Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [27]
Losing years of control over one’s money was a very stiff price, but it was not the worst of it. The loss of money did not sting the way it once had stung. Money was no longer what money once had been. The polity had never been a free-market society. People dying of plague were not much impressed by free markets. The polity was a plague-panicked allocation society in which the whip hand of coercive power was held by smiling and stouthearted medical rescue personnel. And by social workers. And by very nice old people.
Mia’s forthcoming ordeal had been plotted in meticulous detail.
The first major trick was to stop eating. Her entire digestive tract would be clogged with a sterilizing putty.
The second trick was to stop breathing. Her lungs would be filled with a sterilizing oxygenating silicone fluid. These two processes would immediately kill off most of the body’s internal bacteria.
The third trick was to stop thinking. The blood-brain barrier would be scrubbed free from the capillaries of her skull and the cerebrospinal fluid would be replaced with a sterilizing saline fluid. Profound unconsciousness resulted.
The next trick, quite an advanced one, was to stop being quite so rigorously multicellular. Mia would be fetally submerged in a gelatinous tank of support fluids. Her internal metabolic needs would be supplied through a newly attached umbilical. The hair and the skin had to go. The bloodstream and lymphatic system would be opened to the support vat for the remaining course of the treatment. Red blood cell production would be shut down and the plasma replaced by a straw-colored fluid toxic to any cell which was not mammalian. All commensal organisms in the human body had to be destroyed.
Once the bacteria were thoroughly and utterly annihilated, the hunt would commence for the viruses and prions. It would take about a week to tag and destroy the genetic menagerie of imbedded human viruses. It would take about three weeks to destroy the vast metabolic cosmos of once-unsuspected human prions. These rogue proteins would mostly be shivered apart through magnetic resonance techniques.
Once this much had been accomplished, Mia would become an entirely antiseptic organism, a floating amniotic gel culture.
The DNA treatments could then commence. Intercellular repair required a radical loosening of the intracellular bonds so as to facilitate medical access through the cell surfaces of the corpus as a whole. The skinless body would partially melt into the permeating substance of the support gel. The fluidized body would puff up to two and a half times its original volume.
At this point, flexible plastic tubing could worm its way into the corpus. The skinless, bloated, and neotenically fetalized patient, riddled with piercings, would resemble an ivory Chinese doll depicting acupuncture sites.
Specific procedures would take place in the marrow of the femurs, the spine, the ventricles of the brain, the sinuses, and other deeply interiorized spaces. Toxic buildups and precipitated mineralized bodies in the arteries, gall bladder, and lymphatic system—especially the metabolically crucial coacervate deposits in the pineal gland—would be reduced or eliminated.
On a genetic level, Mia’s cells would be studied for cumulative replication errors. Precancerous and/ or junk-burdened cells would be tagged with artificial antibodies and made the targets for programmed apoptosis. Some 15 percent of the body’s cells would be killed during this period and removed by