I awoke to the feeling of restlessness and soreness all over my body, yet, paradoxically I was relaxed amidst the aching of my muscles. My bed sheets matched my body’s core temperature creating the ideal sleeping requirements, I didn’t want to get out until I remembered today is my first day on my new job. My eyes opened to the other side of the room bathed in bright orange light from the sun and reached over to grab my phone that had been left to charge on my desk to check the time; only four minutes before my alarm was set to go off. Closing my eyes and waiting for the alarm to sound off wasn’t an option at this point, so I elected to quickly log in to my social media accounts to catch up on what my friends have been up to. I stayed on my shoulder under the comfort of my woollen blankets, scrolling up with my thumb the backlog of messages from friends in distant parts of the world.

When the alarm did sound off, interrupting my catching up with a giant tab displaying the time followed by its distinctive beeping. I was quick to turn it off before emerging from my bed to engage in my morning ritual of getting dressed and feeding, I looked out the window of my bedroom to see the sun slowly rise over the Barrier in the distance. I spotted two of the three moons faintly visible in the sky; the larger one with a slight purple tinge to its surface I knew as Charybdis and the smaller moon with the yellowish glow to it was Qamar. Waking my mother up this early in the morning made her short tempered so I didn’t make much noise when eating cereal, I placed my earphones in while I listened to some current news and by the time I had finished eating, I freshened up one last time.

The front door creaked loudly on its hinges; my face tensed at the high-pitched noise I was certain my mother had heard. I made sure to make a note of it to get some lubricant for the hinges. In my hand I held my rugged and partially torn backpack by its shoulder strap, my favourite backpack, having been with me for years and never failing to satisfy my needs. I rummaged around inside it in a final effort to checklist the things that I had brought with me, most especially my Public Transport card and the sandwiches I packed. A sigh of relief escaped me when I was certain I had everything packed. The dilapidated hallways of my apartment building at this time of the morning felt different, I couldn't recall a time in the past when I saw the sunrise glow strike the walls and exposed brickwork underneath and bathe the corridor in its light. To be up so early felt like such a strange alien sensation to see familiar vistas under a different light, on the wall across the window a public monitor screen broadcasted constant news bulletins; I stopped for a second to glimpse at the news anchor, a blonde woman with a fade cut hairstyle spoke to an unseen audience of news regarding the crime rate in suburbs near and far followed by a spreadsheet showing the present stock rates of corporations with explanations of their shifting values; the military industrial complex of Amaria has been selling their Tungasite ore for next to nothing after finding a rich vein causing all microchip manufacturers to cheapen the price of their products. The Union of Northern Socialist Kingdoms have also been mass exporting their deposits of Iron and Bauxite.

After meeting with my brother last week asking him for work, I swore to myself I would never take the train and busses unprepared again. The train ride I experienced to the Central Transport hub last week would prove to be a different experience with the morning rush compared to the midday rides I took before with the crisp air in shaded areas of tracks, the train's faulty climate control system left the entire cabin cold with the heat of the cabin coming from the uncomfortable passengers.

Mental note: bring some tea or hot water to keep warm. I thought to myself.

The Central Transport hub was filled with many more passengers, even more so than in the afternoon. It was packed to the point of being a claustrophobe’s nightmare being in its large art deco atrium echoing with the footsteps of hundreds of people packed within shoulder distance of each other and the bellowing of the public announcements. I checked my wristwatch for the time and smiled to myself knowing I was on time. Climbing up the stone staircase toward the platforms consisting of the monorail system and the mag-lev system, it was a slow crawl up the grand staircase, being forced to move at a pace by the masses I considered slow. It annoyed me that people moved this slowly.

High above the foot traffic on the ground of Amaro park I leaned on the concrete railing looking down at the many office workers scurrying to their places of work. The foot traffic from twelve floors above gave the men and women of the workforce the appearance of minute ants. Black dots moving about in a scattered pattern.

“C’mon, where the hell are you?” I muttered.

I cursed under my breath waiting for anyone to show up. Being told to not be late whilst being held up by others being late was frustrating. Fifteen minutes passed; my frustration grew till I fumbled getting my phone out of pocket to call Thomas. He answered with concern asking where I was. “Where do you think? I’m outside the door waiting for it to open!” suddenly it hit him, he realised he forgot to mention the back entrance for employees to enter through. I rolled my eyes and shortly the front doors unlocked and slid apart to let me in. The pristine waiting room was dark, light came from the operating rooms and Thomas’ office. Thomas leaned against the door frame of his office wearing a deep blue tie in front of his sky-blue button up shirt, his attire more fitting for a cubicle office worker than a prosthesis clinic manager. His dark brown hair was gelled and combed back giving him a slicker look than a stuck-up floor manager.

“Good morning sunshine, sorry about making you wait. That was on me. There’s a utility corridor for employees to use in the back, I should’ve told you.” Thomas’ face blushed red with embarrassment.

He waved me over to his office and I complied. I pressed down on the button next to the door frame to close it behind me as Thomas sat down behind his desk.

“Sorry for not telling you. Well, umm… Welcome to your first day!” Thomas said as he clapped his hands. “First things first; you can leave your bag in here if you want. We got a kitchen with a fridge just behind the operating room. We do have cameras in every room and we have a guard at all times, just because we service high profile clients doesn’t mean we are conflict free.” He sat up and strode past me to leave the office.

Outside the office in front of Thomas and I, the reception desk lay empty, we turned to the right and Thomas opened the door to the operating room. Inside the clean white tile room, three surgery chairs sat unoccupied; each chair was padded with cracked green leather. Monitoring equipment and a rack securing tools was mounted to the back of the chairs, curved rails hung from the ceiling with plastic curtains. On the opposite side of the operation room from us, an open doorway exposed another room with a large metal table surrounded by four people; I recognised the receptionist, Anna, was occupied watching something on her phone. She only barely acknowledged our presence when we walked in responding with a simple upward jerk of her head, the other three were men. Two of them chatted and laughed whereas the third was drinking out of his water bottle, all three men looked at Thomas, then to me with curious expressions. Perhaps wondering why their boss was escorting some random person who looked like they didn’t belong there.

“Everyone, may I get your attention please! I wanna introduce to you my brother, Michael. Mikey here is starting his first day of work with us so I expect you to treat him with respect.”

I felt his grip on my shoulders tighten as he introduced me. The three men smiled as they greeted me.

“Hey man.” said the tanned bald man who had been drinking.

“Welcome to Hell, bud.” A man with dirt blonde hair said. His voice carried with it a noticeable Northern accent. Most likely from the Union of Northern Kingdoms. “So, when you say treat him with respect, you actually mean…”

“I mean abuse him, call him names and make his life a living Hell.” Thomas chuckled.

The third man sitting at the table nodded and jerked his hand upward in a lazy attempt at a wave.

“Michael, you already met Anna, this is Benji. He’s one of our surgeons” he gestured to the man at the fridge. “Thorsten here,” he pointed to the dirt blonde man with the accent. “Is our programmer and Tech specialist. Emphasis on ‘specialist’ the dude is a savant! And finally, we have Jerome, he is our surgeon and tech assistant.”

“He exaggerates. I just fix the software and mechanical side of things. Make sure they don’t break before they should.”

Thomas turned to face me. “And there you have it, that’s everyone. Anna, what is our itinerary today?”

She looked back at her phone, tapped in a few commands before speaking. “Miss Tomoharu says she is having problems with her implants, she is scheduled for the nine AM slot. And we have an ocular upgrade on Mr. Sonner at two-thirty.”

“Well, that is unfortunate,” Thomas said “Here I was hoping to give you a busy day. Right, I want you to help Benji in anything he asks.”

Thomas slapped my back firmly as he left the breakroom. Benji told me to leave my bag on the table, I swung it around till it clattered on top, Benji sat down next to me and extended his hand for me to shake.

“Don’t worry, you’ll love working here.” He said with a friendly smile.

The day felt as though time had slowed itself to a crawl. The first client; Miss Tomoharu, complained of her prosthetic forearm seizing up at infrequent intervals. Her prosthetic was of a slim design, matching her other arm in shape, ribbons of ornate gold streamlined down the obsidian black casing from her elbow joint down to her wrist. An elderly lady in her seventies with oily black hair she carried herself as a lady or heiress to some vast fortune. She smiled in a friendly manner. I watched Benji plug a wide cable jack to Miss Tomoharu’s neural socket. It was then I realised it wasn’t just her arm that was synthetic; her eyes glowed a bright red colour as data scrolled across her cornea. I also noticed a socket at the base of her neck while Benji stared at the screen as lines of code scrolled up on the screen, Miss Tomoharu caught me glimpsing at the port at the base of her neck.

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“It’s for my lungs,” she said. “A bit of lung damage from a house fire and smoke inhalation. You’re new here, aren’t you? Yes, I haven’t seen you before. Don’t worry Benji here has seen me more than my late husband.”

Everyone chuckled.

“I am new, yes. Thomas, the manager, he's my brother. He offered me some work and I took it.”

Miss Tomoharu placed her synthetic hand on my lap and lightly patted it, the articulation and joint movement was almost lifelike.

“I’ve been a regular client since before he started working here, he is very good at what he does so respect him.”

I assured her I would and she smiled. Benji told me to look over his shoulder to look at the monitor screen. He instructed me to watch what he did carefully; a command terminal with information about the implant filled the screen. Benji tapped on the keyboard and a progress bar popped up, he typed in the command cmd:copy I:\autorun.exe D:\decomp\temp.exe.

“Alright kiddo, whenever you do a diagnostic like this you got to copy the executable files from cybernetic implants and run it through a decompiler.”

Running the software on the copied files, Benji explained to me as the binary code from the implant was converted into assembly code. I watched him staring intently at the screen as he typed away on the keyboard. He pulled up a stored schematic on the implant that the client had, he further explained to me to always pull up the wiring and mechanical schematics of the product when doing this kind of work. I saw him scribbling down on a notepad the output memory address before closing the window. Carefully eyeing the diagram before looking toward her arm, Benji tapped the screen to get an expanded view of the wrist area, it enlarged into an exploded view that filled the screen with technical specifications and individual part numbers listed alongside each part. Benji, determined he was, knew where the problem was. In his eyes, the determination was there for him to see where the issue may lie.

He tapped on a miniaturised motor located in the wrist displaying only: Tyger_Onyx/ Carpal/ Carpal_servo/Servo_controller

“Alright, Michael, watch closely,’ Benji turned to face me as he spoke. “I’ve read on forums from other technicians that they have had similar problems to this on the same product. The most common theory is that there are two different sensor inputs and it's confusing the hell out of the servos.”

I made no attempt to hide my confusion, my raised eyebrow must have looked comically stupid. “I have no idea what you are talking about.” I said in a deadpan tone.

“A’ight kid, lemme break it down for you: This prosthetic has two separate sensor outputs added in instead of multiplying them and the result isn’t even clamped to fix things. As a result, part of the neurological data is corrupted, the servo’s controller input overflows and the motor will infrequently seize up.”

Benji’s fingers tapped away on the keyboard initiating a recursive search for functions within the decompiled code. His fingers flew with exceptional speed as Benji implemented commands.

“Alright, things are looking fine, algorithm factors are normalized, the code compiles. I think we are good to go.”

Benji opened up the command tab and copied the modified code and had it uploaded into the prosthetic. “The coding on this thing is complete garbage. It looks like something a first-year comp-sci student put together.” The terminal showed the progress bar fill up steadily as it returned the modified code to the arm, Benji grabbed the data jack and unplugged it from Miss Tomoharu’s neuro port. “Alright, miss. That about should do it. If it seizes up again, come right back and we’ll sort something out.”

Offering her my hand, Miss Tomoharu took it for assistance in getting out of the reclined chair. She thanked me before walking out of the operating room and into the waiting room. She seemed nice and Benji really knew his stuff. He handed me a bottle of disinfectant and a cloth wipe before instructing me to wipe down the chair and workstation. Moving the cloth in a circular motion felt tedious as I rubbed the disinfectant over the padded chair with my task nearing its end. The door slid open and Thomas walked in to check on me.

“Benji, how is he?”

“He’s okay, just dealt with another seized servo of Tomoharu’s arm. The Tyger Onyx model is becoming a problem we need to deal with. I’d recommend we stop selling it until the manufacturer recalls them or supplies us with a proper software patch to fix the damn things.”

Thomas nodded.

The following hours went by and my entire work day consisted of menial tasks to pass the time. In between Miss Tomoharu and upgrading Mr. Sonner’s optical implants I took note that none of my colleagues did much. Benji warned me not to get used to the idea of a slow day. Tomorrow promised to be much more busy and more representative of what work was going to be like. He sensed my unease and nervousness when we worked on Mr. Sonner’s upgrade. Taking out his old implant left a golf ball sized hole in his face and I couldn’t resist staring into the socket. I felt grossed out looking into it.

I had wiped down the entire floor of the operating room. I layered it with a strong bleaching solvent and then wiped it down with a mop to clean it off. The strength of combined chemical fumes made it impossible to think any bacteria or disease could survive on the surface. Jerome and Thorsten walked behind me with their bags over their shoulders. I turned to face them to see them walk into the kitchen with Benji grabbing his cooler bag out of the fridge. I wondered where they went off to. Thorsten turned around to face me “Thomas said to see him in his office.” Before they closed a door in the back of the kitchen. I got up off my knees and went into the manager’s office. Thomas was in the middle of putting a folder away in his shoulder bag, he looked up to face me as the door opened up, I explained what Thorsten told me.

“Yes, right. Well it’s home time, I wanted to ask if you wanted me to give you a lift home?”

“You really would do that?”

Thomas looked puzzled.

“Of course, I would, why wouldn’t I?”

“It’s just, well, it’s just that you’ve already done so much. You just gave me a job and I worried I was taking advantage of you.” I stuttered nervously, deliberately avoiding eye contact.

“Michael, I know how hard it is out there. Yes, I am a manager of an exclusive clinic but that does not mean I fool myself with delusions of what the real world is like. I wouldn’t do these things for you if I thought you were taking advantage of me. One day I’ll tell you what it was like for me when I first started out. What it was really like.”

Thomas and I walked in lockstep down the utility tunnel, the thick concrete blocks that made up the walls echoed each footstep away from the back door to the clinic. Thomas took his time turning off all lights in the clinic, eventually he locked up the back door and told me to walk with him to where he parked. I looked to my left and asked him about what he meant earlier regarding his early days. I already knew the story; he would tell mum and I what his work life was like when he came home late at night.

“I regrettably was not very honest back then. I didn’t like lying to you and mum but I had my reasons. I said I will tell you another time so let's leave it at that.”

During the trip in Thomas’ Nova sports car, I sighed with relief when I sat in the perforated leather seats. Thomas was generous to activate the seat massager feature in the passenger seat. The mechanism pressed in between my shoulder blades before rapidly hitting my lower back area. We were on the main highway leading to and from the city centre, the sun was setting low on the east, in the distance the Barrier’s warning lights glowed brightly among the dark orange sky. The traffic leaving the city was heavy, the road had five lanes to each side and our slim sports car was small compared to the bulkier utility flatbed trucks and much more spacious and streamlined than the economical cars that can barely fit two people. On the radio, two hosts debated about recent developments and newsworthy articles. In the back of my mind, I could feel the anxiety return at the thought of the Cold war becoming a much hotter one, both the Union of Northern Socialist Kingdoms and the Alliance of Liberal Nations have been throwing threats of escalation towards each other for years now. But in reality, we all knew that the Amarians just wanted an excuse to use their new Pyrosonic bombs. I suppose we should be counting our blessings that the Council of International security imposed a ban on the weapons from being deployed without their consent.

“Premier Erling Andreassen of the U.N.S.K High Command, said in an opening statement to the press this morning ‘Any violent action taken towards the Union or any nation under its protection will be met with a response of equal measure.’” The radio station had played the recording of the Premier’s own words, albeit with the voice of a translator on top of the native speaking leader.

The radio broadcast continued on about the recent bout of sabre rattling between the two superpower nations followed by announcements from the CEOs of mega corporations publicly announcing new products. I leaned my head on the window as I watched vehicles overtake us while we overtook others. Thomas veered to the side of the road to take the turn-off into Sanctuary Hills, entering the small one lane road we were greeted by a soft chime whose source seemed to come from all around us in the confined car, we passed by a metallic arch after turning onto the turn off which prompted, on the bottom of the windscreen orange text appeared before Thomas, reading: Toll passed: 25 Escudos charged.

It didn’t take long before it became apparent that we were out of place. Any fancy sports car did not belong in Sanctuary Hills, we drove past shady bars and public garbage bins on fire, crowds of homeless gathered around the makeshift fire pit. After another half hour of driving through suburbia we arrived outside Mum’s apartment. I turned to face Thomas to thank him for the lift home while I opened the door, he grabbed my arm. “Would you like me to pick you up? It wouldn’t bother me; I can be here by Seven in the morning.”

“Really? Well, thanks Thomas!”

He nodded; a smirk crept along his lips. Thomas let go of my arm and I stepped out of his car. The door slid along the chassis and slotted itself into the side of the car giving it its definitive aerodynamic form before Thomas drove off. Night had overcome the city but the vast network of city street lights bleached the sky with an orange hue. Clouds above reflected the orange glow of the street lights and in the distance pillars of light danced from the city centre, some kind of exclusive event, one would imagine. I felt tired. First day of work and a long commute? I just wanted to be in the comfort of my home. Kids ran up and down the corridor with the doors to their apartments open, clearly the parents didn’t have any regard for safety. I rummaged around in my bag for my keys and pushed the front door open. My mother was behind the kitchen bench, her hair was pulled back into a bun and she wore a white apron covered in juices of various foods and droplets of broth from the stew she was in the process of cooking when I entered. She looked up to greet me when I closed the door behind me, her eyes were dark from exhaustion and from overworking herself. Untying her apron and setting it aside, my mother closed the gap between us and sat down on the couch, gesturing to me to sit beside her. “So tell me, how was your first day at work?”

I sat down on our tired leather couch which let out a soft groan. My joints in my legs started aching from standing up for so long. Pain spread from where my femur connected to my waist and spread the pain to my muscle tissues. My tired expression said everything to my mother, she had been working for so long she knew what it was.

“Hah, welcome to the working world, son. This is what it’s like to be an adult. Work and work and work, then you got to pay rent, on top of the bills. First; there’s the electricity bill” Mum had her hand closed but extended each of her fingers as she counted the different types of bills. “Water, gas, television, internet. AND on top of that, there also happens to be the strata we pay to keep the building maintained.”

I scoffed.

“Have you looked at the building lately? We all know the superintendent is just pocketing that money and doing the bare essentials. The gyprock is exposed, there’s water and mould damage in the corridors, the carpets are worn thin and on top of that, everyone on the first-floor claims to hear a banging noise in the water pipes.”

“I know it sucks but there isn’t much we can do about it. He owns the building and if we don’t like it then he’ll evict us. And if you read the property reports lately, you’ll know that there isn’t much available housing in one hundred kilometres. Now that you are working, I expect you to help out financially around here.”

“Yes, mum.” I said, pouting.

She patted my leg and walked back to the kitchen, the bubbling of liquids stirred about in the pot.

“Dinner’s almost ready!” she announced. I stood up off the couch and helped mother prepare the table, we sat down and ate quietly to the tune of metal scraping ceramic and klinking utensils.