The Aurum Anomaly

By the time Lila was old enough for her first contract, her mother's nostrils were already scarred.

They shimmered faintly when the light caught them-thin, iridescent veins of dried gold embedded in pale tissue. A lifetime badge of productivity.

"Just breathe through your mouth," her mother said that morning, standing in the cramped kitchen, fastening the blue plastic badge to Lila's shirt. "You don't want to sneeze in the vats on your first day."

Lila rolled her eyes. "Ma, they recycle everything. A sneeze is just a bonus."

Her mother's lips twitched. "Still. First impressions."

Outside, the sky had that permanent metallic haze, the faint glint that people said came from all the airborne microflakes of gold that factories belched out. The old pictures in school books showed a deep blue sky over open-pit mines, rivers gelded by runoff, entire mountains chewed up for ore.

Then the "Nasal Anomaly" had started.

No one agreed on the cause. Some blamed early gene-editing misfires. Others said it was industrial pollution, or nanotech gone wrong. All anyone knew was that, over a few generations, humans had started excreting trace amounts of elemental gold in their nasal mucus.

At first, it had been horrifying, then miraculous, then regulated.

Gold-bearing mucus-nasal aurum-was pure and endlessly renewable. No digging, no blasting, no tailings ponds. Just tissues and tanks. The last hard-rock mine had closed before Lila was born. The old bullion reserves were melted down to make dental implants and novelty watches.

But like anything abundant and cheap, gold had lost its mystique.

There were no more vaults, no more heists. No one robbed banks for metal they could harvest from any commuter train on a cold morning. Gold was in everything now: flexible circuitry, dishware plating, school locker hinges. Disposable utensils glinted dully in cafeteria trash bins. Even the cheapest earbuds used ultra-thin gold tracery printed from industrial snot.

And at the center of it all were the factories.

The Aurifex facility where Lila was assigned loomed over the edge of town like a low, humming glacier-a sprawl of white and chrome and exhaust stacks. A huge billboard wrapped around its frontage: a smiling worker in a pristine jumpsuit, head tilted back, fingertip daintily poised at one nostril.

"Do Your Part. Pick For The Planet."

Lila joined the flood of blue-badged workers funneling through the gates. The air smelled of antiseptic and faint metal.

Inside, the orientation room filled quickly. Rows of chairs faced a holoscreen that flickered to life with the familiar training video: time-lapse shots of glittering circuits, kids playing with gold-foil kites, satellites deploying golden sails in orbit.

A bright, animated teacher-figure appeared, nose shining like a beacon.

"Welcome, Nasal Resource Technicians!" it chirped. "You're joining the golden backbone of our world-sustainable, renewable, responsible!"

Lila tuned most of it out. She'd seen variations of this video since childhood. Safety procedures. Hygiene. The importance of maintaining hydration and micronutrient intake to maximize yield.

Finally, the doors to the Floor opened.

Row after row after row of reclined chairs stretched into the distance, each with a built-in headrest, arm supports, and a small funnel attached to a flexible tube. The funnels fed into clear pipes that snaked like veins toward the central processing vats-a distant, shimmering chamber where the collected mucus was filtered, dried, and smelted into ingots.

This was Extraction Hall A, one of twelve.

Supervisors in yellow vests guided new hires to their assigned chairs. Lila's seat had a small number etched onto the arm: A-03-8427.

"First time?" asked the woman in the neighboring chair. She looked to be in her fifties, with flecks of gold catching the light in the creases of her nose and under her eyes.

"First contract," Lila said, sitting down. "Apprentice picker."

"Senior picker," the woman replied, tapping her own badge. "Name's Reya. Don't worry, kid. First three hours are the worst. After that, something in your brain just…turns off."

"Comforting."

A tone chimed above them. The holoscreen at the far wall displayed a giant clock and a set of numbers-target volume, current yield, efficiency scores.

"Shift starting," Reya murmured. "Remember: gentle rotations. You tear the lining, they dock your pay for medical downtime."

Arm braces clicked into place along Lila's elbows, adjusting her posture so her dominant hand hovered a few centimeters from her face. A soft, mechanical voice spoke from the chair's headrest.

"Technician Lila Maren. Cycle coaching enabled. Please prepare for Extraction Cycle One."

A dispenser hissed; a sterile wipe slid into a slot by her right hand. She wiped her fingertip, resisting the urge to laugh at the absurd ceremony of it.

Lila had grown up in a society where everyone picked their nose. Kids were told not to, but mostly because of germs, not manners. Tissues had sensors to measure daily yield; family health plans included aurum quotas. There were even home collection tanks for tax rebates-flushable cartridges that gleamed faintly as they spun down.

But industrial picking was something else. This was streamlined, optimized. Stripped of all its sheepish privacy.

"Commence," said the voice.

She inhaled through her mouth, tilted her head back as she'd been shown… and slid her cleaned fingertip gently into her right nostril.

The chair hummed faintly. A sensor above her upper lip monitored angle, depth, and time. Holographic guidelines appeared in the air, a translucent lattice tracing the ideal movement inside her nasal cavity.

"Too shallow," the chair corrected. "Adjust by two millimeters."

Lila snorted-carefully-and obeyed.

There. The familiar resistance.

She curled her finger slightly and felt it: the sticky, grainy pull, the faint sensation of grit embedded in soft tissue. She withdrew her finger and held it above the funnel.

Sunlight from high windows refracted off her fingertip. Suspended in the glistening mucus were tiny golden flecks, sparkling like trapped stars.

A little gasp escaped her before she caught herself.

"It's always pretty on your first day," Reya's voice drifted from the next chair, slightly nasal. "After a few years, you mostly see numbers."

Lila wiped her finger clean along the funnel's rim. Sensors flashed green as the gold-bearing mucus slid down into the waiting tube.

On the holodisplay at the front of the hall, the "Current Yield" counter ticked up by an almost comically tiny amount.

"Extraction Cycle Complete," said the chair. "Good work, Technician. Prepare for next cycle."

The pattern repeated. Clean. Insert. Rotate. Withdraw. Deposit. The mechanical encouragement, the tiny tugs in her sinuses, the regular blink of the yield counter.

Within an hour, her nose burned.

By midday, her eyes watered so constantly she wasn't sure which dampness was which. Micro-sprays of saline and nutrient mist puffed gently into her nostrils between cycles, formulated to keep production high while minimizing tissue damage.

"This feels like it should be illegal," Lila muttered as they broke for lunch-fifteen minutes in a cafeteria that smelled faintly of metal and antiseptic soap.

"It was," Reya said around a bite of her sandwich. "At first. Then the economists got involved."

Lila traced the rim of her water cup, watching the way the cheap gold plating along its edge flaked when her thumbnail pressed too hard.

"But why this?" she asked. "When gold came from mines, it was…romantic, you know? Dangerous. Adventurers with pickaxes and lanterns. People died for this stuff. Now we sit in chairs and-"

She mimed a dainty nose-pick.

Reya snorted, then winced and dabbed at her nostril with a cloth.

"They still gild satellites with our boogers," Reya said. "People still propose with gold rings. Wealth still moves through gold-backed cryptos, last I checked. It's just that the dirt is us now. We're the ore body."

"That's not better."

Reya's gaze softened. "You want better, kid, you need leverage. You know why they built factories like this instead of just paying everyone for home collection?"

"Quality control?" Lila guessed.

"Control, sure. But not quality." Reya leaned in. "It's about power. You keep people in chairs, on time clocks, under quotas, they don't have the energy to ask why this much gold is needed in the first place."

Lila looked around the cafeteria. Hundreds of workers in the same blue jumpsuits, rubbing their noses, sipping saline. Above the serving line, a sign read:

"Hydrate Today, Shine Tomorrow!"

"They could use less," Reya continued. "Less plating. Less vanity tech. We don't need gold leaf on cereal boxes or aurum-printed sneakers. But cheap resource makes for lazy design." She shrugged. "So they keep us mining ourselves."

That night, back home in their tiny apartment, Lila sat at the table flipping her first wage chip between her fingers. The translucent card pulsed faintly, its embedded gold tracery forming the Aurifex logo.

"First week bonus," her mother said, setting a steaming bowl of soup in front of her. "Proud of you."

Lila hesitated. "Ma…do you ever feel weird about it?"

Her mother's hand went reflexively to her nose, fingertips brushing the old scar lines.

"Weirder than I feel about digging mountains apart and poisoning rivers?" she asked quietly. "I worked in the last open-pit mine before this. My lungs still whistle when I sleep."

Lila knew this, in the way children know things that are too big to fit fully into their minds.

"I just mean," Lila said, "it's in us. Our bodies make it, and we just…sit in lines and pull it out. All day."

Her mother sank into the seat opposite, wiping her hands on a cloth.

"Gold used to sit in the earth doing nothing," she said. "We tore the world up chasing it. Now it sits in us, and they've found a way to make us tear ourselves up a little at a time instead." She tilted her head. "But it pays for this roof. For your brother's asthma meds. For your art classes."

Lila glanced at the far corner of the room, where her sketchbooks were stacked. The top one was open to a half-finished drawing: a landscape made entirely of noses, mountain ranges rising from endless fields of nostrils, rivers of glittering snot.

"It's stupid," Lila said, embarrassed.

"It's honest," her mother replied.

On the holoscreen embedded in the wall, an ad played: a glamorous influencer holding up a golden compact.

"Thanks to Aurifex," the woman cooed, "my beauty brand's packaging is 100% sustainably gilded! Because I care about the planet-and so do my boogies!"

Her mother muted it with a flick.

"Listen," she said. "You don't have to stay there forever. You've got a head on your shoulders. Use it."

For a while, Lila tried not to think too hard. She went to work, she picked her nose, she watched her yield numbers rise on the big boards. She learned which mornings her body produced more aurum and which diet gave the best "density curves." The supervisors loved her stats.

"You're a natural," one of them grinned during a performance review. "High output, low tissue damage. Have you considered a career path in Efficiency Analytics? Big future in that."

Lila nodded, but all she could think about was Reya telling her: We're the ore body.

She started sketching more obsessively. On breaks, she drew workers whose arms had become drills, whose noses were fitted with corporate valves and dials. She drew gold rivers flowing out of people's faces into the open mouths of giant factory buildings.

One evening, Reya peered over her shoulder.

"You ever thought of showing these to someone?" Reya asked.

"Who?" Lila scoffed. "The Quota Council?"

"There's a group," Reya said slowly, "that meets off-schedule. They talk about…different ways of doing things. Ways that don't involve spending eight hours a day excavating your skull."

Lila's glance shot up. "Like a union?"

"Unions bargained for better chairs and longer saline mists," Reya said. "This is more…speculative."

Curious overrode cautious. At Reya's instruction, Lila went to an address in the old city one night, where buildings still bore scars from when they housed ore crushers instead of call centers. The meeting was in a second-floor room above a defunct jewelry shop. The sign in the cracked glass still read:

"Goldsmith & Sons - Since 1893"

Inside, a small group of people sat in a circle amidst tarnished display cases and coiled wire.

"Welcome," said a tall person with silver hair and a breathy wheeze. "I'm Tamir. This is the Aurum Reclamation Circle."

Lila blinked. "Reclamation from what? It's…ours."

"That's the story they tell," Tamir replied. "That this is a miracle of the body and the market. That we've 'democratized' gold. But look around you." They gestured to the old cases. "There was a time when one ring took weeks of dangerous labor. It meant something. Now they print jewelry from industrial mucus like it's plastic."

"But isn't that good?" Lila asked slowly. "No more exploitation of miners. No more environmental collapse from extraction."

A murmur rippled through the room: fair point.

"It is good," Tamir said. "Or it could be. But instead of taking the win and reducing dependence on gold altogether, we just slotted a new kind of mine into the old system. We didn't ask whether gold should be everywhere. We just found a cheaper way to make it so."

A younger woman in a lab coat raised her hand. "I work in Materials Innovation," she said. "We've had polymer composites for decades that outperform gold in most electronics. They're cheap and stable and don't require…this." She gestured vaguely at her face. "But every proposal gets killed because the gold industry is 'too ingrained.' As long as aurum drills money out of people's noses at scale, there's no incentive to switch."

"So what do you want to do?" Lila asked.

Tamir smiled. "We want to stop giving it away."

The room buzzed with nervous laughter, then quieted.

"We can't stop our bodies from producing aurum," Tamir continued. "Not yet. But we can refuse to treat it like trash, like endless feedstock. Gold once was precious because it was rare. If we collectively decide to limit how much we contribute to industrial supply, we can force a conversation."

"And starve ourselves?" someone in the back snorted. "My kid's tuition is paid in snot credits."

"We're not talking strike," Tamir said. "We're talking redesign. At-home micro-refineries. Co-ops that process small batches for high-value uses only-med tech, space exploration, critical infrastructure. No more single-use gilded garbage. No more plating cereal boxes."

They looked at Lila. "And we need a story. A way to show people what this really is. Your drawings…they could help."

Leaving that meeting, Lila stood on the empty street, staring up at the Aurifex logo glowing faintly on the horizon. The air smelled of rain and, beneath it, that faint metallic tang.

Over the following weeks, she kept working. She still picked her nose eight hours a day. She still watched her numbers. But now, between cycles, she sketched on her tablet, swiping lines with saline-damp fingers.

She drew a future where people wore tiny gold collectors clipped inside their nostrils at home, like delicate jewelry. Co-op kiosks on every corner where families brought in their weekly aurum harvest for carefully negotiated trade. Gold used sparingly: in surgical tools, quantum processors, starship sails. The rest left uncollected, drying into glittering dust inside tissue bins, harmless and unnoticed.

She drew a factory floor where the chairs were empty. Where the funnels were dry.

Reya smuggled some of the images to Tamir. Tamir sent them to underground forums. Someone remixed them into short animated clips with slogans: "We're Not Mines" and "Gold Is Not Trash."

The clips spread faster than anyone expected.

People laughed at first. Memes of golden boogers in business suits, investors diving into pools of mucus like the old cartoon tycoon. But then the comments shifted.

Why do we use gold on everything, anyway?

Imagine not having to hit daily booger quotas.

My grandma mined rock. I mine my sinuses. Different century, same story.

The corporations responded with their own campaign: cheerful ads showing smiling kids learning "responsible picking," upbeat jingles about "Sharing Your Shine With The World." They launched "Aurum Appreciation Week," complete with discounts on gold-plated home decor.

The more they leaned in, the weirder it felt.

One day, Lila arrived at the factory to find the front gates crowded. Workers stood in clusters, noses red, badges dangling askew. The big holoscreen over the entrance, which normally displayed production goals, showed instead a flickering emergency notice.

"System Outage-All Shifts Delayed Until Further Notice."

Reya found her in the crowd. "Supply chain," she said. "Rumor is three micro-refineries in the north region went offline. Co-ops. They aren't shipping their aurum. Suddenly the processors have nowhere to send ours."

Lila's heart kicked. "Tamir?"

Reya shrugged. "Could be coincidence. Could be the start."

The supervisors tried to herd people inside for "maintenance duties" instead, but the momentum had shifted. Someone started chanting, half-jokingly at first:

"We're not ore! We're not ore!"

It caught. Within minutes, the factory façade echoed with the rhythm of it.

We're not ore. We're not ore.

On the holoscreen, the message changed. A hastily prepared announcement from Aurifex corporate:

"Our commitment to sustainable aurum is unwavering. We encourage all Nasal Resource Technicians to maintain normal routines during this temporary disruption. To demonstrate our gratitude, we are offering a one-time bonus yield multiplier-"

The chant only grew louder.

Lila's nose itched terribly. She resisted the urge to pick it, even as the stress made her sinuses swell. Around her, she saw others doing the same: fingers hovering just short of nostrils, then dropping away.

Small acts of withholding.

That night, Lila watched a new clip on her tablet-one she hadn't drawn. It showed a worker at a factory chair, finger poised. A ghostly version of herself stepped out of her body, shook her head, and gently lowered her own hand. The gold inside her nose flickered, then flowed inward, tracing bright patterns along her veins, pooling at her heart.

Text appeared: "What if the gold stayed ours?"

Reya messaged her an hour later: Tamir wants to meet.

At the next Aurum Reclamation Circle gathering, the room buzzed with nervous energy.

"The factories are panicking," Tamir said, voice hoarse but triumphant. "They relied on the assumption that we'd never stop. That a runny nose on a cold day was as good as a signed contract. But now they're seeing what happens when people say no."

"They'll just raise wages," someone muttered. "Throw money at us until we cave."

"Some will," Tamir agreed. "Some will double bonus rates. But others…" They turned to the old display case and picked up a tarnished ring, its once-bright band gone dull. "Some will pivot. We've already had inquiries from three smaller companies wanting to fund composite research. If they can't rely on infinite aurum, they need alternatives."

Lila thought of her mother's scarred nostrils. Of her own raw sinuses at the end of each shift.

"What happens to the factories?" she asked.

"Maybe they repurpose," Tamir said. "Maybe they close. Maybe some become clinics for nasal repair." They smiled wryly. "We're not naive. There will be pain. But maybe less than the slow erosion of our own faces."

In the weeks that followed, the gold inside people's noses didn't diminish. Bodies still made it, day after day, fleck by fleck. But more of it went unused. Tissues filled, bins overflowed with unsold aurum. Without industrial suction, the world didn't collapse.

Some factories did close. Others cut shifts. A few aggressively automated, fitting cheap picking machines onto volunteer faces in desperate regions. It was ugly, messy, uneven.

But alongside that, something else grew.

In old jewelry shops and repurposed corner stores, co-op refineries hummed to life. People brought their weekly nasal harvest not as obligation, but as choice. Contracts were transparent. Uses were selective.

Gold became visible again.

You could walk down a street and tell which buildings had chosen to gild their railings and which had let them stay bare. On public data boards, you could see where aurum was going: 32% to medical devices, 21% to aerospace components, 9% to art, 0.3% to "non-essential decorative packaging."

Kids in school learned about the time when gold was something hidden in the ground, then the time when it gushed from factories of faces, then the time when people learned to say: enough.

Years later, Lila stood in front of a museum exhibit titled "Aurum and Us."

Behind the glass, old mining helmets sat next to early nasal collection devices. A looping video showed archival footage of lines of workers in chairs, fingers poised at their noses, eyes glazed with repetition.

A plaque read:

"In the Nasal Extraction Era, gold lost its perceived value as rarity but gained a new weight as a measure of human compliance. Today, aurum is used sparingly, consciously, and its production-though still an odd quirk of biology-is no longer the backbone of labor economies."

A group of children clustered around a display of her original sketches. One pointed to a drawing of a factory made of noses.

"Ew," the child said, fascinated. "Did people really do that? Just…pick their nose all day?"

Lila, now a curator and occasional lecturer, stepped closer.

"Some did," she said. "For a long time."

"Why?" another child asked. "If it hurt?"

Lila thought of her mother's wheezing lungs in the mining days. Of the long rows of chairs, the quotas, the gold-plated cereal boxes.

"Because we were told it was the only way to live," she said. "We believed gold mattered more than our comfort, our time, our bodies. We forgot that value isn't just about what shines, but what it costs to make it shine."

She tapped the glass lightly, where a line of golden flecks glittered in one of her old drawings.

"And then," she added, "we remembered."

On her way home, the evening breeze carried the smell of rain and distant factories-not the vast aurum plants of her youth, but smaller fabrication hubs, making composite circuits and fiber optics.

Her nose tickled. Reflexively, her hand rose.

She paused, smiled, and instead reached into her pocket for a small, gold-edged handkerchief-a gift from her mother when she'd retired from Aurifex.

Inside the cloth, when she checked later, were the familiar flecks, glinting like captured suns.

She folded the handkerchief carefully, slipped it into a small collection jar she kept by the window-a jar she emptied once a month at the co-op down the street.

The world still ran on countless small, unglamorous acts. People still cleaned, still carried, still made things with their bodies. But gold receded, slowly, from everything.

It hadn't reclaimed its old, mystical worth. It was just another material now. Useful. Beautiful, sometimes. But no longer an excuse to turn humans into living mines.

And somewhere, in some overlooked corner of reality, the earth itself sat unbroken and watched, its buried veins of ancient gold lying still, untouched, as humanity finally learned that not everything that can be mined should be.