Chapter Twenty-Four - The Second Hand Clinic

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Once I made sure Rac was fed, took care of Nose's problem like a champ, and then took five minutes to squeeze into my new skinsuit armour, I was mostly ready to go. I strapped on my Trenchmaker to my thigh, got an armoured coat on--I'd be moving around a lot and power armour was a bit much--and then clipped my sword to my side, in case I needed to be intimidating.

"Ready to go?" I asked as I slipped out of the bedroom.

"I've been ready for an hour," Rac said. She was leaning against a wall, arms crossed and looked frustrated as all hell. "You haven't told me where we're going yet."

I nodded, then stopped in front of her and looked Rac up and down. She was wearing a patch-covered faux-leather jacket. The kind that wasn't even trying to hide that it wasn't made from a dead animal. The patches weren't to look cool, they were functional. Still, even with the stains and all, the jacket came off as... scrappy. She had shorts on under that, and one of Lucy's T-shirts. This one with a winking cat face and text that said Strut My Way. I wasn't even sure what that meant.

Under all that, and sticking out to her ankles and wrists, was a skinsuit. The armoured sort, with some light padding on the knees. Big boots too, with a knife stuck into the side of one of them.

Yeah, she looked like a new samurai. If no one poked at her disguise too hard, or questioned her, or tried to hack her augs.

"Hey, Myalis, did I ever buy new augs for the Kittens?" I asked aloud. "Should I get a blueprint for that kind of thing?"

You did. Your current fabricator won't be able to produce augmentations. While it can make small-scale circuitry, the level of detail needed to make an augment that fits within a person is beyond the capabilities of the machine. Strictly speaking, it could make augmentations at the level you'd expect to find on the market right now, but it couldn't make them easily installable the way those you've purchased for yourself are.

That was too bad. Lucy and I had talked a little last night, and her project in Burlington was somehow still going strong. The city was mostly secured now, with no incidents of aliens showing up to eat anyone in almost three days. Still, the Kittens militia was growing as a sort of community centre type thing.

Lucy was making and shipping crap their way whenever she could. Usually one small box of random crap every day. She said it kept them happy, even if there was no way the stuff she sent was more than a drop in the bucket.

Now, with the fabricator being used for prosthetics, Rac's stuff on the side, Lucy's constant stream of T-shirts and fuzzy pyjamas...

Yeah, I had enough pull here to start a small business just printing things full-time. Maybe I could get Daniel and the other kittens in on it too. They'd need jobs at some point. Rac was taking care of it for now, but right now it was just the one machine.

"Anyway," I said with a big stretch. "Let's head out?"

"Head out to where, exactly?" Rac asked.

"First, one floor down. I want you to meet See-Three. She's the chick in charge of the prosthetics centre we're setting up."

Rac eyed me, but didn't gainsay me as we moved over and into the elevator. One floor down, as promised, and we were on that open floor with the gutted offices. It didn't all look bad, though. Someone had pushed some furniture around since I'd last been down here and another someone had gone at the floors with a mop and had assaulted the carpets with a vacuum.

The clinic was just around the corner from the elevator, and I paused along with Rac to take it in. There was a new window at front with an arching, old-timey logo etched into the glass. The Cat's Paw Prosthetics Clinic.

"Huh," Rac said. "You did this?"

"Nope! Well, I mean, it happened because of me, but mostly because I fucked up and rushed to fix that fuckup. Actually, you know what, I take none of the blame. Someone else fucked up and I had to clean it up, but I didn't do a great job of it. One thing led to another, and I figured I owed a lot of people some new limbs."

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"I've been printing them like you asked," Rac said. "There must be a couple hundred made by now."

"Yeah," I said. "Now, let's see if they're being put to good use?"

We walked over to the clinic and stepped in. The lobby was clean, which was nice. Obviously it was the same decor that had been used for the office here before, but that wasn't all that bad for a clinic. Some chairs were filled with a few scruffy looking guys and one or two people that looked... like ordinary folk, really.

There wasn't a secretary behind the counter, but I knew we were seen when See-Three came rushing into the room from the back. "Stray Cat," she said.

"Hey," I replied. "Uh, this is Rac, the girl who's been printing things for me upstairs. Rac, this is See-Three, she does prosthetics."

That last was probably obvious. See-Three's right arm was currently missing from the elbow-down, replaced by... some contraption with about fifteen little articulated arms with different nibs on the ends.

Plus, the face. See-Three's triple-optical look was hard to misplace.

"Pleasure, I hope you don't mind if we don't shake?"

"That's fine," Rac said. She looked a bit uncomfortable at all the naked cyberware on display.

"So, is this a check up?" See-Three asked.

I nodded. "I wanted to make sure things were still good here," I said. "Are they?"

She grinned. "They are, come on back, I'm just finishing up an install. We still lack staff. I've got a few friends who are into cybermodding as a hobby, of course, but it's not every hobbyist that wants to turn it into a job. Not to mention that the pay's shit and we're not accredited."

"Is that a problem?" I asked.

"For insurance, yeah. It is. If you do work on others without insurance accreditation, then they can blacklist you as a non-compliant. Basically, all of your personal insurance costs quadruple because you're working outside of their ecosystem."

"Huh... that's fucked up. Have you considered pipe bombing that insurance company?"

"Several times. But they all do this," she said. "And it makes sense. We're cutting into their business. Anyway, lots of hobbyists are also blacklisted for breaking DRMs and such. It happens in the hobby."

She brought us to a room in the back, clearly someone's office at some point, but it had been cleared out, with a plastic tarp divider strung up along one wall to keep the blood splatter at bay.

A guy was on a reclining seat, breathing deeply through a mask fit onto his face with a little inhaler-like tube on the side, like for asthma. "Is he... knocked out?"

"More or less," she said before gesturing to his arm.

It ended midway down his lower arm. There was a plastic sleeve, and then a bunch of bare metal doohickies and small contacts.

"Your prosthetics are very... plug-and-play? It's different than what any of us are used to. Easier to install though."

"That's good," I said.

"Yeah," she agreed before pulling a box open. I recognized it as one of these from the printer upstairs. The arm within was plain, a bit boring, but it was an arm. And then See-Three broke it.

She snapped a fitting apart, then unscrewed another bit with ease, her little articulated armatures undoing a strip of the upper arm just before the elbow. She was left with a little less than half.

"See? It's pretty easy to strip off entire sections until you're left with what you need. Took a bit of getting used to, but I don't need to chop off someone's arm at the shoulder to install one of these. The interface is whatever, but the software is very compatible with just about everything on the market."

"So it's good?" I asked.

"It's alright," she said. "Hardcore body modders will have better, but only because they'll be looking to get every last half-percent out of their gear. This isn't as tweakable."

"Well, damn. So, how's everything else going?"

She sighed. "Right, let me just tell you."

I sensed that I was either in for bad news, or a long ass rant, and I wasn't sure which one would be worse.

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