The Body Shop

It’s hard to imagine that I could be up writing at 1:40 am on a Tuesday night as a teacher. I used to be up this late on a regular basis in college, and when I worked graveyard, I did this without batting an eyelash. Now, as I remind myself over and over again that I have work in the morning where I have to guide students through the finer nuances of JavaScripts loops and arrays, I can only chuckle at the writing prompt I chose.

While this is certainly nothing that could spark any great philosophical debate, it does bring to mind a rather amusing idea of what the world could look like in the future. I would love to live in a world with a body shop like this. For those of you who know me, I would swap my terribly weak and ever in pain eyes for cybernetics at the drop of a hat.


 

The Body Shop

My great, great, great, great grandfather opened his auto shop in the early 1950s. It wasn’t some grand shop, just a small single car lift with two bays. It survived two wars, four economic crises, and two pandemics. Once, in 2101, my Pops almost closed the doors permanently, but luckily, with a bit of convincing, I talked him into handing me the keys.

One thing most people don’t know is that an auto shop is only a single step away from being a body shop, and only three steps from being a body shop. I remember it like it was yesterday, opening the garage bay and cleaning out the old engines and parts, selling them for capital to invest in the cybernetics market. Oscar’s Body Shop took on a whole new meaning. No sense changing the name when the work is mostly the same.

On a typical day, I get the normal mundane stuff like recalibrations, hydraulics checks, sensor replacements, and of course the firmware updates. Sometimes though, you get a few special clients in, namely, the metalheads who want some fresh chrome to keep their buddies from ragging on them. It’s not unusual to do a limb replacement or an ocular implant, but those are always a bit special. See, I’m no surgeon, but I do know my way around a cutting torch and a pair of nuero-phasing control rods. Hell, give me an hour and I can probably get an industry certificate in neural computer data integration.

Honestly, I’m not the cleanest, I’m not the nicest, and I’m certainly not the cheapest. What I am is honest. We are a family-owned, family-run, body shop that only works with and uses the highest quality products on the market. No repros, no after-market skims, and certainly no blackmarket pirated tech. The finest in quality since 1953. So, remember, like our commercial says, “when you’re looking for an experienced body shop with decades of experience and a reputation to match there’s only one place to go for all your cybernetic augmentation needs. Oscar’s Body Shop on the corner of Norris and Grove.”