"What's your name?" asked Nipwilliger.

"John. John L.," said the cyborg.

"What's the 'L' stand for?"

"Legerdemain," said the cyborg. "I.e., the word tattooed on the skin of my back."

"What's it mean?"

"Sleight of hand. Someone's idea of competitive branding."

"Whose idea?"

"It don't matter. I fucked him up and wrecked all the blueprints."

*

That's right, I broke the mold when they made me, mused Legerdemain, later, sitting Indian style before the dwindling campfire, streamlining his calluses with a Dremel tool while the troll dozed. Maybe they'll get me, maybe they won't. But not tonight, and it won't be here. That was in a song written and sung hundreds of years ago by a man known as Bob Dylan, widely recognized by the emotionally intelligent as the American Shakespeare. Whenever Legerdemain had cause to wonder (as he frequently did) Why are the humans? he would queue up some Dylan. Or better, a dude named Neil Young, who also ranked, in the mind of Legerdemain, as the American Shakespeare.

*

Legerdemain wondered who or what might qualify as the American Jesus. Could a half-human qualify? A half-machine? One thing seemed certain: left to its own devices, pure humanity had for roughly the past three thousand years revealed only a disturbing propensity for birthing anti-Christs. And not of just the, "I'll get mad drunk and mean and trash the mobile home before I kill you and the kids" variety either, thought the cyborg. No, humanity had borne -- and continued to squeeze out, centenially -- an alarming processional representative of what the cyborg thought of as the Lucifixion: shit-eating, fire-breathing, civilization-destroying lunatics. Chemically imbalanced

*

Rock and roll will set you free