Davis said it would take twenty minutes to get over to her apartment, but he probably knew Argenta was already starting the modification process without him, which explained why her intercom went off in fifteen.

“Fuck,” she muttered under her breath, scooping up the bit of custard from the boston creme donut she was eating that had fallen onto her jeans with her pinky. She rolled across her bed, where she had sat down to release the sleeves on her prosthetic legs, and hit the electronic lock button that she had moved from its original location, by the door, to the top of her nightstand, specifically for circumstances like these.

“It’s open!” she shouted. A few seconds later Davis opened the door.

“What’s up?”

“Still waiting. The original stuff has been wiped at this point, and the new program’s installing... who knows how long it’ll take to calibrate.” She rolled over to the other side of the bed where the box of donuts was sitting, and tossed it over to Davis. “Can’t connect to the internet, according to the guide, or the new installation might be detected and I’ll get a whole bunch of errors about how it’s dangerous, untested, not what the hardware was made for, on and on...”

“You should have called before you started.”

“I agree, it would have been easier to open the door for you.”

“No, I mean, you always start modifying your prosthetics without someone being there with you. They’re your legs. Don’t you want someone around if something goes wrong?”

She shrugged “I can’t help it, I get excited. It’s a certain rush someone who isn’t a stump-baby wouldn’t understand. Anyways, you’re here now, fifteen minutes didn’t make much of a difference.”

“Fine.” He sat down on the bed next to her and took a chocolate cake donut out of the box. “So what is it this time? You’re not going to try to attach toes again, are you?”

Argenta laughed. “Not for a while. That only ended in a spiral of self-pity and frustration.”

Code updates were easy, but scouring (or, if one was exorbitantly wealthy, buying) the parts for physical modification, installing them, calibrating them properly, that was the chore. Sure, Argenta could walk fine in her current model, it was as sturdy as some expensive high-end ones due to her tireless updating and maintenance, but things like standing on her toes, simple things like that, still eluded her. Sometimes she resented Davis, being one of the few people in the area to be born without some sort of deformity or missing limb. All he had to worry about was the baseline standard government issued microchip prosthesis, which held his personal documents and had a few other nice features. Most of the time though, she just admired his luck. He was her lucky charm for these procedures, in a way.