You know they say that shit’ll fry your brain.

Trav had just laughed at that. Cracked the grin of the young and immortal, patted the shoulder of that artificial husk, silicon skin and titanium frame, as if to say this old thing?

They say that about a lot of things, he’d said. Hell, back in the day, they thought it was TV that was going to turn us all into zombies.

They had laughed along with him, yeah, it did sound like a pretty obvious hoax when he put it that way, but the thing’s dead, glassy eyes had still kept tweaking their nerves. Always seemed to be watching them too much and not enough, too empty and aware all at once. Looking at it, they had felt too young and not so immortal after all.

And now?

They stumbled up the stairs towards Trav’s apartment, trying to hold in their guts with a hand pressed to the wide, slithering gash in their stomach. It had all gone wrong, just a simple deal, Trav had said, sell a little smoke so he could buy the latest fixes for his new toy and they could do whatever they wanted with their share. How immortal was he feeling now, lying in a lake of his own blood back in that alley by the pier?

Stupid question. He wouldn’t be feeling anything at all now, just like they wouldn’t in a few minutes. It was all slipping and gushing out through their fingers, and their only hope was that he’d left the swap cord for that glass-eyed new toy, new body, somewhere they wouldn’t have to look for it.

The spare key almost slipped out of their fingers, too, everything slick and sliding away from them, breath, heat, thought. They wiped a hand on their damp jeans so they could turn the doorknob, and there it was, the first thing they’d seen stepping into his apartment for the last few weeks.

Watching them, it seemed, as they stumbled inside. It sat draped over the busted spare armchair, looked like a woman, pretty, young, and when they’d asked why, Trav had just said it would be a waste of money to buy a second body the same as what he already had. And anyways, it wasn’t like he’d planned to live in it. Just take it out for a night on the town now and then.

It wrecked a person’s brain, they said, spending too long in a husk like that. No nerves, no heartbeat, none of the squish and warmth and wobble that made the human mind feel at home in its body. But all of theirs was dripping out between their fingers, and there was the cord, thank god, thank Trav, already plugged into the jack on the back of the husk’s head.

They pushed their hair away from their own jack, colder than it should have been, or maybe that was just their fingers, numb and clumsy as they fumbled up the other end of the cord from where it lay on the floor.

Better to be fried and wrecked than dead. Or at least, it had better be. It was the only hope they had left, holding their breath, bracing themself for something a little like death as they shoved the other end of the cord into their jack.