Two men entered through swinging doors labeled QUARANTINE and placed the oozing man on a stretcher and wheeled him back through the doors as he moaned. Time blurred as one by one everyone in the room was escorted deeper into the building and new arrivals replaced them. Eventually it was my turn. A woman dressed in the white pants and blue shirt of a medical worker entered the room. She had red hair that reached down to her shoulders, but otherwise only the normal combination of Asian, white and black features that I myself possessed, but the hair-, I envied her, mine was straight, black and short, completely indistinct.
"Richtor, Jonathan. Doctor Montaigne will now see you." She turned and walked away. I stood and hurried after her. She entered a hall with ten doors on a side, spaced five or six feet apart, one she stopped suddenly at and opened. I passed her and entered the room. I automatically removed my shirt and climbed face down onto the table. It was completely silent for several minutes until the door opened again and a man with the beginnings of gray hair entered. He reached out and tapped at a panel on the wall and without pausing turned to speak at my exposed back.
"Mr. Richtor, you have a deficiency of metals. How do you expect the unit to keep you healthy if it doesn’t have the ability to create the necessary tools? Have you been sick at all."
"No."
He snorted. "Well count yourself lucky, who knows what sorts of problems would arise without proper medical attention. Hmm. It seems that you fall under the new guidelines. Your supply of metals has been completely rearranged. The medical boards must have made some startling new findings. Seems like everyone’s has been changed." He stepped forward and set a cold metal case on my back from which I could feel him removing several small metallic tablets. He carefully touched the spot between my shoulder blades, to the left of the spine, where the port surfaced on my skin. As the centimeter wide disc opened he deposited the tablets and watched it close.
I don’t really know how the unit works, but I understand it’s purpose. It was one of the implants they put in you at the age of selection. After your career was determined by aptitude testing and availability and a small amount of free will they fit you with implants, mostly called mods, necessary to carry it out. I personally received three. On the back of my left hand is one that handles accounts, identification and whatever else they put in there that I don’t know about. Everyone has one of those. In my back is a semi-intelligent, and very capable, medical machine which monitors and diagnoses me continuously and then creates tiny machines to carry out specific task, perhaps if I had a tumor it would make several with a vibrating protrusion which could be used to liquefy the tissue and then after the job was done they would deactivate and be processed out of my body as the machine created new tools to carry out new tasks. Most don’t have one. When I was very young they determined that I was mentally very capable, someone they would have put in a high place, but I had so many physical defects, chemical imbalances, and extremely severe asthma. They decided I might be worth it and put a medical unit in my back.
One of my first superiors at work was a small, ruthless, cold woman named Veneti. I still occasionally see her. She doesn’t look a day older than when I first met her, fifteen years ago. She has one of the units in her back. Mine doesn’t seem to be intended to work that well.
The last I don’t know much about. I was never told that it existed, but I’ve tested the parts. At first I didn’t know quite what it was for. It was classified as an implant and the basic design appeared to be a reservoir for a small amount of a substance, which upon radio activation, emptied out. At first I had been suspicious that it was for military personnel, perhaps to carry some sort of drug to modify their behavior or boost their abilities, but it wasn’t designed to ever be opened and refilled, it was made for one time use.
I have a scar near the base of my neck, a very small one and with some effort I found that, not everyone, but some others also have the scar. I became suspicious, but it was a few years before I realized what it was. On my way home from work in the afternoon I walked from the station. A very young woman caught my attention. She screamed, standing out of the crowds in the entrance to a store, at nothing in particular. I couldn’t understand her, but she yelled and yelled and as I passed I saw her run out and begin clubbing people in the street with a metal clothing rack she must have ripped from a wall inside. The crowd recoiled and as it drew away I could see her in the open. There were a couple of people crawling away from her on the ground and she kept swinging at them and yelling until she suddenly collapsed. In a second the crowd moved forward and over her body continuing about their business and I went to her, concealed from whatever electronic eyes might be watching by the crowds. The scar was on her neck too. I realized, the scanners that occupy every building on every street are all capable of radio commands.
I took the clothing rack and put one end under my foot, I twisted it and bent it until it severed. The thing was a soft metal and when it separated it left edges and points. I placed the edge above her scar and paused momentarily, applied pressure and then pulled it down until it was a few inches below. Blood began to escape from the tear and slide down her neck until clothing absorbed it. I took the crude surgical implement and dug deeper. The wound was large, large enough that I was able to put my fingers in and feel around. It took a few minutes, but I did find it, a tiny black sphere floating near the spine. I pulled it out and looked. It was the same implant, the same one I’d seen, the same one I had, and it was open and empty. The crowds parted to move around me as I studied it with blood covered hands. I didn’t hate the girl. She was special, different, but once she was dead I didn’t have a problem with cutting her. The body is just a massive number of cells, they can grow cells in any lab, the body doesn’t make you anything. Her personality, whatever it was, had made her capable of deciding to fight back, against what I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t even sane, it doesn’t matter. Once she was dead what made her special was gone so I cut her.
It must be some sort of poison. They monitor you while young and those likely to become problems are fitted with the implant, if you become trouble they don’t even have to send anyone after you, just someone to pick up the body.