Helix looked from Chango to Mavi and back again. If she had her druthers, she’d be the one to leave, but her earlier attempt at rolling over ruled that out. “I guess so,” she said reluctantly.

“I couldn’t really bandage your ribs,” said Mavi after Chango left, “so we just have to do this carefully. Gently she helped Helix roll over.

Despite the pain of moving, Helix was glad to have her face down against the mattress. She didn’t have to face Mavi as she pulled back the bed covers to examine the wound near the small of her back. “I have to change the dressing” said Mavi, moving across the room. Helix heard a drawer open and close and then she felt the cold blade of a scissors against her skin, felt the bandages lifted, and something cool and soothing applied to her wound. “I have you closed up with cellular tape. It seems to be healing clean.”

She heard the tearing of paper, and then Mavi reapplied bandages, and helped her onto her back again, and not once, during any of it, did she say anything about a second pair of arms. oOo

Chango walked up the rickety steps of Hyper’s house and leaned against the screen door, shading her eyes with one hand so she could see inside. Squinting she surveyed the dim interior of the first floor. Hyper had gutted the place after his folks died; knocking down walls and taking out the front two thirds of the upstairs, leaving only a small room above the kitchen where he slept, when he slept. Four metal tables stood bolted to the floor where the dining room had been, heaped with machine and electrical parts. The front part of the house was a maze of books, magazines and holocubes. And above it all hung the archives of Hyper’s past interests. He’d laid steel girders across the rafters, and every time he completed or tired of a project, up it went. Old model airplanes and boats spun lazily in the occasional breeze, along with automated kites, walker robots, rebuilt text processors and a chemistry set.

“Hey, you home?” she called, her lips brushing against the rusting screen. Hyper looked up from behind an enormous old cathode ray monitor squatting on the floor by the front windows. He had gutted it and was now putting it back together. His brick-brown skin glowed with perspiration. It wasn’t all that warm a day, but Hyper always ran hot. “Chango, c’mon in sister dear, check this out.” He waved her in with one hand as he worked an electric screwdriver with the other. She slid in the door and locked it behind her. “You shouldn’t leave your door open,” she said.

“Oh, I forgot. C’mere,” he gestured for her to sit beside him on the floor. His skinny legs stuck out from paisley boxer shorts that were too big for him. His long toes splayed among screws and transistor chips. The shorts and a faded, stained t-shirt were all he wore except for a head mounted holotransceiver perching atop his skull like a small black brain parasite, secured by a thin band across his forehead and over his ears. The imaging lens which hung down over his right eye reflected a miniature circuit diagram. To Hyper, it would appear larger, hanging in the air two feet in front of his face. His eyes darted from it to the tube while his fingers sorted feverishly through chips and wires.

“Can you hand me that scissors?” he asked, nodding to the graphite shears by her knee as he uncoiled a length of fiber cable.

“What are you doing?” she asked, handing him the shears.

“If I install an optical receiver in this thing and connect that to a quad board I can program it to display raw visuals in real time. I want to mount it on that go-cart chassis over there, give it infrared and motion sensors and let it follow people around and imitate them. Robo-Mime.”

“God, what a pain in the ass,” said Chango.

Hyper glanced at her grinning, “Love those nuisance machines,” he said. He fastened a connector clamp onto the end of the fiber cable and turned to face her. “So, how'd it go?" he asked, "I missed you last night at Josa's."

Chango shrugged, "There were complications." She handed him the swiper containing the codes she’d scanned the day before.

Hyper’s dark brown eyes widened, "Complications? But you weren't arrested."

"No, not those kinds of complications. At least not yet. I scanned this woman, I thought she was armed," Chango laughed weakly. "When I tried to give her back her card, she bolted. I followed her, and she got jumped in an alley. Turns out she's a sport. She was hurt pretty bad, so I took her to Mavi's."

"You got pretty involved with a failed mark, didn't you?" Hyper said softly, his gaze upon the circuit map only he could see.

"Hyper, she was really hurt. One of her assailants had a knife. What was I supposed to do, leave her to die?"

"Why did you follow her in the first place?"

Chango shrugged, searching for an answer. "When I bumped her, and then tried to give her card back, she freaked. She ran, scared! I was... curious."

"You said she was packin'. She shoot any of those guys?"

"No she wasn't. I thought she had a shotgun, but it wasn't — it was one of her arms. She's got four." Hyper whistled, "Functional?"

"Yeah! Fully developed, fully functional."

"Wow, impressive."

"See? I couldn't let the sister die."

"Yeah, I guess I can see that. You give her card back, then, or what?"

"No, I didn't," Chango reached into her pocket and pulled out the plastic square. "But get this," she handed it to Hyper, "it isn’t even a cash card. It’s data." Hyper glanced at it. "What's its encryption signature?"

"I don't know, It’s nothing I’ve ever seen before."

"Hmm." He flipped it between his fingers thoughtfully and held it up to the light. A faint pattern glimmered on its surface, and then, as he tilted it just right, bloomed into a hologram. Spiraling curves of burning, electric green wrapping around one another, just discernible as an S enfolded within a stylized G. GeneSys.

Hyper glanced at her, one eyebrow cocked. “Mind if I keep this and look at it later, when I’m done with Robo-Mime?” he asked.

“I don’t know, what if she wants it back?”

“Then I’ll give it back.”

Chango shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

oOo

Chango nudged Mavi’s screen door open with one toe and slid through, dumping the hemp fiber grocery bags on the kitchen table.

Mavi was at the stove, whispering over a simmering saucepan. The roiling steam perfumed the kitchen with sage and goldenseal. Her words faded, and she looked over to see Chango. “You bought groceries.”

“Yep.” Chango reached inside one of the sacks and drew out a package of spaghetti. “‘Pasta a la me’,”

she said with a flourish of the box. She drew out three eggs and juggled them.

“Ladies and gentlemen, she cooks, she climbs, she produces groceries out of thin air, she’s Changini the miraculous.” Mavi pawed through the bags, “how did you get all this stuff?”

Chango took a bowl down from the shelf over the sink and cracked the eggs into it. “Through the idleness of fools.”

“So that’s what you were doing in Greektown last night,” said Mavi returning to her mixture on the stove.

“What else?”

“Oh, I don’t know, show girls, maybe?”

Chango snorted, stirring the eggs with a fork. “What would give you that idea?”

“Your friend.”

She laughed, “Oh no. No. A dancing girl afraid to show her body? I think not. Mavi, you’ve got to get out more.”

“Then how did you happen upon her?”

Chango shrugged uncomfortably and began beating the eggs with a fork. “Actually, I’d been following her.”

“Following her? But she’s not a show girl.”

“Would you stop? Jeez, I can’t perform an act of good samaritanism without you trying to turn it into some tawdry little scenario.”