Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [28]
The surviving cells would then be treated to a neotelomeric extension. The telomeric ends of the chromosomes were a genetic clock, wearing thin as the human cell approached its Hayflick limit of allowable replications. New telomeric material would be spliced onto the chromosomes, tricking the aging cells into believing in the fiction of their own youth. The cells would then begin replicating furiously in the nutrient broth, and the wasted body would regain its 15 percent of lost body mass.
The extremely rapid growth within a buoyant support vat was closely akin to fetal growth. It was to be expected that there would be certain developmental abnormalities, especially in the adult joints and musculature. This was an expected price for marination in a fountain of youth.
The recovery process posed its own difficulties. The skin had to be regrown, commensal bacteria had to be gently reintroduced, the interior fluids had to be painstakingly replaced with natural substances. It was not entirely certain when the patient would regain consciousness, or what that state of consciousness might entail in the way of somatic sensation.
“I believe what you’re trying to say is that this will be extremely painful,” said Mia.
Her counselor was Dr. Rosenfeld, a sharp-faced, brilliantly preserved clinician with two dark wings of hair. Dr. Rosenfeld was a man of her own age. He had taken pains to inform Mia that he still considered himself fully bound by the Hippocratic oath he had taken some seventy years previously. In Dr. Rosenfeld’s opinion, there were a few hundred million Johnny-come-lately medical technicians, and then there were actual doctors. Dr. Rosenfeld was a traditional, actual doctor. He would never allow any patient in his clinical charge to enter such a profoundly transformative state without a great deal of previous bedside manner.
“The term ‘pain,’ ” said Dr. Rosenfeld, “is a relic of folk models of mental function. We have to draw a distinction between the higher-level subjective experience of pain, and the basal-level sequence of somatic nerve transmissions. All of these practices in NTDCD would be extremely painful to a fully operational brain, but your brain is going to be considerably less than operational. Have you heard of Korsakoff’s syndrome?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Of course, in modern practice we recognize thirty-one distinct substates of Korsakoff’s.… You will be placed into one of those amnesiac modes during the procedure. It’s like a virtuality, but it’s a profound healing space. Extreme states of so-called pain may flash through certain preconscious processing centers involved in working memory, but those experiences will simply not be recorded through any normal channels. We’ll be doing constant emission scanning, and I can guarantee you that whatever preconscious events may occur will never be consciously accessible, either during the time of treatment or afterward.”
“So I’ll feel it, but I won’t feel it.”
“That’s semantics again. ‘Feel’ is a very broad and inexact folk term. So is the term ‘I,’ for that matter. Maybe we can say that there will be feelings, but there won’t be any ‘I’ to have them.” Dr. Rosenfeld smiled. “Ontology is fascinating, isn’t it? I hope we can work through this discussion without invoking René Descartes.”
“I’ve read René Descartes.”
“The old fellow was remarkably prescient about the pineal gland.” Dr. Rosenfeld spread his long-fingered, tapered, well-kept hands. “NTDCD is no mere maintenance procedure. This is the closest that humankind has yet come to genuine rejuvenation. This might be a treatment program that could put our patients on the path to immortality.”
Mia only smiled. It was a claim that she had heard and read many times before. Medical entrepreneurs loved to claim that their particular line of life extension would carry patients all the way to a future transcendant medical breakthrough.
“It’s a public-relations tactic that’s been rather overblown,” Dr. Rosenfeld admitted. “Still, look