The screen lit up with an image that Lena was sure she should feel sick of by now. Multicolored bars and numbers highlighted each aspect of a pale red heart; had she not seen so many real ones in her career, Lena would not be able to tell that it was artificial.

“Ready to begin, Mr. Purcell?” She asked the young man sitting at the computer screen with the brown buzzcut and the white lab coat and intense glare that matched hers.

“Ready, Dr. Markova,” Purcell said. Lena could tell that the response was automatic.

“Very well. Bio-organic heart, test number nine, dated 4:17pm, Friday, Autumn the 59th, 2110…” She typed the details into a tablet attached to a leather satchel over her shoulder.

“Beginning now.”

Purcell pressed the enter key on the keyboard before him. They both looked ahead at the window separating their cozy white observation room from the testing chamber beyond. The heart sat amid a web of thin tubes that formed a humanoid silhouette. At Purcell’s command, they filled with purple liquid; Lena smiled weakly at the memory of her old university classmates’ nickname for it - ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Blood.’

The false heart started pumping as a red number on Purcell’s screen gradually started going up: 12… 17… 22…

Lena read them all as ‘not 60.’

She recalled visits with her father in Saint Petersburg shortly after beginning her medical studies. He had recently discovered the new online casinos, and would insist to Lena that he had discovered the most foolproof strategy to get rich quick on any given game. She recalled his wrinkled, gray face tensing in anticipation, then crumpling as his strategy so quickly and spectacularly failed.

37… 42… 45…

Lena thought he was a foolish old man for falling for it so many times. Now she felt the tension she’d seen on his face so long ago pressing on her skull.

48… 50… 52…

What did that make her? A foolish old woman?

53… 54… 54… Not 60… Not 60… Not 60…

Lena leaned closer to the screen, making Purcell slide sideways on his chair to make space. She heard her father’s voice echo in her head.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

‘One more.’

“Terminate the test, Mr. Purcell,” she said.

Purcell hit another key, and the testing fluid vanished back up their tubes. The substitute heart stopped abruptly, becoming little more than a formless glob glaring through the glass at Lena for forcing it to live such a fleeting, redundant existence.

“Not this time,” Purcell said; again, his words sounded automatic.

“No, Mr. Purcell,” Lena said, removing her half-moon glasses and rubbing the space between her eyes.

“Next time,” Purcell said.

Lena opened her eyes and found Purcell looking up at her with his typical effortless smile.

“Next time,” she said, replacing her glasses and reflecting the smile. “Why don’t you head off, Mr. Purcell? You’ve done good work today.”

Purcell’s smile vanished. “Are you sure, Dr. Markova?”

“I can finish up. And you’re due to clock off in half an hour anyway. The hospital won’t burn down in that time. Go and visit Yesteryear’s. Enjoy your evening.”

Purcell’s smile returned at the mention of the shop’s name. “Thank you, Dr. Markova.”

“Thank you, Mr. Purcell.”

As Purcell doffed his lab coat, Lena left the room and returned to the piercing white corridors of Allen Critchley Memorial Hospital. They were neat, straight lanes populated only with the odd nurse, doctor, or visitor moving swiftly to wherever they needed to be. They were like blood vessels moving through healthy veins, as Lena thought any hospital should be.

She took the nearest elevator, traveling two floors up to the long-term care ward. The corridor was as stark and white as any other in the building, but Lena knew that the rooms beyond played at being small apartments, complete with carpeted floors, miniature kitchens, personal bathrooms, and closet-sized spare bedrooms for visitors.

She peered through the window on the door of one labeled O’Riley. With the curtains drawn, she saw a young girl with freckles and messy orange hair. She leaned over an old wooden table supporting a fantastic assortment of model buildings. She carefully adjusted the positioning of a building at the far left end which Lena recognized as the Metropolis Theatre. Across from it, past so many other buildings, including a shoebox-sized town hall, Lena also recognized Allen Critchley Hospital, shrunk down to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of its fortress stature. The entire miniature colony was surrounded by fields of green paints.

Lena smiled at the sight; when she was Catherine O’Riley’s age, she’d succeeded only at passing eighth-grade biology on her second attempt. Then again, she supposed young Cathy had the unfair advantage of having all the time in the universe to perfect the art of model-making.

Cathy’s father, Harold, knelt at the left side of the model colony, his air almost identical to his daughter’s save for a few gray streaks. He beamed with parental pride at the Metropolis Theatre, as well as all the other surrounding amusements of the Leisure District, no doubt planning to take Cathy to each and every one of them one day.

One day…

Lena spotted her spectral reflection in the windowglass. Her brown eyes and half-moon spectacles seemed to glare at her. She’d collected even more grey streaks than Harold O’Riley. A web of lines buried the face of the young girl from Saint Petersburg who once failed biology.

‘This could be the face of a broken promise,’ her reflection whispered. ‘The face of an abrupt lifetime spent waiting in a room for nothing. The face of every number below sixty.’

Lena carried on, banishing her reflection’s words from her mind and replacing them with new ones.

There’s always tomorrow.