Free Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life by Thomas T. Thomas Page B

he bothered to take his pulse or something. To be able to walk, run, dance without dragging around a cart carrying his battery, air pump, and monitors.
    He had asked the doctors if it would still hurt, the way the incision over his mechanical heart still pained him sometimes. They said the sternum, which was the bone they had to crack open to reach inside the chest cavity, as well as the ribs that they spread apart in the process, would all heal in time. As for the heart itself, it wouldn’t feel like anything. It was his heart. He wouldn’t feel the sutures that held the organ inside its web of arteries, veins, nerves, and connective tissues. Those sutures would slowly dissolve and the tissues would grow together. The new heart wasn’t going to fall out or flop around. It was part of him and, on a cellular level, always had been.
    From out of nowhere, probably from his actively groping subconscious, Praxis recalled the scene in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, where the wizard—who had proven to be a humbug from Nebraska, another visitor from the outer world, and no more magical than Dorothy herself—gave the Tin Woodman the heart he so fervently desired. It was nothing but a big, red pocket watch in the shape of a heart, which Jack Haley hung on the outside of his barrel chest. No, wait. That was the Judy Garland movie. In the original book, the wizard cut the Woodman’s chest open with a pair of tin snips and hung inside it a heart made of red velvet stuffed with sawdust.
    Well, Praxis decided, as they gave him the injections that would make him sleep, he already had a damned tick-tock mechanism going on inside him. … Maybe the stem cell wizards and their heart made of velvet and sawdust would be an improvement. … Quieter, at least, with no more whirr-click, whirr-click … whirr-click …

5. Afternoons on a Rooftop
    Why anyone would build a garden on a rooftop in San Francisco was beyond the understanding of John Praxis. The city had only two seasons: cold and drizzly winter, cold and foggy summer. The only time you would hunger to sit outdoors under a warm and smiling sun came in May and October, although random days might come during that nominal summer when the fog would burn off by noon and the onshore breeze would not start blowing it back again until three or four o’clock. And then the nurses at the Mission Bay medical center herded their convalescent patients, like a little boy chasing pigeons across a plaza, up onto the roof “to get some fresh air.”
    Come to think of it, he wondered as he settled into a chaise longue, why didn’t the city’s pigeons ever flock up here? The glass walls surrounding the garden were no barrier, being open at the top. Visitors, if not the patients themselves, usually brought food, were not stingy about sharing it, and sometimes carelessly dropped wrappers full of crumbs and bits. It must have been the hawks, Praxis decided. Hawks lived high up, so they could dive on their prey. Every major city had its population of red-tailed hawks that stooped on the pigeons from ledges and cornices. As a new architectural feature, his daughter had shown him a dozen websites with dedicated cameras following the real-time lives of these predators and their nestlings, including the rending of smaller, gray-feathered carcasses. Probably the pigeons had learned not to fly so high anymore.
    While Praxis sat and mulled this problem in urban ecology, a woman came over and took the chaise next to him. She moved stiffly and reached forward with both hands to lift her right calf up onto the long seat. Something wrong with the joints in her leg or back, he supposed. She wore a bright-blue sweat shirt and matching pants, as well as low-cut sneakers, so he guessed she had just come from physical therapy. But her head and hair were covered with a long silk scarf worn as a turban. The cloth’s background was peacock blue, which color-coordinated with her sweats, but was streaked through with various