I was about a week from finishing my contract – a week from meeting Kysha at the Belize International Airport and getting back to my normal life – when Shinji collapsed on the limestone strip mine and Bob, our supervisor, informed me I was taking over his shifts.
“Instead of mine?” I asked.
“In addition.” Bob swiped his face with a sweat rag. “You’ll be doing ten hours a day for the next five days.”
I stared down at him. Most of the bio-modding I’d done to take this job was invisible, like the Heat-Safe Kidneys® and subdermal cooling membranes, but my new height was obvious as soon as I entered a room. My limbs had been extended so that I now stood nearly two meters tall. I no longer fit any of my old clothes, and I didn’t recognize my new treelike frame when I made the mistake of glancing at a mirror. More surface area to volume, so more opportunities for heat to escape, and a better chance of working beneath the sky’s midday furnace without my organs failing. But not nearly enough to labor ten hours a day, five days in a row, through temperatures that often passed 50 Celsius with 70 percent humidity.
“I can’t survive that amount. Shinji has more mods and he’s out sick after our regular five hours.”
Bob shrugged. “Mod up.”
“I can’t afford to.” The payments for my current mods, fronted when I’d signed up and skimmed off each paycheck with interest, were eating a good chunk of my total earnings.
Bob leaned back in his chair. “Can you afford not to?”
I wanted to quit with a fierceness that momentarily made the world go dark, wanted to flip him off and storm out the door, but instead I ran quick calculations in my head. I had taken this job to earn the down payment on a house with Kysha. Quit before the contract was up, and I’d have to pay back the full rate on the mods I’d already gotten, plus the past year’s room and board. I’d leave with almost nothing. Worse than nothing, because at least before I’d come here, my body had been my own.
I’d have spat on his desk if I could spare the fluid. “I’m going to see Shinji.”
“Let me know his advice.” Bob turned back to his terminal. “I want your answer by end of shift.”
I went to visit Shinji in the hospital trailer and found him by the tag at the foot of his cot. Until that moment, I’d thought he was just sick. I pulled back the sheet that covered him.
He’d had so many mods his corpse hardly looked human. He was squat, less than half my height, his skeleton reshaped to pull extremely heavy loads. His skin was bronze, some enhancement to protect from acid burns. Most of his body was covered with feather-like scales that blocked the sun and lay flat to prevent the trapping of heat. None of it had been enough to save him.
No more mods, I thought. I wasn’t letting another scalpel near me. I’d take my chances.
“Hey!” the nurse shouted. “You’re not supposed to be here!” She started toward me. I dropped the sheet and left.
I did my regular five-hour shift that afternoon, running cables and fixing tools alongside the automated diggers that cut up and scooped out chunks of limestone and carried them to the hauler-trucks that idled nearby. Each digger was a robotic quadruped twice the height of a human, stomping through the dirt on hydraulic legs and rotating through its rack of drill, saw, and clamps. They were powerful and dangerous and constantly malfunctioned in the dust and the heat.
The air was heavy, a damp weight on my head and back. The sweat glued my sweat-wicking clothes to my thighs and chest. I panted through my mouth like a dog, feeling the air singe my throat. My thoughts kept going back to Shinji.
When we used to meet up before or after our shifts, he inevitably spoke nonstop about the adventures he’d had, on almost every continent and deep mines beneath them, and he’d done enough that he never told me the same story twice. I’d been a reluctant modder, dreading every change. He’d jumped into it, relishing the opportunity to make himself stronger, more productive, tailor himself to whatever reckless task needed doing.
Compared to his experiences, my life story hardly seemed worth sharing. I’d gotten a degree for a field that it turned out AI could do better and more cheaply, and then I’d discovered my innate unsuitability for a series of customer service jobs. The person who had changed everything, and the one subject I was eager to talk about, was Kysha.
“What’s the first thing you noticed about her?” he’d asked me.
“I’m not sure,” I’d said, visions of her filling my mind.
“Of course you’re sure.”
“Okay. Her hair. It was gorgeous. It was out past her shoulders. People had to move out of her way when she walked.”
“Does she still have it?”
“No, that was a while ago. She shaved most of it off. It’s only about an inch thick now.” I’d used the present tense, but I hadn’t seen her in months. “It turned out it wasn’t her hair, it was her. Her confidence. She still walks like people need to get out of her way, and they still do.”
Now, I tightened a bolt on one of the diggers and made up my mind. I wasn’t going to end up like Shinji. I would do whatever I needed to survive and get back to Kysha. I would get another mod.
If I were judicious, I’d still walk away next week with almost a quarter of my gross earnings. Not enough for the down payment we’d wanted. But enough to cover the rent while we figured out something new.
The air conditioner roared and rattled in the corner, but even in Bob’s tiny cabin office it couldn’t overpower the omnipresent heat. “At least give me the night shift.”
“Sign up for a second year, and maybe I can make that happen.”
I ran a hand through my hair. Even after nearly twelve months, my stretched arm ached when I lifted it above my shoulder.
“The extra hours get you the hazard bonus,” Bob pointed out.
I adjusted my mental calculations. “What if the company covered the modding?”
“You know we can’t do that.”
I knew that sometimes they did, for their best workers. I’d done my research before I signed up. It was worth their investment, because some portion of modded workers never successfully reintegrated into society. They either never left the mine or they left but came back.
They didn’t already have a life waiting for them on the other side.
“If you can cover the mods, I can take the extra shift.”
Bob wiped his face again. “We’ll pay fifty percent.”
Dr. Elijio was the company surgeon. She had her own building onsite, with sturdy cinder block walls and a vestibule to keep out the heat and dust. The rooms beyond it were the cleanest and coolest I’d seen since I’d arrived at the camp. Some of the workers joked that they kept the building so comfortable to encourage us to visit and use up our wages on mods. I was pretty sure it was more than a joke.
“What are my options?” I asked.
Elijio shrugged. “You’ve already done the most common. But I do have something new, a pair of flaps that fold out of the neck. They contain blood vessels near the undersides to cool your blood down quickly.”
“What is that adapted from?”
“Dinosaurs like the Stegosaurus and Spinosaurus, if you can believe it. Although if we really wanted to learn from animals, we’d just stay out of the sun during the hottest part of the day.”
“Too bad that’s not an option for strip miners.”
“But then I wouldn’t have a job, right?” She smiled, inviting me to grin with her. I didn’t take the bait.
I had the surgery that evening, followed by two nights and a day to recover. Sleeping that long, in a cot in the air-conditioned clinic, almost made the surgery worth it. Then my downtime was over and I was back on the mine.
The company had stripped the forests off the Maya Mountains, and now we were tearing down the mountains themselves. The mountaintop was a baking plain of dirt, bordered at the edges by tangled bracken fern and spindly trumpet trees. It was hard to imagine that this used to be rainforest, shaded by towering Swietenia and Spanish cedars, home to jaguars and howler monkeys. It was hard to imagine there had been a time the world was cool enough for unmodded laborers to do this work.
Jim was already out on the field. He used his mechanical hands to replace a digger’s hydraulic cylinders without the need for tools. He grunted when he saw me and strode off toward another digger, his motorized legs rising and falling at unnaturally acute angles. Even for modders, the cyborgs were too much, a step apart. He knew how disturbed I was by the metal and plastic that had replaced his human limbs. I always tried to be polite, but I couldn’t keep my disgust – my fear – off my face.
But they could work through the day without stopping, and hardly ever got heatstroke.
Jim glanced back at me. It was only for a moment, but when I looked into his eyes I saw the same thing he must have always seen in mine. Disgust.
I tried all day to figure out if the flaps were doing anything to cool me off. They were supposed to fold back when I wasn’t flaring them, but they were still swollen and immobile, stuck on my neck and shoulder blades like vestigial wings. Each time I decided they were making a difference, I spent the next fifteen minutes wondering if it was all in my head.
Either way, ten hours was an eternity, my body cooked beneath the broiling sun. I stumbled my way across the field, almost got my leg chopped off by one the diggers before I hopped back at the last minute. I spent the last few hours too dizzy and confused to keep track of what I was doing. I kept feeling pain on my neck and reaching up to find out what was wrong, and each time my fingers brushed my new flaps I was shocked and horrified all over again.
That night, however I turned, the flaps got crushed beneath my body weight. Each time I rolled onto them their constant throbbing ache turning into a stabbing pain that fully woke me up again despite my exhaustion.
I paid a visit to Dr. Elijio before dawn. “Can you fix them?”
She examined me. “Your body just needs to heal. They’re filled with blood vessels; that’s the point. You could lose a lot of blood if I tried to do anything to them, and with the heat trauma your body is going through, I don’t think you’d survive.”
“Can you remove them?”
“Do you have the money for another surgery?”
Not if I wanted a place with Kysha. That was what carried me through the heat and the pain. After a year, I was going to see Kysha again. She was coming in four days. And then it was three. Every minute I was awake, every hot breath out on the mine, I counted down.
Eventually, there was one day left.
And, finally, it was time.
“You’re a good worker,” Bob told me. “If married life isn’t what you expected, you can always come back.”
I signed the exit papers, not even looking at him. “I’m not coming back.”
He shrugged and mopped his face.
Kysha had insisted that she meet me here in Belize so we could fly back to Michigan together. She’d pleaded with me not to take this position, but in the end we didn’t have any alternatives. She had a stable pharmaceuticals lab job, but the salary wasn’t enough for the life we’d imagined together. She knew I was doing this for us, and flying down to me was her way of showing support.
As the cab got closer to the airport, though, I started to worry. What if she didn’t come? What if she’d met someone else? What if she’d changed her mind? What if she saw me and couldn’t handle the mods?
By the time I arrived, I had convinced myself she wouldn’t be there. When I saw her in the concourse after all, as bright and alive and beautiful as she’d ever been, I was so overwhelmed that I stopped, taking a deep breath to prepare myself, to exhale the last year, the heat, the agony, to release it all, so that I could be the person she remembered.
She was in profile, scanning the crowd. For me.
As I stepped forward, I saw her eyes fall on someone like me, another worker, heading for a gate. He didn’t have neck flaps, but he was stretched, like me. She looked at him curiously, like she had encountered a strange animal at the zoo.
I froze.
And then I turned and left the airport. Got in line for a taxi and returned to the camp.
Returned home.
Kysha sent me four voicemails and a string of texts in the time it took me to get back to the Maya Mountains. “I’m here at the airport. Are you OK? What’s wrong?”
Each time my phone rang, I reached out to answer it, and each time, I pulled my fingers away before I could.
I kept seeing the look of revulsion Jim had given me. The revulsion I’d always felt for him. I didn’t know how Kysha would have responded if she’d seen me. I was afraid to find out. My mind had been filled with images of the life we’d have together. But that’s all they had been: my imagination. And now, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t conceive of a path back to that idealized life.
It was my own revulsion I ran from.
My body clenched when I reached the gate, knowing the pain that waited on the other side. But I had nothing outside to go back to.
“I assumed it would take at least a couple weeks,” Bob said, as I ducked into his office.
I thought about the heat I’d endured over the past week, doing my ten-hour shifts. “You said I could get the night shift this time, right? And back to five hours?”
“I said I’d work on it. Some positions would need to open up. But I still have your ten waiting for you.”
I put my fingers to my flaps. I was just as much an outcast as Jim.
“Here’s what I can do,” Bob said. “You sign up for a year, you’re top of the list for nightshifts. Sign up for two years, we’ll cover a third the cost of any new mods you take on as well.”
I swallowed. My phone was in my pocket. I waited for it to ring or buzz with a message. But one didn’t come, and even if it did I still wouldn’t answer it.
My finger found the off button and pressed.
“Give me the two years.”
Bob grinned and put down his sweat rag. “I’ll get the paperwork.”
EDITOR’S NOTE:
As mentioned in the editorial, click here to check out behind-the-scenes video of the audio recording of Strip Mine!
