Gloria looked at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that maybe I can get us in for once.”
Gloria didn’t laugh, but I knew she would later.
Greg Egan
Yeyuka
Though not all of his stories are about information technology, and most make only passing nods, if any, to the icons of classic CP, most Greg Egan stories are like’ 80s CP in their foregrounding of ideas over character. A typical Egan story bombards the reader with ideas and their implications and lets literary concerns go hang. This one has a nifty technological device at its heart. But it turns into a story about first-vs.-third world economics, and then, uncharacteristically, into a story about one person’s moral decision.
On my last day in Sydney, as a kind of farewell, I spent the morning on Bondi Beach. I swam for an hour, then lay on the sand and stared at the sky. I dozed off for a while, and when I woke there were half a dozen booths set up amid the sun bathers, dispensing the latest fashion: solar tattoos. On a touch-screen the size of a full-length mirror, you could choose a design and then customise it, or create one from scratch with software assistance. Computer-controlled jets sprayed the undeveloped pigments onto your skin, then an hour of uv exposure rendered all the colours visible.
As the morning wore on, I saw giant yellow butterflies perched between shoulder blades, torsos wrapped in green-and-violet dragons, whole bodies wreathed in chains of red hibiscus. Watching these images materialise around me, I couldn’t help thinking of them as banners of victory. Throughout my childhood, there’d been nothing more terrifying than the threat of melanoma — and by the turn of the millennium, nothing more hip than neck-to- knee lycra. Twenty years later, these elaborate decorations were designed to encourage,
I touched the ring on my left index finger, and felt a reassuring pulse through the metal. Blood flowed constantly around the hollow core of the device, diverted from a vein in my finger. The ring’s inner surface was covered with billions of tiny sensors, spring-loaded, funnel-shaped structures like microscopic Venus fly-traps, each just a few hundred atoms wide. Every sizable molecule in my bloodstream that collided with one of these traps was seized and shrink-wrapped, long enough and tightly enough to determine its shape and its chemical identity before it was released.
So the ring knew exactly what was in my blood. It also knew what belonged, and what didn’t. Under its relentless scrutiny, the biochemical signature of a viral or bacterial infection, or even a microscopic tumour far downstream, could never escape detection for long — and once a diagnosis was made, treatment was almost instantaneous. Planted alongside the sensors were programmable catalysts, versatile molecules that could be reshaped under computer control. The ring could manufacture a wide range of drugs from raw materials circulating in the blood, just by choosing the right sequence of shapes for these catalysts — trapping the necessary ingredients together in nooks and crannies moulded to fit like plaster casts around their combined outlines.
With medication delivered within minutes or seconds, infections were wiped out before they could take hold, tiny clusters of cancer cells destroyed before they could grow or spread. Linked by satellite to a vast array of medical databases, and as much additional computing power as it required, the ring gave me a kind of electronic immune system, fast enough and smart enough to overcome any adversary.
Not everyone on the beach that morning would have had their own personal HealthGuard, but a weekly session on a shared family unit, or even a monthly check-up at their local GP, would have been enough to reduce their risk of cancer dramatically. And though melanoma was the least of my worries — fair-skinned, I was covered in sunscreen as usual; fatal or not, getting burnt was painful — with the ring standing guard against ten thousand other possibilities, I’d come to think of it as a vital part of my body. The day I’d installed it, my life expectancy had risen by fifteen years — and no doubt my bank’s risk-assessment software had assumed a similar extension to my working life, since I’d be paying off the loan I’d needed to buy the thing well into my sixties.
I tugged gently at the plain metal band, until I felt a sharp warning from the needle-thin tubes that ran deep into the flesh. This model wasn’t designed to be slipped on and off in an instant like the shared units, but it would only take a five-minute surgical procedure under local anaesthetic to remove it. In Uganda, a single HealthGuard machine served 40 million people — or rather, the lucky few who could get access to it. Flying in wearing my own personal version seemed almost as crass as arriving with a giant solar tattoo. Where I was headed, cancer had very definitely not been defeated.
Then again, nor had malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, schistosomiasis. I could have the ring immunise me against all of these and more, before removing it … but the malaria parasite was notoriously variable, so constant surveillance would provide far more reliable protection. I’d be no use to anyone lying in a hospital bed for half my stay. Besides, the average villager or shanty-town dweller probably wouldn’t even recognise the thing, let alone resent it. I was being hypersensitive.
I gathered up my things and headed for the cycle rack. Looking back across the sand, I felt the kind of stab of regret that came upon waking from a dream of impossible good fortune and serenity, and for a moment I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and rejoin it.
Lisa saw me off at the airport.
I said, “It’s only three months. It’ll fly past.” I was reassuring myself, not her.
“It’s not too late to change your mind.” She smiled calmly; no pressure, it was entirely my decision. In her eyes, I was clearly suffering from some kind of disease — a very late surge of adolescent idealism, or a very early midlife crisis — but she’d adopted a scrupulously nonjudgmental bedside manner. It drove me mad.
“And miss my last chance ever to perform cancer surgery?” That was a slight exaggeration; a few cases would keep slipping through the HealthGuard net for years. Most of my usual work was trauma, though, which was going through changes of its own. Computerised safeguards had made traffic accidents rare, and I suspected that within a decade no one would get the chance to stick their hand in a conveyor belt again. If the steady stream of gunshot and knife wounds ever dried up, I’d have to retrain for nose jobs and reconstructing rugby players. “I should have gone into obstetrics, like you.”
Lisa shook her head. “In the next twenty years, they’ll crack all the molecular signals, within and between mother and foetus. There’ll be no premature births, no Caesareans, no complications. The HealthGuard will smooth my job away, too.” She added, deadpan, “Face it, Martin, we’re all doomed to obsolescence.”
“Maybe. But if we are…it’ll happen sooner in some places than others.”
“And when the time comes, you might just head off to some place where you’re still needed?”
She was mocking me, but I took the question seriously. “Ask me that when I get back. Three months without mod cons and I might be cured for life.”
My flight was called. We kissed goodbye. I suddenly realised that I had no idea why I was doing this. The health of distant strangers? Who was I kidding? Maybe I’d been trying to fool myself into believing that I really was that selfless — hoping all the while that Lisa would talk me out of it, offering some face-saving excuse for me to stay. I should have known she’d call my bluff instead.
I said plainly, “I’m going to miss you. Badly.”
“I should hope so.” She took my hand, scowling, finally accepting the decision. “You’re an idiot, you know. Be careful.”
“I will.” I kissed her again, then slipped away.
