EXCERPT LEVEL 0. KRUEGER’S AD 2003, February 15, 15:30. Krueger’s Bodymod Parlour, Los Angeles. Jim Krueger (or a rough approximation) is scrubbing dried blood off the third-hand Sony neurotronics deck that functions as an improvised operating table. He is forty years old but looks much older: large frame, badly chiselled features, with a reddish-blond fascist-torturer crew-cut. His eyes are a frozen grey (the left pupil no longer contracts). Krueger deals in semi-intelligent tattoos, telecommunicative piercings, and junk-shop technocosmetics which teeter on the scalpel-edge of legality, catering to K-Gothic neosavage aesthetics as it bleeds across into data-pin piercings and skintelligence-scavenging. His own hideous cranial scarring leads to endless jokes about bargain body-parts and the cutting edge of computing. For the most part, Krueger’s occupation involves grafting electrotechnic slivers into the heads of teenage girls. You play as Zeta Kane (she’s your carrier): one of Krueger’s regular customers.…