Scanner chip implants were so common, we all took them for granted. I should have realized the changes were bound to have messed with it.

But I could beat myself up about it later.

I pulled up my sleeve.

Right before my eyes, the changes were encroaching the center of the back of my right hand, where my chip had been implanted when I was a toddler. Scale-sheathed fungal tissue cut paths through my skin, weaving around the center and branching toward my thumb and first two fingers. My fourth and fifth fingers were already looking dried and frail.

“Fudge!”

Although I’d never forget where the chip had been implanted, the way my transformation was actively altering the geometry of my hand made it hard to tell if the chip had already been compromised in one way or another.

“Is that bad?” Andalon asked.

“Yes!”

“What can you do?”

“Um…” My thoughts raced. I paced back and forth on legs I couldn’t feel. My broken leg flexed at impossible angles as I stopped minding my steps. “Given that surgical equipment can’t cut through wyrm flesh, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s obstructing the signal from my chip.”

Assuming the chip was still there.

I stopped and shuddered. “Oh God…” I cleared my throat. “I think I’m gonna have to cut it out.”

It was my medical school nightmares all over again!

The amount of studying you had to do in medical school was enough to make you seriously question your life choices. I certainly had. Back in the day, I hadn’t realized that studying was only as helpful as your ergonomics allowed. Like the physical therapist had told me, I held all my tension in my shoulders and that, combined with my atrocious studying posture—I often studied in bed, lying on my stomach—led to a vicious combination soft-tissue injury: agonizing strain in my trapezius and sternocleidomastoid muscles, along with a gratuitous case of carpal tunnel syndrome, the compressed nerves buzzing with languorous electric fire. My career was saved by a dry needling in the form of syringe needles, or—for the more delicate parts of my face and neck—acupuncture needles. The cost, though, I paid in nightmares. Every now and then, without fail, I’d have painful nightmares about needles buried inside my hands, and that the only way I could fix it was by clawing them out with my fingernails.

“How are you going to cut it out?” Andalon asked. “Is Mr. Cash gonna help?”

I almost yelled at her for that—but I held my tongue. I had bigger fish to fry.

I focused my attention on my hand.

How am I going to cut it open?

Fudge. I didn’t have a scalpel on hand, and I didn’t have time to rummage around for one!

Then, my eyes wandered over to my left hand’s brand new claw. Light from the console screen-savers gleamed on my claw’s lustrous, onyx-black surface. Its tip was like the edge of a fading Moon.

I had an idea.

Oh no.

I did not like it.

Please, no.

Meanwhile, Andalon had raised her hands and was flexing her fingers, mimicking claws. She whispered with excitement. “Wyrmeh claws… wyrmeh claws…”

I closed my eyes and exhaled. “Andalon… please… stop that.”

Mercifully, she complied.

I still fidgeted with my bowtie.

I felt lightheaded as I walked over to the reception counter and sat on the edge of the stool. My eyes leapt back and forth between my hands.

The chips were implanted subdermally, resting above the abductor pollicis brevis muscle that controlled the thumb.

I blinked.

“Abductor pollicis brevis?” I muttered.

I had a sinking feeling these wyrm memory powers of mine were going to end up turning into a clone of Dr. Nowston.

I groaned. “I’m really going to do this, aren’t I?”

There was a joke about how having a chip implanted in your hand was the way good Trenton citizens paid off our collective debt to Mu and DAISHU for the part they played in ousting Zinker and the rest of the Prelatory, and though it wasn’t that good of a joke, it had the virtue of being true. Three-quarters of a century ago, a couple of well-placed improvised explosive devices “voted out” the theocrats from their offices in the Imperial Palace, and as a result, the economy tanked. Foreign-backed coups tended to have that effect. The Trenton expat community in Mu worked alongside DAISHU (some would say “beneath”) to rebuild our country from the ground up, often literally so. The theocrats had shored the heck up out of our military, our navy, our police, and the Church’s Inquisitors. Civil engineering? Infrastructure? Utilities? Healthcare? Not so much.

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As a rule, if it was shiny or went beep-boop, it was probably here only because the government had purchased it from DAISHU, on credit. It was a package deal, and the chips were just part of the package. To tell the truth, they really did simplify a lot of things. They were like little mechanical rice grains, the kind you might imagine a robot would eat along with his order of mecha-sushi, if mecha-sushi—and robots capable of eating them—were, in fact, a thing.

I cleared my throat, hoping it would do the same to my wandering thoughts.

It had been a really, really long day, and I seemed to be perpetually freaking out. I looked up at the empty Night sky that I couldn’t see anyway because the ceiling was in the way.

Can’t I have just a moment of calm? Please?

But, of course, there was no response.

Gritting my teeth, I pressed my right hand onto the countertop, palm flush against the smooth, plastic surface. I dangled my pointer finger claw over the back of my hand like one of those old fashioned claw-grabber prize machines.

Squinting my eyes and biting my lip, I lowered my claw. The claw pressed against the back of my hand, a pinprick point right next to where the chip should have been.

Exhaling sharply—it sounded like a whimper—I dragged my claw across my skin.

“Yah!” I yelped from the pain.

Flinching, I flicked my claw across my hand, up and to the right. The cut went deep; my right thumb spasmed, and I honestly couldn’t tell whether it was the stress of the moment, or if I’d just permanently handicapped myself.

My body answered for me. Like with the “test” cut where Ileene and all the other (possibly stress-induced) demon ghosts had tackled me, the tissue around the wound immediately started to tingle, and if I squinted, I could make out where the cut’s edges had begun to stitch themselves shut.

Whimpering—my legs quaking beneath me—I stuck my claw-tip into the incision. I tucked it under the edge of my skin and—gently, gently—lifted.

A whole section of still-human skin lifted off my hand like the skin off grilled chicken breast. In my squeamishness, I tugged too hard, tearing the skin near the edges. In a fit of terror, I pulled away my claw and shook my right hand like it was on fire, only to freeze as I saw and heard a rice-sized thing fall onto the countertop and bounce up and over the edge and drop somewhere onto the floor.

Gripping the edge of the countertop, I lunged forward and stuck my head over the counter, looking, looking, looking—

“—Fudge.”

— — —

It was like I’d dropped my glasses, only worse. My statistical existence hung in the balance with every ginger footstep. I crept on hands and knees as I searched for the chip, and more than once did I bash my head against the reception counter’s base. My claw rasped on the vinyl as I patted and palmed my hands on the floor, frantic, whimpering, and terrified.

Then, finally, the technological rice grain pressed against my hand.

“Eureka!” I shot up to my knees and yelled, and in that way managed to bash my head into the reception counter for a third time.

Ow.

“Mr. Genneth, why do you keep hurting yourself?”

Rubbing my head, I sighed. “My therapist asked me the same question,” I mumbled.

I reached down and grabbed the little chip, pinching it between the thumb and index finger of my right hand. Keeping a careful hold on it, I walked over to the TV console on the wall and waved it over the console’s scanner for a third time.

“Please work,” I muttered. “Pleeeeeease…”

Beep.

The sound of a scanned chip! The access menu appeared on the console screen.

“It works!” I laughed like a lukewarm madman. I cried a tear of joy. Painful, painful, joy.

Sighing, I dropped the chip into my coat pocket and zipped the pocket shut; I could figure out how to deal with it later. I needed a break. I wanted a half-hour or so where I didn’t feel like I was either about to have a heart attack or an emotional breakdown.

I held my PortaCon up to the TV console until my console prompted me to Link Devices. I stumbled away from the wall as I tapped in the necessary commands and then slumped onto the sofa, exhausted in every sense of the word. Of course, I’d completely forgotten my tail, and I paid for it with an unbearable pressure crushing my severely manhandled tail beneath my leg.

No rest for the weary.

Or, perhaps, just no rest for me.

I adjusted my seating position, sitting with my right thigh on the seat and my left foot propping me up on the floor.

Tapping an un-clawed finger on my console, I opened the TV app and took control of the screen on the wall, switching the station to CBN. I was too late to watch the first airing of tonight’s episode of The Ilzee Rambone Show and too early for the second airing. Instead, I’d tuned in to the tail end of the program—mid-commercial, no less. I filled the time with food. My left hand kept a steady flow of bits and bobs of medical waste from the now-nearly-empty orange waste bin to my mouth. In a minute or so, my fingers and claws scraped at the bottom of the waste bin. I looked down into it.

I’d emptied it of its contents.

Unfortunately, I was still peckish, and—worse—the bin’s interior was coated in smells that shouldn’t have been appetizing, but were. Blood. Pus. Stool. So, of course, I started sucking on the gaudy orange plastic like it was some kind of giant candy—dry, dirty, and nearly tasteless—as my saliva, mouth, tongue, and throat weakened it, making the plastic crack, and crumble. After a couple of licks, I could bite pieces off and then chew and swallow, like it was some kind of peanut brittle—and, for the record, I hated peanut brittle.

I could feel my sickening snacks at work, sealing up the wound I’d so clumsily dug into my hand.

The commercial break ended, and with it began the Nightly farewell. As usual, Ilzee was closing up her show with some one-on-one talk with Kirk Dempshire. Dempshire—CBN’s resident forty-nine year-old silver fox—was the host In Conclusion, with Kirk Dempshire, a program which had spent over a decade occupying the hour time-slot after Ilzee’s show. Like most of our media corporations, CBN’s national headquarters was clustered at the intersection of Loom Street and Petta, sandwiched between the boisterous Financial District and the loamy bluffs beneath Ledèrvo Grove, and all its pomp and vanity. Normally, I always looked forward to Ilzee and Kirk’s jocular banter. I loved watching the camaraderie that developed between different newscasters as they worked alongside one another over the years. In this day and age, it was all too easy to forget that the talking heads and figures of note whose presence outlined our daily lives were just as human as the rest of us. A genuine friendship was always a precious sight, especially when so much of our public discourse was toxic through and through.

But there was nothing “usual” about tonight’s Nightly farewell.