"Alright, let's see what the matter is, liebchen." Frakie's lip curled into a snarl as Dr. Henry Swaim stuck the strange device into his biceps, the sensor on the end of the needle lighting up with a queer blue LED glow. "Liebchen," Frankie growled, subtly correcting Swaim's pronounciation. The vaguely-Scottish Swaim spoke with none of Johannes' heavy German accent, despite spending most of his life in the Berlin sprawl. He instead spoke with a chillingly traceless cosmopolitan dialect, suitable for European corporate boardrooms and perhaps trials in Nuremberg. "And don't call me that," Frankie eventually added as an afterthought.
"Uh-huh," Swaim replied in disinterest, prodding Johannes' arm with a growing series of the glowing blue sensor-needles. "And this muscle twitch, when did you say it began? Ever since the bad business in Berlin?"
"Yes, around then. Whenever I'm at rest, or after I really exert myself, or-"
"Uh-huh," Swaim cut him off, pulling out a tablet-style commlink and examining it carefully. "And have you been doing those exercises I prescribed you?"
At this, Frankenstein rolled his cybereyes, the glowing red irises of the ancient models flickering out for a moment from the exertion. "What's the point of having chipped muscles if I still need to do three hundred push ups a day?"
Swaim squinted at Frankenstein furiously, then tapped at the tablet in vengeance. Frankie jumped as a mild electric shock travelled through his arm, the sensor-needles blinking from blue to green one by one. "They're not chipped. They're bioware. They're still muscles. You still need to maintain them; you need a high protein diet and plenty of exercise. Stick to krill, none of that soy junk. I can tell from your metabolic readings and the sodium content in your blood that you've been to the Stuffer Shack. And furthermore-"
Swaim's lecture was cut short by the surprisingly loud noise of Frankenstein's Transys commlink buzzing. It rattled against the metal examination table, sending echoes through the leaky, morgue-like basement of Dr. Henry's street clinic. The matte silver hemisphere of Frankenstein's high-end comm bounced its way from one end of the examination table to the next, the chattering device threatening to fall off before Frankenstein caught it with lightning-fast reflexes. As Johannes read the message, Dr. Henry Swaim tried hard to pretend he was looking at his own tablet-like comm and not trying to snoop. "Good news, I hope? I don't mind doing maintenance for you, you know, but I'm eventually going to have to start charging, my friend."
Frankenstein tapped out a quick response to his fixer. <<I will gladly take that address.>> "Yes and no," Frankie said to the doctor, then shrugged non-commitally. Almost as if in retaliation, Swaim jabbed at his tablet again. This time, Frankestein barely flinched. "Ow."
