The smell of fresh blood spilled through the regeneration mill.
It was December, and the steam rose off the atria grills,
where another batch, cut and wrapped, was sent to market.
It was December, season of giving. What better than pretested hearts?
Eight new ones a day every day produced and stowed
in the only factory in the world capable of fusal growth.
There were toes and eyes, grown behind the lungs and spleens,
but the hearts were the deli***ies. Frozen dry, trussed and squeezed.
Until the noisy demand hit its functional peak.
Viral marketing: "Get a new heart and overcome your disease!
Only seven million cubits and thirty-four Earth coins if you buy now;
just swipe your thumbprint on this hologram screen before supply's out!"
Martin Graves was a junior mechanic at the mill, repairing drones
that rarely froze but sometimes needed reboots or battery clones.
He'd spent eleven years of training at Gates Academy,
passed rigid assessments, visited lectures and gave with great veracity
a thesis dissertation based on alchemy's modern appliance.
His teacher said it was dated yet found it quite honest, unbiased.
That gave Martin the path to this organic mechanical field,
where he marched to the head of his class and stood out for his pedantic zeal.
It was December, three hundred and fifty-two hearts to be shipped,
a task carried out by seven drones in the mill and two on the cargo lift,
all working in unison over the next twenty-one hours and nine minutes.
Martin tugged on his blue shirt collar and readjusted one time widget,
then sent the first of the drones back out onto the factory floor.
One at a time, he pulled them aside just long enough to recalibrate cores.
When three hundred and fifty-two hearts arrived at Booker's Children's Hospital,
Chief Doctor Gregory Regus knew a mistake had been made, yet, "That's impossible!
Drones act only on programming," he said, so he took it as a gift from God.
Besides the hearts could only last for a few more hours outside of a living body.
There were four hundred and thirty-one children at Booker's in need, and yet
because they couldn't afford the regenerate hearts, they'd been kept on machines instead.
One of the lucky recipients was a freckled boy, twelve years in age.
With his lifelong heart murmur fixed, no one smiled brighter than Steven Graves.
As for Martin, when the drones returned and were debugged in manual audits,
the junior mechanic was found guilty of treason, theft and damaging losses.
They televised the execution. The injection spared Martin his torment.
And afterward, they moved his body to the mill to harvest his organs.
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