Coal Miners
25 November 2007 16:16![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skonen_bladesCoal tattoos. That’s what it was called when coal dust got into a miner’s wound. The cut darkened and it became a permanent black line.
Coal miners ate their sandwiches daintily, pinching one corner between each thumb and forefinger. The rest of their black-encrusted fingers were raised like old British ladies, far away from the sandwich. The part that they were holding onto got thrown away. The dark poisons had seeped into the bread from their fingertips.
Life expectancy down there used to be around forty-five or so. That was before humans unlocked the genes. The cure for the plague that killed half of the planet’s population forced mankind’s biology to outgrow what was previously defined as human.
We skipped ahead six chapters in our evolution, overachieving little tryhards that we are. Those scientists were bloody savants without the idiot. The vaccines were rushed to the city centers. Riots followed. Governments were reinstated. It was a long ten years. Giant ‘dead pits’ burned at the centers of most cities for years.
Half of the planet was suddenly vacant. Room for everyone now. It was a new dawn.
The vaccine let us be groomed for our jobs. If a job was dangerous, the body could be adapted to endure and even thrive in hazardous environments. No longer did we have to destroy the environment around us to suit our needs. We could, when the occasion called for it, become different to suit where we worked.
The coal miners were a pale breed. Their lungs were changed. They still needed oxygen but they could also gain nutrients from the coal dust as well as the previously poisonous gasses miles down beneath the earth. Their nostrils were very wide.
They had small, green-white, night-vision eyes that glinted in the darkness like sharks in an ocean at evening.
These were bodies that could take punishment. Bodies with solid fat on them coating muscles borne of pure endurance.
The ones that had been there the longest had the most detailed coal tattoos on their broad backs and huge arms. The workers looked like pot-bellied, albino, hairless gorillas wrapped in the black-ridged whorls, initials, and high-contrast designs of their mates. Memorials for those crushed in cave-ins, crude portraits of departed friend’s faces, and cultural swirls from Celts, Maoris, Africa and the Orient.
They didn’t need many lights to work in the depths and they didn’t need to come for fresh air. They’d do six-month stretches down there. They don’t call it the bowels of the earth for nothing. They’d come up stinking.
They needed respirators filled with coal dust and special sunglasses when they were above ground.
tags
Coal miners ate their sandwiches daintily, pinching one corner between each thumb and forefinger. The rest of their black-encrusted fingers were raised like old British ladies, far away from the sandwich. The part that they were holding onto got thrown away. The dark poisons had seeped into the bread from their fingertips.
Life expectancy down there used to be around forty-five or so. That was before humans unlocked the genes. The cure for the plague that killed half of the planet’s population forced mankind’s biology to outgrow what was previously defined as human.
We skipped ahead six chapters in our evolution, overachieving little tryhards that we are. Those scientists were bloody savants without the idiot. The vaccines were rushed to the city centers. Riots followed. Governments were reinstated. It was a long ten years. Giant ‘dead pits’ burned at the centers of most cities for years.
Half of the planet was suddenly vacant. Room for everyone now. It was a new dawn.
The vaccine let us be groomed for our jobs. If a job was dangerous, the body could be adapted to endure and even thrive in hazardous environments. No longer did we have to destroy the environment around us to suit our needs. We could, when the occasion called for it, become different to suit where we worked.
The coal miners were a pale breed. Their lungs were changed. They still needed oxygen but they could also gain nutrients from the coal dust as well as the previously poisonous gasses miles down beneath the earth. Their nostrils were very wide.
They had small, green-white, night-vision eyes that glinted in the darkness like sharks in an ocean at evening.
These were bodies that could take punishment. Bodies with solid fat on them coating muscles borne of pure endurance.
The ones that had been there the longest had the most detailed coal tattoos on their broad backs and huge arms. The workers looked like pot-bellied, albino, hairless gorillas wrapped in the black-ridged whorls, initials, and high-contrast designs of their mates. Memorials for those crushed in cave-ins, crude portraits of departed friend’s faces, and cultural swirls from Celts, Maoris, Africa and the Orient.
They didn’t need many lights to work in the depths and they didn’t need to come for fresh air. They’d do six-month stretches down there. They don’t call it the bowels of the earth for nothing. They’d come up stinking.
They needed respirators filled with coal dust and special sunglasses when they were above ground.
tags