Credit: Emrah Elmasli

The dog sniffed in disgust. "Turned out to be some 250-year-old codger who'd had every bit of his body replaced by synthetics. God, that hurt. Oh, sure, he looked young, he looked prime, he looked like the perfect host; but no, his skin was made of some kind of biomimetic organic metal with embedded high-tensile-strength polymer fibres. So he pulls me off — which wasn't hard, because now I'm spitting out diamond film coating and can't hold on to anything — and turns around to lecture some kids behind him about how in his day, children had respect and didn't throw fish at their elders. Didn't throw me at the kids, of course. That might have helped. No, he dropped me in a trash can."

"He was just being a good citizen."

"He called me a dead fish. Anyway, eventually I crawled out. My next try was no better. She had an Artificial Intelligence implant, so even when I did get control of her biological brain, the artificial one just took over. When I tried to use her interface to control the AI, her regular brain started running things again. It was hopeless. Her date thought she was having a seizure, so I broke and ran — "

"Ran?"

The dog glared at me. "— flopped into her purse. After a few minutes, I crawled over and grafted myself to her friend. But he had a prosthetic neo-cortex, wired up with high bandwidth fibre optic connections and Web links. Almost fried me like an omelette."

"Speaking of which, you still want that kibble?"

"Gimme." He jumped back up on to the stool. "Since then I've hit three remotely controlled robot bodies, five synthetic cortex replacements, two diamond/bio-composite spinal cords, seven prosthetic neural networks, ten artificially grown mechanical synaptic systems, two self-aware personal digital assistant grafts, seven fully implanted childcare AIs with defensive capabilities, and I don't know how many nanorobotic immune system enhancers. Have you ever been attacked by a nanobot swarm?"

I walked back to the other side of the counter. "I got caught in a swarm of bees once." I didn't have the heart to tell him I'd been wearing a boron nitride multi-wall nanotube body, so they'd mostly just tickled.

He made a dismissive sound. "Bees! When we left my home system, you people could barely put in an artificial hip. But now ... " He gave me a look of disgust you rarely see from a dog, unless you make it wear some kind of hat. "Then there was that guy under the bridge. Multiple personality disorder. Haven't you cured that yet?"

I shook my head. "Against the law. When they wrote the AI Emancipation Act there were a few loopholes, so now if your multiples don't want to be eliminated, they can sue you."

"He had a Medical Alert Sensor Implant. I barely touched him and he went off like a car alarm."

"It's fresh kibble, you know," I said cheerfully. "We're known for it far and wide. Shut up, Bob."

"Even your DNA is just one more old sock for you to play with."

I winced at the analogy, but figured it was just the dog in him breaking through again.

"The four perfectly good chemical bases you evolved with aren't good enough for you any more, are they? You and your hyper-slick blood vessels and biological microwave broadcasting abilities and redesigned viscera. What do you think all that does to an extraterrestrial parasitical life form? One woman last night had seventeen brains — all scattered in groups of little networking nodes throughout her body. How are we supposed to gain control of seventeen brains?"

I admitted there was a good chance no one had considered that.

"And that's not even mentioning the non-human genetic transfers. Shark cartilage! I hit a guy with a reinforced shark cartilage support framework. He'd completely replaced his skeleton with some kind of automorphing micromesh brace. What kind of human doesn't even have a spine, for God's sake?"

Political humour not seeming appropriate, I let that one go.

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