The parasols offered no respite.

Mina Singer hurried down the sidewalk, past shop displays and the phallic metal stalks of air-scrubbers. Bits of litter glinted in the hot breeze. She heard the surf above the strident buzzing of traffic and totemic maintenance robots. Although her new lungs had yet to succumb to the crippling heat, she clapped an oxygen mask to her face, a fragile thing that writhed with liquid crystal animation as its batteries feasted on her breath.

She wished she'd stayed inside, away from the gnarled aerial landscape of the arcology, still sheathed in fecal brown weather-resistant epoxy as feral-looking bots went about installing the last of the ducts. They were fast these days, their chrome limbs moving in fickle choreography. She ducked under a refridgerated parasol, hugging herself as her sweat cooled. The mask chafed her lips.

And suddenly she was crossing the street, eyes riveted with longing. She could already feel the greasy kiss of the telepresence eyepieces, the brief stab of electricity as her reluctant neurons mated with their prosthetic counterparts. Fortunately for her addiction, Mina didn't necessarily care if telepresence scenery was real or virch. As long as it wasn't here.

She entered the clinic -- "parlor" was the accepted term, but she could never shake the places' medicinal origins -- through a door encrusted with security tech, all of it needlessly and ostentatiously visible. And then she was breathing heavily, mask askew, eagerly palming the touchscreens that descended in front of her in wheezing pneumatic welcome. Her prints flashed congratulatory green; a second door opened with a rattle of beads and she fell into the arms of something rubbery and cool and not even vaguely human, lantern eyes misted by fluorescent strip-lighting, fingers as narrow and defiant as petrified twigs.

She knew the place; the place knew her even better.