Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [46]
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,