This is a podcast extra from Nature.

Each week, nature publishes a science fiction story in its futures slot.

At the end of every month, we read you our favourite.

This month's story is Heartworm, written by JJ Roth, published on the 25th of June, and read by Jeff Marsh.

Zora doesn't know it yet, but I'm going to free her heart.

It lives in a cryptographic cage, behind a shield of code integrated into her nervous system.

Protection against rogues, social climbers and others her father finds unsuitable for her affections,

unfitting for a husband, including me.

After our constitutional law class, I catch up with Zora on the steps outside Langdell Hall.

A light snow is falling, swathing the quadrangle in white.

The wind gusts. One end of Zora's camel-colored cashmere muffler blows over her coat's boxy shoulder, revealing the shaved patch on her neck.

Her hair's growing back, except over the thin, silver scar at her skull's base. A small circular jack marks the scar's centre.

A month ago, before Zora's father learned of our engagement and sent three dark-suited

employees to pull her out of antitrust class and force her into a limousine, she had no shaved

patch, no scar, no jack. A month ago, we backbenched during corporations' lectures, holding hands,

making fun of the gargantuan oil portraits on the wall behind the professor.

Famous old men, still hanging there five decades after the law school appointed its first

female dean. Men like Zora's father, who owns half of Massachusetts and controls much more.

Can I help you, Peter? She doesn't give me her wry, tricksters smile. Doesn't reach for me with that

freckled hand, nails paired short to better execute Mozart's keyboard ornamentations.

Won't come to my closet-sized rented room in Somerville to make love before studying, as we've done

so often over the past two years. She'll return to her side of the tracks and forget we ever spoke,

...