The light in a Fusion Doc’s surgery is bright enough to show every stain. Instruments wait in sealed trays. A client sits beneath them trying to look calm while a price appears on the wall beside the procedure. The Doc watches their face for a moment, then adds the cost of anaesthetic.
A Fusion Doc will fit almost anything if you can pay for the part, the labour and the risk. Most are technicians rather than doctors, trained to connect nerves to circuitry, make a second-hand limb respond and keep an illegal implant working long enough for its owner to walk out. Some are brilliant surgeons. Others learned by keeping soldiers alive after battles nobody officially fought. Some are merely quick.
Their workshops sit behind shuttered shops and below clubs, close enough to the street for business but easy to leave when a deal goes wrong. They ask where a part came from only if the answer affects how it fits. They know the Reapers sell stolen hardware; they know a customer may have killed to afford an upgrade. Neither fact changes the price.
They can install a factory-fresh enhancement, rebuild a damaged one or make a discarded part work in a body it was never designed for. A person who needs a replacement lung tonight has little power to bargain. The cheapest fitting may keep charging them for years in repairs, pain or medication.
A good Doc takes pride in work that survives. Dead customers do not return, and a botched job is bad for business. Pride does not make him generous. He remembers who paid, who owes and whose implant contains a component worth more than the rest of their body. He may save someone’s life at three in the morning and have a collector at their door by noon.
People leave the surgery stronger, faster or simply able to breathe again. They also leave knowing precisely how much of their future they have sold to get there.