Natural Resources

The other day I was cradling my head in my hands in a pathetic attempt to block out the horrors of the world, and I noticed that my fingers smelled like metal. Not gunmetal, exactly, or coin metal, which both seem to carry an accompanying odor of machine oil or grime, but like freshly milled iron.

Not that you mill iron, exactly, or even that I've smelled such a thing, but that was the impression I got.

So I'm thinking that maybe I finally woke up a cyborg, but iron is pretty old-school, and everything about me was as human as it ever was. I had been bleeding from my fingernails (for reasons I won't detail here) earlier, so I knew I still had blood in my veins, and I wasn't hearing any whirring noises as I moved, so I searched for other explanations.

I won't bore you with the variety of possible causal factors I came up with before I settled on the aformentioned handblood. It seems obvious to me now, of course, but I hadn't washed my hands after my gore-seeping. I just sort of let the wounds coagulate as the excess blood dripped into the garbage. Yeah, yeah, it's gross, I know. But blood, especially blood fresh from the wound, seems cleaner than most things you might find on your hands. Unless you're carrying plague or something. But I'm not. So far as I know.

Anyway, all that aside, the point I wanted to make is that blood is rife with metal. I guess we sort of all know that from biology class, what with hemoglobin and such, but I never thought that there was a high enough percentage in there to actually make my blood-stained hands smell like iron.

And so I'm thinking...if there's that much, could I mine it? You know, extract it for the industrious use of Man? I don't know much about mining, and it seems like access to iron mines might be difficult to come by, but blood is everywhere. And I mean, how cool would it be to smelt a sword with iron you mined from your own blood?

Well, I think it would be cool.

Unfortunately, a bit of research has shown me that the iron content of a single body's blood isn't really high enough to support an amateur weapons smithy. Maybe a tiny letter opener every other year, but that's about it.

For the broadsword I really want, I would need more people than just me. You know. Donors.

And it would all be strictly voluntary, I swear.