For the Five Percent, the Upgrade Question Is Now About Heat

Roughly one person in twenty now carries some neural or somatic augmentation, and in the outdoor trades that share is climbing for a blunt reason: the ones with thermal-regulation implants can still work the afternoon shift. On a Lagos construction site where the wet-bulb reading closed the yard twice last week, foreman Tunde Balogun watched his augmented crew keep laying block while the unaugmented were sent to the shade. "It shouldn't be that the implant decides who eats," he said. The safety review of Somaform Augmetics' neural-interface line remains open and contested, and clinicians warn that heat-adaptation augmentation is spreading faster than the evidence on its long-term load. Labor advocates want the implants classed as protective equipment an employer must fund; industry calls that a mandate on the body. What began as enhancement is quietly becoming, for some jobs, a condition of the job.