Free Shadowrun: Spells & Chrome by John Helfers

probably somewhere close by for safety. Moses wouldn’t mind docking with the one with the overlarge lips, but he needed to save his cred for the hair replacement and the fins … and to fix something. What attachment was he going to repair? Besides, his father had taught him to stay away from those kinds of women. They were sinful. Moses was SIN-less
    “And the Lord said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with the fathers; and his people will rise up, and go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land, whither thy go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them. Deuteronomy thirty-one-sixteen.”
    “Talking all Biblical. Still looking in the puddle, he is,” big lips said. “Yo, Clint.” She sidled up to Moses. “You interested in a little whoring, maybe we—”
    “Get lost,” Moses said.
    “S’matter, don’t like elves?”
    “Live nude dancing elves,” Moses said, looking up at the sign again.
    Big lips shuddered and swayed down the street, arm-in-arm with plastic dress.
    “Tadd would’ve spent his nuyen on them geese.” Moses missed his old chummer.
    The last time they were together Taddeus told Moses he didn’t discriminate enough, that he bought pre-owned cyberware on the black market when he should be shopping at legitimate places. “The legal clinics won’t deal with the stuff you’re putting in your brain,” Taddeus had said. “Who knows where that stuff came from? I oughta turn your doc into the authorities.” Tadd said other things, too, but Moses hadn’t had his data filter turned on, and so could only remember a few sentences.
    Ripper docs, shadowclinics, Taddeus wouldn’t have anything to do with them, Moses knew. But then Taddeus didn’t have near the modifications as Moses. Taddeus wasn’t quite better-than-human. Tadd was still mostly human.
    Moses had been better-than-human for several years.
    “Nuyen. Nuyen. Nuyen.”
    He liked his ripper doc ‘cause he could pick up modifications that weren’t exactly legal, and he never had to supply an ID or SIN. And it wasn’t like he had these things done in a back-alley filth parlor with half-used, unsterilized medkits at the ready in the case of accidents. It wasn’t technically a black clinic or a body bank. His Doc had a real medical degree and operated out of the basement of a tattoo parlor, a real high-end underground clinic. Moses had done his research before going under the knife. Doc hadn’t had his license pulled for any of the usual reasons—too many malpractice cases or amputating the wrong limb. He’d simply experimented a few times on a few unwitting and later protesting patients … and got caught. Moses wasn’t unwitting; he underwent each modification with both insect-like compound cybereyes wide open, and he didn’t care when Doc suggested a little muscle doping now and then or a little trial genetic infusion.
    And Doc was a real ecologist, as green as they came. He believed in recycling—bioware implants, nanoware, cyberware, augmented limbs. Because Moses bought most of his stuff second-hand from Doc, he could afford the integration system for all his simsense and networking devices and the bundle of skillwires with multi-functionality. He wouldn’t have been able to buy tricked-out cyberears if they’d come right off the assembly line.
    Moses thought he might ask Doc if those ears could be tweaked just a bit, so he could hear the snakes. The cherry-grape one might have some juicy secrets to share. He glanced back down at the puddle. Yep, the snake was still there.
    Doc was good at providing discount prescriptions. Moses had to take three … or was that four … pills a day to stave off biosystem overstress, and another couple pills to treat his temporal lobe epilepsy. The latter malady was an acceptable side effect of having so many cyber implants. Doc said the condition was chronic and degenerative and that if it got much worse Moses would need