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The cyborg laid flat on the hot metal platform, her arms and legs captured in straps to avoid any reflexive movements caused by the engineer picking away at the inside of her chest. Inside her open cavity, an impossible mess of artificial organs and tubing mesh was visible, pumping strange chemicals to unknown places. The clutter was knotted around bunches of both electrical and digital wiring that twitched sporadically as the engineer poked and prodded at various mechanisms. The plastic balloon that operated as Enevelen's singular industrial 'lung' would rise and deflate in an unnatural, stuttered way, accompanied by the quiet whistle of escaping air. Small electrical shocks popped and clicked along the segmented metallic structures that permeated and encompassed this mess, a skeletal frame that housed the whole viscous monstrosity. Its vat of liquids and flesh bubbled in a heap of lubricated plastics and mock-titanium.

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A brief cough sounded from the host of the body, and the whole mess shifted. An inner clock switched a gear, a nearby piston flailed out in wild aggravation to punch a nearby metal cushion, and a rogue wire sparkled dramatically, sizzling like fried bacon. The creature inside Enevelen was incomprehensible, and nothing about the way it behaved felt remotely natural to her. She stared down at it through glazed, unblinking eyes, and watched with horrible discomfort as the engineer invaded her chest with his telescoping eye stalk. He retrieved a mandible from a twisting tower of electrical instruments attached to his arm, and carefully used its heated end to solder a fray in a single copper wire. It sat underneath two plastic-rimmed tubes, which he held apart with six additional thin metal fingers. They protruded at varying increments from the arm like branches of a stiff metal plant, twisting with the segmented body of the arm in freakishly quick mechanical spirals.

"Ewww haha," mumbled Chlorophi from the peanut gallery. "Did normal human bodies look this disgusting?"

They loomed over the process from the opposite side of the workbench, towering over Enevelen's body in the piss-poor lighting. Looking up at Chlo's skeletal form, combined with their haunting, inhuman stillness, made them resemble to her the frightening visage of a sleep paralysis demon. Their bulbous plant-housing head was half-cocked in a bodily expression of gross fascination, with their arms and hands interlocked behind their back. The view of her body was nauseating, Enny would agree, but Chlo was likely getting a sick thrill out of seeing the grody insides of their favorite species.

The engineer poked at the lung, swiveling it around with a mandible to test its elasticity. A small amount of water had collected inside, likely from condensation. There were several temperatures of different extremes regularly fighting each other for dominance within her body, originating from a cavalcade of incompatible mechanisms that had been installed to compensate for her older, outdated augmentations. Water droplets appearing on the interior of a temperate area within her body was expected, but not desired.

A tiny straw flicked out from one of his mandibles, almost needle-like in size, which the engineer slowly inserted into one of many small rubber access ports in the balloon. He prodded the finger into the small pool of liquid like a mosquito hunting for blood, and with a sudden, quiet slurp, the water disappeared into the straw. The engineer then retracted the needle into his arm, and shifted his attention elsewhere.

Enny hated routine maintenance, as it was expensive and always uncomfortable to sit through. Emergency repairs like reattaching a dislocated femur or nursing an infected digestive system were by no means easy or cheap to obtain, but the typical monthly tune-up, inspection, oil change, etc etc... It was a costly chore that demanded a hefty income and regular compromise. Unmoderated food intake would cut into her maintenance budget, careless spending on weaponcare would cut into her maintenance budget, spending quality bonding time with friends at any mock-restaurants or general outings that required paying more than a handful of credits would cut into her maintenance budget... It was unrelenting. She abhorred it, and worrying about affording the procedures permeated every facet of her life. Hunting required her to be totally functional at all times, operating at peak efficiency with absolutely no room for error, so it was essential for her to attend these arduous visits as frequently as she could. Missing one appointment wouldn't be the end of her, but being unable to attend or afford repeated visits in such a dangerous environment as this would inevitably mean falling into the dreaded 'spiral' that all working cyborgs feared... which was NOT something she wanted to be thinking about with someone poking around inside her innards. It was in her best interest, Enny rationalized, to avoid prolonging the procedure with additional stress-fueled inconveniences.

The engineer returned Enevelen's organs back to their original positions, before locking up her chest cavity. He then moved his attention upward towards her head, which signaled the beginning of her least favorite part of the procedure. She wanted to lie and reassure herself that she had become totally desensitized to how frightening it was to have the engineer's telescopic eye inches away from her face like this. She wanted to believe that it had become so routine that the mechanized screwdriver spinning millimeters from her left eye socket had felt almost comfortable, even familiar to her after so many visits. Sadly, none of this was remotely true.

The engineer removed Enevelen's mysterious, tinted black visor and placed it on a tray to the side of her. Chlorophi, still peering in from the other side of the workbench, was using all of their willpower to avoid picking it up and jokingly breath-polishing it with their shawl like a pair of prescription glasses. They knew no one in the room would have the appropriate sense of humor to appreciate the gag.

Enevelen's true face was rather sickening and uncanny, a dark bluish-grey silicon skull with a flab of pink printed mock-flesh pinned overtop, along the temples, to frame humanoid-adjacent backlit green eyes that housed her distinct piercing gaze. Her eyebrows on close examination looked fairly natural, bushy black stripes that usually went un-emoted, but the rest of the head being as frightening as it was left any 'natural' element of her to look hilariously artificial. The skin tapered off around where a nose would normally be, leaving a large hole deviated by a plastic septum. The two "nostrils" wired directly into her rebreather sat in this space, whistling between the wiring like a broken kazoo as she breathed. The sound made her self-conscious, and she quietly tried to gasp through her skeletal mouth to rectify this. The resulting sound was much more unnatural, like a fish drowning on land, and the realization of this made her attempt to hold her breath. The rim of the titanium casing surrounding the vent-like rebreather hugged the contours of her chin, its gaping hollow gap around her cheekbones creating a prominent and unpleasant visual hole where her absent visor normally sat. With her face visible, she assumed she must've looked like the rotting skeleton of an oxygen-starved astronaut, hugged tight inside a thin, crumpled space suit that had been crushed and spaghettified by a black hole. Her head was flat and rather elongated in the back too, where wires pooled out into data ports in her spine. It resembled the technology of of fifth generation gaming consoles with fat, clumsy chords and yellowing grey-beige plastic casings, the mechanisms inside clicking incessantly like a retro-era mainframe computer. She always thought her body looked a bit like a clunky Dot-com bubble era PC with the physique of a wrecked motorcycle.

The engineer carefully peeled off the skin surrounding her eyes, revealing a hollow void that housed her two green eye stalks. They stood unsupported like wriggling free-standing fungus in the large facial cavern, the globes rolling around in her sockets as she glanced anxiously at the two figures above her. The plastic muscles hanging below flexed and pulled against each other along greased metal frames, bundles of blinking, wobbling wired devices cobbled along the roof of her mouth behind her eyes. The underside of her brain was profusely corded into her upper spine sitting behind it, electrical pulses sparking along its length as it twitched with each passing thought. Thick greyish-green slime pooled at the back of the hole, bubbling quietly from the boiling heat.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Chlorophi choked out through her boney hands. They had made the mistake of looking behind the eye stalks, possibly even noting the smell of Enny's inner head, which had a stench like rotten fleshy gums on unboiled and not-so-recently pulled wisdom teeth.

Without any emotive movement from his body, the engineer's low mechanical voice groaned out from behind his telescope. "Keep your distance during this procedure. We must limit the possibility of outside bacteria causing damage to the brain, or infection to the jaw."

His mandibles wormed their way past her eye stalks, and pinched at thicker, intestine-like piping below the fleshy, plastic brain. It shivered slightly at the sensation of his cold, sharp fingers, which made Enny's eyes twitch slightly. They darted around in a panic, focusing in on the hot lamps gleaming from behind the engineer's imposing visage. The bright light reminded her of the desert sun.

She had a brief thought of how nice it would be to get back outside once she'd snagged a new commission, sitting out in the warm air and peering down her rifle's scope at some unknowing bountyhead, hiding away in the sand.... Another million credits easy, it would be effortless. She could spend hours out there in the heat just reminiscing on old memories of being in the army, back when she had a little more direction in her life... or maybe just relax and think over her personal ethos, alone in the dunes. It would be a peaceful afternoon, once she got everything situated.

In the reflection of the engineer's camera-like lens, she noted a reflection of the slime behind her eyes, a disgusting writhing mess of blinking lights and tangled muck-coated piping. She was gripped by a tense feeling of disgust that made her wildly nauseous, and forced herself to turn her eyes away. She could not close them, as her eyelids had been removed along with the attached flesh, and she could not turn her head due to the danger of the engineer's instruments damaging her brain. She began to sweat profusely, mentally screaming in an internal panic. There was nothing she could do, she was trapped by this visual in her mind. All she could do was look away, and hope it would end. Bile was rising in her throat.

In a moment of impulse, she glanced back into the reflection, internally berating herself in a frantic, animalistic tantrum for doing so. "Don't look! Don't look you stupid idiot! You're killing yourself, you're killing yourself," she shrieked in her mind. Her hands were shaking, and her toes curled in fright. She struggled to swallow the rising acid reflux that crawled up into the inside of her mouth.

In the reflection, Enevelen saw the interior of her of pink skin being reapplied over the top of her head, slowly screwed in by the engineer's noisy driver. Enny looked at her face, the space around her eyes now looking something adjacent to humanoid. She sighed in relief, her frantically beating heart returning to a calm, regular pace.

"We'll run diagnostics for an overview of the functionality of your conscious systems, but you won't need to be restrained for this now that we're done inspecting any areas with nerves or muscles."

The engineer's dozen or so long, thin metal fingers retracted into their twisting stalk, two remaining outside it to collect a wire from behind Enevelen's head. His other hand released her straps into the table with an adjacent button-press, and she flinched at the sudden and jarring feeling of flexibility. He motioned for her to sit upright, and swing her legs over the side to allow for better comfort during the next step. The wire he had obtained was lightly tugged from her head towards a handheld PDA he had collected from a shelf under the platform, into which the engineer inserted the wire's plug with a soft *click!*. A vector diagram of her artificial, misshapen brain appeared on the display, coupled with text boxes, counting rapidly as they scanned her for dysfunctions and irregularities. It made no sound as it did this, only at the end of the scan did it 'ping' with a bright tone signaling completion of the scan.

"I see a slight discrepancy in your memory, possibly a result of self-tampering... but I won't badger about that if you don't want me to. Otherwise, the majority of your brain and awareness seem to be functioning identically to your last few inspections, aside from a slightly higher frequency in electric activity. Did you switch out a capacitor in your hypothalamus?"

Enny nodded, still a bit shaken from the earlier procedure. "U-um, yes, I was having trouble sleeping. I discovered one of my capacitors had burnt out, so I replaced it."

The engineer shook his head. "You should really reserve that sort of operation for a licensed augmentation engineer. It's very dangerous to modify an artificial brain without proper understanding of safety procedure, there's the risk of causing severe damage to essential mental processes. It's very likely you could've given yourself irreparable brain injury if you had made a mistake."

Enevelen begrudgingly nodded again, quietly withholding her resentment of the scolding. The engineer's prices for such a simple procedure were very steep, and she suspected there was no real reason for this other than to profit off of the desperation of such a situation. How typical. Why shell out a sizable amount of credits for a procedure she could just as easily do herself? She had taken several courses of emergency medical and artificial treatment during her century-long stint in the Foundation military, so she was more than qualified, she felt. She didn't need someone else rummaging around in her brain anyway.

"We can run a few more tests to identify the source of the discrepancy in your memory, or we can write up the bill now and send you on your way. What would you like to do?"

Enny glared at the engineer from a turned angle, grabbing down at her visor to re-conceal her skeletal visage. "I'll take the bill, but I want an itemized receipt."

She lifted herself from the table, struggling to find her footing after yet another traumatic dissection from her least favorite cyborg. Billing was in the running for her least favorite topic of discussion as well, but something she needed to be prudent about to avoid being overcharged.

"I want to see you write out every damn thing you expect me to pay for. I want to see how much you've got the audacity to charge me for the tools, the materials, the damn sandwich you ate on your lunch period before my appointment..."

The engineer shrugged in acknowledgement and returned to his counter without much of a response. He couldn't care less, Enny supposed. Like many cyborgs of this era, his body had likely lost the capacity for any natural thought or emotion several decades ago. He was just a machine now, she observed, just like the rest.

Chlorophi helped Enny to her feet, still bitter and shaken, holding her by the arm as they collected her brown satchel off of the floor. She draped it overtop her shoulder, and the two wandered out of the workstation, observing the crowd of ill machines waiting in small, cramped chairs for their turn on the workbench.

Chlorophi glanced back at the waiting room, flabbergasted. "Does he seriously make you pay for his lunch, or were you just kidding...? That's ridiculous if that's true..."

Enevelen laughed quietly to herself at Chlo's frustration. "I hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised... He's the only one in this town who's willing to work on a body as old as mine, and he seems to like taking advantage of that by punishing me with high prices... Last check-up I had here ran well over three million credits because I had to have a part of my femur repaired."

"Whoa," replied Chlo.

The two of them wobbled out into the dusty street, Enevelen stumbling over herself as the dirt beneath her betrayed the traction of her feet. She wobbled over the faded yellow lines of a buried highway overpass that used to tower over the space, though now it had collapsed and had been consumed by the mountainous desert. This particular settlement of cyborgs had manifested a ramshackle town of steel and iron over top, like a children's tree house of rotten wood among the branches of a petrified oak.