Axl forgotten, Rinpoche ambled over to Tukten and yanked his foot, tugging the slack-mouthed boy off his pony. It took the revolver from Tukten’s unprotesting hands.

‘Move and you join them.’ The silver monkey jerked one small thumb towards the corpses. ‘Okay?’

Tukten nodded.

‘Piece of shit,’ said Rinpoche, but it was talking about the revolver not the boy. ‘Even for this place.’ It snapped out the cylinder to check the machining, then snapped the cylinder back into place and spun it hard, counting off the few brief seconds it took for the five chambers to come to a halt. Still scowling, the monkey flipped the gun forwards over its trigger finger and sighted along the barrel.

‘I’ve seen kids make better toys.’

Without pausing, the monkey passed its hands swiftly over the revolver, its fingers moving faster and faster until they blurred. Which was the point Axl realised they really had disappeared, into a steel-grey smoke of freeform nanetics.

Somewhere inside that cloud a metal matrix so thin it was invisible to the human eye was holding the ex-revolver in place while subatomic assemblers crawled over its surface like dust mites, breaking millions of molecular bonds as Rinpoche rebuilt the weapon from the ground up. Growing the parts it needed rather than cutting them down from steel blanks, the way a semiAI or a human would. It reworked the metal too, rebalancing the carbon content of the barrel and cylinder, folding the steel like filo into thousands of invisible Toledo layers.

It would have preferred to work in ceramic but was making do with the source materials at hand, that way was quicker. When Rinpoche passed the revolver back to Axl the only thing about it that was the same was the overall shape. Form fits the function and the silver monkey might not like the inevitable side effects of Samuel Colt’s ingenuity but it had no problems with the man’s original sense of aesthetics.

Axl tossed the remade revolver from hand to hand, spun it once round his trigger finger and then flipped out the cylinder. Everything fitted flush, like it had been machined by an anally-repressed semiAI to dangerously minimal tolerances. Smiling, Axl tapped the cylinder back into place and watched it spin.

‘Yeah,’ said the winged monkey, ‘very pretty. Now about those housekeeping routines for you ...' It grabbed Axl’s skull and, before Axl could pull free, warmth bathed his face. ‘Not carrying credit chips are you? Good… They’d only be wiped.’

Ruby-red irises peered deep into Axl’s synthetic eye. ‘Okay,’ said the animal. ‘The good news is there’s more spare hardware inside your head than suits in a sushi bar. The bad news is that eye’s about to fail.’

‘Remake it,’ Axl suggested heavily.

‘Can’t,’ said Rinpoche, then changed its mind. ‘Well, I could, obviously, but it’s a sealed unit and pretty cheap at that. Why fuck around with an emulation when we’ve got more spares than Bodies’r Us… ?’

Unfurling its wings, the monkey twisted its head as if getting rid of a nasty crick in its neck and kicked off from the ground, pinions spreading as black wings caught and rode the bitter wind.

‘Where are you going?’ Axl shouted after it and Rinpoche grinned.

‘Shopping.’

They were exactly what he thought they were, unfortunately for Axl.

Cupped in the palm of the monkey’s hand lay two eyes, slippery with mucus and trailing fat sticky skeins of optic nerve. Blood coated the animal’s fingers and little slivers of flesh were trapped beneath its glass nails.

‘Farm fresh,’ it told Axl grinning. ‘Thought we’d have had to improvise until I ran into monks carrying a teenage lama. He was almost dead anyway.’

‘You killed him?’ Axl tried not to sound shocked.

‘Me? Rinpoche? Kill a priest?’ The monkey grinned. ‘How stupid do you think I am? I waited.’

Neither of them talked after that. Axl because he couldn’t with his face gripped in the monkey’s paws. The AI, which had once been the Colt and was now a silver monkey templated from Tsongkhapa's memory of a Bon myth, because it couldn’t spare processing power to run the necessary vocal sub-routines. Besides, it didn’t see the need to talk. The man had blacked out as soon as fingers were dipped into his orbital socket to scoop out the RedCross eye.

Rinpoche worked fast. Admittedly not as fast or as flashily as when it had remade the revolver because this time it was working with living tissue and besides who was there to impress? Axl’s brain had toggled consciousness to standby and the blank-faced boy was too deep in shock to pay attention to anything.

The new eye was 20/20. Undamaged cornea, a clear perfectly-shaped lens and an ideal ratio of rod to cone cells lining the retina. So good it could have been grown to order. It also had an iris of unnaturally intense brown, as bright and shiny as the speckled shell on a newly-opened horse chestnut.

All Rinpoche had to do was amend the eye for infrared and a couple of colours the human eye couldn’t usually see.

Having grafted the optic nerves and reattached Axl’s rectus muscles, the silver monkey adjusted a tiny dip-switch that fed off the optic nerve further up the line, popped the new eyeball into its waiting socket and began to concentrate on the ruined pit that was Axl’s other eye.

Smoke flowed from its fingers as assemblers broke free from the hand to reassemble in the wounded hollow of Axl’s eye socket. Scar tissue was cut back to raw flesh beneath and then the nanites began to rebuild, matching and shaping to a mirror image of what Rinpoche had memorised from the socket of Axl’s other eye.

Work done, the silver monkey grafted and stitched, not with thread but molecular chains, amending proteins to regrow muscle fibre and extend the optic nerve.

‘Okay,’ said the monkey. ‘Almost done.’ Fingers danced over Axl’s face and it was like watching torture in reverse, scar tissue and bruises disappearing beneath the silver monkey’s touch.

‘Now let’s get you back to Buttfuck, Hicksville. . .’ Rinpoche walked across to where Tukten was sat blank-faced by his pony, and crouched down in front of the boy, looking for some sign of intelligent life.

‘Well… life, anyway,’ the monkey said sourly to itself as Tukten blinked and gaped at the silver animal sat in front of him. ‘Wait until he wakes up and then get him back to Cocheforet, understand? I’m relying on you.’ Metal fingers that could have cracked stone reached out and gripped the boy’s jaw lightly in one hand.

‘Just don’t let me down.’

Fuck-wit.

Either the sound system was faulty or Rinpoche had amused himself by intentionally degrading the hardware until the backing track inside Axl’s head sounded as tacky as some kid’s home-grown deck. Every high note was tinny and the bass muffled down to the consistency of wet flannel.

He recognised the track all the same, a heavily remixed WarChild cut from fruity loops of temple gong instead of dry snare. And if it was Rinpoche’s idea of a joke, Axl didn’t care—it still stank.

Though not as much as Rinpoche’s other little retro augmentation.

The timecode was white, digital primitive and running backwards. The tiny almost transparent numerals floated on the edge of Axl’s vision, at the top left of his left eye, somewhere about 10 o’clock.

The read-out didn’t click from 000.00.00 to 187.59.59 until Axl shook himself awake and it’d counted back to 187.54.00 before Axl even noticed them. He was too busy coping with reality in 3-D, colour and surround sound.

SS St Bernadote/Sept-21/13.00. Slot allocated for take-off. Time remaining to allocated slot. . . Axl only realised he been reading the departure authorisation for the Nuncio’s cruiser when the words scrolling down his sight vanished leaving him staring at a worried looking Tukten.