And we have a winner! I loved the contrasting descriptions in this one, down to the way he “strode and shuffled.” Great work, Ian Wood, @writebastard. Congrats on your win!

Here’s his entry again for you to enjoy.

He was tall, dark, and handsome, and incredibly ugly. This was by design. He was also short. Blonde and raven-haired, winsome and depraved, loving and hateful. When he’d finished interacting with someone, the person was never sure whether he or she had just been flirted with or threatened with physical violence. He left a ripple of furrowed brows behind him when he strode and shambled down a crowded street, and if he got you alone in a room…well, anything could happen.

It was a physical and psychological modification package that most people wouldn’t use even if their work required it, and his work most definitely required it. No others in his chosen profession, however, went quite so far as he. He was the walking embodiment of the uncanny valley, wrapped in a full body suit of wet nanoware that mimicked flesh and pumped out waves of psy that reached right through your skull, leaving little bursts of random neuronal arcing where any clear memory of him might have formed.

And, if he wanted to, he could blow your brains out through your ears with a well-directed pulse.

All of these morphings of form and spurtings of waves and pules took a tremendous amount of energy: while on the job, upwards of 10,000 calories a day. The morning that he vaulted over the counter of the Magnolia Bakery on Bleeker Street and began cramming fistfuls of cupcakes into his molten, distorted face, he hadn’t eaten for three days.

See you all next week!