Greed: “His vocal synthesizer hummed sub-sonics over the bank’s standard-issue headset, whispering endorphin-releasing frequencies as he suggests higher, more glamorous investment opportunities.”

Avarice: “Trophies of initiations from long-forgotten clades, body marked with scars and tattoos, microsoft cables and poorly skin-matched cybernetics. In his day the hardware wasn’t that good. You got what you got. But ever since he came down with that flu from overseas, he’s been different.”

Gluttony: “Their skull was about 75% metal; unparallelled skill in the Ripperdoc community had tracked this one’s progress from clinic to clinic, under noodle shacks and into video stores. They gossipped amongst themselves, how methodical and specific the requests for alignment, synchroniscity, were. This, ‘concrete crusader’ as the doctors eventually nicknamed them, was an antique shopper and a custom builder, tech seemingly tooled specifically for them.”

Sloth: “If he ran Jo-boy, y’know, he could stay under there for about a day and a half. Twenty-four, twenty-five hours. Staring dry-eyed up at the tempered interface bowl of information stream into his retinas. The juicebox he had for hydration had long biodegraded into an irritating powder that sucked the moisture from his skin like a vampire, but he was unaware. He worked all week at the plant making sure the bad screen worked so he could come home and enjoy his weekend of good screen.”

Pride: “Even if it’s grown on cloned shark colagin, it’s still fur. It’s still warm, it’s still mink, and it’s still expensive. Eurodollar signs scream down her scrolling vision into a blur, fingertips twitching as she swipes, selects, and adds to her cart. Money is no object and beauty is pain, is it not? And honey, she’s been hardwired for pain since her technicolor birth.”

Lust: “She was a street predator, swimming lazy arcs through the nightclub throngs of sweating humanity like a shark through a spawning pool. People are vulnerable when dopamine is thumping and she can smell it in the air. Vulnerability is a double-edged sword she’s weilded steadily through her life; honing one edge while she sinks the other into hot-blooded, yielding flesh.”