"I want to be a superhero when I grow up!" Jimmy spat out with glee, unable to contain himself a moment longer, the instant she lifted him onto the examination table.  

"I don't know, Jimmy, you have to be pretty rich for that. Every time you destroy a city block going after a super-villain, they come after you to foot the bill for the repairs." 

"Shouldn't they send the bill to the bad guy?" 

"Those guys never have accidental city destruction insurance worth a darn." 

Jimmy sighed. "Yeah, I guess it doesn't go with the whole bad guy m.o." Doc Holiday had him sigh for him again as she checked his vitals with the stethoscope. "How's the new arm working out?" she asked his mom. 

"Best baseball pitcher in the entire school." 

"Good," she said. 

"Ah, I'm over baseball," Jimmy said, taking deep breaths for her like a trained seal. He'd been through this routine so many times. "I want to be a musician this week." 

"What kind of musician?" 

"Ah, I need to be able to compose symphonies in my head. Leastways that's the only seat open right now in my school orchestra, the dean says." 

"I can manage that." She looked over at mom. "But does mom want to spend the money?" 

"It's actually included in the enrollment fees to Juliard. They know if you're not chip-enhanced you're not going to make it. The competition is just too stiff anymore." 

"Very well then." She went over to her computer and played with her keyboard. The fabricator spit out the chip on demand a few seconds later. She pushed it up to his forearm and let it tunnel under his skin. 

"Whoa! No surgery this time!" Jimmy said. 

"Nah. We're past that. Too slow and too risky. This is way safer and way cheaper." 

"How long does it take to work?" 

"For something like this," she said, "I'd give it a couple weeks. And that's if you cooperate. If you go off dreaming about being something else again, who knows if it'll work at all?" 

"Shouldn't you know?" 

"I don't get much call for this one, not in my end of the woods. But it comes with an average rating of 4.5 stars, according to over a hundred Amazon.com reviews. And their algorithms are pretty good with weeding out the fake testimonials." 

Mom looked happy, at any rate, smiling at him. Jimmy stared at his arm. "Doesn't even hurt. Feels like it should hurt." 

"It's not so easy beating Mozart at his own game composing symphonies in his head as you'll soon find out. Even with the chip. You're going to have to work at it very hard. Honestly, I think you're a little too young and too fickle for this one. I'd have gone with Indi-500 miniature drag racer. Much more you." 

"Very me," he said, then sighed. "But mother over here is determined to see me become the most famous composer in the whole world. You know how mothers are." 

"Yes I do," she said, giving Mrs. Bowman a mock disapproving glare.  

"I told you, Jimmy, there are too many people with those modifications already. And there's no way to distinguish yourself short of getting around the track faster. This way, you have a chance to establish your own voice, and even if they're a million genius composers out there thanks to the chips, they all have their own unique voice which can't be replicated. There's a future in what can't be enhanced, not what can." 

"Yeah, I know," he said with a big mock sigh of his own. 

"Don't let his theatrics throw you. He loves music, just that he loves a lot of other things. He'll thank me in five years." 

"Yeah," Jimmy said, accepting her help off the examination table, "if I don't shoot you first," he mumbled. 

"That's his father talking," Mrs. Bowman retorted, putting her hand on his head and leading him out the door. 

The orderly walked in the next customer. A military vet. There wasn't much of him left after stepping on a land mine. Both legs gone. One arm gone to the shoulder. The other one gone to just below the elbow. "Guess I don't have to ask what you want?" she said.  

He smiled at her, jumped up on the examination table, and started dismantling himself, pulling off the fake limbs. She didn't catch the sight until she'd finished looking up from her computer. "Whoa there, big guy, no need to come unglued." 

"Ha-ha." 

"So we talking regular limb replacement, or cybernetics?" she said. 

"I'm a war junkie, doc. Just going to go right back into the thick of things. So may as well make the limbs cybernetic." 

"Well, you'll have to go under the knife for that." 

"I heard with the new nano..." 

She held out her hand to arrest the flow, shaking her head at the same time. "Years away from practical application. And once the limbs go on, there's a couple months of follow up therapy to make sure you learn to not overwork the human part of you. Your spine won't have additional shock absorbers to take what your new arms and legs can take." 

He frowned. "Don't suppose you can stick in the new spine and titanium skeleton one time?" 

Doc Holiday smiled, "Not on your budget, soldier. And the army won't fit the bill. Cheaper just for them to use a full-fledged robot. Surprised they still let you play." 

"Yeah, well, as it turns out those high-priced robots are best saved for more high-priority missions than the ones I get." 

"Won't be long before they're cheap enough to go anywhere. You sure you don't want to consider another line of work? I can set you up with a chip-enhancement that'll actually give you an edge over an AI as a hybrid." 

"We're all living on borrowed time, doc, some are just a little farther past their expiration point than others." 

"Well, give it some thought anyway, while you're out there lying bloody and unconscious, and find there's not much else to do but ponder the errors of your ways." 

"Ha-ha. And they told me you have a great bedside manner." 

They both turned at the sudden intrusion. One of her patients had just walked through the wall, not paying attention to where he was going. "Sorry," he said, looking up from his iPad. "Guess I should have been looking."  

"George, meet the future you," she said gesturing to the guy who'd just walked through the wall with the same limb replacements that George had requested. 

"Yeah, cool, that works."  

"Since I'm here," the intruder said, "you aren't going to make me walk to the back of the line again, are you?" 

"What is it you want?" 

"National Geographic has an opening for a photo-essayist to take up root in the amazon. I'm not rated for the tropics, can't take pictures or write to save my life." 

"So why do you want the assignment?" 

"Are you kidding? You know how easy it is for an upgraded American to find a wife over there? One that'll cook and clean for you and spit out babies and slave over raising them, all without questioning the natural order of things?" 

She smiled. "You definitely go to the back of the line, soldier." 

"I guess I should have figured you for the feminist type. You're not going to hold the cracks against me about the wife, are you? I don't want to get down there and find myself programmed to hump logs instead." 

"I'll try and control myself. I hope you'll do the same." She gestured to the hole in the wall. 

"Sorry, doc," the orderly said, racing in. "He got past me." She watched him walking off with cyber-appendages that looked like they should be attached to a robot, not a human. "What did people do before they could be anything they wanted to be?" 

"Don't know," she said. "Life must have been hell." 

They turned around to see George reassembling himself. It was no mean trick, without any arms or legs. "Wow," the orderly said, "that was worth the price of admission." 

"Convince our interior decorator of that. And make sure that wall repair bill is added to our photographer friend's bill and not taken out of my pocket," she said. 

"Will do, doc," the orderly said absently, her eyes still riveted to George's reassembly project.