She sat in her hotel room, looking through the window at the border checkpoint into Mexicali, sharpening her fangs. Her silver tooth extension implants were not the very latest fashion in biohacking, but they were still one of her favorites. Duende sat in just the pink glow of her laptop as she laid out the various tubes and syringes that were filled with the concoctions she had engineered to get her across this border, looking closely at each with her solid red eyes, without visible pupils. In the past few weeks, the United States had declared biologically modified humans like herself illegal, a threat to humanity and to the holy sanctity of the body taught by Christ. She could truly give zero fucks about what Christ thought of her beautifully amalgamated body, one with enough modifications to be hard to identify an original gender, or any state before the sin of creating herself. She had decided that she had to get out, but the dictator had already made all passports for modded people invalid, so she had to get creative.  

She had chosen this hotel to be her last stop in the US. From here, she could see the large mech bodies of border patrol drones walking between the lanes of vehicles. Larger than humans, around twelve feet tall, these bipedal drones had backwards bending legs that allowed them to run faster than most cars available to the public, and nasty weapons at the ends of their hands. Both long claws for ripping open the trunks or roofs of cars when they needed to, as well as circular belts of large armor piercing rounds, to deal with the increasingly militarized weaponry and armor of both gangs and white supremacist paramilitaries. She could also see the “agents”, robot dogs armed with automatic weapons and with screens attached to their heads to provide a human face to border enforcement.

There was a knock at the door of her hotel room. Duende was expecting the medic she had hired to meet her here, but not so soon. 

“Ok,” she thought, “here we fucking go, chinga la migra.”

When she opened the door and saw the medic, she was immediately relieved that she appeared femme. Somehow she still trusted people on the femme spectrum more with her body than those on the masc side of biomods. There didn’t seem any good logic for that, but she had just experienced less violence from folks who enjoyed the same kind of eyeliner she used. 

The medic looked at her, and said “Duende S?”

“Yes,” Duende said. 

“Can you give me the verification code?”

Duende had already pulled it up in her phone and had it fresh in her mind, “766A/%9”.

“Great, thank you. Can I come in and we can get started?”

She walked into the room, carrying a paper bag that Duende recognized would contain her instruments wrapped in single use plastic wrappers to ensure sterility. 

Duende said, “I need you to take out my eyes, and replace them with these non-modified looking glass eyes. I’ll also need you to inject me with this nanosilver solution I designed to not allow my other mods to show up on a B-Ray scan, and monitor the transfusion until it is complete. Just make sure my heart doesn’t stop. And can we do something about these teeth? Just until I get to the other side, of course…”

Shocked, the gig worker doctor said, “and you thought you could just use the MedicMovers app to do all of that?”