Mechanical Heart

It followed him like a curse. Every step he took, the tick tick ticking of his heart echoed in the chamber of his ears, trailing him in the hallways, threatening to expose all that he was.

He hid it well, in the long sleeved shirts and the baggy pants to cover the jagged lines of his joints. The panel that lay hidden on the inside of his forearm buzzed incessantly in the hot summer sun in warning, so he retreated away in his room behind closed doors and curtains.

“Such a vampire,” his friends joked, and he playfully bared his teeth.

There were times that people came a bit too close, ventured too near something they weren’t ready to see. Once, Scarlett, a sweet, wide-eyed girl with a bit too much optimism, grabbed his wrist in a rush of emotions incomprehensible to him. Her soft, uncalloused hands latched onto the hard, lifeless joint of his wrist. She withdrew in shock. The panel in his arm buzzed in silence.

That was the thing with humans. No matter how alike he looked, no matter how much the blue of his eyes appeared to have the same depth as theirs or how much his skin puckered in the cold, all he was ever going to be was an efficient metal framework of bones inside a sack of faux skin. They aged; his gears ground down against each other until nothing was left of him but fine dust.

It wasn’t all doom and dust and imminent destruction, though. Sometimes, staring out his bedroom window, he watched the rapid movements of a ruby-throated hummingbird as it extracted nectar from a flower, and a picture engrained itself somewhere in his head. He could capture any place he had ever been, any moment and time, and revisit it as he pleased. He was a walking photobook of his favorite moments.

It was all part of him, made him different- but some strange part of him was starting to think that his mechanical heart didn’t really matter so much at all. 

“C’mon, man.” His friends, clustered around him, looked at him expectantly. Waiting on him. “You ready to go?”

He smiled because he wanted to smile, not because some programming in him told him it was the logical response. “Yeah. Let's go.”