skonen_blades

He sits at the end of the bar with metal jutting out of his head. He was one of the first to receive the implants.

They’d done a lot with tinier and tinier ento-nerve breeding. They’d gotten the miniature steam tubes down to a fraction of a millimeter. Cooling was still the big problem in his day.

That was why he had four giant steaming bars of copper sticking out of the base of his skull. A steady drip of cooled oxygen dripped into a grommited hole in his head just above his ear with the precision of a well-wound clock from what looked like a hamster feeder.

Jack Furstens. We just called him Firsty. It was play on words since the pioneering operation he had endured had left him with a lisp and he drank here a lot. Firsty it was.

He has the same tech as the rest of us but we were younger and had received our implants after the advent of elektriks. Good old Peter Edison had discovered that this invisible stream of electrons could be made to travel down through wires that were smaller than the vacuum tubes and steam pipes. They ran cooler and could be put into a smaller space.

Used in conjunction with the bioware and steamdrivers, the new ‘computers’ were durable, stable, ran cooler, and only needed a little bit of upkeep. Some water here, a few crumbs there and little charge in the battery and Bob was your uncle. The fans were a little noisier but hey, it was a noisy city.

Firsty was a volunteer who went under the knife to get one of the first implanted cranial computers. With a series of punch cards, he could know Spanish or any of a dozen other languages. One of the problems was that no-one manufactured punch cards anymore.

His head was almost entirely hardware in an era that was starting to use ‘soft’ware to program their computers. Firsty’s head would have to be given to a hobbyist/mechanic/surgeon for the proper changes just to add another language or specialized field of knowledge to his existing slots list.

The heavy machine that had been grafted into his head was unable to be removed without fatal consequences. The bioware had grafted in surprisingly well. Might as well pull a tree out by it’s bloody roots.

He was a dinosaur. He was an oddity. He was a footnote in history.

We bought the Time Magazine with Firsty on the cover off of a collector at a boot sale down at the market last year. We had it framed and put above the bar for his birthday as a surprise.

The picture is Firsty in front of the glass and iron hospital service that performed the operation. There are zeppelins in the sepia sky in the background. He’s very handsome. His implants are rimmed with shining brass flanges to hide the entry and exit pustules. The copper gleams. He looks like he’s had one of those old fashioned espresso machines installed behind his face. It looks like Dr. Frankenstein took up industrial design and watchmaking. It’s a breathtaking shot.

He’s smiling with abandon like he just won the heavyweight championship of the world. He’s happy in a way I’ve never seen. I don’t think I’ve even seen his teeth since I worked here.

His face went pale when he saw it. He asked us to take it down. We thought he was joking with that flatline deadpan of his. When we laughed, he threw his glass from across the bar with amazing accuracy and smashed the frame to pieces. We swept it up and he continued drinking like nothing had happened.

I had it reframed. It’s in my office now where he’ll never see it.

Firsty. He’s down at the end of the bar with steam coming off of his head. He sticks to chilled drinks. He’s nearly had enough. I know the signs.

I’m polishing a glass when I hear his heavy head bounce off of the oak of the bar with a sound somewhere between a cash register and a parking meter before he slides off the stool to the ground.

The boys’ll put him in on the couch in the back.




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