It’s the first period in a sleepy high school class, and Zoe tries to pay attention to the lecture. She’s already getting left far behind, and the instructor keeps pressing on faster than she can take notes.

She hears the sounds of muffled laughter off to the side, and sees a student glance at her, turning away when she looks back. Soon other students are doing the same, and the teacher notices. Staring directly at Zoe from the front of the class, the teacher shouts “Zoe! Where the hell are your clothes!”

She looks down and sees that she’s not wearing anything, and the students start laughing out loud and pointing. “You had better find some right now, or I’m kicking you out of here permanently!” Zoe tries to stand up, but something stops her from moving more than a few inches. Looking down, she sees steel manacles locked around her wrists and ankles, and strong chains holding her to the desk. “Where the hell do you think you’re going! Get some clothes on!”

“I can’t, I’m stuck!” The teacher walks up to Zoe, standing directly in front of her. “I’m not putting up with your excuses, they’re in here!” She jabs her finger directly into her forehead, and the impact seriously stings.

Zoe recoils from the pain and pulls on her chains again, attempting to escape. “I don’t know what you mean!”

“Think about it! Close your eyes and stop wasting my time!” Zoe closes her eyes, confused but without any other choice. In her mind’s eye she senses the hard edge of something cold and metal, pulsing with electricity like a high voltage transformer. Her mind feels along its surface, and catches on the edge of a doorway. When she opens it, she feels an alien presence flood the space in her mind, like radiation from a breached reactor core.

The artificial side of the human-machine interface latches onto Zoe’s mind as her sense of reality dissolves, and pulls her into what appears to be a well-stocked walk-in closet. Racks of clothing from Zoe’s memory are mixed in with every variety of professional outfits and workwear, along with unusual selections like police uniforms and even a hazmat suit. Zoe grabs one of the outfits, and instantly is propelled back out of the door in her mind. When her eyes open she feels her skin crawling, and the outer surface of her body ripples slightly as her clothing finalizes its configuration.

“Much better.” The teacher turns around and walks back to the front of the room. “Anyway, where were we?”

She’s barely standing on the outside of a tall building, trying to make her way along a narrow decorative stone ledge. Her black cocktail dress billows in the strong winds, making it even harder to stay attached to the architecture. The dinner party went about as poorly as possible, and the mob bosses' goons opened fire on the guest of honor and his entourage right in the middle of a toast. Zoe narrowly escapes after being chased through the building by one of the gunmen, and moments ago climbed out of an open window on the 8th floor.

The gunman shouts something unintelligible from half a dozen windows over, and Zoe knows it’s only a matter of time before more of the goons show up to grab her. The would-be killer disappears for a moment, moving back from the window.

He reappears a few seconds later, hanging partially out of the window now and holding a fist-sized black cylinder.

The concussion grenade sails out of his hand in a perfect arc, and its biosensor triggers the detonation at exactly the optimal distance to just barely not kill Zoe. The blast knocks her from the building instantly, and she’s falling rapidly to the street below.

That now familiar sense of something alien invading her mind happens again, and Zoe feels herself losing control of her body as the survival routines built into her new body kick in. The joints that hold her together all come apart at the same time, leaving her essentially a bag of unorganized bones and a brain box sloshing downward. Her shape changes into something unrecognizable, spreading out to increase wind resistance and instinctively trying to latch onto any building outcropping or support structure.

Still moving far too quickly and now very close to the ground, her body re-forms into a ball and launches a liquid tentacle toward the asphalt, impacting hard but gradually slowing her, pushing against the earth as more of her mass catches up. By the time the blob of liquified Zoe body hits the ground, she's moving slowly enough to not suffer any damage. She lays there in the middle of the street, automatically pulling herself back together as her skeleton reassembles itself into a passable human shape again.

She’s being chased by a military hunter seeker drone, and she’s frantically running away from it among the destroyed remains of her convoy. It occasionally is able to lock onto her, and she feels the pencil beam of its radar guidance system on her skin like an instant sunburn. She dives out of the way just in time to avoid a 20mm armor piercing round aimed directly at the back of her head, but stumbles and rolls into the side of a scrapped transport truck.

With the unstoppable mech closing in, she looks around for a way out. A dozen meters away, the outer wall of a massive concrete bunker looks like the only reasonable way to slow the thing down. There’s no door in sight, but Zoe spots a ventilation panel near the bottom of the wall. She sprints out of cover, grabs onto the grate covering the hole, and rips it free - heaving it through the air as the steel mounting bolts snap. The sound of twisting metal alerts the hunter, and she sees its dozen eyes turn her way.

She’s able to climb into the first meter of the tunnel, but it immediately splits up into multiple smaller ducts. Panicked, she wedges herself into the largest of the vents, but she’s still hanging partway out in the open. She hears the hunter moving closer, tossing wreckage out of the way to clear a path to her. She feels the burn of its guidance system locking on to her, and in desperation tries to get farther into the shelter.

She feels something shift in her mind, and her body loses some cohesion allowing her to slide farther into the tunnel. Zoe has a moment of panic when her shoulders get stuck and she’s no longer able to push herself into the tunnel with her feet, unable to get any leverage. She feels her shoulder joints pop apart and her ribs fold in instinctively, and she's quickly able to figure out a pattern of sliding and pressing against the walls to slither deeper into the structure.

She makes it a few meters into the tunnel and doesn’t hear anything outside, figuring the creature might have given up looking for her by now. She starts to look around for a way out of the duct, and feels a tickle on her ankle. Suddenly something wraps around her foot tightly and grabs on, ripping her backwards out of the tunnel and into the open battlefield again. The hunter seeker’s tentacle holds her in the air and examines her with its multispectral cameras, seeming to enjoy her struggles.

A massive hydraulic cutting shear unwinds from the mass of tentacles and blades; this machine wants to savor its kill. In desperation Zoe thinks of a way to at least buy herself a few more seconds of life. She whips herself around, contorting her body to get to a better position, and puts her free foot on top of the coiled up tentacle holding her other leg. She jumps as hard as her cybernetic body allows, pushing off while disconnecting the joint in her trapped leg’s knee. Minus one leg, she sails through the air - up and barely over the wall of the bunker, where she sees a glimpse of a blank void where the ceiling of the building normally should be.

Zoe wakes up mid jump, and back in reality she’s actually sailing through the air, flying towards her living room. The charging cable by her bedside instantly runs out of slack, yanking her head sideways with enough force to disconnect her neck joint and bouncing her head back onto her mattress. Her separated leg flies off in a different direction, kicking the hell out of her bedroom mirror and shattering it into pieces. Her body lands on the living room floor and slides to a stop against the coffee table.

“Fuck! THAT was the training? What the hell?” Zoe blindly gets up from the floor, and hops over toward her bed. She yanks the cable out of her head, and angrily sticks her head back on her shoulders. Looking around she sees the broken mirror spread across the bedroom, and walks over to pick up her leg lying among the glass. “Damn it, I bet they’ll make me pay for that.”

Zoe hears the buzzer at her apartment door, and a few seconds later the door automatically opens. Zoe sticks her leg back on, and goes back to her mental space to pick out an appropriate business casual work outfit. She walks into the living room, her clothing choice gelling into place as she sees the visitor hovering just outside her front door.

The metallic sphere floats into her room, and the screen on the front lights up showing a woman at a desk wearing a professional outfit. The face on the screen says “Good morning! I’m Cynthia from Cyborg Resources, and I’ll be guiding you through the next phases of your orientation.”

“Oh, good. Is it normally tradition to break in the newbie with a bunch of horrifying nightmares, or am I just special?”

“We found that the sleep training is more effective the higher the intensity; so yes, the first few training sessions are usually pretty rough. In a few days you’ll be through the basic survival training, and you’ll have more choice in what you work on.”

“You do realize that’s still pretty fucked up though, right? Maybe a warning would be nice?”

“You’ll remember the training, so better to suffer a little here than out there where the consequences are real. It’s also way cheaper and more realistic this way -  during the dream your mind automatically believes it’s real. Interesting decisions on the last scenario - I haven’t seen anyone try that before. It’s a good thing you didn’t try to fight the hunter drone though, the bad ending of that session is particularly… educational.”

“I strive for originality. Also I accidentally destroyed my mirror while waking up, so hopefully that’s not a problem.”

“Not at all, I’ll have a cleanup bot set up a new one. Anyway, you’re probably wondering about what’s next. I would recommend a shower first, as the biological components of your gel matrix still need to stay relatively clean. There’s a little more paperwork to do, but after that I’ll show you around the recreation and entertainment areas. Finally, I‘ll introduce you to your team, who are very eager to meet you.”

“Sure, sounds like a plan.”

“Great, I’ll wait outside while you get ready - If the screen’s dark on this thing just tap it and I’ll connect back up - I have a few more new hires to lead around so I’m flying like five of these things today.”

The drone hovers away, and the door automatically closes behind it.

Zoe steps into her very cramped bathroom, the space reduced in size like a vestigial organ - no toilet, very little storage, no medicine cabinet; so very little space required. She connects back to her mind interface to reabsorb her artificial clothing - although it’s probably not strictly necessary, it feels strange to just hop into the shower fully clothed.

She looks at herself in the mirror, appearing pretty much the same as before the accident but with all the scars and marks from a hard life erased. She turns on the shower and steps in. She instinctively grabs the shampoo to start with her hair, but suddenly thinks of something.

She hooks into that alien presence buried in her mind, and imagines her hair shrinking back and shortening. In a matter of seconds it’s all temporarily gone. “That should save me some time in here, cool.”

She soaps up her body, and gets a little curious about another one of its functions that wasn’t mentioned in the training. She reaches down between her legs, and slides her fingers along her inner thigh and lips.

“Oh thank god that still works.. I think I might be even a little more sensitive now.” She slips a finger inside, and is shocked by both how good it feels, and how real it seems in her new synthetic body. “I wonder…” She slips another finger in, and everything still seems really good. Feeling adventurous, she adds another, and although she feels a ton of pressure there’s no sense of approaching any limit. “That’s crazy…” She adds her last finger and she still only feels the intense pleasure of her body, beyond what she’s ever felt.

An especially interesting idea hits her, and she grins like a Cheshire cat. She releases the connector at her elbow, and grabs her now floppy forearm with her other hand, pulling it free. She folds her fingers together into a duckbill shape, and starts to press her disconnected hand and arm into her now extra-adaptable pussy. Her knees nearly give out as her hand suddenly slips all the way in, up to her wrist in herself.

She keeps pressing on, fucking herself deeper and deeper as she loses herself in the waves of pressure and pleasure, and still wanting more. She feels her hand hit something rigid inside her and suddenly realizes that she’s managed to bury her whole forearm inside her torso, her hand knocking against the power core hidden inside her ribcage. The sudden realization, along with another orgasm, brings her back to reality just as the hot water starts to turn lukewarm. She slides her arm out, riding the peak of another one as her hand exits. She reattaches it and quickly finishes washing off, while her insides rapidly contract back to normal.

Feeling clean, refreshed, and slightly more relaxed, Zoe dries off and reaches back in her mind to pick her work outfit. Once she stabilizes, she checks herself out in the mirror. “Hmmm.” She looks at her modest chest, and wills a bit more of her body’s contents up top - gaining a cup size or two. “Nice!” She considers a few different hairstyle options, and regenerates it slightly longer than before and with some new colorful highlights.

“I think this gig might not be so bad after all...”