I stood in the living room, looking at the wall screen and the two new e-mails that just arrived for me. One came from the bank, and one came from the central licensing board. When I heard the apartment's front door open, I quickly hid both of them. No need to worry her just yet.

The front door slid open, and my partner Alli came in, carrying some kind of hardened case.

"Hey, Pree! I'm home!"

"Hey, Alli!" I said, walking toward her in case she got too close to the screen. We gave each other a quick hug and kiss on the cheek, and then she took the case over to a cabinet. "Get what you needed?"

"Yep! My lucky day," she said, stowing the case in the cabinet and piling some other stuff on top of it before she closed the door.

"No need to give me any details," I said. "I'm just glad you're back okay."

"You don't need to worry so much, sweetie," she said. "I know what I'm doing, and I know the people I'm dealing with. But I know you don't want too many details, so I'll just say I'll be able to take on some better-paying jobs now." She sat in her favorite easy chair and lounged across the arms, crossing her long legs and tucking one arm behind her head.

I didn't know exactly what Alli did to make money, but I had a decent idea. Things being what they were, I knew that plenty of people did things that weren't strictly legal, whatever it took to get by without losing themselves to complete depravity. Some of them were basically acceptable, as long as you used the word 'technically' enough times, and some of them ... well, that was why I didn't want too many details about Alli's average day. The less I knew, the less trouble I could get her into if anyone asked.

"Good," I said. "I can't complain about more money coming in the door. At least one of us can help keep the lights on."

"Hey, don't worry, babe," she said, sitting up in the chair and patting her lap. "You're the best mechanist I know, and everyone needs a good repair person. You'll find an opening soon."

I wandered over and sat in her lap, leaning my head against her shoulder as she rubbed the small of my back, running a finger gently along my seams. I certainly could use some soothing, but it wasn't quite doing the job today.

"I don't know about that," I said. Well, I couldn't put it off for long. I reached for the remote and pulled the e-mails back onto the screen. "I just got a notice from the bank about the balance on my student loans from mechanical school, and the licensing board denied my application for an independent repair practice."

"Oh, I'm sorry," said Alli, hugging me a little tighter.

"They said I can reapply for an indie license if I can get a referral from another practitioner, but the only way to do that is if I work in a corporate shop for for a few years first."

"And there's no way you'd go to work for a corpo shop," said Alli. "High-end part swaps for execs and taking crap from privileged fat cats with chrome where their ethics should be." She kissed me on the cheek again. "My hero."

I nestled closer into her. She got me.

"Well, you don't have to worry about the loan, Pree," she said. "Like I said, I'll be getting more job opportunities soon. We'll get by."

"And what do I do while you're out there helping us get by?" I said. "I don't just want to sit here, I want to help. That's why I went to mechanical school in the first place."

"Is there any way you can do repair work without a license?" said Alli.

"I mean, yeah, as long as I'm willing to risk getting thrown into the impound," I said. "Running an unlicensed repair practice is against the law, and so is visiting one. I know there are plenty of slumdocs who run pop-up clinics, but they have to be ready to flee if corpsec shows up, and they still can't help the people who really need it, not unless they take on paying clients from OC outfits to pay their costs, which means they need plenty of security around if they want to stay loose. I don't know any hired muscle looking for work, do you?"

I could feel Alli shift in her seat and tense up a little, and I realized what I'd just said.

"Oh, no, no, I'm sorry," I said, leaning away from her a little. "I didn't mean to get into that. Forget I said anything."

"Well, Pree, that's the trick, isn't it?" She ran her fingers through my hair. "You just said that the only thing between you and the work you want to do is the law. You have everything you need to help people like you want to, but you might get detained if you try it. As it turns out, you do know someone who can help you with that."

"No, Alli, I don't want to do anything that would put you at risk," I said. "You risk so much for our wellbeing already, and I don't want to burden you with this.

She turned my head toward her and lifted my chin. "Now look. The one thing you will never be to me is a burden. I said I would be by your side whenever you need it, just like you did. We both made each other a pretty specific promise about that, remember?"

I smiled. She could be so sappy sometimes. I leaned in and kissed her on the lips, just as I had on the day we made that promise. "Yeah, I remember."

"Good," she said.

"So you'd be willing to lead me into a life of crime so I can help people?" I said.

She giggled. "You watch too many flicks. There's no such thing as a 'life of crime.' We're just people. We just decided that the corp's rules aren't good enough, that's all."

"What about the OCs?" I said. "If half the things I hear about them are true..."

"At best, a third of the things you've heard are true," said Alli, "but you're right, there are plenty of things the OCs get up to that I don't like. That's why I don't deal with them except under very specific terms, for a specific objective. You know me. You know I wouldn't do anything that would make you ashamed of me."

"Of course." I wrapped my arms around her and stroked the seam in her neck. She gave a faint shudder and pulled me closer.

"That's why I would never ask you to be any OC lord's pet slumdoc," she said. "I wouldn't want you doing anything you're ashamed of, either. For that matter, if you see even the faintest thing about what I do that makes you uncomfortable, you say the word and you'll never have to hear of it again. The last thing I would want is for you to look at me and see the wrong person."

"Don't worry," I said. "I trust you. So if you wouldn't have me do unlicensed repairs, are you going to teach me to do what you do? Whatever that is?"

"Okay, slow down, hot shot?" she said with a grin. "I said I don't want you working for an OC, but that doesn't mean I don't want you doing what you do best. Here, let me show you." She patted my back and gently lifted my leg, and I got up from her lap and followed me to the cabinet where she had stowed her new parcel. She got the case out of the cabinet and opened the lid to show me what was inside.

"This is a new aug I picked up from a local contact," she said. "It allows me to bypass security on data terminals and gain access to secured files and storage."

"Oh, it's a hacking rig?" I said.

"Yep, you definitely watch too many flicks," she said. "We call it Ada, if we call it anything at all. Take a look. What can you tell me about it?"

She didn't sound like she wanted to be educated. She sounded more like she was quizzing me. I took a closer look at the Ada aug and thought back to my mechanical coursework.

"This smaller piece looks like it takes an optical feed," I said. "It's got some kind of somatic input as well, but I can't be too sure. I've never seen hardware quite like this. I assume it's a cranial piece, though. The larger one, definitely upper torso. It's just the right shape to fit into the airflow space in the chest, and this little vent system seems like it would help maintain temperature and ventilation. As for what it does, I mean, I guess it looks like a storage device."

"Nice," said Alli. "I knew this would be up your alley. Plus, it's nice to know my contact knows their stuff. Okay, if you're sure you want to become a hardened criminal, here's your first assignment."

She pushed the case toward me. I looked down at it, and then I looked up at her. She tapped her head, and then her chest.

"Oh!" I said. "You want me to be your pet slumdoc."

She nodded. "You think you can do it? Do you need a special space, or can you do it here?"

I looked at Ada again. "It looks like a pretty slick piece. Pretty easy to install, as long as nothing goes wrong. That's always the trick. Of course, part of it's cranial, so there's plenty that can go wrong."

"But you have the gadget in your kit, right?"

"Yeah, I have the tools to do the job," I said, "but I don't have the tools to repair anything I might break if my hand slips."

"Oh, come on," she said. "What are the odds that your hand would slip? You've got the steadiest hands I know."

"Nobody's immune to slipping up," I said. "It's an awful lot of risk to take with something as important as your head. And the professors always said that you should never work on someone you care for."

"Well, that might be true for mechanists," said Pree, "but on my side, we always prefer to work with people we care for, people we trust." She leaned in close and held her forehead against mine. "Hey. We're supposed to trust each other, remember? Well, I trust you." She leaned back and pushed the case toward me. "Now show me what you got, Miss Life-of-Crime."

I looked Alli in the eyes, and all I saw was conviction and trust. And if it was this or find a repair shop that turned a blind eye to probably illegal augs, maybe Alli's way was better after all.

I went to my room and grabbed my kit, and then I came back into the living room. Alli had locked the door, and now she was lying on the floor next to Ada's case, crossing her legs, making herself comfortable. I knelt down next to her and took my dampener out of my kit box.

"Last chance to back out," I said.

"Are you calling me yellow, Pree?"

"Don't say I didn't warn you."

I slipped the tip of the dampener into a seam on her thigh, putting Pree into deep sleep mode and quieting the feed from her emergency sensors so she wouldn't start stirring while I worked. Then I slipped her top up over her head and took the magwrench from my kit, pressing it against the join points around her breasts, until the whole panel came loose and I lifted her breasts away completely.

Once her chest cavity was exposed, installing the larger portion of Ada was easy. It fit neatly into the space just as I had suspected, and the power supply spliced into one of Alli's feeds without any trouble. Once I had fed the input port up toward her neck, I replaced her breast panel and fastened the joins, and then I pulled her top back down. Easy part, done.

I started to press the magwrench against Pree's neck, but I started to hesitate. This was where it stopped being theoretical. But she trusted me, and I had done things like this in school a hundred times. Not in my living room, and not on the love of my life, but Pree was right. I trusted her, and she trusted me. All that was left was for me to trust myself.

I put the magwrench to her neck, and after a moment, her head came loose. I detached the data feeds and held her head in my lap, undoing joints on the back and sides of her head to gain access to her cranial pan. Once I had the central core open, I paused and closed my eyes to steady myself. You weren't supposed to work on the core without three backups and four experts, and here I was sitting on the floor of my living room doing the job with my basic kit.

I reminded myself. 'It's just an aug. Slip in, plug and play. And it's illegal. It's not like anyone meant for me to install this thing in a uni-grade facility. Pree's lucky we're not in an alley.'

I slid the little aug into the space behind her eyes, letting the little tap on the end splice into her optics and main feed. The aug would draw its power from that feed, so all it needed was to connect to the storage space in her chest. I laid the connector cable so it could feed out her neck, but I couldn't see a way to connect it to an external target. It definitely had no wireless capacity, and it didn't come with a skin transit.

It would still work, though, so I resealed her cranial pan with a sigh of relief and sat back to examine my work for a moment. There it was. Job done. Without a skin transit port, though, Pree wouldn't be able to try it out once I got her back together. I'd have to do this part myself, too.

I pulled the cable out of her torso and plugged it into a port by the wall screen, sitting her body up against the wall, and then I pulled the cable from her head and plugged it in to another port. Then I leaned against the wall next to her body, wrapped her arm around me, and brought her out of sleep mode while I held her head in my hand.

She slowly blinked her eyes, and then she looked at me and the rest of her.

"Well," she said, "this is a new one."

"Alli, meet Ada," I said. "Ada, this is Alli."

I saw her eyes dart back and forth as she looked at her new feed. "Cool," she said. "Is this our household feed?"

"Yeah, take a look." I stood up and held her head so she could see where the cables were plugged in. "One of those leads to the new board in your head, and the other leads to the storage drive in your chest. It should have enough throughput for you to control your body like normal, too."

"Oh, yeah?" She looked down at her body, and she started moving her arms and legs experimentally. I watched her fingers explore the open space where her head belonged, feeling around for the cable. "Oh, boy, that feels really weird. How come you didn't reattach my head?"

"I couldn't see a way for the cables to come through a seam," I said, "and there wasn't a skin transit port to replace a panel. Far as I can tell, the only way for you to use Ada is to take your head off, so unless you have a wireless feed aug, I think your contact gave you the short end."

"Well ... here, let me clean this up first." I saw the e-mails highlight on the screen, controlled remotely by Alli's Ada, and slide into the trash bin, and then the screen went back to the default mode. "Good, we don't need those old things anymore. Now, help me up, will you?"

I pulled her body to her feet, and then she took her head from me and cradled it in her arms.

"Actually, my contact told me how Ada worked," said Alli. "I couldn't get one that worked the way I wanted, so I took what was available. I was planning to upgrade it eventually, but now I'm thinking that won't be necessary."

She wrapped an arm around my waist and held her head out in front of us. "If you can do this in the field as easily as you did it here, Ada should do just fine as is. The question is, the next time I go out on one of my little trips, do you want to come along?"

I started to smile. I had just broken the law, and nobody said anything, except for Pree. And all she said was that she trusted me, and how proud she was of me. Maybe a life of crime wasn't so bad.

I took her head in my hands, pulled her close, and pressed my face into hers.