The taste of metal—titanium, to be exact—forever lingers in Ben’s mouth. The inorganic addition that blocks off access to his throat is non-corrosive, barely even noticeable. Really, taste is an overstatement. But there are pings that light up the sensors on his tongue, pings that were supposed to fade within days after the surgery that first installed the blockade there, pings that have instead remained with him for an entire lifetime. It should, for all intents and purposes, not be possible for Ben to taste titanium. Titanium shouldn’t have a taste. Doesn’t have a taste. But still, even if it did, Ben’s body should have long acclimatized to the intrusion.

There is metal down his throat, too, lining what would have been an esophagus on a fully flesh body, but for him has been home to a kaleidoscopic collection of colored wires for all fourteen years of his life. Once protected by fragile, infantile rib bones—an easily destroyed shelter, broken and peeled away and never put back together again—a weak, wonkily beating heart and too-small lungs were replaced with a quietly humming generator, a motherboard, and delicate wiring that connected flesh limbs to a mechanical core. All of it contained and shielded by layers of unfeeling metal. 

And Ben—Ben cannot help but wonder if those with organic throats and salivary glands instinctively know the correct taste of their own spit, of the walls of their own mouth, like how he knows, in his mechanical heart, that titanium is the taste that lingers on his tongue.

 Ben is more metal than flesh. 

Legs, broken once after tumbling down a flight of stairs at the fragile age of three, can never be broken again. Solid titanium and steel replaced bruised flesh and splintered bone, all the way down to his toes. The protective metallic casing encloses wires, motors, and intricately complicated mechanics beneath. 

Shoulders, upper arms, forearms: all preemptively replaced in order to avoid similar accidents. 

That particular surgery was a birthday gift. His eighth. By that point, Ben had already gained calluses on his fingers from his sixth birthday gift: a little acoustic guitar that stole all of his time and attention. 

Hands, home of fingers that danced clumsily across the strings of that beloved gift for years—a present that must have been half-regretted by his parents as awful twangs of sound filled their house at all hours of the day—were kept as flesh at Ben’s insistent urging.

It was already difficult enough to learn how to play the guitar, after all. Unyielding metal fingers would only make the process more difficult. Perhaps out of a wish for actual music in their house, rather than two more years of jolting sounds, his parents agreed.

And despite their combined grief about the cosmetic damages his hands obtain—despite the paper cuts and bashed fingers, distant cousins to the scuffs and scratches on Ben’s metal knees—his parents have, at least, enjoyed the music.

At his collarbone, there is a sharp transition from pale titanium to fragile flesh. A thinly skinned neck and face. Closely cropped, coiled hair—black, which soaks up the sunlight with an even greater fervor than the metal—adorns his head. He was born with a wild head of hair, which his father likes to joke about as being a sign of Ben’s future temperament.

But Ben is bald in all of his baby photos. 

When he asked why, back when he was too young to understand what it meant to be sick—the deadly kind—his father had grown quiet. Said, haltingly, that his head had been shaved in preparation for surgery. 

His father does not find that part of the story nearly as funny.

At the time of his birth, Ben was the youngest person to ever undergo Robotic Replacement Surgery, especially for such vital organs as the heart and lungs. He knows this, in the same way one knows that their parents must have been children once: a distant, unimportant fact that has shaped his entire life.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, when Ben was younger, he would overhear friends of his parents reminiscing about the days before their surgeries: about the sunburns and splinters, and about the feeling of growing stronger. Of tasting food and a sense of smell that wasn’t described in unfeelingly mechanized words.

But although Ben was born, as any baby is, fully flesh, he can only remember his robotic, mechanical core. He can only remember titanium legs. He can remember having flesh arms, though. Skinned elbows. Layering thick, light gray paint on his dark skin, layers upon layers upon layers, until there was not a speck of flesh to be seen. He remembers pretending his arms were mechanical, like that of his mother and father. Pretending that they all matched: an identical familial unit. 

So for Ben, even the flesh he can remember isn’t missed.

His parents have always encouraged this line of thinking. After all, it was them who organized the surgeries, who had to be convinced by Ben to keep his fingers and hands as flesh, and who are fully robotic themselves, from their proud, noble heads to the bottom of their titanium feet. 

If it were up to them, Ben would be the same, but regulations have long been put in place to prohibit the replacement of the head until a person is eighteen. The only surgery that cannot be signed off on by a parent or guardian. 

Dents, scuffs, scratches, calluses… to his parents, these flaws and imperfections used to be near criminal. But, after replacing his knee joints a dozen times over the course of three years—from ages seven to ten—their need for perfection was overpowered by the innate recklessness of a growing boy. 

His mother, voice box humming at a barely audible register, repeats a sort of self-reassurance whenever she discovers another scuff or scratch. She reminds herself that he is only a child, only a boy, who loves adventure and excitement. She’ll then look at him, full of sweetness, and brush the backs of cool titanium fingers over his cheek, over the latest cosmetic imperfection, and ask how he got it. Her laughter will be only a little strained as the tale unfolds, a flick to his ear at the final words his only punishment for thinking he had to hide it from her. 

Sometimes, when they think Ben is out of earshot, he’ll overhear his father gently reassuring his mother that he will eventually grow out of this boisterousness. That his recklessness is only natural—expected, even—and that they cannot stifle him too much, unless they want him to lash out later in life. 

Overhearing those conversations always makes Ben feel more than a little wrongfooted, more often than not finding himself unconsciously acting on his best behavior for a few days afterward, until the allure of trying a new trick on his hoverboard or the itchy urge to scale the side of their two-story house takes hold once more.

Ben tries to understand—he does, really!—their fears. Their concerns. Because flesh and bone can heal, cells can regenerate, but metal cannot un-dent, cannot un-scratch. The whole part has to be replaced, sometimes. 

But also—it’s only on the surface. The real stuff, the important stuff, is all underneath.

Every night sees Ben and his parents seated around their dining table, despite the fact that none of them can process food inside their mechanical bodies. It’s an old tradition, or something, left over from his parents’ youth. A gathering of the family. 

Only instead of eating, they finick with their respective daily adjustments and necessary maintenance. 

When Ben was a child, his father would use lovingly worn tools—an heirloom, from his flesh father before him, who used to use the same tools to fix broken appliances—to adjust the tension in Ben’s joints. He would playfully tweak his son’s nose with smooth metal fingers when he inevitably sighed in relief as the building pressure was released. For his twelfth birthday, his father had gifted him the treasured toolkit, deeming him old enough to understand how to take care of both the tools and himself. 

Alongside the toolkit, Ben was gifted lessons. Knowledge. How to adjust the gears in his joints, the tension, the level of looseness best suited for each of his limbs. How to carefully clean between each plate, each curve, what panels he could open by himself and what should only be touched by a professional Robologist. 

Most of their neighbors—far younger than his older mother and father, who are one-hundred-and-twelve and one-hundred-and-five, respectively—find their communal adjustments (and the presence of the sturdy oak dining table) to be silly and ridiculous. 

“Why don’t you let a robot take care of that crap?” became a common gripe. A favorite of their next-door neighbor: a snooty fully Replaced woman with a hoard of robots that take care of her every need.

Or, from their younger neighbors, only in their forties and fifties, who Ben’s mother privately calls new-money individuals: “Mr. Simred! Mrs. Simred! Dining rooms are so old-fashioned. Please—I know a great interior decorator; he redid my old house just recently. Immersive reality rooms are really a great feature to add for any home! Plus, it might curb some of your son’s… more excitable tendencies, if he can go on vacation anywhere, at any time.”

It is funny, in Ben’s opinion, to watch his parents politely turn down all of the unwelcome suggestions to their neighbors’ faces, only to later rant about their audacity over the dining table. 

The dining table, which reminds Ben’s mother of her grandmother’s house. She had dragged the large, sturdy thing home a few years back after finding it at an antique store. She fervently explained that they should have a communal time, every night, where they could all talk about their days and gripes, their highs and lows.

Never mind the fact that they could use the far more reasonable sitting room—something both Ben and his father had mentioned. That suggestion had been shot down immediately.

“It’s tradition,” she had insisted, firm and decisive, “It has to be around a table. That’s how my grandmother did it.”

Since that day, the surface of their dining table has been decorated with forever-unused plates, their edges dipped in a pretty pale blue with the same color flowers twisting across the surface. When Ben’s family sits down to do their nightly maintenance, the plates are pushed toward the center of the table to make room for tools and limbs, for metal cleaner and soft towels to buff out stains. Sometimes, Ben catches his mother looking at the plates for longer than a normal glance would last, but she always turns back to her maintenance once she notices his gaze.

About the Author

I have a been writing fiction for over a decade now, starting in elementary school. I like to think I have improved a lot since elementary school, as I have now learned to incorporate actual themes and messages into my writing, rather than what sounds the coolest at any given moment. While writing this particular piece, I thought a lot about the Ship of Theseus and what it means to be human, and whether or not humanity is defined by flesh or a soul. What originally began as a one-off thought piece has now spiraled into an actual fully-fleshed novel (or, at least, the origins of one). Here is my tentative prologue: I hope you enjoy.

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Cover design made using Canva design tools.