Visions of the Future (35 page)

When he woke up, he was dead.

Utter blackness, total silence. Nothing. Nothing but black when he opened his eyes—or thought he had.

No smells. There should be the clean, antiseptic, efficient scent of the Medical Extension Center.

No background rustle or steps. No drone of air conditioning, no distant murmur of conversations, no jangle of a telephone.

He could not feel any press of his own weight. No cold table or starched sheets rubbed his skin.

They had disconnected all his external nerves.

He felt a rush of fear. Total loss of control. He was a slab of meat waiting for extinction.

To do that required finding the major nerves as they wound up through the spine. Plus the many other pathways from the rest of the body. Then a medical tech had to electrically splice them out of the tangled knot at the back of the neck. Delicate work. He had heard about it, of course, wondered what it was like—but this…

A sharp slap of fear ran through him. What did it mean? Why—?

He fought his rising confusion. He had to explore. To think.

He pushed the emotions away. First he had to know more. Was he fully dead? He waited, letting the adrenaline of his fear wash away.

Concentrate. Think of quietness, stillness. You’re on a beach, maybe, surf rumbling in the distance… let it go…

Yes, there. He felt a weak, regular thump that might be his heart. Behind that, as though far away, was a slow, faint fluttering of… lungs?

That was all. He knew that the body’s internal nerves were thinly spread. They gave only vague, blunt senses. But there was enough dull sensation, in the background, to tell him that the basic functions were still plodding on.

Still… Paralysis encased him like concrete. He sent signals to push out his tongue, purse his lips, shrug his shoulders, open his eyes—and got nothing back, no sense if any of these motions had happened.

There was a dim pressure that might be his bladder. Snap his fingers, even? He could pick up nothing specific from legs or arms.

He tried to move his head. Nothing. No feedback.

Open an eye? Only blackness.

Legs—he turned both, hoping that only the sensations were gone. He might be able to detect a leg moving by the change in pressure somewhere in his body,

No response. But if he could sense his bladder, he should have gotten something back from the shifting weight of a leg.

That meant his lower motor control was shut off.

Panic rose in him—a cold, blind sensation. Normally this strong an emotion would bring deeper breathing, a heavier heartbeat, flexing muscles, a tingling urgency. He felt none of that.

There was only a swirl of conflicting thoughts, a jittery forking in his mind like summer lightning. A halfway house on the road to death.

He forced himself to think.

His name was Carlos Farenza, and he was 87 years old. Born in LA in 1998. His own father had died at 62 of hypertension, but 87 was no great achievement these days. With enough organ replacements, blood scrubbing, neuroengineering, the nutrigenomic supplements and anti-aging treatments, anybody who didn’t have stupid bad habits could make it to a hundred. It was just a matter of looking both ways before you stepped out into traffic.

The only limitation was cost. Nearly everybody was on Universal Medical, but society couldn’t afford to go on overhauling each eroding body. It was like keeping an old car running for sentimental reasons. Eventually, you were spending more money on parts and repairs than a new car would cost. The same way, society judged when people had run up too great a tab, so kicked the problem forward in time, through the sleepslots. For “society” substitute the eternal bands of arguing lawyers, who had nothing but their fees at stake. But some measure had to emerge.

So there was a test. For Carlos it came every three years, and that’s what he was here for. You came in and they poked you, prodded, pried you open and ran a whole-body diagnostic. If your mental and physio indices were up to par, you got three more years of free service on Universal Medical. Like getting your driver’s license renewed.

If you flunked… Even then, it didn’t necessarily mean death. Not unless you had already elected for that, of course. There was a hundred thousand kilobuck reward, passed on to whomever you stipulated.

If you checked out, there were other rewards for your inheritors, family, even friends. Reasonable, really—the government had to encourage elective suicides, to keep costs down.

But death was seldom the right answer. Most people chose the sleepslots. The medical techs laid you away in a near-freezing slot, electronically modulated, and stored you until something could be done about your condition. That might take ten years, and it might take a thousand.

So they had laid Carlos out on a diagnostic slab, hooked him up, said the usual soothing words. He had been jittery. Everybody was nervous when going through diagnostics. He’d had a cancer diagnosis before, but they’d muted it, maybe cured the damned creeping thing. These diseases were tricky these days, though; cancers seemed to know how to hide.

Still, it wasn’t exactly a life-or-death thing. It was merely life versus suspended life. But you never knew how you would do, no matter how well you felt. Tricky.

But he damn well knew which he wanted. He had good friends, good times, his job—everybody worked, or how else to support the truly old?—was a pretty humdrum office position. But he still enjoyed it. Divorced at the moment, but that could change. He had places he wanted to see, relatives, a neighborhood. He was anchored in his time. He didn’t want to wake up in some distant future with outdated skills, a lonely stranger.

If you failed the test, there was no reprieve. You didn’t get a vote; you were shut down neurologically. The techs would methodically prepare you for the sleepslots. If they had discovered a deteriorating condition, something that might even malfunction, under the strain of bringing you back to full consciousness… well, then the law said they could stack you in the sleepslot without waking you up. For your own good, of course. Just shut you down.

Like this.

They weren’t finished, or else he’d never have come awake again. Some technician had screwed up. Shut off a nerve center somewhere, using pinpoint interrupters, but maybe a tech pinched one filament too many. They worked at the big junction between brain and spinal cord, down at the base of the skull. It was like a big cable back there, and the techs found their way by feedback analysis. Some small fraction of the time, microscopic nerve fibers got mixed up, if the tech was working fast, Carlos knew. Maybe a gal looking forward to coffee break, she could reactivate the conscious cerebral functions and not notice it on the scope until later.

Had that happened to him? Maybe he had come to partway through his down-run into the slots.

He had to do something.

The strange, cold panic seized him again. Adrenaline, left over from some earlier, deep physiological response. He was afraid now, jittery, but there was no answering chemical symphony of the body. His gland subsystems were shut down.

An analytical rage built in him. He had never been cut off like this. Then a new idea:
Maybe this was what the slots are like. A kind of living death.

There was no way to tell how rapidly time passed. He counted heartbeats, a minute five—but his pulse rate depended on so many factors…

Okay, then, how long did he have? He knew it took many working hours to shut down a nervous system, damp the neuro systems, drain lymphatic points, leech the blood of residues. Hours. Routine never encourages alertness. The technicians would leave a lot of the job to the automatic machines, go get coffee, gossip…

He noticed the chill as a faint background sensation. It seemed to spread as he paid attention to it, filling his body, bringing a pleasant, mild quiet… a drifting, slow slide toward sleep…

Deep within him, something said no.

He willed himself to focus, in the utter blackness and creeping cold. They said the technicians always left a pathway to the outside, so if something went wrong, the patient could signal. He had read about that, somewhere. It was a precaution to take care of situations like this. But what would it be, what pathway?

Eyebrows? He tried them/felt nothing. Mouth? The same.

He made himself think of the steps necessary to form a word. Squeeze in the lungs. Constrict the throat. Force air out at a faster rate. Pluck the vocal cords just so. Move the tongue and lips. Throughout life you did it without thinking, but when you did, it seemed impossibly complicated.

Nothing. No faint hum echoing in his sinus cavities to tell him that muscles worked, that breath strummed his vocal cords.

He had read about this in a magazine article somewhere. The easiest way to slide people into the slots was just to shut down a whole section of the body. Okay. His head was out, obviously dead. Legs out. Feet gone, too. And genitals weren’t under conscious control even at the best of times.

Arms, then? He tried the left. No answering shift of internal pressures. But how big would the effect be? He might be waving his hand straight up in the air and never know it.

Try the right. Again, no way to tell if—

No, wait. A diffuse sense of something. Try to remember which muscles to move. He had gone through life with instant feedback from every fiber, anchoring him in his body, every gesture suggesting the next. Muscle memory. Now he had to analyze precisely. How did he make his arm rise? Muscles contracted to pull on one side of the arm and shoulder. Others relaxed to let the arm swing. He tried it.

Was there an answering weight? Faint, too faint. Maybe his imagination.

The right arm could be responding and he wouldn’t know it. The attendants would see it, though, and patch into him, ask what was going on… unless they weren’t around. Unless they had gone off for coffee, leaving the sagging old body to stage down gradually into long-term stasis, with the medical monitor checking, to be sure nothing failed in the ancient carcass.

Suppose the arm worked. Even if somebody saw it, was that what he wanted? If they turned his head back on, what would he do?

Demand his rights? He didn’t have any. He had already signed the required documents, read through the contracts, stared at the legalese,
I, Carlos Farenza, being of sound mind and body…
All taken care of. The attendants certainly had dealt before with people who protested, demanded to see their lawyer, bright minds trapped inside failed machinery. They would ignore his momentary lapse, slide him into a slot, no matter what he said.
For his own good y’know.

Despairing, he stopped his concentration. He had been trying to lift the arm and now gave up. He let the muscles go suddenly slack.

And was rewarded with an answering thump.

It had hit the table. Something damned well worked.

He waited. Nothing came to him in the blackness. No attendant came rapping in to correct his mistake.

So he was probably alone. Where?

Carlos found his memories strangely dim and diffuse. He could see the street this morning: an orange sun behind clouds, taking the bus… the chill winter breeze blowing trash down the sidewalk, numbing his ears… being surprised at how rundown this part of town was nowadays… walking down Wilshire past the new Conway building, first big one put up since the earthquake. Down side streets, the look of a gray, dusty city starved for water, not lively the way it had been in the 2060s. He had wondered about finally moving away from the city, panting as he shuffled toward the usual irritating wait at the Center. The staff always thought the old ones had plenty of time to waste. Then the ritual papers, always more stuff to e-sign, never time to read them. The pretty nurse who took his clothes away. Settling into the diagnostic sheath. Looking up at the ceramic glow, the little snick and strum, sharp bites of the incisions…

He must still be there. Not already in a slot, or else he wouldn’t be able to think at all. The literature they handed out described this process and he had read it all. On a slab, then, the electronics tapped deeply into him. He tried to remember what they looked like. The access terminals were on both sides, mirroring the body. So maybe, if he stretched, the right hand could reach half the input switches.

He concentrated and gave the commands that brought his arm up. Again, no answering signals to tell him if it worked. This was what it was like to be disembodied. The hand probably worked; it would have been too much trouble to disconnect it while the arm stayed live. Remembering carefully, he lowered the arm, rotating it—

A thump. Someone approaching? No, too close. The arm had fallen. Good. Balance was going to be hard. He practiced rotating the arm without raising it. No way to know if he was successful, but the moves seemed correct, familiar, while others did not. He worked without feedback, trying to summon up the exact sensation of turning the arm.

Dipping it to the side, over the edge. Working the fingers.

He stopped. If he hit the wrong control, he could turn off the arm. Without external feedback there was no way to tell if he was doing the right thing.

Pure gamble. If he had been able to, Carlos would have shrugged.
What the hell. You only die once.

He stabbed with straightened fingers. Nothing. He fumbled and somehow knew through dull patterns that the fingers were striking the side of the slab. The knowledge came from below, some kind of holistic sensation from the deep inside him. His body, then, could not be wholly out of action. Information spread, and the mute kidneys and liver and intestines knew in some dim way what went on outside.

A wan answering pressure told him that his fingers had closed on something. He squeezed it. He made the fingers turn, carefully…

Nothing happened. Not a knob, then. A button?

He stabbed down. In his head he felt slight jolts. Sinus cavities? Like blowing his nose? He must be smacking some control to do that. With no feedback there was no way to judge force. He stabbed; a jolt. Again. Again.

A cold tremor ran up his right calf. Pain flooded in. His leg was in spasm. It jerked on the slab, striking hard—he could feel it. The sudden rush of sensations startled him. In the heady surge he could hardly tell if the heady wash was pain or something else. Just to feel at all was a pleasure.