The worst part of her brain running on that sort of bandwidth was she couldn’t convince herself it was just fucking up the numbers. It danced through the figures quick as a spark down clean wires, quicker than thought, and told her she could work every second for the rest of the month, waking, sleeping, all of it, without making enough to keep her mind on the premium plan when the next cycle rolled around.

She pressed her fingers – left hand, the flesh ones – to the dented metal contours under her rat’s-nest wig. The processor inside that beaten chassis was just about good enough on its own to keep her lurching through manual labour, keep her alive, mobile, servile. Anything more, she had to outsource, run through the ether and other, cleaner circuits.

Anything more, now, she had to find a way to beg or sneak or steal, or else feel her mind shrink like a strangling garrote the moment her credit chip declined.