Through the Lungs and Back

Chapter Three

I lost Ilaria and Mom in the hospital. An android nurse took them left, but I went right to see what new technology they're working on. I just have to be careful not to run into any more android nurses. Especially not malfunctioning ones. Those are terrifying. When I was young, back when the majority of nurses were still human, they would tell me stories about malfunctioning android nurses. They were incredibly strong, and they could be programed to kill certain people. Manipulated almost like people are, they would say. I can hear the metal grinding from the workshop. This hallway is completely deserted. No android nurses, no doctors, no chemists, no nothing. The door to my left starts to vibrate. When I go to peek through the window, the door rips itself off its hinges, and I duck to avoid getting hit. Loud rock music starts blasting from the room. The force from the door hitting the wall didn't attract security or android nurses, which is really weird.

"Get in before the nurses come!" I peek through the door to see a pair of purple eyes staring back at me. "You! The attractive one!" I look around to see if the voice is referring to someone else. When I don't see anyone nearby, I slowly walk towards the room. "Oh, forget it." A mechanical arm reaches out from the room and pulls me inside. The same mechanical arm grasps the door using nothing but energy, and reconnects it to its hinges. The smell of wood and metal quickly fill the room. There isn't a spot on the wall without posters plastered over it. It's like there was a clear coat of paint over thousands of different overlapping posters. There are white fairy lights hanging from the ceiling as the primary source of light. There's a skinny wooden door in the back with no window on it, but there's no handle. Only a hole where it used to be. There are desks scattered around the room, both wooden and metal. They are cluttered with either body part molds for sizing, pieces of incomplete mechanical transplants that fit the molds, or seemingly ancient tools to create them. There are pieces of string taped to the walls with vintage photographs of machine parts clipped to them. There's a lonely desk sitting in the corner of the room with a sketchbook and a very bright homemade lamp. When the music stops, I can focus on something other than the room.

"It's been awhile since I seen real people." My vision decides to focus on a teenage girl with blue hair and purple eyes. Metal goggles pull her hair out of her face, along with a short ponytail at the back of her head. She suddenly grows to be about my height. "I'm Molly." I haven't heard of someone named Molly for as long as I could remember. It was a popular name a long time ago, but now there aren't many Mollys. She extends her hand to me. She's wearing a tank top, so It's easy for me to tell that her entire left arm is a mechanical implant, along with her right hand. The top left corner of her forehead has metal pieces pushed together, until it meets her eye. Both of her eyes are mechanical. They're purple, and her irises are currently red, so that means she's scanning me. "I'm Christian." I shake her hand. I watch her eyes scan me up and down, for weapons, maybe. It's considered rude to scan people like that, but I don't mind. When I take a breath, Molly covers my mouth. She pushes me against the wall, right next to the door. Her eyes go back to normal when the android nurses scoot by the door. Molly tightens her grip over my mouth when an android nurse pounds on it. The pounding shakes the wall, and smaller machines and tools fall off the tables. Molly bites her lip and looks down. After a moment, the android nurses leave the same way they came from. She lets me go, and picks up things that fell off tables.

"Bein' locked in here really sucks. Officials are always prowlin' 'round and waitin' for us to screw up so they can hire someone new. They can't legally fire us unless we screw up, y'know." Molly says as she picks up her instruments. "I can help." I reply, picking up some more of her instruments. "Nobody helps people like us." Molly says, taking her goggles off and setting them on a table. Her hair falls out of the ponytail, and it doesn't even touch her shoulders. "People like you?" I ask for her to specify. She sits down and rolls up both the legs on her cargo pants. Her legs are the cleanest set of metal transplants I've ever seen. The only breaks are her knees and ankles, which are magnetic spheres that connect her feet and the different parts of her legs. "I'm seventy-six percent metal. After forty percent of your body is metal, you're not human anymore." She stands up, and her pant legs fall back down. "Are ya metal?" Molly asks me, starting to scan me again. Instead of saying anything, I take off my right right shoe. I got a metal transplant foot ten years ago after I broke my real one. The doctors didn't care to try and fix it. They knew a transplant would be more expensive than just fixing it, and that was back when doctors were trying to get as much money as they could because they couldn't live off of what they were given. But things have changed, and now the doctors make more money than everyone else.