This is a write for ten minutes practice session: http://writeforten.com/posts/533

It’s a part of you, this thing they’ve implanted. What is it made of, some polymer clay, iron, ore, something wicked or new, who knows. They put these things inside, hoping to gain insight. imagine what they could glean from a clean specimen. Men with no connection, nothing to lose, nothing to gain.

Back in the dark, again, they’ve got this thing wired to your head. If you think straight, the lights go out. What can that be for? If there’s a reason, they wouldn’t tell you. That’s part of the experiment, the data collection, the reason.

But you do this to pay for school. It’s all you can do, that or sell parts. It’s better to gain a little implant than lose a little kidney or push your plasma on the street. At least these guys are professional. Or so they seem. How could you tell if this was legit or something sinister? It’s so easy to make things. The suits, the badges, the equipment. It looks like it would have been expensive before you could just make things. But now, these guys could be broke, selling off your data to the personality cloners, pushing our your identity to the over-net, leaking out your dreams to the pay-per-view audiences in distant places.

You wonder for a minute if this is your fifteen minutes of fame. Could it be? Could this be all there is to show? You’ve got this tube of gelatinous metal in your ribcage. Are you the first to try it? Probably. You try bending and find it’s sore. You jump, push, pull, drop and roll. There in a half turnpipe spin, you find bliss. This new ribcage of yours just splits open to reveal a tentacle mesh of neotechnic hands, reaching out for perch against the walls, rocketing you back and forth. You close your eyes. They carry you, these arms, walking for you, bounding through the hallway of the artificial medical unit. There at the end, you see a woman in white standing next to a hover-tray. It’s giving her in injection. She faints. Move along. Nothing to see here. Nothing but images as you float by, out into the streets.

There’s a place in the park where all the old men go to die. They play games with their past selves, screaming banter at bankers, bidding on winners and pranksters. Eventually, it all caves in. The pieces fall. The trees sag and drop their leaves.