anywhere

A small light flashed out the side of Anton Kovaks's head when he sat up from his bed, cold sweat running down his broad shoulders. The fan and coolant system for the gun embedded in the right half of his skull had already started in his sleep. He could feel soft undulations of the fluid through ticking switches, languid rotations of keys and clasps, turning gears. It was ice on hot skin and water after a long run. In the dark of his sparse apartment bedroom, his chest rose and fell slow. Before long, he was laying back into his pillow, by then having forgotten the dream which seemed to flash in his sleep nearly every other night. It was 4AM, and he had to be at work in an hour.

The train's entry lights usually caught Anton dozing, red reflecting off an eye half-lidded and bloodshot from however many all-nighters he pulled in the last week - feeling somehow more than seven. His morning routine, though priming him for the workday, did little to wake him up. Anton's body had been conditioned to go about the morning's motions regardless of lucidity. Maybe this was for the best. Days where he was conscious were harder. The stillness of his apartment in the early morning and late night made a habit of settling upon him like a coat of iron, crushing his lungs and holding him in place. A silence lurked in the dark corners of the rooms humming in a way that made his brain bleed, rendering him acutely aware of his small size in an expansive, dark world that seemed devoid of people.

Small, of course, would be a relative term. Anton's frame was imposing and of large magnitude, as if to tell all near that he was their master and to be obeyed. This was through no fault of Anton's of course. One with the crowd, not only did he carry himself as unassumingly as one could, he also hadn't so much as glanced at a gym since he left his former job. Despite this being the case, Anton inexplicably maintained a cruel and powerful physique, apparent even under heavy brown coats and wrinkled button-ups. Still swaddled in muscle like bundles of yarn on a dowel, still drawing just as much fear from women when alone with them as before, one could only assume that some degree of hollowness spread to his bones, and his muscles were what animated them.

Beyond the coat and the body, Anton's hair was what protected him from other commuters. Black and brittle, it appeared to sit on his head rather than grow from it, like a pile of burnt straw. Not only did it mask him from the prying eyes by which he was constantly surrounded, it also did well to hide the quietly clicking, oscillating contraption contained in smooth metal casing which overtook half of his head. So too did his mess of hair shield the lone, ever-squirming eye set deep in his skull, scrambling from passenger to passenger to exit to passenger in its mad dash and yet methodically compiling files on each person flashed over all the same. At a passing glance, you wouldn't really notice anything amiss about the large, foreboding figure next to which you sat on your daily commute, beyond a vague impression of discomfort. That is, if you were seated to his right.

The opening of train cars always appeared like the bursting of a pimple to Anton, watching the performance half-asleep at his neighborhood's station before flawlessly reproducing the choreography as he exited the one downtown. The passengers had a way of exploding out the doors that characterized the inside of the car as a burning hell from which they were desperate to escape. This wasn't far from the truth, thought Anton. People simply shouldn't be packed so close together. Long days alone on his father's farm in boyhood meant the only crowded space to which he grew accustomed was the slaughterhouse. He could only suppose then - being that work necessitated the death of the child - that this commuter train was no different, a half-place where boys stepped off and returned men. Such was the reality of work, the great killer. Though, with the way some of the men still milled about with their own senses of vigor, it dawned that perhaps the killer's methods were imperfect. What was to be made of a slaughterhouse from which the cattle emerged not in neat slabs of meat, but rather as some distorted, gasping in-between, stripped of all definition and yet entirely unfit for consumption?

Rain followed Anton through the concrete maze, so arbitrarily constructed it appeared built with the sole purpose to confuse. The walk from the station to the office was fortunately short, and though the heavy grays and constant din swirling through moderately-populated streets made each step a little harder, he felt at home in the city, where the constant directive was always to do and never to think, to consider. Anton swung the door open with force, eager to escape the dreariness of his commute, before realizing with a sharp return to his usual nondescript shuffling that the inside of his office was no less so. The elevator doors were settled deep within the framing of the wall, presumably as old as the building itself. Cheaply manufactured with tin or aluminum and bordered with what could only have been luxuriously gold-tinged scrap, it was rickety, constantly stalling along its track from years of misuse and misdirected anger. To open and enter without catching on a phantasmal obstacle or invisible nothing was to witness a modern miracle. Unfortunately, Anton bore witness to no miracles that morning.

The interior of Anton's workplace was excessively dull. As office workers, they naturally were stationed in cubicles, or separate suites if they were lucky. One striking detail of the place - perhaps the only one - was its symmetry. The entire floor was laid out to be perfectly symmetrical across the north-south axis, only broken by the manager's office at the far end. This manager, a neurotic fellow called Einhoff Sir, but whose given name was Henryk, hated his job - it was clear in the way he walked and talked and sat and stood. Anton liked to think that Einhoff Sir was the reason for the workspace's peculiar orientation, and that his office's placement was the reason he so despised working there, unable to stand himself as the lone imperfection in his own vision of greatness.

His own desk was in a far-off, dim corner of the floor, where a lone window lurked too high to boist morale and too low to allow a sense of timelessness. Sunsets had a tendency towards casting a somber, golden radiance onto the dust and paper scraps piled on the other two desks in the nook, dirty from disuse and neglect. Rainstorms however, though well-liked by Anton and most others in his city (perhaps for giving form to some collective melancholy within them all) were particularly irritating for the way the winds rattled the panes enough to send occasional mists floating down onto his paperwork like a message spat off the breath of the Earth which he had no interest in receiving.

Beyond Anton's own desk, a tidy, dry affair save for bursts of disorganization around midday amidst throes of documentation, and beyond the other two where would-be coworkers would sit (he noticed the re-hiring for accessory departments not in-view of Einhoff Sir's office were much slower than the fevered pace at which empty desks in the main area were filled), were dividers five feet in height, appropriate for privacy while working but also for the occasional wave or head peeking out. He found the murmur of the office reassuring, as if always reminding him there were other people but ten paces away, and he knew that the cubicle dividers being replaced with true walls would not only extinguish this warm ember of safety, but also create a room shockingly claustrophobic.

Around noon, the focused chatter of typeteeth had by now settled into its steady rhythm. Expense reports. Anton appreciated the passivity of his position in the workplace - recording expenses, writing reports, filing figures and files. Insofar as history was concerned, he had heard long ago its function was to record the mistakes of the past such that they wouldn't be repeated. He wondered then, what point there was in action if its only use to the future was as a cautionary tale, and that the future's present would similarly be nothing more. Or was history instead man's futile desire for permanence and immortality in a world of impossibility? This treatment would make sense for a great war or a king's crowning, but what was to be made of these drab figures, these tired reports? What king was there to be crowned here?

"Kovaks?"

Anton heard her voice before she walked into view, but heard her soft footsteps on the tufted carpeting before that. It was Virginia Ewing speaking, foreigner from the New West, accompanied by Marcina Olenka - office receptionist - stood behind her as if taking cover from something.

"Yes?"

"The reports."

There was nothing Anton could do to mitigate the obligatory wince and recoil when he faced someone. The gun hadn't been loaded since he left his former post at the security firm, but the hesitation remained. Sometimes he half expected to see his coworkers' heads blown apart as he turned towards them. For a man almost never caught outgunned, he slouched deeper with every second Virginia loomed over him. Her manner of speaking felt exceedingly masculine in an almost jarring way, and it was precisely that which she had to thank for her swift ascension up the corporate ladder. Whenever she opened her mouth, whether it was one word or one hundred, what came came forth with the force of a heavyweight boxer's blows. If the way her chest and padded shoulders puffed out didn't give it away, that characteristic verbal assault made it obvious to Anton that Virginia was a New Westerner. They all had that way about them. Like young stallions that knew of nothing but their fastest gallop, New Westerners seemed to know nothing apart from the tone of accusation, each question a crime and every remark a punishment.

"Right, the reports. Filed before noon."

"Good."

Virginia didn't seem pleased. Though neither did Anton. He could still feel the weight of her expectation on his mind just as clear as her gaze fixed on his face. Unable to shrink back any further into his chair, he wore a pleading look, dark eye deep-set and ringed with exhaustion, wrinkles cracked and skin sickly from fluorescents overhead glancing off smooth metal just barely visible under his black brush. For a few moments, she stood there just staring at him. After she turned heel and walked back off to parts of the office populated by time and people, the small, soft-bodied Marcina Olenka followed suit with short, hurried steps, all without saying a word. Anton could only wonder why Marcina of all people had tagged along, and for such a trivial matter no less. Before he could put enough into the thought to get anywhere, his wandering eye caught on a report half-finished, and he set off to work again.

The workday concluded at 5PM, after 12 hours of cubicles and cabinets and dials and disclosures. For how strenuous the fall's mandatory overtime was, Anton did not mind. In fact, he even welcomed it. At work, there was always something to be done. Always another disclosure to draft, always another report to file, further figures to preclude from the previous period's fiscal inventory, always something. This was in stark contrast to the period that came after work, in which there was nothing. Sure, Popov and Burkha always made their rounds for anyone they thought hardy enough to share a few bottles with. Usually they'd get a few takers from the warehouse or the occasional burnout from sales looking to poison themselves into a weekend coma. Their only merit - aside from astounding fortitude of the liver - was their kindness enough to drag their poor drinking buddies from whatever liquor store they tapped out in back to their apartments for recovery. But never would they ask Anton, lone member of the accounting department, large and looming, perpetually ready, aimed, and waiting. For them, nights were the sharp sting of drink and the warm stutter of a world distorted. For Anton, they were nothing.

Tanned, scuffed leather briefcase in hand, he weaved through the cubicle labyrinth, noticing here and there those that didn't have anything to go home to, or were too in need of money to do so. Among these dreary faces, Anton noticed Marcina, who met his gaze and raised him a small wave. She gave a weak smile, though anyone could read the exhaustion on her face. Marcina was seated behind the front desk, slumped over a telephone and a binder of appointments far too overstuffed to ever be closed. It was anyone's guess how she got this job, and moreover how she managed to keep it - the woman had the voice of a ghost. Often she had to repeat herself to the displeasure of callers on the company line, who never seemed to catch what she said on the first or even second time. Anton returned a nod to Marcina, looking away before long. Marcina seemed the type of girl who took poorly to direct observation, though he had no way of knowing this to be true. Anton did not stop on his way to the elevator, and did not see Marcina again until the next morning.

The trek up many flights of stairs leading to Anton's apartment was one he expected to get easier with time, but it never did. Every morning down eight floors and every evening back up again. After awhile, the journey even seemed to get longer wish each passing week. By the fourth month, it had more than doubled in length, and Anton discovered he was now living on the eighteenth floor. For all the people living in the building though, not once did he ever meet another resident. He had no problem with this whatsoever, though a part of him always wondered if they had been avoiding him. If they were, they did a fine job of it, though that's not to say they were invisible. What silence there was in the halls was made up for in loud, sporadic bursts of noise from the neighbors' apartments. A shout across the hall, something shattering up a floor, the creak-creak-creaking of a young, overactive couple's bedframe next door. The radio tuned to a dead channel or the late-night news was usually enough to make it tolerable, but the rapid staccato of approaching footsteps in those empty halls kept his deadbolt locked and his eye over his shoulder.

Whether it was world news on the screen or a strained romantic drama on the page, it was all the same. Anton had in recent years become something of a scientist in the passing of time, exacting and ambitious in his methods. These practices often bled into his work, where he would experiment with new techniques before returning home to further explore his current innovations, inevitably repeating the process the day after. These pastimes were never of the constructive or productive persuasions, no, they were only ever trials. When a task's efficiency at reducing the minutes in an hour or the intervening hours between the morning's beginning and the night's end was determined, it was promptly recorded, cataloged and filed away. Then onto the next test. A scientist has no room in his practice for leisure, after all. The process of research is as rigorous as it is demanding, and without noticing much at all, Anton had eventually found the bulk of his waking moments consumed by this pursuit. The misfortune which alone bore the blame of Anton's continued lack of a doctoral degree in his subject was the lack of an academic institution to consider the field legitimate. Regardless, it was with full confidence he could claim mastery of the highest order in this discipline, a trailblazer and gifted academic far surpassing his peers. This is all to say, of course, Anton's home life was quite unremarkable.

Tonight, inside the long, narrow apartment kept bare and yet cramped all the same, it was the mail to which Anton had dedicated his time. The pile of mail, offhandedly tossed onto the shabby wooden table on which he ate, had now grown to overtake its surface entirely, rendering Anton unable to eat and at risk of starvation lest he leave the mess unattended. Slumping into a cold, lacquered wooden chair, letter opener in hand, he reached into that stack of dusted, wrinkled beige and white and pulled back a most unusual notice.

Reading this, Anton grimaced. Reading it again, he laughed. He read it again thereafter, and then again and again, though by that time he had the letter committed to memory. He still remembered the installation procedure completed several years prior, the most fearsome component of the mandatory weapons restructuring of Stadtler Group's Asset Protection division. He remembered his time in the waiting quarters of the Stadtler Ovo Regional building, talking with a high-ranking accountant from the Group's corporate operations headquarters in Sveldten sent to oversee the restructuring which he termed a "liquidation." Tens of thousands of factory-new receivers, mountains of ammunition, and whatever remained of the vestigial "Non-Lethals" division - in all its dubious effectiveness - melted down and auctioned off for what the increasingly feverish accountant could describe by then only in strange, frantic hand gestures that surely meant more to someone hailing from his country, but to Anton meant nothing.

In the hall he remembered the sweat-soaked tension of the intake paperwork, and the walk to the door. He had not seen anyone else of his squadron there that day, nor did he see any newly manufactured machine-men at all emerging from the operating section. Rationally, there must've been another exit deeper in the building, but of course in some sick, misguided hope, Anton could choke down the lump in his throat only with the belief that those christened through this procedure were transformed into blinding, radiant angels. He remembered the wordless assurance of his naivety when he saw the surgical theater, littered with screws and sockets and shavings of aluminum, and the ashtray with its cigarette butts swimming in a filthy brown oil. He remembered the day and days after, of weeks and months' stabs dissolving into stings into aches into nothing at all. He remembered the sensation of scalpels driving through his skin before the anaesthetic hit.

Having decided that was enough mail for the night, the paper was promptly discarded in the wastebasket below the dining-paper table, bouncing off the mound of similar trash before finding its place among them on the floor. Turning to the clouded mirror clasped against the side of his fridge, Anton's fingers ran the length of his implant; Reflecting off the iron carapace housing it, his fluorescent lamp's sterile white brought out the greys in the skin of his hands. To minimize potential discrimination (ineffective) the metal was painted to match the shade of the operator's skin, though in the years since Anton's complexion had devolved from a fair porcelain to its current sickly murk. Passing glances might find a man in sore need of a rinse, but Anton knew painfully well that the dust in the Metronymian air had long since colored his blood with soot, circulating it through his fibres and capillaries, giving him lungs spotted with sand and skin wrought with rust.

Beyond this flesh-toned shell and the rotting biology surrounding, traces of rust gathered too along the gun's barrel. A cleaning was beyond long overdue. Likely worse was the thing's interior - the same unsealed round chambered for what would soon be a third year. It was his third day since installation when he discovered his inability to remove chambered rounds through any method other than direct ejection - blasting and burning it out the barrel. The day after, he learned to always keep a round chambered when an accidental dry-fire left him comatose for the following four.

Once examining the threads of the firing engine's starter cord lost all interest for the final time - the prospect of slamming the firing pin into that expired cartridge escaping him - it was time for TV news. Riots downtown would seal off Exit Corridor 255 for the week. The sitting executive minister visited those countryside settlements devastated by the most recent bombing campaign of the Heavy Mineral Independence Initiative. Though relatively unknown to him, that region was close enough to the old Kovaks family farm for Anton to recognize the villagers' accents didn't sound at all like country-folk. And the settlement looked nothing like the satellite photos which charities constantly inundated anyone foolish enough to show sympathy with.

Suspension of disbelief now decidedly broken, the channel changed. Soap opera now. The slimy sheen cast over both the cast and the rooms into which they shone had the tendency to degrade even the most beautiful, vigorous icons into ghoulish corporate creatures. Viara Vivanova, ubiquitous sex icon and spokeswoman of several women's organizations, starred as the impoverished housewife rescued from the dregs of modern living by the rich business mogul far beyond her years. The acting was dubious at best, as was the writing, the set design, the camera work, and just about everything else that went into the production. Even Viara's body, smooth and toned and explosive with hyperbolic, blinding radiance - that too - depreciated. In the magazines, in photographs and on posters and backlit marquees, Viara was all of those things, but on the television, she was a ramshackle facsimile of herself. A bastardized imitation.

The many who tuned into the show's daily broadcast debatably only did so to see her, to mash their faces against the screens to catch glimpses if she just turned a little further this way or that. With sweaty, gnarled hands, they reached out to the screen, to try and touch their shimmering paramour which dissolved into mist when grasped. "They'd watch anything with her in it," thought the execs, as the set design team was laid off. "Of course," as the lighting department went belly-up, every bulb turned a garish spotlight. "Like moths to a flame," as the makeup and costume budget dwindled. As their étoile de sensuale grew gaunt, her curves straightened and broke to staccato scratches, makeup overblown into near-clownlike parody and her wardrobe shrinking to the barest rags and tatters. It was a mystery as to how the screen and the team behind it managed to produce such profound obscenity, as was the reason behind this covert mass-humiliation campaign of the low-income, middle-aged, high-libido male TV fan. What was known was that popular culture had now been officially and inarguably infiltrated and deposed by that most vile obscenity, and it got great ratings to boot.

Anton grimaced. He couldn't help but lament what he labeled the downfall of the day drama every time he saw that show. It was a festering sore upon the channel guide, a virus transmitted through radio waves, cancer metastasized through cathode ray tubes, word of mouth feeding it - glutting it:

"Did you see Vivanova last night?"

"Boy did I!"

"I lost it when she … with … I mean, how can one woman even-"

"Astonishing!"

"Right? I was almost a little scared for her health!"

The only hope was that the boil would one day burst, steaming pus draining down back into the sewers and seedy underworld where it belonged. He asked himself, "People have to put their feet down eventually, don't they?" And he answered, "No." It was never indignation nor satisfaction. Never crossing either threshold. The solution was always to eat until the plate was clean and to come back at the next meal, wasn't it? To roll over within the bed or the trunk or the body bag. Everyone had their fill, regardless of what it was. You could only wonder if it would ever become unpalatable, indigestible, when the great stomach would rupture or split open and out would spill the bile and flame which could burn away the rot. Until then, the streets and schools and strip malls would all reek of filth and garbage. Next channel.

It was three days after reading the letter (four days after receiving it) that Anton attempted to contact his former colleague, Garya Gorgonov. Garya was a member of the same department at Stadtler Group's Ovolych branch before Anton's departure and his subsequent transfer to an outpost in a far-off eastern settlement known well for its constant embroilment in civil conflict. The news that Garya had been killed in action made a weak appeal to Anton's sympathies, and the reassurance that he "died doing what he loved" from a man who must've considered him a brother-in-arms fared similarly in moving his disaffection for the field and the men who continued making careers from it. Anything in Garya that he called a friend became hard to discern by the time of his termination, almost entirely clad in metal shine and scent saturated with industrial lubricant and fuel for micro-servos which managed movement of his faceplates. Whatever expression he attempted when hearing the news was an unquestionable failure of engineering as usual, but Anton could still feel the squirming metal bearings in the hydraulic joints of Garya's mechanical fingers as he shook his hand for the final time, firm and precise with exactly three shakes of 15 pounds of pressure per square inch exerted in the grip. In terms of technique, it was an objectively perfect handshake far superior to anything the unassisted human hand could produce. But it was still cold when he shook it. Beyond joyful reminiscing, Garya's condition was of real consequence to Anton only for his itinerary. Garya's death meant no access to internal records. The Ovolych branch had closed down shortly after their last exchange, and Stadtler as an institution was notorious for denying former employees access to such resources. With no paperwork of his own to contest with that of Fitz-Schaunen and their screwdriver-wielding, cigarette-puffing standards, the hope emerged that they might somehow have used the Stadtler contract payout to improve themselves as a company.

Five days after reading the letter and six days after receiving it, that hope was laid to rest before even reaching his destination. It was impossible to count how many black-suited men and women were packed into that tiny blown-out building-ruin sandwiched between an alleyway and the back of a years-abandoned shop facing the cordoned-off street. The way they trickled out and yet poured in from the single entrance as well as through the newly-collapsed brick wall gave the impression the place was larger on the inside. The uniforms and postures and synchronized gaits as they stepped around blackened remains of the place wafted that federal scent towards Anton's crooked nose. Judging by the state of the area, this was undoubtedly the second-most activity this place had seen in years, the first being whatever drew the suits here to begin with. Anton reexamined the letter. This was where he was directed to go, and the writing hadn't changed from the last time he consulted it a few seconds before. He inhaled sharp when he stepped over the "NO CIVILIANS" tape at the deserted end of the alley, and by the time the air left his spotted lungs, one was on him like fly to a carcass.

"Civilian. You must evacuate immediately. No civilians are permitted in this area. If you do not leave I will employ methods of force."

His eyes were wide, frantic pupils pinpointed on Anton's face. He saw the implant. His vision even focused on it for a moment, before buzzing back to the rest of the civilian. His tone, his stance, his expression were all that of a practiced professional - cool and reserved and radiating control over anyone outside that black suit. But in his eyes he was wild with unnatural energy. And there - his fingers, they drummed excitedly on the magnetic holster of his AC45-11 Slideless Handheld. This man - an officer of some kind, judging by the tiny black-on-black reflective badge pinned to his chest - was high on the job. Again.

"I received a notice to report here for an appointment regarding the recall of my implant."

He knocked on the device for effect. The officer did not react. He was doing something. It was familiar. Anton knew he was being sized up. He knew because he was doing the same thing, just as he always did. But having it done to him felt vulgar. The man's gaze ran up and down along his hands and chest and hairs on the back of his neck, pausing at the cold metal on his face before kicking back to protocol and continuing. The officer was slower at it than he was. That made it worse. Anton shoved the letter in front of the officer's face before it could continue. The officer scrambled back a foot, vocal cords taut and primed to shout something, hand grasping at the handle of his gun, but after a swift recomposure he snatched the paper from Anton's hand and began to scan it both with his eyes and an additional bulbous metallic device snaking out from his sleeve. The high-pitch as it strobed blue over the paper was just low enough to make Anton's ears hurt. He could feel his head-machine stutter in a way it wasn't supposed to. The officer stuck the letter back out. Stimulants made him a fast reader. Anton took it from his clenched fist, smoothing out the wrinkles and slipping it into his coat.

"No civilians are permitted in this area. Your appointment has been relocated to the Biomechanical Regulations Division building out of Corridor 254. Evacuate immediately and do not return here, or force will be employed against you without prejudice-"

Anton about-faced and made his exit. The officer, perhaps eager to assert dominion over him - to insist himself the man of higher caliber - did not deserve the satisfaction of a conversation politely concluded. Stepping back over the legal tape, he only then noticed the taste of soot in his mouth from the scene of the investigation finally hitting him. Retching, Anton wondered how dissimilar was the taste from the air in his home or his office or the intervening streets. He didn't like the answer.

The gridlock from Exit Corridor 255 spread throughout all adjacent roadways like electric cancer, sharp, wild sparks arcing up lanes and bunching at traffic light resistors, getting hotter and hotter until one driver turned red with anger and stomped the gas, lurching their metal warmachine into the drivers in front of them. Then the stagnance was cured, but the new problem became violent chaos. It was a wonder that the city's fleet of automobile pilots didn't fly their way over to 255 itself and simply gun it into the heavy pit of rolling, angry bodies. Well, a few drivers had already done just that, but the wonder was that more hadn't followed. That pit of angry bodies was just what Anton had a scenic picture of as he sat in the hour's latest surge of street-stopping, heart-pumping stillness. Running parallel to 254, the site of the riots along the much vaster Corridor 255 swam and churned all 250 feet below, nestled into a valley that quickly became a glorified kill-pit for the many protesters which exhausted themselves in the struggle and were eventually trampled by their brethren. Nobody expected it to last this long - these lengths were the domain of boycotts and legislation and such - but it was later found that this political flashmob was motivated not just by national unrest, but by hardcore party drugs funneled in from several adjacent nightclubs which eventually advertised the spectacle as a sort of politically-flavored block-party. And so it became more-or-less. It was unclear after the first couple days who was a protester and who was only there for the coked-up high-impact of thrashing bodies against theirs. All involved were known to be under the influence of high-strength substances by logic that anyone sober wouldn't last longer than an hour in the crowd, and for the week-plus that it had ran for, more people were going in than out. Before Anton could remember exactly what organization or cause the mob was there for, the driver in his rearview buzzed their tinny siren-horn at him. Once again movement had returned to Corridor 254.

There was no hiding that the building of the Ovolych Provincial Biomechanical Regulations Division was far nicer than those on the other side of the city. Their elevator door wasn't even kicked-in - and you could tell it was a real elevator too, never prompted to wonder if it was really some dubiously-disguised dumbwaiter.. Almost regal with its white stone accents, the exterior was done in the traditional style. The Division likely moved in after whatever once-important government department closed shop. Similarly distinctive shops and high-end offices undoubtedly sculpted by similar hands told the story of a rich neighborhood in the older, feudal times - one that nobles sold off and graduated from as the locale's tastefulness grew unbearable. For as out-of-the-way as it was, the area's architecture almost made the commute worth it.

Entering and speaking to a small blonde girl at the counter clearly too nervous to be doing this for money, Anton was instructed to sit and wait. While the opulence of the place's exterior invited excitement as to what wait inside, actually walking in made it clear the Division could only do so much with its budget and judging by the quality of the chairs in the lobby, most of that "so much" seemed to go towards the rent for the offices. Looking around, Anton spotted a few others like him, and a few more not. A solemn man several decades his senior with a rusted jaw straight from a scrapyard and a leg amputated at the hip, trying to smoke a cigarette through his nose. A young man none over 20 whose arm was a mangled mess of wires and sinew, occasional stray sparks or whirrs jumping or sounding out, uniting with his low, continuous moans of pain. A woman sat cross-legged in the far corner by a large window overlooking a snowy courtyard, quietly humming a delicate tune in perfect time. It wasn't readily apparent what was wrong with her, but the audible skip at the coda of her tune eventually revealed it.

Of course, the most noticeable of the visitors was the group of some-thirteen of them nearer to a set of swinging black double-doors, all seated in chairs rearranged to a semicircle. Their murmurs and chatter barely ran above the man's moaning and the woman's music, and they seemed the cheeriest there by far. Their hushed topics seemed vaguely legal in nature, but their manners of speaking made it known that all but the black-suited man with thinning hair among them were laymen and women. The same black-on-black badge winked and shined small reflections of white snowlight from the window over to Anton, as if it was the same one he saw earlier and it recognized him. He debated interrupting the group to inquire if he belonged among them, but decided to stand by the word of the squirrely front-desk girl he spoke to half an hour ago. Only after looking back down at his feet (after scanning the exits again) did Anton realize how slow time was passing. When he was eventually summoned by name through the doors to his appointment he passed by the confused, frustrated faces of the circle group. They must've thought themselves deserving of an earlier appointment, being that they were here before Anton. But he knew that wasn't how places like this worked. In the split-second his eyes met the black-suited man's, his soft smirk made it clear he knew too. Then the doors closed, and it was miles and miles of fluorescent intake rooms and file stores and conference halls and cubicles. Two and two-thirds of a mile he had to walk to get to his appointment, all at the side of his wordless escort, a woman this time tall with a gray cardigan and slacks. Her hair was done up so tightly it should've pulled her skin clean off her face, yet it remained firmly planted and age still managed to wrinkle her eyes and jowls unflatteringly. Anton might've found her attractive - had she looked at him even once throughout their trek.

Reaching his new destination, the escort continued walking without acknowledgement, and Anton was then left with whoever the person was in the darkened medical office he now stood in, hunched over backlit skeletal-scans casting otherworldly shapes across the room behind him. A single clearing of Anton's throat made him jump so hard he nearly knocked out the UV lamp craning above him. Adjusting his coat, he spun around in his chair as he switched on the overhead light, still dimmer than the ones in the hall by half. He was a portly man with full grey hair and sharp stubble that looked like needles the way the light glinted off of their razor tips. He had thin glasses that didn't fit his eyes balanced on the bridge of his large nose, and through them he actually smiled at Anton, seeming eager to atone for his embarrassment.

"You'll have to excuse me sir, this area of the building is usually silent as to compensate for the highly sensitive equipment we employ, and our staff here thus rarely speak. Noise in this place is not an occurrence to which I am well-accustomed. I had no idea you'd be this early though, so do forgive me. I am the good Mekanodoktor Mikel Zlazny, but you can call me Mitscha."

"Pleased to meet you."

He wasn't, but it was his body that said this and not him. The body doing the mind a favor, automating these necessary evils, in hopes that the mind can do something greater with the excess. The muscle and sinew are honest and can only matter so much as they can push and pull and bear the burdens without breaking. Unfortunately, Anton's mind could never live up to the expectation.

"You are here for an appointment regarding your implant, yes? That Fitz-Schaunen place manufactured and installed it, yes?"

Mekanodoktor Zlazny shook his head, not waiting for a reply. His expression soured as he retrieved and read from a wrinkled, grimy folder that looked out of place on his otherwise spotless desk. What did it say? Clearly the doktor didn't like it. The way his eyes flitted from the file to Anton and back and forth and back again put him on edge. Could a medical file possibly contain a person's most darkly private secrets? Anton hung suspended a hundred feet in the air like a trapeze artist, waiting for the punchline to snap his steel wire.

"The records indicate you will need to undergo a thorough examination of your machinery."

The doktor's speech slowed to a condescending crawl, then paused. Questions?

"What sort of examination? Is there anything you can tell me about the recall or the state of my implant?"

The man remained paused. Frozen in space, as if animated only by an algorithm entirely unequipped to handle the input given, suspended like Anton from a highwire but lacking all momentum - not a performer but an art installation, an aerial sculpture. Then, after a small twitch, he returned to motion, eyes still narrowed, expectant with tapping fingers. Anton got the impression his previous question was somehow unacceptable. A second attempt would be necessary.