As I sit on the edge, its hard not to think about the events that brought me

here.
She was brilliant. Libertine red hair that cascaded down, burning waterfall
onto frozen silk white shoulders. Neither of us dreamed it would end like this.
Neither of us believed we would ever die, no matter what we were told.
This is the story of how everything I ever loved turned cold and hard.
Mechanisms and wires. AugPro.
Click. Click.
It began, as all good stories do, with a girl. Fifteen years after the turn
of the millennium, I was nineteen. She was Italian. Every lost young English
boy has a soft spot in his heart for a beautiful Italian romantic.
Click. Click.
This wasnt your average dark-haired, brown eyes Italian tourist that I met
at some piss-filled club in Brixton. No. This girl, her name was Lisa, skin
pale as Arctic ice and eyes as blue as the silhouette sky, she left Italy by
herself when she was seventeen. Furiously intelligent, wildly passionate, more
than a little bit insane. Borderline Personality Disorder, I think.
Symptoms: Chronic emptiness, fear of abandonment, indistinct conception of
personal identity, suicidal tendencies.
Click. Click.
We met at school, as you do, one day outside the counsellors office. It was
only a painful flicker of the eyes before each of us realised just how batshit
crazy the other was. I walked her home that day and we were lost in each other
from then on.
I know what youre thinking, this sounds beautiful. This sounds raw. This
sounds like a love story between two regular, mentally ill people.
This sounds like a love story.
This sounds like love.
This sounds like it has a happy ending.
Its not.
It doesnt.
Click. Click.
Things took off startlingly quickly. She moved into my house within a couple
of months. She had no family in England to stop her doing so. Over summer I
went to Italy, met her mother, met her father, sweaty lazy days on fresh beaches
devoid of people. When we came back, wed finished school and all we
had was the house that my father left me when he died two years before and a
lot of free time. We read a lot of books, watched a lot of films. Fair bit of crime.
Apart from the occasional suicide attempt, everything was beautiful.
Then one day she came home from some job waitressing at a caf somewhere, I
cant remember where. I can never remember.
Click. Click.
Tom, she told me, theres something you gotta see.
Six words changed my life forever.
What you have to know is that towards 2020, technology started to ramp up,
building up to a terrifying cascade of electronic oblivion that no-one really
had any idea how to control. In ten years we went from household WiFi to household
AugPro and we, the youth, were in the middle of it all.
Click. Click.
AugPro was the leading corporation involved in the rapid, worldwide
development of Biological Component Augmentation as it spread through the veins

of humanity, bolstered and nurtured by corporations and politicians.

If you think it sounds complicated, its not.
BCA is when a Bionics Doctor, such as those mandatorily instated at every GP in
Britain under the New Age Conservative party in 2018, finds something, anything,
wrong with your body and tells you that they need to stick some mechanical part in
there to fix it.
Oh, dear, this bastard will tell you, Youve been a smoker for twelve
years, Mr Bloggs, we better install some LungFilter-XFs.
Sounds great, Mr Bloggsll say. I mean, this stuff was free. Tell a middleaged man that he can sprint like he could when he was twenty for free and hell sign
up to do whatever you want.
Click. Click.
One day Lisa came home and hurriedly began to garble something to do with
BCA, and I, ever my paranoid self, immediately jumped to the worse conclusion.
My blood froze like cooled iron, clogging up my arteries. I thought shed
gone and got herself a new pair of robo-lungs. An augmented eyeball. A brand
new hypothalamus to help her sleep better. I wasnt exactly happy with the way
the world was turning out and I didnt want either of us to be a part of it.
After I calmed down again she explained it to me. Our friend Rno had somehow
found a way to hack into the AugPro system. This guy was obsessed with the BCA
revolution. He had more than ten pieces in his head alone, and hed found a way
to hack into any random AugPro piece from anywhere in the world. This was the
find of our young, discontented lives.
What this meant is that youd retrieve all the data from this arbitrary AugPro
device. Now, if this was just a foot piece, a bionic toe, for example, all you
d get is a load of movement data, integration files about the other toes, the
leg. But if you were lucky enough to get into someone frontal lobe piece, a
replaced hypothalamus perhaps, this meant you had access to the entire brain.
Thats memories, fantasies, thoughts that the person who had it in probably
didnt even know about themselves. But thats not what we were interested in.
Our young, raw, opportunistic minds went straight for the oldest trick in the
book: bank details.
Rno had found this AugPro hack on one of those deep-web
anonymous forums where your signal gets bounced all over the world so the
government cant track it. What he didnt tell us at first was that to hack into
someone elses AugPro device, you had to get your own installed. A head piece.
Hypothalamus, Pineal gland, frontal lobe, it didnt matter, you just had to insert this
dead cold metal parasite into the only thing that truly defined yourself.
Obviously, I wasnt attracted to the idea.
We debated it for months. Wed both seen how Rnos pieces had changed him.
Improved his cognitive abilities, taken away his eczema, even restored his thyroid
levels back to normal. Wed also watched our once relatively lively and sociable
friend retreat back into his artificial world of twisted neurones and binary code.
Looking at the world out of the eye of a computer, analytically, rather than through
the warm, flawed filter of humanity. Nothing about AugPro, even this scam, appealed
to us. Until we started watching his bank account fill up.
Come on Tom, Lisa would beg me sometimes, its just one
piece, itll barely make a difference, think about everything it could do for
us. Stop being so paranoid.
The only problem is that unless you wanted to risk having your entire brain
being scooped out by some backstreet Bionics Doctor, the operation was permanent.

She won me over eventually, and on the 19th of June 2021, hand in hand, for
better or for worse, we trudged along to the local Bionics Hospital for a free NBHS
operation. We minimised as much as we could and each got a small memory
enhancer in our entorhinal cortexes. Afterwards there was no real difference, we
were able to remember our shopping lists more efficiently, I was even able to retrieve
some of my older, happier moments, burning through the rest of my childhood. We
never had arguments about who said what when, because we both knew.
The hack went exactly as planned. We were able to discreetly access the data of
anyone who had more than three augmentations planted in them through Rnos
computer or ours back at the house. Protecting our own data, wed scan for hours
until we found someone who had another head chip and enough money in their
account, before transferring the money anonymously to our own accounts. Real
banks had started to give up long ago, only the old fashioned like us were still using
physical money. Corporations like AugPro kept everyones financial information
registered, so all you had to do was walk into a pristine, bleached shop with the
pristine, bleached techno-morons behind the tills and when they scanned you for
your chip, all payment was sorted. I wont lie. It was efficient.
Click. Click.
We never took too much money, just enough to live with a few
more luxuries, but it was infectious. It was a manufactured sickness. Less than a year
later Lisa came home with another chip in her ventromedial nucleus. The
satiety centre.
To help with my dieting, she told me.
I freaked out, but not as much as I shouldve done.
Click. Click.
She had two more installed before I got another. Whereas I was doing it to help
with the hacking, to keep us more anonymous or to scan more devices at a time, she
was doing it to help with everyday life. She loved it. Theres this buzz you get when
you walk out from the operation and your eyesights better due to a retina implant, or
you can do Sudoku faster due to a upgrade in your dorsolateral prefrontal
lobe. She got addicted.
But she was as beautiful as ever, and we felt invincible.
By the time it all went wrong, eight years after that day outside
the counsellors office, I had four AugPro pieces in my brain. She had sixteen.
All around her body with nine of them in her head. It was too much. I shouldve
known.
I shouldve known.
Click. Click.
It was late night in December, the day that I came home to find her sprawled on
the bathroom floor, her wrists sliced. She hadnt had an episode in a so long, I
couldnt believe what was happening at first, but despite my numb shivering fleshy
fingers barely being able to pick up the phone, I managed to call an ambulance in
time nonetheless. I remember finding some sick humour in my wondering whether
she, this cyborg woman, could even die. But the doctors at the hospital, both Bionic
and regular, told me that she nearly had.
They also handed me something that shed been clutching in her bloodied hand
for the entire ambulance ride, I hadnt even noticed I was so shaken.
It was a pregnancy update. It was clear right there, the facts of life and death told
on a screen. There was no baby anymore. It was going to be stillborn. Iron poisoning
combined with a overly high level of electrical signals, all caused by the AugPro
devices. They told me that she should never have exceeded the recommended

number of seven pieces installed at once.

Sevens the magic number! They told me, glistening artificial white teeth
smiling at me with all the empathy they could muster out of their decayed
electronic minds. Neither of us ever knew there was a recommended number. I
remember wandering how many others this had happened to.
I waited two days at the hospital before they let me see her, and as the love
of my life emerged from the recovery ward she walked past me without a sideways
glance. When I chased her, she pushed me away. I ran back, grabbing anyone with
a badge on their shirt and demanding that they tell me what theyd done to her.
It was her wish, they said.
Shed replaced both her amygdala and her hippocampus, the emotion and
memory centres of the human brain, with AugPro upgrades. The sarcous RAM and
hard drive of everything that made her shine like she did. I stumbled out of that
damned hospital choking and collapsing, my fleshy weak body slamming onto the
grey unforgiving tarmac of the car park.
She lost her love in that operating room and so did I.Everything I loved, the
entire reason I ever had any cold metal wires inserted into my body. A computer.
Dead.
Click. Click.