Exhalation

The short story "Exhalation" (published in a collection of the same name) tells the story of a world where people are made of metal. The first person narrator is an "anatomist" who uses a specially designed periscope and tools to perform an auto-dissection, a dissection of the narrator's own mechanical brain, in order to discover how memories work and why people don't remember much more than a hundred years back. Understanding the process of memory, which involves the constant movement of air across tiny gold lattices, leads the narrator to discover that the air pressure people depend on is running out.