Comfort Zone

Comfort zone; the range of temperature and humidity within which the human body feels and works comfortably and efficiently, typically 19-24 degrees centigrade.

Whiteness; he watched as each crystal was added so the white, like a living thing, spread. In it he saw blankness, emptiness, purity, the capture of rampant moisture, the locking up of vapours, a mini arctic.

He stood up from the freezer cabinet and began to repack his tools. If only global warming could be fixed like this, replace a component, reset, switch on, the ice caps reform, suck up the moisture, cool the earth.

But, he thought, the component that needed to be replaced was man himself; take him out of the machine and you would fix things.

His overall was neat, a cool blue with the “Freeze” logo emblazoned across his back. Florent was 21. Dark hair, medium build, deep brown eyes, a lightly stubbled jaw line. ”Freeze “was his own fledgling business, only a year old. Redundancy from Peugeot saw him take his skills on their air conditioning units into freelance work – anything to do with cooling, refrigeration, air-conditioning.

Last summer in France, 2003, thousands of old people had died in a heat wave – a scandal that rocked the nation. The result was a rocketing demand for domestic air-conditioning units as well as units for old folks homes, offices and shopping complexes.

Humans perspire to provide natural cooling but it hadn’t been enough. Their old hearts could not pump fast enough. The hotter the air the more moisture it can carry and the harder for your perspiration to evaporate. You needed something to

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: alastair macleod
Bildmaterialien: alastair macleod: "flats," by alastair macleod
Lektorat: alastair macleod
Übersetzung: cover typeset in effloresce
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 04.12.2012
ISBN: 978-3-7309-0085-7

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