.” He starts swiping on his watch again. “We believe we can give you a reasonable market rate, if you can accept piecemeal payment.” He surreptitiously puts his drink down in the middle of the table, with his wrist angled towards Gale. There is a number written out on the watch display.

She starts to run some mental math. There was no way for her to know how fair this compensation was, but with that kind of money she could live fairly comfortably and on the down-low for several months. On the other hand, who knew if she could even work as an infocourier again when the dust settled and word got around that she’d sold out one of her clients. Not like there was any choice in the matter.

Soma pulls his hand back as he takes another gulp of his drink. He made it look so natural. “Of course, we can offer services of greater value if you don’t choose cash.”

“Like what?” She’s skeptical.

He speaks with all the patience of a schoolteacher. “Well, as I’m certain you know, our specialty is in the acquisition and modification of mechanical cybernetics.”

Pausing for a moment, she extrapolates from what he’s saying. She means to say something like “Aren’t those a bit old-fashioned at this point?”, but what comes out is, “You proposing I become some kind of clank?” Only after the words leave her mouth does she notice just how loud her voice had gotten, and another wave of silence washes over the coffeeshop. The weight of a half dozen pairs of eyes bear down on her neck.

Soma puts his drink down, accompanied by a rhythmic clink ing as he drums his metal fingers against the recycled aluminum.

“I– I didn’t mean…”

His eyes are sad. “You’re spilling your drink.”

She looks down. The hand was sitting in a puddle of hot coffee, fingers pale and gripping the cup so tightly it was reduced to a crumpled mass of cardboard. She had felt none of it. The hand releases the cup and flails limply, shaking off the remaining liquid.

“Regenerative neuropathy?” He seems to be talking from a place of concern for her well-being. 

Bluntly, “I’ve had it looked at.” 

The conversation lulls. Ambient sounds of the coffeeshop gradually resume, filling the gaps where their voices should be. Neither party makes eye contact. Gale starts to weigh whether she should get napkins and clean this mess up or if it would be considered disrespectful to get up from the table, and as though reading her mind Soma pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes up the excess coffee. Something stops her from saying thanks.

She contemplates just getting up and walking away from the whole affair. The more she dwells on it, the more it seems that her career was irrocevably shot and the body it relied on in shambles. There was no short-term cash infusion that would fix this. She’d be best off if she just so happened to misstep on her route home, tumbling from her building-to-building rooftop route into the crowded street, stories below…

“You know,” Soma interrupts, “mechanical augmentations weren’t my first choice, either.” Gale’s vision snaps back into focus as she looks at him. Through his glasses he’s staring at the horizon, idly running one hand through his hair and tracing the metal mesh on his temple. He turns to meet Gale’s gaze, a sober sympathy in his eyes. “But in the state it grew into, this flesh wasn’t cutting it for me. I needed to mold myself into something that I could actually live with.” He pauses, and his gaze shifts as though he was looking through Gale. “Something that would be able to keep up with her .”

A tingling feeling takes root in that scalded hand. It would certainly be more convenient if she didn’t have to worry about the seared nerve endings it undoubtedly had tomorrow. She bats away the thoughts of simply not being tomorrow, and mulls over Soma’s proposal. Was she ‘living with herself’ now, by coping with this body that she hardly considered her own? Or was she somehow unalive, simply waiting in limbo until the earth reclaimed her?

She squeezes the meat of one thumb between the forefinger and thumb of the other hand, testing the pliability and softness and fleshiness of it. Bile works its way up the throat again.

Soma tilts his head back and holds the soda can upside down above his mouth, shaking the can a bit to drain the last few drops. Satisfied, he tilts his head forward again and faces Gale. “We don’t need an answer from you right away, but finalizing sooner than later will make option B shake out a lot better.” He stands, crushing the empty can in his hand. “Big Sis got a line on some lower chassis that would be a good fit for a runner on a Hoshi Family contract. Can’t say how long they’ll be in stock.”

Gale traces the wet outline on the table with one finger. Everything seemed to come back to that woman, didn’t it? “I’ll think about it.”

The man smiles, a nauseatingly soft expression that seems to make a halo of air around him radiate with warmth. “You have our contact info.” He waves curtly, and turns to leave the establishment.

—

That evening, Gale dreams vividly.

Ribbons of viscera on the floor. A tiger savagely tearing into its prey, face blood-splattered and claws gore-lined. Sharp, twisting stabs of pain at a steady rhythm, building up and layering over each other until they form a solid wall of sound, a symphony at fortissimo. There is no sign of relent from the predator as it executes what it was wired to do. The prey thrashes and writhes and screams, performing its role by acting out the instinctive obligation to cling to life.

The entertainment is unending. The predator is never sated, and the prey will never die. No amount of life shed on the floor will put an end to the performance.

This scene is something intimately familiar to Gale, something deeply wired in her brain from her late-formative years. Superimposed on the play in front of her she can see the many hours of online killfilms she’d consumed, a genre of near-snuff born in the anxious era when rejuvenation was New and regeneration was Hip and the average man felt like he was immortal. A select flavor of amateurs had taken to home-filming their own performances and Gale had eaten upevery bit of it that she could find, even as the market swelled and desperation to stand out drove participants to partake in more and more extreme acts. Along the way, the puzzle pieces of her late-blooming identity snapped into place, realizing her inclination for sadomasochism far before it had ever clicked that she was primarily into women.

Ever since then, it was not uncommon for Gale to have violent dreams with similar motifs. What she gradually realizes, is that it is strange that she is an active participant in this one.

In her dysmorphia she hadn’t identified that dream form as herself, but she experiences the pain in first-person as the arm is once again torn off. When she feels the connective tissue delaminate and the fibers of the deltoid muscle separate fascicle by fascicle, she is forced to acknowledge that the mass of meat is none other than her own. The hideous pop of her clavicle freeing itself of the acromion and the shearing force of the scapula degloving from its meaty socket would normally be enough to make her hurl, but her dry heaving spurs nothing but an ambient taste of acidity in her mouth. She can’t tell if the broken causality is because of the dream’s ambiguity or is because  of the body– her body– being broken beyond all logical continuity. Either way, the sensations register as all-too-real.

Some approximation of adrenaline courses through her, slowing everything down and giving her more time to take it all in. She tries to strain against her assailant, but she becomes aware that neither fight nor flight are available to her in this state; even if she wasn’t pinned down, her legs don’t respond to her requests to move at all. Were they even still there? Or was this regeneration-induced numbness?

Desperate for something to do aside from freezing in place, she focuses her attention outwards in an attempt to will a form out of the dream-being assaulting her. Somewhere between the blur of muscle and stripes and claws she catches a glimpse of a human face.

“Tora?”

Their faces are now inches apart, Gale gazing deep into her golden-brown eyes. She feels the heat of Tora’s breath down her neck, the pressure of her chest and body crushing her ribcage.

She speaks with the same imposition that Gale remembers, her growling voice laced with contempt.

Odious Gale, who had turned to me in despair with naught to
offer me except this despicable flesh: What
punishment do you seek, aside from rending limb from
wretched limb? What course is suitably pitiful for you?

She doesn’t break eye contact as she grabs Gale’s remaining wrist and twists it upwards above her head, a loud crack sounding out as her radius and ulna break at an unnatural angle. Gale’s head spins, full of bile and heat.

“This…” her voice is dry and cracked. She barely enunciates the words, as though that would make them less real. “This is what I want.”

She savors the undivided attention of Tora upon her as those massive hands slide down Gale’s torso. Her fingertips snag on sensitive jags of torn flesh, on cuts still not yet recovered. Gale inhales sharply and squirms, bucking her hips against her co-star’s body. Tora reciprocates the pressure, allowing Gale to find traction where her legs fail her, her body heat warming up Gale’s cold and increasingly exsanguinated corpus.

Gale is so painfully aware but so pitifully not-there as her mind wanders far from her imagined-meat, tingling with euphoria. It hardly registers as Tora traces one hand back up her torso and pins her head back, her large fingers snaking their way behind Gale’s parted lips. The coarse flesh and cybernetic-wiring of Tora’s fingers chafe her gums and tongue, but Gale welcomes this as she feels Tora probe inside her, tracing the enamel with her fingertips. She winds around the perimeter of her gums, pushing her cheeks outwards, before she brings her pointer finger up to Gale’s palate. Her breath hitches. She has little doubt that Tora could split her skull in that moment, if she wanted to.

Tora teases her, slowly stroking her finger back and forth.

The wires in Gale’s brain short-circuit. She wants nothing more than to have this suffering go on forever, to see this body molded and destroyed like brittle pottery in the hands of this woman she barely knew.

And maybe she can have that, even once she leaves this eternal moment.

—

Gale tries to step forward, moving one leg jerkily in front of the other. In the process she nearly loses her balance, narrowly avoiding landing flat on her face by catching herself on the bannister in front of her. “Fuck,” she swears under her breath as she muscles herself upright with her upper body strength.

She looks down at her new legs, long and rough and metallic. They quiver as she struggles to stabilize them, the strong quad spread spun from biosynthetic filament doing little to help balance her stance. Trying to push through the discomfort, she sends an errant signal to her calves. The artificial muscle groups try to go on tiptoe, straightening out the springy coils of her feet and sending Gale flying backwards, crashing on her firm steel ass.

“Hey, hey, hey! Don’t try to push too hard, just take one step at a time!” The physical therapist, spread far too thin as they workshopped with multiple Family associates at once, hands off the lacrosse ball that they were using to walk one patient through shoulder exercises and rushes to Gale’s side. She takes their hand and leans into them heavily as she stands up, her legs bowing at an awkward angle as she rights herself like a newborn deer. “Your brain is going to take a little bit to get used to signaling to these new filaments. Take breaks if you need to.” Their words are heartfelt but tired.

“Right, got it.” Gale transfers her weight from the person’s arm to the bannister, where she immediately starts to move forward again. She manages to string together a few consecutive steps before she has to catch herself again, by which point the physical therapist has moved to the next patient.

She pauses for a moment, unintentionally giving herself rest, as she takes in just how odd of a group they are. The rehab clinic was an extension of the same facilities that the Hoshi Family had ties to for handling surgical operations, and you could recognize that through their clientele. Most of the others in the room are clearly a part of the Family’s hired muscle, getting used to performing mundane daily tasks with their now above-legal-spec bodies. There were an odd handful of patients who seemed to be civilians such as herself, who’d cut an extralegal deal when legally available augmentations had proved too pricey or lucrative for their needs. 

The only specific face she recognizes is Soma, who seems to be performing finger dexterity exercises with one arm that is significantly less scuffed than the other. He’s wearing a low-strung tank top, exposing his synthetic arms and back with no attempt to cover the silver filaments of his pecs, only barely concealing the scars on his flesh just beneath where the fibers ended.

Feeling a bit more stable, Gale resolves to move forward and strings together more tentative steps when the door to the room opens and the air is vacuumed from her lungs. She recognizes the body of that giant before she ducks through the door, the hired muscle in the room also picking up on this and stiffening upright regardless of what positions they were in.

She clears the door, her strictly bound golden bun with nary a hair loose just barely scraping the upper frame. Her stern brow surveys the room before settling her gaze on Soma, then walking briskly past Gale to get to him.

Tora.

Her in-person presence seemed to dwarf the version of her that existed in Gale’s mind, and she feels herself start fawning for her all over again. The way she made the room her stage, even in routine matters. The gravity of her face as she surveys her lieutenant, degrees of caring hidden beneath that gruff exterior. Gale yearns for little more than an ounce of that attention and care, pondering just how far in the Family she would have to get to spend time with her.

Tora pats one hand on Soma’s shoulder and he nods and stands. They start to walk towards the door and past Gale when there is a glint of recognition in Soma’s eyes. He stops.

“Hey, Gale! It took getting a few more jobs under your belt, but I’m glad you decided to accept the call of the steel after all.” He repeatedly clenches and flexes the hand he was rehabbing.

Gale freezes. She wasn’t prepared for this in the slightest, and feels that face light up like a christmas tree. She wants to disappear, to observe her crush from afar and not deal with the messy reality of interpersonal interactions. Instead, she manages to make some kind of affirmative whine while looking anywhere other than the direct line of sight to Tora’s chest.

Soma taps Tora’s arm, as though to jog her memory without giving confidential details in public.

Tora nods. Gale swallows, a frog-sized glom of saliva stuck partway down the throat.

“I remember her assignments well. It is a 
rare occasion to find such a self denying herald
whose proficiencies are so many in note. I dearly
hope that our surety will be a prosperous one.”

Gale’s mind is static, random pinpricks of noise and thought. She really thinks that highly of me? This vaguely registers externally, face dazed but nominally happy.

Soma’s watch buzzes and he checks it. “We really do need to be going now, though. No doubt I’ll see you soon.” Tora nods in agreement and the two start to walk away, already talking with each other about their next engagement.

Gale manages to collect herself enough to get out a shaky “Th-thanks!” before they leave the room. When they’re at the door Soma discretely turns and, outside Tora’s line of sight, gives Gale a thumbs up.

Gale takes in Tora as much as she can and continues to stare at the door for nearly a minute past that. This woman might barely look her way, but she knows that she will do what she needs to in order to follow in her footsteps.

She looks down at her toes. They would take some getting used to, but on some acute level she knows that she doesn’t regret the decision at all.

Clutching the bannister tightly, she takes another step forward with her shaky legs.

Chapter 4: Central Dogma

A pair of steady hands mark the incision point, deftly skipping a marker up the forearm and stopping just shy of the brachioradialis. Gale doesn’t wince as the cold marker applies ink to the skin, noting that the arch of the mark maintains a constant distance from the radial artery.

“There.” The doctor puts the lid back on the marker and steps back for a moment to admire her work. “If you’ll forgive me, we’re a little busy today, my lab assistant is unavailable. It’s just going to be little ol’ me.” She chuckles genially, crows feet growing exaggerated under her smiling eyes.

“That’s fine.” Gale doesn’t mention that she prefers it this way. There was something unsettling to that creature that she couldn’t quite place. When on her own, Doctor Wharton had some of the best bedside manners she had encountered. “I take it this payload is something that requires high blood flux?”

The doctor holds a finger up to her lips. “Oh, you know that I can’t talk about the proprietary specifics.” She winks. Gale was right on the money.

The doctor steps away for a moment and comes back into the room with a dolly carrying assorted surgical equipment. Gale finds herself staring at the item in the center of the cart, a two inch long pulsating mass of cobbled-together flesh. The mass is suspended in a clear vial labeled “RelE” hastily written in doctor’s script, with hardware connecting the mass to several different assistive machines on a lower shelf of the cart. The doctor snaps on a pair of nitrile gloves, she reaches into the container and starts methodically detaching assorted tubes.

She continues to chat. “It’s amazing what we have to do to even imitate what the human body is capable of.” She pauses for a moment to make eye contact with Gale, underscoring her point, “without gray-legal biocouriers like you, we’d never be able to share samples like we do now.”

Gale breaks eye contact, her gaze drifting to an array of robotic arms behind the doctor. They clatter and whirr steadily as they tend to samples, a young man standing over them and performing some kind of maintenance. She knows that by all technicality, what the doctor said was correct– while there was technology like the machines on the cart to support ex vivo tissue samples, they were fragile and excruciatingly expensive to ship. In comparison, tucking away tissues inside a human body augmented with a compartmentalization system? Perfect homeostasis, cheap.

Gale picks her tone carefully. “I’m just glad that there are still tissues that can’t be downsampled and sent digitally, or else I’d be out of a job.” Somewhere deep in her synthetic duodenum, flesh twists over itself into a knot. She masks this pang well, another routine part of obfuscating a lie.

The doctor laughs, like a wind chime made from scrap metal. She flashes a bright smile. “I’ve been around the block too many times.” The flesh in the vial floats lifelessly, and the doctor switches her attention to her patient. “Progress is cyclical. Some new technique or tool is developed, promising to lay bare the fundamentals of the field, and thousands of man-hours go into using it.” She begins securing the limb to be operated on. Her grip is firm but not forceful. It almost feels reassuring as she tightens the leather restraints. “Then, two or three decades down the road, we realize some of our fundamental assumptions were wrong, and we need to revisit why we were doing what we were doing in the first place.”

The conversation is far departed from Gale’s domain of knowledge, but she’s been around enough eggheads like these to know how to engage. “Isn’t that just the nature of science, though? You can’t just shun every new tool forever, you need to update your ideas in the face of new information.”

“How very Bayesian of you,” the doctor grins wryly at Gale, inviting a reply. When one doesn’t come, she turns back to her tray where she picks up a small sealed packet. “You are right, of course. I guess I’m just particularly leery of selection bias.” She looks wistful for a moment, then laughs sharply as she tears open the packet. “Ha! When I was a kid, they taught us that any DNA that doesn’t result in a downstream protein was junk!” Turning to Gale again, she pulls a small wipe from the packet and runs it over the incision site, staining the skin a murky brown. The arm tingles slightly, the topical anesthesia already setting in.

Gale studies this woman as she does one last check over her tools. Everything about her, from her shrink-wrapped flesh to her general demeanor, screamed loomer. She carried with her the vivacity and confidence of someone who has known their place in the world before the dawn of functional immortality 100 years ago, and Gale figured that she must have been on the older end of that age bracket. Flatly, “I wouldn’t have guessed you were a day over 45.”

The doctor pauses for a moment to loose a shrill laugh. “Oh, you’re too kind.” She smiles again, a surprisingly pleasant expression that sends wrinkles cascading from the edges of her mouth to the upturned corners of her eyes. Looking at the tools, Gale gets the sense that everything has been prepared by this point, but the doctor wants to continue on her earlier tangent. “Sequencing at scale used to be so novel. It was such a big deal when we’d recorded the human genome, three gigabytes of Gs, Cs, As, and Ts that, in theory, contained all the information needed to create a human being. We understood that this blueprint would be copied and carried by messengers to create proteins. And proteins! Oh proteins, we knew those were important. Understanding the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ would take quite some time, certainly, but we knew proteins to be the macromolecule responsible for making things happen in biological systems. And for several decades, this is what we focused on: understanding that initial DNA blueprint and the downstream protein it made. We’d collectively overlooked the importance of that intermediate between the two: RNA. While RNA often was a messenger, we later discovered that there are many other cases where it fulfills other roles– like changing what other messengers do or even fulfilling jobs that we’d once ascribed to proteins! And this is without getting into spatiotemporal dynamics– the time and the place of the message can be just as important as its contents…” Her voice trails off as she stares into the distance before snapping back to Gale, “but that’s enough of that. Are you ready to get started, my dear messenger?”

Gale does her best to keep her tone neutral. “Ready as ever.” Just fuck me up, doctor.

With blade in hand, the doctor moves like an entirely different person. She snaps her arm out quickly and cuts, wielding the scalpel like a duelist. The flash of the blade so quickly follows the skkrting of retractors and forcep-guided-needles that the motions seemed to be simultaneous. To free both hands, the bloody blade often found itself clasped between the doctor’s crooked teeth. Gale’s combat-grade regeneration caused the flesh to regrow around the tools as the doctor worked, threatening to undo the doctor’s work in an instant. Speed was paramount for this operation. Moving incisively, she splices the exogenous flesh in the splayed-open hole, allowing the patient’s regenerative factor to cause the transplanted flesh to take. The misshapen blob pulled itself comfortably into the crook of Gale’s arm, meat, vessels and connective tissue regrowing to accommodate the foreign attachment.

Just as abruptly as the procedure had started, it was over. If not for the blood-soaked tools and smeared iodine stains, it would be impossible to tell that the patient’s arm had been slashed open mere moments before. The doctor glances at her watch as she puts down the forceps and needle. “One-ten, not bad. Not bad at all.” She nods as she strips off her nitrile gloves, dumping them in an adjacent biowaste bin.

Gale reaches across to free her restrained arm when the doctor interrupts, “Oh no no no, I can get that for you.” She puts one hand on each restraint and works both clasps free simultaneously. The movement looks effortless, but Gale muses that if she’d attempted it she probably would have found herself lacking in dexterity. “You already have the destination coordinates and Telosgen contact information, yes? You should be good to go.”

Gale moves the arm around to test how well the nerves have regenerated. She hadn’t felt a thing during the whole operation, so it was difficult to gauge whether a misaligned nociceptor would cause pain further down the line. Best to try and get a sense of that now. While swinging the arm around, she replies. “Yes, I already have everything I need.” Movement through the elbow joint flowed smoothly, indicating that the bicep had recovered sufficiently. As she clenches the fist to check for finger movement, she can’t shake the feeling that the flesh isn’t quite hers.

—

Gale runs two fingers along a thin, spiraling white line in the concrete. She knows that it should form a slight ridge, but the fingers are numb and don’t even register the coarse grit on the surface of the slab. She scowls and slides the hand back into her leather glove, covering the rings of whorled and dark flesh at the base of each finger. The regeneration scars serve as a harsh reminder of the pounds of flesh the debt collector would requisition if she couldn’t get her shit together. She tugs the glove taut and pulls her sleeve back down. She’d rather keep it out of sight and out of mind.

She glances over her shoulder. Finally, the road is empty. She grips the football-sized toolbox under her arm as she hustles down the street. The box contains a cybernetic cortex, some kind of lucrative new model with increased energy efficiency. She didn’t know the specifics; her delivery contract for the Hoshi family was on a strictly need-to-know basis. Despite pivoting from being a biocourier to being a mob package courier, her job was the same as it ever was.

If all goes well, this box will be her ticket out of this mess.

She turns and takes one last look at the building where she had picked up the package. She recognizes the architectural style, a typical neo-brutalist apartment complex from the e-velo boom of the 2050s. What was once stark concrete rises from the ground at an obtuse angle, covered in a criss-cross of white scars and vines. Clunky balconies protrude from the surface at varying depths, a heterogeneous blend of plants, furniture, and decorations adding sprinkles of color and texture to the surface.

Gale finds herself focusing on those white scars. Decades of harsh freeze-thaw cycles have long since taken their toll on the building, but the BioCement is still standing strong. She looked into the tech behind this once. Invisible to an outside observer, veins of hydrogel laden with dormant bacteria weave through the cast like a circulatory system. When a crack pierces the building deep enough to reach its capillaries, the hydrogel will foam to life and flood the crack with fluid, re-awakening the bacteria. These animated bacteria will consume the gel and, enabled by the calcium in the concrete, secrete a calcium-carbonate cement, filling the crack in its entirety.

Something about the structure struck a chord with Gale. There was a charm to the messy imperfection, the way the inorganic concrete breathed and bled like a living being. Turning away from the building and orienting herself towards her destination, she realizes that the numb fist is clenched by her side.

That isn’t the same thing.

—

“Whoa. Hey. You doing alright?”

Gale wakes up to a metal hand gently slapping her face. She is woozy, unable to put a coherent string of thoughts together. It feels as though a weight has been removed from her chest, although she doesn’t quite remember why. There is a sense that everything is going to be alright, and she basks in a subtly euphoric glow.

Disturbing the tranquility, her body claws at the back of her mind, trying to alert her consciousness to dire circumstances. Ugh. Pulling herself back to reality, she looks down at the body. It is slack, propped up by a gangly man in a suit.

The arm, into which the doctor had spliced new flesh not even an hour before, was gone. A sharp, stabbing pain thrumming at the edge of her consciousness. Only a bloody stump remained.

Oh, right.

Memories start flooding back. The delivery graft and that gently smiling doctor. Arriving at the drop-off point, with no contact to be seen. An encroaching numbness taking over the arm, the doctor not answering her calls. Panicking. Running. Heart pounding. Staring down the grim reaper. A last-ditch plan to turn to an unknown party. Her savior.

Tora Hoshi.

Gale looks upwards to see Tora’s blonde head turned away from her, radiating like the sun. She is conferring with a subordinate, who hastily takes off his belt and fastens a makeshift tourniquet on the shoulder of the dismembered arm. The flesh sputters and writhes, the attempted regeneration dying down with the blood flow stemmed. Gale’s eyes drift to the sword Tora had just used to remove her arm, once again sheathed and slung idly by her side.

Gale feels herself drawn to her by gravity. It was by none other than providence that she had run into the leader of the Hoshi crime family, and her presence transcended all expectations. Gale knows, down to the marrow, that encountering this woman has changed the entire trajectory of her life.

She gulps. Her head is spinning, and at this point she doesn’t think it’s entirely from the blood loss. Next to someone with the power to sway the entire planet, she was just a speck of dirt. And not only had this woman personally saved her life, but by all technicality she owed Gale a favor.

Gale feels the body try to pull upright, forcing the man supporting her to shift his balance. As disheveled as she was, she still felt compelled to put on a tough front.

The arm. With a white-knuckle grip on her emotions, Gale raises her voice. “The package.” Her arm. “When can I expect compensation?” For the data. Telosgen’s arm.

Tora turns to face Gale, her cold, scrutinizing eyes tilting down to meet her gaze. Gale narrowly stops herself from buckling.

“Biological data is not of our domain, to
have fair compensation, we will need time to gauge its
purpose and value. Our comrade here will coordinate a
later meeting to review remuneration.”

As she speaks, she gestures to the man supporting Gale who gives a thumbs up in acknowledgement. With a curt nod, she turns and resumes her course from before Gale had pleaded her for dismemberment.

Gale tries to follow Tora, a satellite trapped in her orbit. She doesn’t get very far, shaking legs carrying her just out of the associate’s grasp before he reaches out and stops her.

“Hey, listen.” His voice is soft and melodic, the exact opposite of Tora’s. “I don’t know what kind of augs you’re slinging, but when that adrenaline wears off you’re not going to be in any state to keep up. You need rest. We can talk shop later.”

Begrudgingly, Gale stops. She knows he’s right. She looks down at the stump, now softly pulsing and oozing fluids. Pain registers somewhere in her mind, a distant warning light on a dashboard. As best as she could guess, about a centimeter of meat has regenerated since she last looked at it. It should have been at least four times that much– this was exhaustion on a level that she could not just grit her teeth through.

Gale watches Tora’s back, wide and towering above her subordinates, as she strides farther and farther away. She does not look back, her stern gaze ever-focused on what lies ahead.

Gale sighs wistfully to herself. This is a view that she will need to get used to.

—

Fuck fuck fuck! Why can’t anything go right for once!

Gale finds herself running full-tilt down an alley, slowing her pace only slightly to make a running jump towards a fire escape. She narrowly grabs the bottom rung of the ladder. Ok. Still going as planned. Only when she starts to swing and make a reach for the second rung does she realize one key miscalculation: her numb hand. This maneuver was a spectacle of athleticism on a good day, but with one of her hands only nominally functioning? Fuck.

She decides to reach for the second rung with her good hand and it connects without issue. For a split second, her bad hand buckles under her full bodyweight, but she pulls through it. Reach up with the bad hand, connect. Good, now she’s on the second rung.

A ruckus at the entrance to the alleyway, hasty footsteps. “There she is!” Without climbing up a few more rungs, she will still be in range to be pulled down from the ladder. She is running out of time. Inhaling sharply and stifling the panic, she reaches for the third rung.

This time, she isn’t so lucky.

Her numb hand slips and she falls to the ground, nearly one floor below. There isn’t enough time for her to try and roll forward to mitigate the impact, her collision with the ground makes a meaty thud.

The goons are on top of her before she can come up with a backup plan. One rugged man pins her arms back and drags her to her feet, two men block the view from the street and produce sidearms. Another pair walks past them and looks further down the alley, walking right past where Gale had deposited the cybernetic package under a pile of trash.

Well, at least one thing is going in her favor.

One of the armed men steps forward, eyeing her up and down. His face warps furiously, wrinkled and red. “Alright, girlie, where’d you drop the goods?” Oh, he is mad mad.

Her options are limited. What she needs was more information. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The man closes the distance between them, his face now inches from hers. “Don’t fucking play coy with me.” He jabs the sidearm into her thigh.

Until he came closer, Gale hadn’t gotten a good look at the weapon. It resembled a miniature crossbow, with a silvery ampoule loaded on the end of the bolt. This was similar to arms Gale was familiar with, but the elongated drum under the belly of the chamber, some kind of auto-loader no doubt, was illegal for a civilian to carry– that would explain why they weren’t waving it around when they were in a crowd earlier. Was it military surplus?

The man groans at the extended lull in the conversation. He pulls the trigger. Searing pain erupts in the thigh. The glass ampoule breaks, freeing the rubidium point to rend flesh, hissing and crackling as it reacts forcefully and melts into liquid. The bolt comes to a stop, embedding itself deep in the leg. Gale starts to keel over, but the grunt manhandling her forcibly props her upright. Instinctively, the body tries to heal the wound but with little success– even a regenerator like Gale couldn’t offset the liquid metal now marbling the meat. She definitely wasn’t going to be running anywhere soon.

“Where. Is. The package?” The man growls, pressing the weapon into her other leg.

Fuck. She needs to buy time. “I passed it off to a buddy. They’ve got an autono-bike, probably halfway to the Pacific by now.”

The man blurts some expletives that Gale doesn’t recognise. Biting his finger, he backs off and confers with his allies. Gale writhes from the pain in her leg, causing the man holding her up to tighten his grip. She probably bought herself a few minutes before they figured out that she was full of shit.

Options. What options does she have? Escape is definitely off the table at this point, she has to survive. She has an ounce of leverage with the hastily hidden package, but has fuckall outside that. Hell, who are these guys even with? If nothing else, she wants to be able to report back to the Hoshis. She has been doing her best to memorize their faces, but in this day and age it was a snap for regenerative plastic surgery to change that.

They have military-grade weapons and an interest in cybernetic brains… could they be with the MacDowells? Her knowledge of the underworld families isn’t as thorough as her biotech corporation knowledge, but pieces of the picture start to fall into place. The Hoshi family specialty, Cybernetics, was a market born from the ghost of robotics; a compromise between the capability of machines and the frugality of human labor. The only major markets where robotics still saw use were military and law enforcement, where the operative bottleneck was often compute power in free-standing units. It made perfect sense for the arms-dealing MacDowells to be interested in a cybernetic brain with lower power requirements. Of course.

Tracing back her thoughts, there’s just one thing that keeps irking Gale. Certainly, Tora knew about this? Was this a declaration of war between the two families? And why did she get trusted with–

Gale’s train of thought is disrupted by a coarse hand on her collar. That man is once again inches from her face, snarling. “We cross-referenced the wettapes, you didn’t meet up with anyone before entering this alley, and witnesses said no one walked out the other end for the past hour till one of my boys was there.”

“Damn, I must’ve been remembering the wrong delivery.” Sarcasm as a coping mechanism.

“Pcht!” The man spits to the side, venting his rage. He releases Gale’s collar and backs off from her, heatedly stepping to one of his comrades. “We know where the package is now, you see. It must be somewhere in this alley,” he says intently as he is handed a different side-arm. Gale’s eyes go wide. “Now, I can make this painless for you if you help us out. I don’t wanna spend the rest of my day digging through trash.”

Gale recognizes the new weapon in this man’s hands, the same model was recently in the news from the assassination of the CFO of Aspir Corporation– a metabolic dysregulator. Just one prick was enough to send the regeneration of even non-injured flesh into overdrive. Sweat pools on the ground underneath Gale. Not only was death near-certain, but it would hurt the whole time she was dying.

He tenses his finger on the trigger. “We could have resolved this much more peacefully if you’d just handed the package over in the first place, you know.” Ready to shoot.

Bile gushes at the back of the mouth. The thought had honestly never occurred to her. She’d thrown away her old way of life in the instant she’d offered her flesh to Tora. Taking on jobs from the Hoshis was rooted in practicality, sure, but something deeper had compelled her to do it. Just thinking about that woman–

The steady pounding of the heart skips a beat.

She wanted to spend the rest of her life following that woman. And here she was, about to be murdered in some dingy alley.

Death had been just around the corner for Gale many times now, but only now did she find herself upset by it. Could she even pretend her death would be in service to Tora? Or had she been doomed by a reckless misstep? Did anything she did today even matter? Her vision goes blurry. She doesn’t parse the pooling tears until she blinks them away.

The least she could do was face it with a little backbone.

“I’d rather be dead in a ditch than betray my guiding star for some no-name lowlife like you.”

The man grunts. “Send my regards to the Hoshis.” He pulls the trigger. Gale begins to fall, a world of technicolor and sensation overwriting her senses as her cells explode into a regenerative frenzy. She is completely disconnected from the outside world before she hits the ground.

—

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Gale slowly stirs to her senses. She smells chemical cleaner and steel, feels constant uncomfortable prodding, constraint. Gradually, eyelids pull upwards and eyes draw into focus. She lay in a hospital bed, attached to a number of supportive and diagnostic devices. The image of the pulsing flesh parcels that she used to deliver appears vividly in her mind. She does not look down to survey what state the body is in.

“Vigor has rebounded to you through slumber, I see.”

Gale abruptly awakens. That voice, that manner of speaking, was absolutely unmistakable. Her surroundings snap into focus as she scans the perimeter to her bed. None other than the matriarch of the Hoshi family, Tora Hoshi, was seated next to her. When she tries to speak, her voice is tired and raggy. “T-Tora?”

The woman closes her eyes and nods solemnly.

“Luck and the augmentations from your prior employment were
pivotal for surviving that attack. One of my
infantry was prepared for your rescue after their exit.”

Gale swallows. Twice now, this woman saved her life. “So that’s why…” She braces herself and looks down. One arm is gone. Though she can’t see her lower body beneath the sheets, she suspects that at least one leg is inoperable, if not destroyed. A sense of gratitude floods her, warming her extremities.

“Personal delivery of this news felt due. This
parcel was expected to be intercepted, as
it was intended as a test of your loyalty. Such a
test was necessary for someone who had first earned
favors unsettled through the betrayal of a different
party. Rest assured, your success has been monumental.”

The words weigh heavily on Gale. Some rational part of her wants to be mad, but the way she swells with pride overrides it. In retrospect, it all made a lot of sense. There had been no reason to tell her about the contents of the package– she had certainly done her number of blind deliveries before– but if it was to entice her to sell out…

“So you told me about…”

As though reading her train of thought, Tora shakes her head.

“No. As the MacDowells have assuredly encountered by
now, deliberate misinformation was used to make bait
most enticing. Upon inspection, this unit is far
from remarkable– although performing said probe
opens the doors to our Trojan horse. Aggression
currently maintained by their family has
warranted a response that is made in kind.”

So… she was just another pawn in Tora’s game. This unrestrained wave of honesty almost felt therapeutic to Gale, but there was a nagging in the back of her mind that she couldn’t fully let go of. Did Tora know that she would be safe through all of this? If she had died in this scheme, the Hoshis would be free of the debt they still owed her for whatever that biological data was. Did it really make sense to trust her?

Gale turns her head, Tora’s presence now dominating her field of view. She can’t help but feel that this woman looks out of place in a hospital. Her stance is skewed and stiff, sword placed ineffectually at the foot of Gale’s bed. The way that Tora usually carried herself would not feel out of place in a backroom business deal, or commanding troops into battle. But here, in a hospital, finds herself cast in a compassionate role. Despite being a self-styled matriarch, nothing about her demeanor could be described as maternal.

Tora still chose to make a personal appearance here, even if it bent her out of form. Gale is touched by this.

“Once you have recovered, there is another assignment
that I would like you to take on. Though it is not a shipment
typical of a courier, it should suit you quite well.”

Whatever is left of her digestive tract starts to turn over itself. A new gig job. Is this situation any better than when she had been working as a biocourier, ferrying data from doctor to doctor?

She spends no time deliberating on it. Yes. Yes it is different. This woman had saved her life twice over now. She would gladly turn her flesh over to her as many times as she asked for it. To Gale it was an intrinsically held belief: she would be safe so long as she followed this woman.

“Yeah. I’ll take you up on that offer.”

She doesn’t need to state her loyalty to Tora for her to know it’s there.

Chapter 5: Skin in the Game

In many ways, it is another unremarkable Tuesday with another unremarkable business meeting. Alone in her office, Selena Ophite fidgets with one of her rings, a snake biting its own tail, and double-checks the current time. It is still before noon, her guest– none other than the matriarch of the Hoshi family– is by no means late.

Selena hates this kind of anticipation. She has done everything she reasonably can to take hold of the situation: she was the one to solicit the meeting, and Tora Hoshi had agreed to do it on her turf. It was a bit forward of Selena, certainly, but far from unprecedented. As the two youngest syndicate leaders in Bay City, they had plenty of reasons to meet in private, both for business and otherwise. Selena’s eyes flit to the door again. The control in this moment, the ability to set when everything would be set in motion, is entirely out of her hands.

Selena narrowly stops from jumping out of her chair when the doorknob rattles abruptly. Her heart starts beating in double-time, a primal response preparing her for what is to come. The tiger would soon be in her den.

It almost felt intimate, to see this man’s heart exposed to open air. The meat throbbed back and forth, a mesmerizing concert of diastole and systole dutifully pumping blood throughout the body. Selena found herself wanting to reach inside his clipped-open ribcage and pulled back flesh to hold the muscle in her hands, cupping it like a stack of precious gold.

“You can’t do this! I– I’ll find some other way to pay you back! Please!” The man choked back tears, threatening to get spittle and snot all over both the surgical team and his own insides.

Selena scoffed. Sometimes she wished that their debtors could be put under general anesthesia, but local treatment had long been established as the much easier to manage standard of care. Her eyes glossed over as she scanned his body, the half-metal cybernetic frame obfuscated by scrubs and surgical sheets. How passé. His face was warped with extreme emotion, the skin on his forehead and surrounding his eyes distorted with wrinkles unbecoming of his age. According to their records, he was supposed to be a spry (and valuable) 32.

She let the surgical team continue their work, drifting aside to idly rifle through the clothes stripped from the man earlier. Immediately upon touching the fabric, Selena winced. Ugh. Synthetic, some kind of cheap polyester blend that felt clammy in her fingers, held together with low stitchcount seams. She inverts the jacket, further appalled at the lack of lining. Though the clothes showed little signs of wear, they were not built to last. The cheap bioplastic would end up in a landfill by the end of the season.

“Please!!” The man continued bawling, one member of the surgical team frantically fashioning a gag to keep him quiet. “I have a wife and kids!! I can’t– They can’t– mmphhphph!” His last words were stifled as a wad of fabric was stuffed into his mouth.

Like the flip of a switch, Selena slithered as close to the man as the hygiene barrier allowed. The surgical team gave her a wide wake as she pressed into the plastic membrane, staring down into his frantic eyes. “How fortunate they are!” Her lips curled back into a grin, revealing two rows of perfectly straight white teeth. “To have a father willing to spend his heart to save his family!”

For a brief moment, her accelerated heartbeat was in sync with his.

Tora walks through the doorway, her expression dour. She appears to be sulking, a ducking maneuver taken out of muscle memory as she clears the door. Partway through she corrects this trajectory, standing at full height in the oversize frame.

“Please, please, take a seat.” Selena gestures to an open chair opposite her desk. She smiles, internally questioning how her expression reads to an external observer. Though she was an expert at calculated social graces, she could feel her emotions clawing their way through her skin, ravenous.

Tora strides across the room. She looks sorely out of place, her bespoke camel hair trenchcoat and stern bun from an era long departed from the sleek, minimalist décor of Selena’s office. Under the vaulted ceilings, Tora’s height doesn’t give a sense of physical imposition so much as it makes her seem further out of place, like someone mistakenly chose the wrong scale doll to go with their dollhouse.

She takes the chair and sits in it, legs spilling everywhere. Selena pretends not to notice as she repositions the sword tucked into the belt of her coat, angling it so that it would be easy to draw at a moment’s notice.

“Is today’s engagement for reasons as abundantly
obvious as they appear to be on first blush?”

Selena’s eyes briefly flit to the sheathed blade as she cocks her eyebrow. “Oh? Cutting straight to the chase? No banter, no quip about luck, no ‘how was your day, I heard you had some important negotiations recently?’” She feels her heart beating in her throat, though her cool delivery wouldn’t give it away.

Tora only sets her jaw in response.

Hmph. Well, two can play at that game. Selena stands from her chair and turns her back on her guest, switching her gaze to the window. The overcast sun gives the view a washed out and drab feel, the people on lunch break darting about far below like ants. The Pacific Ocean is visible in the distance, a shipping freighter stopped near the horizon.

“I suppose it was rude of me not to offer you lunch.” She contemplates retrieving a bottle of Cabernet tucked-away in a cellar-temperature fridge, but she knows it would be an entirely self-serving measure– Tora isn’t the type of person to drink while there was still business left in the day. Staring at the horizon contemplatively, she leans back and rests her hips on the desk. “You always are one to be direct.”

Tora bore down on her, leaning her weight into Selena and pinning her to her own desk. Even through her designer three-piece suit, she felt the heat of Tora’s skin pressed against her own. She ran her hands up Tora’s thighs, feeling the dense muscle and sinewy web of cybernetics that decorated her body like a circuitboard. What a waste it was, to have such high-grade meat marred with antiquated tech.

Her hands free, Tora reached around Selena and started to wrench her suit-jacket from her shoulders. The fabric strained under the force, threatening to tear the jacket apart at the seams. Selena shimmied to help the jacket off as her hands glided up Tora’s torso, fingers finding their way to the topmost fastened button of her button-down. She tugged downward, the clasp flying off with a pop.

Tora grabbed Selena’s wrist before she could grope her now-freed cleavage and twisted the arm back, Selena folding immediately. Leaning forward, she growled into Selena’s ear, her message clear: Don’t do that shit again. Warmth flooded Selena’s thighs, and she involuntarily bucked her hips against Tora’s, desperate for friction. Her want feebly escaped her mouth with a pithy moan. Tora granted her her wish, and lifted up one of Selena’s thighs so that she now straddled her leg.

The give and take was intoxicating, animalistic pleasure lighting her entire body as she grinded while she was stripped of her business attire. It would be so easy to lean into Tora’s domineering tendencies, to let her simply have her way– and while that would certainly be more than adequate as a means of stress relief, it was so much more satisfying to press her buttons and feel her response. She took a moment to admire Tora’s face, brow furrowed in concentration and cheeks flushed. Strands of hair started to fall out of place, her look growing uncharacteristically disheveled. Selena smirked. She wasn’t surrendering control to Tora; she was getting exactly what she wanted out of the transaction.

Selena’s torso was now bare to the world, and Tora cupped her breasts in one broad hand. Selena’s flesh was one of her many points of pride, long since molded into her ideal form– It was only natural for this woman to be enamored with it. And in all fairness, she was just as taken with Tora, as well. She imagined undressing Tora further, stripping not only her suit jacket and shirt, but the metal veins from her flesh. With that tech out of the picture, her biochemically enhanced muscle would be quite valuable. Tracing one finger of her free hand down Tora’s bulging pectoral muscles, she ran the numbers in her mind.

She wanted to have her, in more ways than one.

Tora’s gaze tracks Selena as she stands from the desk. “But you know, I think you like it when I force you to take the long way around.” She fluidly slinks in front of Tora, getting closer to her than is usually allowed in polite company. She doesn’t react. “We have more than our business history in common, after all.”

Tora grunts, finally conceding something.

“Yes, we two are without compare in our positions
leading syndicates in the underbelly of Bay
City. But it would be asinine to act as though our
paths here were comparable. I was not the one to
have a gambling empire bequeathed from her father.”

Selena grits her teeth and walks past Tora, putting some space between her and her guest. That line of conversation never fails to get under her skin, and Tora knows this well. She inhales sharply, ready to give her usual refutation– it was her management and organ bank that put the Ophites back in the black, after all– but she doesn’t bother. Quickly regaining her composure, she switches her trajectory. “And yet, here you are. You have some kind of begrudging respect for me.” She loops her arc back to Tora, the snake circling its prey. “I know you don’t give those fogey men in the Organization the time of day, unless it somehow works in your favor.”

“Your position is not a privileged one. This liaison
is just as conditional as those; It will only
last so long as it best serves my desires, both those
personal and professional.”

Selena studies Tora’s face as she enunciates this, trying to discern depths of emotion that she would never deliberately reveal. This woman’s mask isn’t just a means of keeping other people from her weaknesses; it was a tool of self-deception as well. While her voice is strong and imperial, the fire in her eyes cedes when she alludes to Selena. She needs some kind of connection with others– it’s loneliness tamping those flames. It had to be the reason why that woman puts up with Selena’s provocations. And, while she may never admit it, she must also get some kind of kick out of putting Selena back in her place.

The pause in the conversation starts to linger, but Selena continues her observation. She stands in front of Tora, that woman’s stare bearing down on her with what felt like physical pressure. Her brow is as tight-knit as ever, giving Selena the impression that that flesh is stapled in place by the unsightly cybernetics at her temples. It takes a moment for Selena to tear her eyes away from the shiny metal, begrudgingly admitting that it would be unseemly for the underworld’s leading cybernetics vendor to be unaugmented. Her eyes drift to Tora’s hands, broad and craggy appendages lined with more circuitboard print. As excellent as those hands may be at dismantling the very cybernetics that she sold, Selena can only imagine them sitting in a homeostasis tank, waiting indefinitely for someone to buy them.

Selena hops onto her desk and crosses one leg over the other. “I don’t see that situation changing anytime soon. The other bosses are set in their ways, and you’ve made thorough enemies out of all of them with all you’ve done.” She gulps, anticipation welling up like a lump in her throat. “And try as we might, neither of us can kill the other, in any meaningful material sense.”

Tora’s eyes narrow, exaggerating the deep furrows under her eyesockets.

“Reappraisal of this assessment may be in order.”

Selena recalls the half-dozen bodies worth of backup parts that she has stored across the state. The snake bites its own tail, a cycle of perpetual death and self-production: the immortal ouroboros.

No, that shouldn’t be an issue at all.

In under five minutes, the entire operating theater transformed. What was initially a subdued and orderly open heart retrieval became a hectic and chaotic butchery, a race against the clock. They had to to recoup their losses by extracting as much value as possible before the debtor finally hit the bucket.

Selena paced back and forth outside the barrier. It was a bad look, to have the extraction come to this. They performed assays to estimate this man’s market value, certainly, but the Ophites had been unaware of one key factor: incomplete rejuvenation. This was far from the first time this man had attempted to cash in on his organs, and the aging induced through repeated regeneration had massively cut into the flesh’s value. He attempted to mitigate the aging by undergoing costly rejuvenation procedures, but whatever black-market clinic he’d turned to had skimped on the job: most of his mass had a biological age of 85. With this information, his estimated market value dropped by at least 90%.

In retrospect, his abject panic at the normally nonlethal heart extraction made a lot more sense.

Flesh was extricated from the inert frame at a steady clip. Skin, flayed and wound into bolts. Meat, expertly sliced and divided into portions in clean deli trays. Bones, collected into heaps and scrubbed clean of collagen. The team worked diligently, breaking each serving down into saleable components before lopping off freshly regenerated flesh, the portion born once again.

This was going to be a net negative, and she knew it. Maybe if they had known he had spoofed them in the first place, they cut all the to-do with anesthesia and post-op, maybe, maybe that would have trimmed margins enough to turn a profit. Selena surveyed her house of flesh when something glimmering in the waste bins caught her eye. Her gaze snapped into focus on the metal limb, an idea taking root in her mind. Cybernetics were worth as much as scrap to the Ophites, thanks to a number of informal agreements that barred their sale. But if she could work around that…

A cold, reptilian smile grew on her face. Maybe there was a way to turn a profit after all.

Tora drums her fingers on the sheathed blade at her side. Though it doesn’t register on Selena’s face, the blade had been in the back of her mind for the duration of their encounter, a low, droning dread that was impossible to fully ignore. A threat she was intimately familiar with.

“You continue to evade why you invited me.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll fold.” Selena sighs dramatically, her hopes for a sensual diversion firmly dashed. “We’ve accumulated a rather sizable stock of cybernetics from our organ wholesale. Naturally, they’re a lot harder to move than our usual fare, especially with the market agreements that the Organization has negotiated.” She focuses tightly on Tora’s posture, eager to lap up every bit of her reaction. “After talks with some of our clinicians, we came to learn that certain employers require cybernetics as a part of their terms for employment. We’ve decided to eschew the Organization’s agreements by working with these employers directly, offering bulk cybernetics and a nominal sum of money in exchange for the fresh and healthy organs that are removed when they are implanted.” She smiles uncannily, as though making a joke to herself. ”Trade-in deals, if you will.”

Tora unfurls and stands in a flurry of motion, a storm awakened from rest. Her chair teeters over, nearly clattering to the floor in her wake. She stands on the balls of her feet, a combat stance ready to pounce.

“While I can offer due respect for bringing this to my
face instead of leaving it to be discovered,
flagrant disregard for the intent of our prior deal
is not something that the Hoshi family freely
grants. Due recompense will be granted for electing to
unilaterally terminate our arrangement.”

Her delivery dips into harsh as she finishes her sentence, severity unmistakably underscored with rage.

With Tora standing tall above Selena, she becomes fully aware of just how cosmically small she really is. Though she may be unkillable, in that moment the primordial part of her brain is ablaze. Danger. Run. This reaction, this visceral upset, this thrill, was what she had been fishing for. Nothing matters except for the reality of that woman as a walking weapon.

While Selena has gained control of their business competition, Tora is the one with control over what happens next.

Selena woke up in a cold sweat. Panic suffused through her body, and for a few moments she struggled to catch her breath before she pieced together what happened. Her hand found its way to her torso, tracing dried blood and a slight ridge in the flesh just above her navel. Regeneration was far from perfect, she would have to have that mark revised later.

She sighed to herself and began to collect her clothes, strewn about the office. Her dejection multiplied when she found two glasses of red wine tipped on to her white blazer. How had she not noticed that in the heat of the moment? She slung it over her shoulder, mentally making a note to tell one of her underlings to get it cleaned later.

At her desk, she picked up a pocket knife from a pile of clothes that must have been her button-down and vest. Weighing the blade in her hand, she relived how sweetly the blade sung to her– just how compelling Tora’s heaving flesh was and how, in the moment, her desire consumed her. There was nothing she wanted more than to claim her pound of flesh, to perversely hold her most personal rival in her hands and know that she possessed her.

Of course, this was not something that Tora had taken well. Before the blade had found its second slice, she sprung into motion and buried that damnable sword in Selena’s torso. It was hard for her to piece together the chain of events through the pain and bitterness fuming in her mind, but she faintly recalled Tora, hilt-deep inside her, kissing her on the lips.

Selena’s blood boiled with too many emotions, a flurry of concerns condensing in her mind. Retaliation like this was unprecedented to her. Had she pushed things too far? This relationship was far from her only fling. Was her impulsive desire going to be the end of it? It shouldn’t matter. Why does the idea of being deprived of this affair send her mind swimming?

If she truly possessed something, it should not be possible to lose it so easily.

The second shoe never drops. The sword stays sheathed, the hands that have killed many stay still.

Without any further words, Tora turns and departs the room, blade in tow.

Selena doesn’t let her gaze linger on the door once Tora departs through it. Lost in thought, she turns to the window and stares at the ocean. Adrenaline courses through her body, but with a few cycles of paced breathing her heartbeat starts to slow to its regular tempo. She fixes her attention on the shipping freighter from earlier. It hasn’t moved an inch since she last saw it.

Selena doesn’t worry too much. Tora will come back. She always does.