Sex, lies, and surgery: an unlikely romance

Five o'clock! Finally. I've been watching the minutes tick by for the last quarter hour. Haven't been able to work. Today is the day--I'm gonna go pay my girl a visit.
I only go every two weeks or so--any more often and I'd run the risk of her calling corporate. Couldn't have that.

I log off my terminal and punch out, and before you can say 'Lana's butchery' I'm in my car on my way down to the lower south side, to the slums.

I'm already getting worked up on the way over just thinking about it. It was about three months ago when I first got the idea, I was down in the slums looking for a phase modulator for my pirate 'net set when I saw her standing out in front of her shop.

Lucky, no traffic today. I drift my single-seater into a vertical parking rack, feed the machine a chip, and watch my car being lifted up and cycled into storage.

I check my pocket quickly, to make sure my counterfeit I.D. is still there. I had to fork over some heavy currency to a friend of a friend in authentication for it, but it was worth it for a fake Ethics Inspector badge.

I walk down around the corner into the alley and step under the half-closed gate, cleverly disguised as a busted service elevator stuck between levels, into Lana's chop shop. No one in the front. There's a chime on the counter, but I don't trip it. I know my way around, by now.

Stepping around the rack of implants and augments on display, over a fat bundle of fiber-optics and plasma feeds running across the floor, I follow the black ny-carb snakes into the back.

She's sitting on a stool at her operating table, working on a full-conversion left arm, basically humanoid. Hearing my foot on the door she snaps her head around, and just as quickly a snub-nosed microwave emitter is in her hand pointed at me. 'That's got to be illegal...' I think to myself, but then I don't really care, I'm just an overdue-funds processor at TessaCorp.

She gives an exasperated sigh, and bitches out loud "God, you can't even miss a week, can you?"

I shrug and spread my hands. "Hey it's your call lady, I can just do my job right and get out of..."

She interrupts me. "Sure. Do your job and get out of my way. No thanks, I'd rather keep my business... and my freedom." She snorts exasperatedly, and turns to face me. Her homo sapiens flash-boiler lowers as she lets her arm relax. "You know, it's because of you people that I have to work out of a hole-in-the-wall like this. Believe me, I'd like to have a nice storefront just off the main strip in the wetware district, maybe with a few skylights and an honest to god vid-line. Your damn licensing fees cost more than I earn in two months, and that doesn't even leave room for food and utilities."

I lean against the doorway. "Sorry honey, I don't make the regulations. I'm just trying to make a living, same as you. Just your bad luck my job is to keep you from doing yours."

"Yeah..." She stands up slowly and pushes the stool under a workbench, and starts to clear her project off her operating table.

I walk casually over to her table and run my hand over the faintly glowing green surface. It gives slightly under my touch--some kind of smart composite, designed to go soft in contact with skin, to cushion patients. I smile a little. "Let's do it right here."

She rolls her eyes expressively. "Yeah, right. The last thing I need is my customers getting blood poisoning. This place may not look like much to you, but it's an operating room, dirty work happens in the back. And stop touching shit."

She grabs a rag out of a bucket of disinfectant and washes down her table, making a point of scrubbing extra hard where my hand had been.

She's fucking with me, trying to set me on edge so she can get the upper hand. I just step back, carefully ducking around a diagnostic display, and drift towards the back of the room. I stop in the doorway to her supply room and watch her scrub away.

Her hair, generally brown, is bleached and dyed to international caution orange, a slightly outmoded term dating back to when there were nations, and agreements on the meanings of certain colors. Shaved short on one side, the other side hangs down over her ear and cheek, loosely clumped together by some kind of static-field generating nanospray. She steps into a shadow cast by a monitor, and I see that the dye actually glows. Her face is typical, but her left eye is an undisguised bionic, without a clever prosthetic contact cowling to hide it, and her nose is unfashionably large. Her pants today are typical for her, vintage rip-stop nylon with pockets, every seam worn to fraying. Her tank top is the same every time I see her, and I often wonder if she owns multiple copies of the same shirt, or just never changes it. It looks dirty enough, covered in stains left by blood, graphite lubricant, and who knows what else. So much for medical sanitation... I love her tank top though, because it hints at what's under it, which I love even more.

She certainly has an attitude, but some times I think she doesn't realize how genuinely sexy she is, or how rare that is these days. In a world where anyone can be any size and shape for the right price, beautiful is just a few thousand credits and an afternoon of surgery away, but her allure is a different kind of thing. Something about her I'm-not-even-trying-today wardrobe, teenage vandal hair and lip ring, and her genuine dedication to her scrappy business. She's special, uniquely human, more interesting than the cookie-cutter whores outside and the high-priced fashionistas on the downtown strip, with their insured designer bodies. I want her badly, and the significance isn't lost on me--she has something money can't buy.

She finishes her ritual of cleansing and tosses the rag into a basket with others like it, in a beat-up portable ion chamber, and looks up at me. Her bionic eye twitches almost imperceptibly, probably passively scanning me for implants, weapons, and vital signs. "Alright lover boy, let's get this done with, I don't have all day."

I back up to let her pass, running my eyes gratuitously over her body. She ignored my gaze stoically and runs an old keycard through a reader to open the hidden door to her tiny apartment.

I step through behind her, and the door closes after me. She walks over to her messy bed and knocks a mess of takeout cartons onto the floor with a swipe of her hand, then pulls off the tangled sheets and blanket. She was a little bit old-fashioned, but then I suppose a lot of cyber-docs operating on a budget like hers weren't about to pay for the feed it took to power a gravitic sleep field. This is good enough for me anyways, after all I'm not here to get rested.

She turns around to face me, and slowly peels off her dirty tank. I take a moment to savor her profile, with her arms in the air and her face masked in old cotton. Her sides taper slowly to the perfect hourglass waist and gentle swell of the hips that women get from a metabolic regulator, but her breasts are all natural, soft and just a little too large, overbalancing the ideal mass/structure ratio and sagging a little bit under their own weight. That's my favorite part of her, though I'm not normally a breasts kind of guy. Maybe it's because it's unusual, especially for a cyber-doc. Something uniquely *her*.

She lets her shirt fall on the floor and stands, arms akimbo, looking at me. After a moment, she spreads her hands, palms up. "...well?" She looks at me, as if to say, 'What are you waiting for? Isn't this what you're here for?' She was right, in a way, but I was realizing that maybe what I really want isn't the same thing as what I thought it was when I left work.

I run my tongue over my back teeth for a moment. I imagine her looking at me like a she wanted me, wanted me to be here with her. I wonder if there's any chance. Suddenly, before I know what I'm doing, the words spill out. "Lana... I'm not an E.I."

She looks at me, part confusion, part suspicion, part doubt. "What?"

I look up at the roof for a moment. Reckless. I had a good thing going. At least she probably won't call Enforcement on me, she's got as much to lose as I do, but I should have just taken what I had instead of wanting it all. Well, too late to backtrack now. "I'm not. My badge is a fake. Please don't shoot me..."

She crosses her arms and shifts her weight, looks away and swears quietly. She lifts a hand to rub her forehead, then drags it slowly down her face, clearly frustrated. "Fuck. What........ I'm such a gullible bitch."


I look at her, feeling unusually guilty, for a mere moment before spitting out "So I'm gonna go..."

I turn and make a hasty retreat, suddenly afraid that she'll pull another horribly lethal sidearm out of somewhere and starting cutting loose on me. I'm on the threshold of her operation room when I hear her call out to me. "Wait... Come back."

Uncertainty. Part of me wants to give in to excitement, while another screams for caution. Turning slowly, I peek very carefully around the frame of her door. Seeing no weapons, I step into view. She has one arm folded defensively over her breasts, and the other gestures vaguely in the air.

"I, uh.... I've been waiting. For you."

She folds her other arm and looks at me. I'm not sure what to say. I entertain the idea of letting my silence make this point for me, but decide not to push her. I'm irrationally relieved that she's still talking to me. "What?"

"For you to come around." She shrugs. "I guess since we're being honest... You're not the first guy I've made this deal with with. If you call me a slut, I'm gonna shoot you. I'm just trying to make it, you know? Just doing what I have to do to keep my job. Like you." She looks down and a deprecating smile creeps onto her face. "I figured out it's not so bad if I.... you know. Hold off. So I'm in the mood. So..."

"...so you.... want me to stay?"

She shrugs. "Yeah, I guess I do. For a lying sack of shit who uses girls with nowhere to turn, you could be worse."

I take a step towards her, reaching slowly to unhook my collar. "Does this mean..."

"It doesn't mean shit." She interrupts me, "Don't think it does. You're just... alright in the sack, I guess. Better than a warmed-up spanner handle and a grainy holo-porn, that's all."
She sits down on the edge of the bed, and by the time I finish pulling my undershirt off, her arms are at her sides again and she'd cracked a real smile, small though it was. "Yeah, you're not so bad, I guess. Tell you what: If you make me *real* glad I let you get away with this, I just might let you come around again, next time I'm feeling horny. You better impress the shit outta me though."

I grin, maybe a little too eagerly. "No shit... Anything you want babe, just name it."

Her eyebrows rose a fraction, "Man, you sound desperate. Maybe this is a bad idea." She reaches slowly for her tank, still watching me.

"No, I just... Well I mean, I didn't buy that I.D. because I was bored... It cost me like 4k!"

She picks up her shirt and holds it to her chest, and I feel a little bit of panic creep over me, as the body I want so badly starts to disappear again. "...what? So what, I'm sure you'll get your money's worth out of it, if you haven't already"

I shake my head and sigh, eyes closing and then opening again. "No, it's not like that. I don't go around doing this. I bought it on the sly when I saw you a few months back, from a friend of mine at the company. I just... Fuck, look. What I'm trying to say is, I didn't just make this shit up because I thought you were easy. You're sexy, Lana. Serious, there's something about you. If you give me a chance, I'll do whatever you want me to."

Lana sucks in her lower lip and fiddles with the ring punched through it. She does that when she's thinking hard. She did that when I showed up the first time and offered not to report her if she'd fuck me. After a minute she shrugs and lets her shirt drop again "Yeah whatever. I guess you're kinda sexy too. Still a lying sack of shit, though."

I grin again and waste no time about stripping down the rest of the way. I don't want to give her another chance to change her mind. She interrupts me when I'm almost naked. "Hey Mr. fake inspector... Can you get me a fake license? Oh, and what the fuck is your name?"

I nod slowly, thinking about her question. "Hurley. Yeah, I think I can. Won't be cheap, but I have a buddy in Authentication, so it should be a pretty good fake. It'll be expensive though, and I'll have to call in some favors. If I get it for you, we're even, fair?"

She snickers and unzips her pants, pulling them down half way, then sliding her panties down to mid-thigh. "Good start... but don't push your luck. You were a real jackass all last month, I want you to be my slave this month. I hope you like munching carpet."

I frown at her, "Hey now come on, do you know what your license is going to cost me?" I try to act like I'm going to stare her down, but she calls my bluff, and I shrug. "Fine whatever."

She giggles at me, and replies, "Man you're a pushover. And here I thought you were some hard-bitten blackmail expert."

I finish undressing myself, and mutter defensively "I just think you're worth it. I don't let just anyone tell me what to do. I don't."

Lana lies back on her bed, pulling her knees up, giving me room to fit my head in right where she wanted it. She chuckles softly and looks up at the roof. "Are you in love with me or something, Hurley?"

I kneel in front of her, resting my hands on her knees, and give an embarrassed little grin. "Yeah. Something like that."