Henry took a sip from the mug of coffee in his right hand as he entered the room, the liquid just hot enough to incite a mild shock of pain, but not enough to actually scald him. Just the way he liked it.

He did not enjoy pain by any measure, but the unwanted sensation helped to momentarily relieve him of some of the stress that accompanied his profession. A burnt tongue was a far more preferable consequence than to that suffered by his compatriots given to relieving themselves with excesses of a more…extreme nature.

His sister did not deign to acknowledge his entrance, her attention focused solely on the array of virtual screens in front of her, each displaying a cornucopia of medical information.

Walking over to stand by Heather’s side, he waited a moment for her to notice his presence, but seeing that she remained oblivious, or more likely feigning it, he spoke.

“Finished?”

“Near enough.”

“Near enough?”

“Well, I’m still out of sorts over Giuseppe being a woman. Yes, I’ve never actually treated her—not that I can remember, at least; even so, I should have noticed something…

Long used to his sister’s waffling over the unimportant, Henry gave her a second more before he would interrupt.

“…so, I’m sure you can understand why I’m being more thorough in examining your newest guest.”

Henry nodded as he waited for Heather to continue.

“Now, imagine how I feel upon discovering that once again I find myself almost missing something. Gods, the number of people I’ve treated over the years and I’m now left wondering if I knew anything about any of them at all?!

He caressed the bridge of his nose as he interrupted his sister’s prattling.

“And I’m sure That’s all fascinating, dear sister, but what I’d like to know—why I sent her here in the first place—Is if she’s platinum or plated.” Henry interjected while tapping one of the screens, his finger passing through the rectangular field of light.

It was an important question; platinum was an archaic term for anything high-end—probably taken from games if he had to guess—meaning it would indicate how much money was involved in this mess. Though the term still relied heavily on a person’s own set of values to properly apply. There was no reasonable way to grade things easily, so a crude system of classifying everything under copper, silver, gold and…you guessed it…platinum arose to help simplify matters. But again, it was all based on the perspective of the people involved, so one man’s treasure and trash and all that.

Once upon a time upon a time, when he and Heather were young, the equipment available in the room they now occupied would have been a treasure beyond their wildest dreams. Even broken. Now…well, now they were just easily acquired—and just as easily discarded—tools.

“He,” his sister replied.

“Hm?”

“He. Him. Male.”

“Um…okay? Well, is he…wait, no, what about…?”

“Voicebox,” Heather interrupted, tapping her throat as she did. “Yes and no, by the way.”

“What?”

“Plated; Yes and no.”

“What exact…oh, oh…ahhh,” Henry said as he realised what she was insinuating. “Icing.”

“Mm,” Heather replied, “everything out of sight’s a lemon.” Tapping her neck again, she continued, “Female model. Decent enough grade, but recycled; hence the constant reset.”

“But everything in sight’s good?”

“Yes and no,” she repeated nonchalantly as she poked a screen to her left, her eyes then returning to the one she had been staring at before.

Placing his mug down, Henry bent over to look at what she was indicating. He would be the first to say that the field of medicine was a near mystery to him, but he had been around his sister long enough to recognise a thing or two. Especially where financial value was concerned.

Looking at the information displayed, everything registered as platinum, but he could see that a lot of the deeper implants were off in size and shape, clearly not custom designed for the young…boy as such pricey wares should have been. They were also obviously not even just store-bought generics.

As for the surface implants, everything seemed to check out…but with what his sister had said?

‘Ah!’

Henry focused on the comms unit at the back of the boy’s skull, the implanted piece of hardware that would allow him to communicate with…well, everything, was not as it seemed. Products could come in all shapes and sizes, even when produced by the same company, but the registry codes were largely standardised around the world. The serial number displayed indicated that it was for a heavy-duty model, and indeed, the framework was for that type. But if you did a thorough scan as his sister had done, you would see that the internal components were clearly for a light-duty variant, though he could see no number on those components to indicate their type, so probably more recycled trash.

Henry ‘Hm’ed’, once again.

‘Icing,’ he thought. Things were starting to add up.

“How much could we get for all of this?”

…

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“…Heather?”

Henry looked over to his sister.

“Oh, good lord, Heather, it’s not the first time you’ve seen a pretty boy.

Still not receiving a response, even at after his teasing comment, Henry’s brow furrowed as he looked from his sister to the screen that so enraptured her, then back again.

He briefly contemplated on whether or not it was worth opening the floodgates that was his sister’s forte in life just to satiate his curiosity. Unfortunately for him, her forte was the one area where his sister was never short on words, so venturing anywhere near that particular area was always something that would cost him the better part of an hour or more if he ever dared to.

“Okay,” he sighed, “…what’s so fascinating that it’s distracting you from talking to the wonderful brother that bankrolls everything you do?”

“He’s been modified.”

“You don’t s…”

“Genetically.”

Henry’s brow furrowed. That did not seem right. He moved to again get a proper look at what his sister was staring at.

“These are the ones I’ve managed to identify so far—their existence, not their purpose,” Heather said as she indicated a list on the side of the screen displaying a large series of what Henry assumed were not chants to some elder god.

There’s no stitch line in any of them—they’re not interwoven, they’re all one mod; free of any excess and redundant data. I’ve also noted several discrepancies that might be custom-designed glands, and…and…my gods, it’s beautiful,” his sister gushed, sounding as if she was almost on the verge of bursting into tears.

So, they don’t make ‘em like they used to,” Henry commented, still unsure as to the reason for his sister’s fascination.

“They never made them like this!” his sister barked. “Not now, not ever.”

Henry considered what she had said for a moment, then replied honestly, “yeah, you’re going completely over my head here.”

He saw his sister roll her eyes as she visibly assessed if it was worth wasting her precious time attempting to try and explain it to the Neanderthal.

A part of him was hoping he failed that assessment.

“Look, even Pre-Rejection, you wouldn’t get this sort of work,” Heather paused a moment as she thought of how to explain it to her twin, “Okay, the rich, they buy the top-end deals, where the mods and implants are custom designed for them…?” she tried to simplify.

He nodded to confirm that he was following.

“…those mods, even when they’re part of a package, they’re all separate products. All that the extra money gets you is some wage-monkey tweaking them to work better with each other. Even then, that process is largely already mapped out. But no matter how well that augmenting goes, they remain separate products.”

Henry vaguely remembered his sister explaining something like this to him before, each word invoking a sense of déjà vu as they were said, but he knew not to interrupt her when she was on a roll.

Someone had to have rebuilt this kid from the genome up. Might not even be a kid with the amount of work that’s been done. And you couldn’t do that with any of the standard tools available, so those would also have to have been custom designed. And all of that would require a hell of a lot of research beforehand….”

“That sounds really expensive?”

Heather rolled her eyes again. “Yesss; fancy blood cost lot of money.”

Ignoring her, he asked, “Then why the ears?”

“What?”

Henry drew his hands to either side of his head and pointed his index fingers upwards; “Elf ears?”

“Half-elf, the Elven style’s longer and more diagonal,” she corrected him.

“The question remains,” Henry replied.

Heather just shrugged her shoulders and returned to her study of the data before her.

Only whores and harlots got the elf treatment—half-elf, or whatever—and if his sister’s excitement was anything to go by, the amount of money involved would be a number far in excess of what anyone in their right mind would waste on modifying one of them, even if they had the fetish and were the richest of the rich.

‘Another oddity about the child,’ Henry noted.

Speaking of which, “The kid? Did you confirm her…his story?”

“I confirmed the possibility of his story, she responded. She pointed to the display of the boy’s internal systems. The spine specifically.

“This whole set,” she began, “It could serve to turn him into a…mobile platform…or whatever they were trying to do, but it could also be used for a slew of other things, so I can only say ‘Maybe’. Of course, if this is just supposed to be a scam, which the icing seems to indicate, then it just needs to look like it’s possible. Which it does. There’s also plenty of bells and whistles and other all the standard pointless-gimmickry present that any boardroom would wet itself over.”

“Whatever the case,” Heather went on, “you can get a good return on everything, even the garbage. Though the real money would be in the blood, as I said. I’ve already taken enough samples—blood, bone and all the rest, but I’d still like some brain tissue as well. Preferably before you do…whatever it is you’re gonna do.”

Henry winced.

“Heather, I’m not a monster.”

She gave him a questioning look.

“Not always,” he relented. “Besides, we can’t sell him. Whole or otherwise.”

His sister then gave him another questioning look, though this time for genuine curiosity rather than disbelief.

Heather was one of the best in the world in what she did, but so was Henry, and it was now his turn to lecture the caveman…woman.

“Think about it; the only reason we could ambush Powell and his thugs was because of the mess the Scarlattis caused. And say what you want about them, but they weren’t stupid. Arrogant, yes, but not stupid. They did what they did because they needed to. Emphasis on need. Jean managed to pull John’s cam footage—the Scarlattis were facing a fully equipped corporate security squad…in an enclosed space.”

Heather just looked at him, completely missing the significance of his words.

Henry rolled his eyes and explained, “Enclosed spaces are dangerous. Limited visibility, plenty of places to hide but limited space to move, uh…and many more things I could point out—the perfect recipe for disaster, is what all that means—and that whole mess made all the riskier because they were essentially a bunch of cats setting themselves against a pack of heavily armed and heavily armoured wolves. Now, you could argue that they should have just dumped the job altogether, but as I said…arrogant.”

Henry ran both of his hands down his face as he tried to rub away his fatigue.

“Point is,” he went on, “they would only do all of this because they figured that they were being set up. These people,” he went on, “they’re running a scam—surface-level plating to fool the casual inspections, probably backed up by a bribe or two and a quick operation should anyone want to look deeper, but not prepared for a sudden and unannounced visit from the head-stompers. The kid gets put under guard or isolated—probably both—the people involved panic, then try to solve their problem with a quick fix.”

Henry picked up his mug and took a sip from it to wet his throat, the now cooler liquid less palatable for its lower temperature.

“A professional negotiator wouldn’t give away the game, so the idiot in charge either did it in person or relied on someone not prepared to talk with our lot. He gives away…”

“Or she…,” his sister interrupted, visibly bored at having to listen to something not about people’s innards.

“…they,” Henry said, not rising to the provocation, not wanting to waste time on silly games, “give away their intent, or do something that gives the Scarlattis the wrong idea, and they go off script and then royally screw things up for everybody. That explains our side of things, but the corpo side? I’m thinking that these people…,” Henry circled the display of the boy’s implants, “they’re a cybernetics division. They would have needed a genetics expert on staff, but wage slaves are taught to work, not think…

“They would only look for what they wanted to see, so they butcher the kid unknowingly and do their thing,” his sister butted in, filling in the blanks, “but then someone gets wind of the kid’s real worth and orders a retrieval.”

“Yes…oooor maybe they just get wind of the scam and wanted someone for an uninterrupted inspection. You said that you almost missed whatever’s in him? No reason to think that they would be any better. Now the importance of why I need to know all this, is that we can’t exactly just go to a corporation and tell them that we’ve got something that they don’t know they want…”

Especially when it’s technically their property already,” Heather noted.

“…yeah. And if they do know what he’s worth, then it could just give them more reason to come after us. Without knowing any of the particulars about whatever they were doing, I can’t properly say how we should handle this. All I do know is that we’ve got at least two parts of an unknown corporation interested in this kid, at least one of which will be desperate to cover everything up. Probably more so now with the Scarlatti’s mess.”

“And if they’re willing to try and screw over those psychopaths, they wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to us.”

“Mm. We could go to another corporation, but we don’t even know whom we’re supposed to be avoiding. On top of that, that would be a political move, no matter our intention.”

“And that’s when you get a target on your back.”

“Exactly. We play neutral; accept the jobs given, not create them. Then again, they might still kill us out of spite or just to make an example, regardless.”

He took another sip before continuing.

“And there’s our lot. The board’s been cleared on our end—so Powell, the Scarlattis and all the other mooks that followed them, as well as a lot of people in our corner, are out of the way, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a straggler or two that do know what’s going on, ones that could screw us over when we least expect it.”

“And if they are looking for this kid,” Heather realised, “then they would also look for anything related to him. So, no hocking his implants ourselves…unless we keep them in-house, but even then…?”

“They could be a landmine just waiting to go off. None of them are emitting anything, but if we’re searched or…well, you get the idea.”

There was a moment of silence as Heather shared in her brother’s frustration.

“Best move would be to dump everything in the bay and wash our hands clean of the whole thing,” Henry said, mostly to himself, airing his thoughts as he further considered his options.

“Uh-huh…,” his sister replied as she studied him, “but you’re thinking of the money?”

“…I’m thinking of the money. Could really help us when we get back.”

“Back?”

“It’s too hot. Even without this particular mess, Powell was too loud—too careless. The elites are going to have to make a move. If only to keep up appearances. Best thing would be to head on down to Mexico for a bit, but I’m also thinking that would also be too obvious…so, France…maybe? I’ll discuss it with everyone tonight—morning…whatever time it is, and see what’s what.”

“And the kid?”

Well, as I just said…best thing would be to wash our hands, but…,” he trailed off.

“But?”

“But…,” Henry repeated, more to himself than in reply as he thought of something.

He then walked over to the intercom by the doorway and pressed the button.

“Hello? Jean? Yes, have you dealt with the van yet? …no…no, uhm, could you instead clear it, wipe the security and make it ours? Good, good. Oh, and could you get Nakamura to come see me, please? I need one of the go-bags.”

Ending his call, he turned back to the other occupant of the room.

“I’m guessing you have a plan,” his sister asked.

He smiled. “Don’t I always?”