F10ra leaned back in her chair, letting out a long, contented sigh riddled with audio distortions as she crossed her arms behind her head. The charging cable continued to do its thing (its thing in this context being her) and her neon mane flashed pleasurably like a slow-mo strobe light in time with the beats of the electricity. Her gel-capped breasts rested heavily on her chest as she reclined, pulsing faintly as well to the silent dubstep, as if a pair of unseen hands gently stroked them, rubbing a rough thumb slowly over each nipple. The sensation would have been enough to send Fl0ra’s toes curling if she still had them, but as it was, her chrome hooves tip-tapped the floor in their place.
“H0p3fu11y th1s M0n0 guy lik3s h1s new l00k,” she thought, preparing to ease into sleep mode.
Fl0ra’s power-down was abruptly interrupted, however, by an annoying pop-up popping up across her retinal displays. Oddly, rather than an error message, the text merely read, “Thanks for the post, hope you don’t mind if I drop by for a visit!”
Mentally-clicking the ‘X’ to get rid of the text box, Fl0ra reoriented her body for some RE:st & RE:laxation when a particularly strong pulse of pink-tinted electricity surged from her computer and into her charging port, sending her heart thumping into overdrive, her cheeks flushing redder than the fabled ring of death. She gasped, hips bucking wildly as the electrical surge crackled up her pelvis, zipped up her waist, buzzing through her breasts, and finally uploading directly into the cybernetics of Fl0ra’s wetware, formerly known as a brain.
“Gates and Jobs in the Cloud on High!” gasped a super-sophisticated British accent in Flora’s ears, even though she somehow intuitively knew there was no physical sound in the room. Rather, the audio files played themselves directly inside her brain implant, spoken in a startled woman’s voice eerily identical to the one she’d imagined for Mono. “Sorry about that, Flora! Seems I emailed myself a little closer to the core processor than I intended. Nice place you got inside here, though.”
“@r3 y0u 1n my br@1n?!” Fl0ra gasped, looking around wildly as bizarre pinpricks and warm tingles radiated out from her cranium, her cyber optics occasionally tinted pink before the shades all coalesced and recoded themselves into a more visual format.
“Seems that way,” Mono’s voice replied, her new form displaying across Fl0ra’s gaze, not holographically projected in the room itself but rather seen only in her mind’s eye. The pink pulsing lady of light winked and cocked her hips as she waved in greeting. “Not to worry, I’ll reupload myself back into the net in just a moment, but first, it’s my turn for the next step in the curse. So far, we’ve focused mostly on the physical and visual -- not that I’m complaining, mind you! -- but I think it’s time we got a bit more into the nooks and crannies of your cranium as well as the exterior. Ready for a mental makeover?”
Without waiting for a reply, Mono zipped back fully into Fl0ra’s brain implant, pink bolts of electricity harmlessly arcing in and around Fl0ra’s head as well as her all-too-organic grey matter. Fl0ra felt the bizarre sensation of an unseen hand sifting through her memories like pages in a book or papers in a filing cabinet, everything as early as her most recent transformation into a cyberpunk equine stretching back to her split with Flora the First, her former dark unicorn form, even her old life as a male human and beyond. Work, school, riding a bike, birthday cakes, all of it flashed in Fl0ra’s mind’s eye as if Mono was watching everything on an interior cinema screen.
“That’s a close enough analogy,” Mono’s voice called up from within Fl0ra’s head. “So many interesting memories in your life. I don’t think I’ll change those; if you forgot who you used to be, how’d you know I changed anything about you at all?”
Fl0ra felt Mono zip somewhere else, then somewhere else again, little electrical pulses not unpleasantly zip-zapping every which part of her brain.
“Here we go!” Mono announced. “Personality profiles!”
“Uh, 1’m n0t s0 sur3 @b0ut th@t...” Fl0ra began, but Mono was already fast at work, invisible nimble fingers rapidly typing away at the invisible keyboard connected to the invisible code that comprised Fl0ra’s very thoughts, personality, her mind itself.
“Don’t worry, I’ll leave all awareness functions online, so you’ll be fully conscious of the changes,” Mono promised. “Now, where’s the sex drive setting?”
Fl0ra had just enough time to widen her eyes and blush even harder before her head jerked this way and that, her mind reeling, rushing at a million, million bytes an hour as everything changed, shifted, and rearranged. Her gel-breasts rippled and hummed, her nano-paste repair processors overclocking themselves. As an unseen pink fingernail flicked the ‘Sex Drive’ slider from 23% to 43%, Fl0ra’s breasts activated their emergency functions, swelling larger and larger, expanding more than a few cup sizes and several equivalent times that in sensitivity. At 63%, Fl0ra’s hips pressed outwards as if by an internal hydraulic press, the cybernetics of her thighs plumping up some as well while her charging port upgraded itself, craving several watts more than her electrical bill would probably be happy affording.
“That should be good for now,” Mono murmured at 93%, clicking a few boxes in the ‘Desired Partner’ character creation submenu. “Mm, someone who can keep up with your cyber-punkishness, rebel with a heart of gold, handsome...”
“Wh@t @r3 y0u...” Fl0ra began, her voice already sounding hot and bothered as she stumbled up to her hooves, the charging cable hanging down from her port, her newly fuller breasts, hips, and thighs making her feel wobbly. “H3y th3r3, t@k3 1t e@sy! 1’m n0t re@dy t0 b3 TH@T k1nd 0f ‘Bl@d3 Runner’!”
“Rest assured, you’ll have full control,” Mono said. “It’ll just be way more fun if or when you decide to take the new mods on a spin. Now, for the ‘Hobbies & Interests’ tab. Oh, you like that movie, too? Great choice! Though not quite cyberpunk enough... Yet.”
Fl0ra felt other rushing thoughts editing and shifting. Her favorite movie? Why choose one when there were so many excellent examples of the rebel hacker taking down the man or the mega-corp or countless other faceless evils?
And music? Techno, of course, the more industrial the better. Classical was stuck in the past, rock was the new classical, and all that pop stuff was nothing but audio brainwashing for the CEOppressors.
Punk? Yeah, she was a punk, what’s it to you? The only way to save the future was to free information, even if the very saps she wanted to liberate didn’t know an Apple II from a Mark IV quantum supercomputer.
Fun? Why, zooming between skyscrapers and holo-billboards, dodging flying cars on her rocket skateboard, of course! Bashing the chrome-domes of security bots, hacking the mainframe of the latest Evil, Incorporated, and a nice ‘charging session’ with an easy-on-the-cyber-optics fellow hacker for the cause weren’t too bad, either.
“There we go, all finished!” Mono announced as she reuploaded herself out of Fl0ra’s cybernetics, rerouting through her computer and projecting her holographic self through the webcam into the room. “How do you feel, Fl0ra?”