Eavesdropping

‘Should I wake a locksmith?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, pushing the praying mantis light closer in and trying hard not to rip anyone’s head off today. The heatwave was enough to get on anyone’s nerves, but right now, the chest cracked open on the slab had all her attention.

She’d always been referred to as the Smith, aka Clocksmith, the ticker-checker, or, her personal favourite, tick-Doc. The last one actually made her chuckle.

Tick doc, tick doc, tick doc...

‘Get me the Magni-glasses 25x and suction. Better get some gauze, too, there’s lots of cleaning up.’ Bloody mess. Coagulated lumps everywhere all around the chest, dark red, almost rust coloured; sandy to the touch, flaky somehow. This was some iron poisoning this guy had.

‘Dentals, start soft’, Smith added while holding out her hand. One of the auto-nurses immediately inserted the soft dental bur into her integrated finger tip. She had had that installed for longer then she could remember. As one would say, of course she could remember. No one forgot anything anymore. But there’s nothing like a hands-on approach into human machinery, she always felt. We all need a good clean-up sometimes, she’d say. Anyway, these routine operations kept her active.

This guy had been fine until the aesti-vat pinged a spike in his iron levels. Vitals seemed fine, but Smith always checked and sure as hellfire, heard a murmur in his heart. They didn’t even bother to wake him up. He had at least another whole month in the vat until this heatwave subsided. So they just moved him onto the slab and cracked his chest open. No point being fussy and waiting it out and stuff had been so quiet. She needed a distraction and a good scrubbing always put her mind at ease.

The Smith liked to stay awake. There’s no consent issue if you’re asleep, like most of the community during the waves. Awake, she could say no to a hella lot of things she didn’t like. That’s probably why she was the tick-Doc after all, head of the medteam for over 80 years and the only one awake in her shift. Around here, she ended up doing a bit of everything.

Apparently, before the waves started, there was a difference between doctors and mechanics. Funny little fact. Wasn’t a choice now. People were half machines as it was. And that’s what the Smith was for, scraping, mending and fixing all the rusted parts, so to speak.

These waves were no fault of the moon, she remembered. Scrubbing always made her remember. These waves were of the sun.

No waves of old would have lasted months. This heat did, though. Ever since those second roaring twenties, in the early 2000s, waves of heat started. All kinds of heat, too. They were all surfers, waiting for the wave sets to blow over, trying to ride it as smoothly as possible. But it’s easier to get hot than it is to keep cool.

BioTec swooped in to protect from the blazing summers. While there were summers. There was no difference now, not really. It was just hot, and blazing. They burrowed, got closer to the core, followed the slow but sure lead of the snails. Aestivation started a couple decades ago, quickly became a ritual.

People didn’t count years anymore; they counted peak-heats. The peak heatwaves were too hot to bear for most, so they went to sleep, making wishes, writing them down in solu-edible paper that they took into the aesti-vats with them, and woke back up when the earth wasn't in a raging fever anymore. Maybe they believed the wishes would turn into future realities through osmosis. Predicting the future by dreaming into your body.

Tick doc… tick doc, this thing is harder than expected, she thought smiling, while changing her fingertips to a harder bur.

‘This thing’s all calcified. More gauze, too’. There was always something soothing in cleaning up. Rust coloured, blood and pus-soaked gauze thrown into the metal basin, sloshing onto each other.

Her grandmother had explained the phases of the moon to her, how the earth keeps the moon steady, and in return the moon tried to drink in the water, waving at the earth.

Always thirsty, never quenched. ‘Can’t we give the moon some water, make it flower, make it bloom?’, she had asked, ‘Like the song…’. She remembered her nona looking at her with curious eyes. ‘Which song, my dear?’ ‘Bloom Moon… she saw me standing alone…’ and she laughed, heartily. A warm, sunny laugh.

Sometimes Smith wondered how she could even remember so well, something that had happened decades before mem-imps. Kids nowadays, they remembered everything they had done forty years before, no worries. The memory enhancement implants did their job during the night sorting experiences into neat discrete folders that were accessible forever. Obsessed with holding on to our past and clueless about what to do with our future.

But these memories felt like they were stored somewhere else, fuzzier and yet closer to the heart. They weren’t saved in the brain, they were saved in her bones. As if they took space in her very chest, filling it up.

Her solar plexus tightened at the thought of that blooming moon and called for her water, eyes filling up with this memory.

Bright and clear awareness had dried her eyes in an instant, though, keeping them wide open, unblinking. ‘Why wasn’t any integration mentioned in his file?’

’The file does not mention any integration. Shall I wake a locksmith?’, said the automated voice, without noticing its own irony.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ The Smith’s breathing created a microclimate of itself under the mask. Sweat from her soft lip hair tasted salty, mixed with a metallic tang in her mouth. She could hear a murmur. An actual murmur from his chest.

‘Water. Give me water and suction,’ she said, almost not breathing at all.

It was the exact colour of the heart. Almost indistinguishable, even now when clean, were it not for a slight metallic iridescence. And the keyhole. A fucking keyhole she had just unclogged.

‘Doc?’

‘Shush. Kill the feedback.’ The machines’ audio automatically turned off.

The room went silent but for the unmistakable sound of waves of blood being forced through the body and a faint murmur. Somehow, a murmur of voices, deep in his chest. Almost as if they were coming through the keyhole.

After all these years working on tickers, Smith almost expected a ticking sound.

Maybe the heart doesn’t do the countdown after all, maybe it guards something, locks it in. Not pumping out, holding in, until it’s full.

‘About time, we find some jewelry in a cracked chest, right?’ But there was no one to diffuse the tension, and the machines had long been disabled of any humor function.

In any good integration, like Smith had at her fingertips, you couldn’t recognise where one part began and the other ended. But this... this looked ancient, or the most cutting edge tech she had ever seen. This looked like a spontaneous biotech-integration. It was one whole, beating heart locket, for lack of a better word.

Was the surplus iron poisoning him, or was the spike just a way to a self-integrated cure? Like a fever, a natural response. As this heat, this unbearable heat…

Sweat dripped into the open chest, with a clear metallic echo.