Well, I suppose I should start this thing out by introducing myself.  I’m Brian Fontaine, and I run the Cyber Shop.  I specialize in custom-made cosmetic cybernetics, but I can probably do just about any alteration you ask me for.  Although, if you come in asking for an earring or tattoo, I’ll probably advise you to go to Claire’s, because asking me for that sort of thing would be about as economical as asking Frank Lloyd Wright to build your deck.
     The whole thing started out when I was in college.  Mom had died in childbirth, and Dad had died of cancer a couple of years ago.  The repeated losses had been hard, but I managed to get through with the support of friends, counselors, and what distant family I still had.  Fortunately, Dad had left behind a sizable trust fund, so I could still go to college.  One good thing I got from the experience, though, was a highly developed self-reliance instinct.  After losing my parents, there wasn’t much that I couldn’t get through and move beyond.  Good thing, too.  
     I was walking back home to my apartment one day after a matinee movie with a group of friends, when a drunk driver came down the road a good deal faster than he should have.  He streamed through two or three red lights, according to eyewitnesses, and sent his car up onto the sidewalk right towards us.  I was in conversation with a few people and my back was to the road, so I was a little confused by the looks of concern on everyone’s faces as they watched the car come screaming down the street.  When their looks turned to fear and they started running, I turned around just in time to see the guy’s grill about five feet in front of me.  
     I vaguely remember people swarming around me at that point, and I know there was a siren, and then I was lifted up, and then the next thing I remembered was a hospital.  I don’t really remember any pain at the time, probably because there was a frigging lot of it and it just stopped registering at some point.  As soon as I was able to open my eyes again, I looked around the hospital bed, but all I really saw was a lot of bandages.  
     “Ah, now we’re awake,” someone said.
     I tried to turn my head to find who was speaking, but there was too much medical stuff in the way.  I was able to lift my head enough to see the extent of the injuries.  There were quite a few.  “H-hello?”  Holy crap, my mouth was dry.  
     “Hello, Brian.  Here, I’ve got some water for you.”  She gave me a cup with a straw.
     I took a drink, but I don’t think any of the water actually went down my throat.  I think my mouth just absorbed all of it.  “How long was I out?”
     “Almost a week.  Don’t worry, all you missed was the surgery.”
     “What kind of surgery?”
     “The kind that’s over and done with.  You’ll be all right.”
     “Nurse, I couldn’t help but notice that I don’t take up as much of the bed as I usually do.  You can go ahead and tell me.”
She hesitated for a while.  I tried to move her along.
     “Do you want to hold my hand?  Would that make you feel better?”  I told you I could roll with the punches with the best of ‘em.
     She chuckled.  “Your left arm was broken, along with a couple of ribs, but we set the bones and they are healing nicely.  Your pelvis and right shoulder were totally wrecked.  We were able to repair them, but your right arm and both legs had to be amputated.”
     I nodded and looked at the window.  I suppose I was lucky to have one.  The nurse seemed to be a little surprised.  “You’re certainly taking it well.  I’ve seen guys completely break down hearing about less than this.”
     “Well, I’m left-handed, and I was never any kind of athlete.  I’m not really missing out on anything.  All I’ll need is my computer, and everything will be back to normal.”
     “Well actually, not quite normal.  I haven’t given you the good news yet.”
     “What’s that?”
     “Well…actually, there’s a man waiting for you outside who needs to talk to you about that.  I’ll bring him right in.  Will you be okay for a few minutes?”
     “If anything else was going to happen to me, I’m sure it would have done by now.”  She chuckled again and went out into the waiting room.  She soon came back in followed by a youngish man in a suit.  
     “Hello, Brian,” he said.  “I’m Alan.  I’ve been assigned to represent you in court.”
     “Hi, Alan.  You’ll pardon me if I don’t shake.”
     He laughed.  Damn, I’ve got a great bedside manner.  I should have been a doctor.  “Well, I’ll get right to the point.  It seems that the bastard who ran into you has several other alcohol-related incidents on his record, and he holds a fairly high position at a big firm downtown.  His company would like to avoid a lengthy legal process, so they’d like to settle out of court.  I’ve asked for twenty million dollars.”
     Hot.  Shit.  “All…right, then.  So did you just need to tell me this, or…”
     “I wanted to make sure it was all right with you.  You are meant to be the one in charge, you know.  I’m just an advisor here.”
     “Hell yes, it’s all right with me.  I’m a college student.  I wouldn’t turn down money.”
     “I thought not.”
     “Do I need to appear in court for this?”
     “No, as long as I’ve got your approval to proceed with the settlement, you can just stay here and recuperate.  I’ll take care of everything.”  With that, he left.
     The nurse stayed behind.  “Well, that ought to cheer you up, not that you needed it, really.”
     Suddenly, I remembered that there were others in this but me.  “Hey, wait!  What hap – Ow, that hurt!”  I turned my head too fast.  “What happened to the others?”
     “They were discharged a few days ago.  One of them is waiting outside for you, if you’d like to see him.”
     “Sure.  He’s probably worried.”
     She led him in, and he came over to my bedside.  “Hey, Brian.  How you doin’?”
     “Hey, Riley.  I think I’ve discovered the secret to rapid weight loss.”
     “I don’t know.  I don’t think Hollywood would go for that diet.  Anything you want me to bring you?”
     “At the moment, all I need is my laptop and my schoolwork.  I’ll probably get sick of hospital food eventually, though, in which case I’d need a burger and fries.”  
     “Dude, at least it beats the dorm food.”
     “Are you sure?  Man, that might keep me up for a week figuring that one out.”
     “Well, while you’re puzzling that one over, I’ll bring your computer over, and I can talk to someone at school about getting your assignments to you.  Hopefully, they’ll know enough about what happened not to ask for a doctor’s note.”
     “Thanks a bunch, dude.  I owe you a couple.”
     For the next month or so, I just sat around in my room at the hospital, working on my degree as the bandages were gradually removed.  At the end of my stay, the hospital gave me an electric wheelchair and fitted me with a prosthetic right arm.  I could bend the elbow and open and close the hook fingers with a set of levers that I pressed with my chin.  It wasn’t great, but it worked well enough.  Other than that, though, it wasn’t really much of a change.  I always spent most of my time sitting on my ass at my computer anyway.  
     The real change came on the day I was discharged from the hospital.  When I got back to my room, I found a large package waiting for me.  I opened the box with my good hand to find a large, very old book and a small card.  The card just said, “Thought this would help you adjust.  Good luck, cousin.”  Huh.  Apparently, I had a cousin somewhere, and he sent me some light reading to occupy my time.  Well, what the hell.  Could be interesting.  
     I opened the cover and took a look at the first page.  There was a lot of really faded writing.  It didn’t look legible anymore, but somehow, I could still tell what it said.  Weird.  The first page was about magic, and the ancient secrets of such-and-such.  As I went on to the second page, the first one disappeared.
     I looked worried around the floor, thinking that the page had fallen out.  It looked like a really old book, and even if it wasn’t really that interesting, it was still worth conserving for the age alone.  I looked all over the floor and my chair, but I couldn’t find it.  Oh, well.  Even if the pages all fell out, the cover was still in good shape.  I went on to read, and as I finished each page, they all vanished, even when my hand was still on the page.  Suddenly, all that stuff about magic was becoming a lot more interesting.  Another weird I noticed was that I remembered the contents of the vanished pages word for word.  If only I could buy my textbooks like this.  
     Over the next few weeks, I kept reading in my spare time as I continued to work on my mechanical engineering degree.  By the time I was ready to work on my senior thesis, I had finally finished the book, and I could do some pretty neat stuff.
For starters, I had some limited telekinetic ability.  I couldn’t levitate objects, but I could manipulate the parts of an object by concentrating on it.  For example, I could focus on my computer keyboard and type without touching the keys.  I could also move my prosthetic arm around without using the annoying chin levers.  That came in really handy.  I could also separate living flesh into separate pieces without harming the organism.  I had always thought that “Sawing a Lady in Half” trick was pretty cool.  The book also told me how to make creams and potions and stuff that contained the same magical properties.  
     So far, I had kept all this to myself, but that all changed when I graduated from college as a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with a Materials Science focus, plus a minor in Kinesiology.  Someone came up to me and told me that I could go into business making prosthetic limbs, and maybe I could come up with something better than that mess with the hooks.  Well, I can tell you, that got me thinking for damn sure.  I had learned about plenty of advanced materials: plastics that were stronger than steel, rubbers that feel just like skin, ceramic blades that were just as sharp as kitchen knives but lighter and sturdier.  And I certainly had the capital to invest.  I had already put a lot of it into Google and Volvo, so I had a steady income for the rest of my life, but there was at least six or seven figures left over.  That would be plenty to invest in a new business.  All I needed to find was a suitable location.  
     I eventually found a nice building in the commercial sector of the city.  It looked like it hadn’t been fully inhabited for a long time.  There were some apartments and condos in the upper floors, and the street level was laid out for shop space, but the only tenant at street level was a game and book store called Freaks and Geeks (no relation to the old TV show, as I later found out).  I met with the owner of the building to discuss leasing most of the ground floor for my own purposes and a sizable living space upstairs, but after talking with the old guy for several minutes, I realized that it would be cheaper to just buy the building outright.  
     A few months later, I had my little corner of the world all squared away.  I had a nice suite of rooms on the top floor, and I had several of the shop spaces on the first floor occupied with my own little enterprise.  All of the equipment was in place.  All that remained was a test run.  I inserted myself into the scanner, which rotated an array of lasers around my body to create a digital image of my body’s exact dimensions.  I brought up the image on the computer screen and began to design the changes.  I copied the dimensions of my left arm for my new right arm, but I had to let the computer estimate the correct leg dimensions.  I had already designed the underlying structure of the prostheses, and I laid the image of the schematics over the image of my body scan.  The computer modified the structural blueprint to fit within my measurements, and the design of my new prosthetic limbs was complete.  All that I had to do now was send the information to the prototyping equipment.
     In a clean room separate from the main floor of the facility, several machines began moving for the first time.  One machine fabricated the structural components for the limbs out of a high-impact composite resin.  Another molded the outer envelopes out of a flesh-like padded rubber.  The final machine assembled the components and inserted the final product into an airlock.  
     After the little bell went off, I opened the outer airlock door and removed a newly assembled right arm and two legs fresh from the oven.  Along with the three limbs, there were also three small discs with sockets at their center.  I removed the jar of paste I had prepared earlier and applied a thin layer to the stump of my right shoulder.  The paste would lie between me and the prosthetic arm, allowing me to manipulate it without concentrating any more than normal.  I had prepared the paste using the formulas I had learned from the old book.
     After applying the paste, I took the smallest of the three socketed discs and pressed it against my shoulder.  I concentrated on it as I had learned from the book, and it gradually sunk into my shoulder until the top surface was flush against my skin.  I then took the new arm and held it against my shoulder as I mentally manipulated the new socket in my shoulder.  A small piece extended from the socket into a matching hole in the arm.  Small prongs hooked into the arm and joined it to my shoulder, the rubber outer coating on the arm touched up against my shoulder forming an almost invisible seam, and just like that, I was back in the piano and guitar market.  
     I experimentally flexed my new right arm, and I was pleased to discover that the telekinesis paste was working perfectly.  I was able to manipulate the arm as if I was born with it.  Since the movement was being generated magically, I hadn’t needed to build motors, wires, or batteries into the limbs, meaning that they would never need recharging and would probably never wear out.  I quickly reached for the other two discs and the jar of paste, and after five minutes, I got up and stood on the floor for the first time in almost a year.
     The final test was still before me, though.  I had decided to experiment with a limb that could do more than just the standard physiological fare, and while I was setting up my shop I had taken a side trip to a martial arts store.  I went over to a shelf and retrieved my purchase, an authentic Japanese tanto.  I held it in my left hand and lowered it down alongside my left leg.  I then tried to flex a muscle I had never had before.  It occurred to me that this was a lot like those “Visualize Money and Success” scams I had heard of online, since I was trying to make things happen for myself merely by wanting them.  My wanting was rewarded when two flaps on my left leg bent open and a small armature extended from within the leg.  I inserted the short sword into the clips, and the armature retracted back behind the flaps, leaving my leg looking completely normal once again.
     Cool.  If I could do this with a leg, the possibilities were just about endless.