From CNN (20 June 2086): Muties Use High-Tech to Evade Border Police
From CNN (1 October 2086): Border Patrol Installs Smellers to Detect Illegal Border Crossings
From CNN (20 December 2086): Illegal Muties Use AI-generated Smells to Avoid Detection
From CNN (15 February 2087): National Guard Deployed to Border Use AI-powered Intention Detectors to Counter Mutie Threat
From CNN (8 April 2087): Mutie Threat Grows as Illegal Border Crossers Deploy Reality Distortion Shields
From CNN (12 June 2087): Army Reinforces Border Patrol with Distortion-piercing Super-AI
From CNN (5 August 2087): Illegal Muties Use Worldwide AI Network Against Border Army
From CNN (10 October 2087): Supreme Overlord Trump VII Sends 100,000 Members of Human-Supremacist Militias to Join Border Effort
From CNN (6 December 2087): Border Mutants Reportedly Using Telepathy to Evade Capture
From CNN (17 January 2088): Every Satellite Ever Deployed Commandeered to Fight Illegal Border Crossings
From CNN (4 March 2088): Human-Supremacist Armies, US Army Fighting Each Other at Border
From CNN (5 May 2088): Border Czar Reports Historically Highest Rate of Illegal Crossings
From CNN (17 July 2088): Muties Harness Energy of Newly Discovered Ancient Civilization
From CNN (2 September 2088): US Army Joins Human-Supremacist Militias to Form Super-Force to Combat National Guard at Border
From CNN (18 November 2088): Victorious National Guard Rebrands as US Army as Border Wars Continue
From CNN (6 January 2089): Muties Use Mind Control to Become Invisible, Increase Number of Illegal Border Crossings
From CNN (20 March 2089): Entire Output of Every AI Datacenter on Earth Harnessed to Fight Illegal Border Crossings
From CNN (9 May 2089): World’s AI Systems Inexplicably Print “Chinga La Migra”
From CNN (20 July 2089): “Sons Of Zardoz” Militia Threaten Nuclear Warfare to Stop Illegal Aliens at Border
From CNN (3 September 2089): Entire State of Texas Obliterated as “Proud Mechs” Militias Detonate Hydrogen Device at Border, Vow to Stop Illegal Crossings
From CNN (15 November 2089): Muties Battle Mechs at Border as Illegal Border Crossers Use Eighth Dimension Turbo-Encabulators to Avoid Detection
From CNN (9 January 2090): Entire Southeast of US Becomes Wasteland as Mutie Agitprop Turns Mechs, Nukes against Border Alliance
From CNN (25 March 2090): Illegal Border Crossings Continue Upward Trend
She sat in her hotel room, looking through the window at the border checkpoint into Mexicali, sharpening her fangs. Her silver tooth extension implants were not the very latest fashion in biohacking, but they were still one of her favorites. Duende sat in the pink glow of her laptop as she laid out the various tubes and syringes that were filled with the concoctions she had engineered to get her across this border, looking closely at each with her solid red eyes, without visible pupils. In the past few weeks, the United States had declared biologically modified humans like herself illegal, a threat to humanity and to the holy sanctity of the body taught by Christ. She could truly give zero fucks about what Christ thought of her beautifully amalgamated body, one with enough modifications to be hard to identify an original gender, or any state before the sin of creating herself. She had decided that she had to get out, but the dictator had already made all passports for modded people invalid, so she had to get creative.
She had chosen this hotel to be her last stop in the US. From here, she could see the large mech bodies of border patrol drones walking between the lanes of vehicles. Larger than humans, around twelve feet tall, these bipedal drones had backwards bending legs that allowed them to run faster than most cars available to the public, and nasty weapons at the ends of their hands. Both long claws for ripping open the trunks or roofs of cars when they needed to, as well as circular belts of large armor piercing rounds, to deal with the increasingly militarized weaponry and armor of both gangs and white supremacist paramilitaries. She could also see the “agents”, robot dogs armed with automatic weapons and with screens attached to their heads to provide a human face to border enforcement.
There was a knock at the door of her hotel room. Duende was expecting the medic she had hired to meet her here, but not so soon.
“Ok,” she thought, “here we fucking go, chinga la migra.”
When she opened the door and saw the medic, she was immediately relieved that she appeared femme. Somehow she still trusted people on the femme spectrum more with her body than those on the masc side of biomods. There didn’t seem any good logic for that, but she had just experienced less violence from folks who enjoyed the same kind of eyeliner she used.
The medic looked at her, and said “Duende S?”
“Yes,” Duende said.
“Can you give me the verification code?”
Duende had already pulled it up in her phone and had it fresh in her mind, “766A/%9”.
“Great, thank you. Can I come in and we can get started?”
She walked into the room, carrying a paper bag that Duende recognized would contain her instruments wrapped in single use plastic wrappers to ensure sterility.
Duende said, “I need you to take out my eyes, and replace them with these non-modified looking glass eyes. I’ll also need you to inject me with this nanosilver solution I designed to not allow my other mods to show up on a B-Ray scan, and monitor the transfusion until it is complete. Just make sure my heart doesn’t stop. And can we do something about these teeth? Just until I get to the other side, of course…”
Shocked, the gig worker doctor said, “and you thought you could just use the MedicMovers app to do all of that?”