Livvy had hoped for some elaboration of his last comment, but none came. She remembered he wasn’t a training officer.
He took out a muting recorder and started talking into it, and she searched her desk drawers. Whoever had used the desk before her – and it looked like it had been a while – hadn’t left many useable supplies. There was no recorder, for example. There had to be a supply depot, and she looked around for a logical place to begin exploring the room.
Her nominal partner ignored her. Okay, she was a big girl and she could figure out how LLE “handled it differently” by observation. Like Louie, she supposed. Fair enough. She still had over six days. Plenty of time to get into the routine.
Chp. 4 Another Damn Doctor (Tuesday)
Chris considered reset day a pain in the ass. It took up a half a day, played tricks on his short term memory, and gave him significant philosophical qualms on the issue of whether he was living the life he should be living. He continued to go in as scheduled because he was living half the life – or truthfully far less than half the life – he and Karen had planned together. Resets were a benefit of his job, they allowed him to continue to do his work effectively, and after all, he still valued life and a useful level of fitness. That was the whole point of Longevity. It plainly beat the alternative.
The morning after meeting his new partner, he showed up for his quarterly appointment, and as often in the city employees’ facility in massive City Central, he saw a new doctor – new to him that is – for his scan consultation.
Unlike most physicians, this one had chosen to keep the face of a 21 year-old. Chris, never having met him before, had no idea of his true age except to know that he had to be at least a decade younger than Chris was, even if he was from one of the extremely wealthy families that were the only ones able to afford resets before the explosion of technical achievements in 2040 made them affordable for a lot of the upper middle class as well.
“You’re 101 chrono, and what? 33 biol? A pioneer,” the doctor said, slightly surprised.
He had been scanning Chris’ records but at that he looked up and scrutinized Chris more closely, a little like he might examine a lab specimen. “Your BMI and cardiac parameters haven’t changed in the last 6 decades. According to our records, you’ve never had anything but departmental resets,” he glanced inquiringly at Chris, “yet you look a very fit 30-35. How do you feel?”
“Like a 30-35 year old,” Chris said.
“You’ve never had any kind of enhancement? A slight metabolic adjustment? No? That’s a lot of work on your own. Very impressive.” The doctor paused. “Too many people think that resets and enhancements can do it all, even though they must know that enhancements to help increase muscle strength and reflex times are illegal.”
“I’m in LLE,” Chris said.
“Ah, so of course you know. Well, you seem to have a regimen that keeps you fit,” he said, then paused. There was obviously bad news coming.
“Unfortunately, I still need to recommend visits every 2 months from now on.”
“Why?” Chris asked.
“Let me see. To put it in terms you can understand. First of all, it’s a myth that the need for resets increases with a little age – you can reach your allotment without having to adjust your reset interval. Most people, other than nervous types with lots of resources, do just that. So it’s not for the resets.
“It’s always been a tradeoff between senescence – cell aging – and instability. Not to get too technical on you… when we learned how to manipulate telomeres and stem cells and really use engineered RNA and transcription factors with incredible precision and molebiologists started devising catalysts that could speed the processes up without stressing… well, to put it simply, we beat senescence. But when we destroyed the Hayflick Limit, we set ourselves up for an increase in instability.
“So, when you come in quarterly for your resets, we do our mapping and scans each time, because it’s not senescence we’re checking for, it’s tumorigeneses. We’ve always been able to destroy a few abnormally replicating cells in situ, but if they get further along than that, it gets more difficult to destroy them without being more invasive. There is a new imaging technology that catches them sooner, that’s all, and if we can catch them sooner, and locate them more precisely, we can treat them sooner. When they’re just a few cells in size… well, you get the picture. It’s not your situation that’s changed, it’s ours. New technology. Better medicine. It’s win-win really,” the doctor said finally, and smiled brightly.
“Uh huh,” Chris said. He’s very young, Chris thought. He believes in a win-win scenario. So young that he was still enthralled with the great gift his science had given humanity, and what more could be done with it. Out of pure curiosity, when the doctor had gotten distracted by something in Chris’ record, Chris took the opportunity to ask a question he asked every decade or so. It was the young physician’s unabashed enthusiasm that made him curious, he supposed.
“Do they still teach history and sociology in the schools?”
“History? Sure, some,” the doctor said. “If you mean specifically the Allotment Riots, of course. Sociology? No, not much. I mean, at the university level, sure, people can take all they want. But you know, it takes a lot just to keep up with all of the molebiol and other relevant science. If we could get a neuro- enhancement, now…” he added jokingly.
He looked at Chris, who had heard it so often before that he couldn’t muster even a flicker of a smile. The doctor obviously had second thoughts about what he’d said, because he added seriously, “We have enough to deal with in the science. We can’t control the rest of it. That’s what the Laws and LLE are for, isn’t it? No offense, but isn’t that
The doctor went back to his memotab and stylus.
“No offense taken,” Chris said mildly. “Right, our responsibility. So, an appointment every two months. Is that it?”
“Yes. That’s based on analyses of your maps from the last three pre-reset scans. Your situation is that you have a long history of nicely modulated telomere regeneration but we have to make sure it is kept under control, and now that we have the technology to catch abnormalities even earlier… In the old days I suspect you would have had what was called a family history of cancer.”
Chris’ aspect radiated patience and the doctor faltered.
“Of course, it’s all here in your record, with tickles: both of your parents and your sister died of cancer in the decade before Longevity was licensed. I guess you spent a lot of your time in the hospitals of the time. Surely with your family history someone explained all our concerns about tumorigenisis to you already.”
“I’m sure they have. I’m probably not a good listener,” Chris said. He remembered being told at some point, decades ago, that his genome handled the Longevity Process especially well, as a result of the infamous tradeoff. After Karen’s death, he’d stopped listening. For the last 55 years he had kept fit and continued to come in on the recommended schedule because it helped him do his job well. He just couldn’t seem to get interested in the details anymore.
Every morning, as they separated to go to their respective jobs, Chris with Enforcement and Karen as a Bioethics professor at the university, she had said “Go forth young man, and fight the good fight.” Karen, who was two years younger than he was, could remember as well as he could when ‘young’ really meant young, so for both of them it had been a bit of a tongue-in-cheek reminder that they had chosen to live in a surreal world.
“If I understand you, I won’t need a full reset every time, at least?” Chris asked, standing up. “I depend a lot on short term memory for my work.”
“No. Most certainly not. As I said, that schedule is unlikely to change. We’ll just be doing scans and making decisions about in situ work with med-bullets based on the results.”
“That’s it, then?”
“You’re done.”
“Thanks,” Chris said politely. The doctor nodded and stared after him as he walked out of the room.
