Rewired

by James Patrick Kelly

  Cure. Not just cut them open to delay the inevitable.

  “But where did all the raw data come from? The RNA sequencing, the X-ray diffraction studies…?”

  The woman’s smile vanished. “An insider at HealthGuard found it in the company archives, and sent it to us over the net.”

  “I don’t understand. When did HealthGuard do Yeyuka studies? Why haven’t they published them? Why haven’t they written software themselves?”

  She glanced uncertainly at Masika. He said, “HealthGuard’s parent company collected blood from five thousand people in southern Uganda in 2013. Supposedly to follow up on the effectiveness of their HIV vaccine. What they actually wanted, though, was a large sample of metastasising cells so they could perfect the biggest selling point of the HealthGuard: cancer protection. Yeyuka offered them the cheapest, simplest way to get the data they needed.”

  I’d been half expecting something like this since Masika’s comments back in the hospital, but I was still shaken. To collect the data dishonestly was bad enough, but to bury information that was halfway to a cure — just to save paying for what they’d taken—was unspeakable.

  I said, “Sue the bastards! Get everyone who had samples taken together for a class action: royalties plus punitive damages. You’ll raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Then you can buy as many machines as you want.”

  The woman laughed bitterly. “We have no proof. The files were sent anonymously, there’s no way to authenticate their origin. And can you imagine how much HealthGuard would spend on their defence? We can’t afford to waste the next twenty years in a legal battle, just for the satisfaction of shouting the truth from the rooftops. The only way we can be sure of making use of this software is to get a bootleg machine, and do everything in silence.”

  I stared at the screen, at the cure being played out in simulation that should have been happening three times a day in Mulago Hospital. She was right, though. However hard it was to stomach, taking on HealthGuard directly would be futile.

  Walking back across the campus with Masika, I kept thinking of the girl with the liver infestation, and the possibility of undoing the moment of clumsiness that would otherwise almost certainly kill her. I said, “Maybe I can get hold of a bootleg machine in Shanghai. If I knew where to ask, where to look.” They’d certainly be expensive, but they’d have to be much cheaper than a commissioned model, running without the usual software and support.

  My hand moved almost unconsciously to check the metal pulse on my index finger. I held the ring up in the starlight. “I’d give you this, if it was mine to give. But that’s thirty years away.” Masika didn’t reply, too polite to suggest that if I’d owned the ring outright, I wouldn’t even have raised the possibility.

  We reached the University Hall; I could find my way back to the guest house now. But I couldn’t leave it at that; I couldn’t face another six weeks of surgery unless I knew that something was going to come of the night’s revelations. I said, “Look, I don’t have connections to any black market, I don’t have a clue how to go about getting a machine. But if you can find out what I have to do, and it’s within my power…I’ll do it.”

  Masika smiled, and nodded thanks, but I could tell that he didn’t believe me. I wondered how many other people had made promises like this, then vanished back into the world-without-disease while the Yeyuka wards kept overflowing.

  As he turned to go, I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “I mean it. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.”

  He met my eyes in the dark, trying to judge something deeper than this easy protestation of sincerity. I felt a sudden flicker of shame; I’d completely forgotten that I was an impostor, that I’d never really meant to come here, that two months ago a few words from Lisa would have seen me throw away my ticket, gratefully.

  Masika said quietly, “Then I’m sorry that I doubted you. And I’ll take you at your word.”

  Mubende was a district capital, half a day’s drive west of Kampala. Iganga delayed our promised trip to the Yeyuka clinic there until my last fortnight, and once I arrived I could understand why. It was everything I’d feared: starved of funds, under-staffed and over-crowded. Patients’ relatives were required to provide and wash the bedclothes, and half of them also seemed to be bringing in painkillers and other drugs bought at the local markets — some genuine, some ripoffs full of nothing but glucose or magnesium sulphate.

  Most of the patients had four or five separate tumours. I treated two people a day, with operations lasting six to eight hours. In ten days, seven people died in front of me; dozens more died in the wards, waiting for surgery.

  Or waiting for something better.

  I shared a crowded room at the back of the clinic with Masika and Okwera, but even on the rare occasions when I caught Masika alone, he seemed reluctant to discuss the details of getting hold of a bootleg HealthGuard. He said, “Right now, the less you know the better. When the time comes, I’ll fill you in.”

  The ordeal of the patients was overwhelming, but I felt more for the clinic’s sole doctor and two nurses; for them, it never ended. The morning we packed our equipment into the truck and headed back for Kampala, I felt like a deserter from some stupid, pointless war: guilty about the colleagues I was leaving behind, but almost euphoric with relief to be out of it myself. I knew I couldn’t have stayed on here — or even in Kampala — month after month, year after year. However much I wished that I could have been that strong, I understood now that I wasn’t.

  There was a brief, loud stuttering sound, then the truck squealed to a halt. The four of us were all in the back, guarding the equipment against potholes, with the tarpaulin above us blocking everything but a narrow rear view. I glanced at the others; someone outside shouted in Luganda at Akena Ibingira, the driver, and he started shouting back.

  Okwera said, “Bandits.”

  I felt my heart racing. “You’re kidding?”

  There was another burst of gunfire. I heard Ibingira jump out of the cab, still muttering angrily.

  Everyone was looking at Okwera for advice. He said, “Just cooperate, give them what they want.” I tried to read his face; he seemed grim but not desperate — he expected unpleasantness, but not a massacre. Iganga was sitting on the bench beside me; I reached for her hand almost without thinking. We were both trembling. She squeezed my fingers for a moment, then pulled free.

  Two tall, smiling men in dirty-brown camouflage appeared at the back of the truck, gesturing with automatic weapons for us to climb out. Okwera went first, but Masika, who’d been sitting beside him, hung back. Iganga was nearer to the exit than me, but I tried to get past her; I had some half-baked idea that this would somehow lessen her risk of being taken off and raped. When one of the bandits blocked my way and waved her forward, I thought this fear had been confirmed.

  Masika grabbed my arm, and when I tried to break free, he tightened his grip and pulled me back into the truck. I turned on him angrily, but before I could say a word he whispered, “She’ll be all right. Just tell me: do you want them to take the ring?”

  “What?”

  He glanced nervously towards the exit, but the bandits had moved Okwera and Iganga out of sight. “I’ve paid them to do this. It’s the only way. But say the word now and I’ll give them the signal, and they won’t touch the ring.”

  I stared at him, waves of numbness sweeping over my skin as I realised exactly what he was saying.

  “You could have taken it off under anaesthetic.”

  He shook his head impatiently. “It’s sending data back to HealthGuard all the time: cortisol, adrenaline, endorphins, prostaglandins. They’ll have a record of your stress levels, fear, pain…if we took it off under anaesthetic, they’d know you’d given it away freely. This way, it’ll look like a random theft. And your insurance company will give you a new one.”

  His logic was impeccable; I had no reply. I might have started protesting about insurance fraud, but that was all in the future, a separate
matter entirely. The choice, here and now, was whether or not I let him have the ring by the only method that wouldn’t raise suspicion.

  One of the bandits was back, looking impatient. Masika asked plainly, “Do I call it off? I need an answer.” I turned to him, on the verge of ranting that he’d willfully misunderstood me, abused my generous offer to help him, and put all our lives in danger.

  It would have been so much bullshit, though. He hadn’t misunderstood me. All he’d done was taken me at my word.

  I said, “Don’t call it off.”

  The bandits lined us up beside the truck, and had us empty our pockets into a sack. Then they started taking watches and jewellery. Okwera couldn’t get his wedding ring off, but stood motionless and scowling while one of the bandits applied more force. I wondered if I’d need a prosthesis, if I’d still be able to do surgery, but as the bandit approached me I felt a strange rush of confidence.

  I held out my hand and looked up into the sky. I knew that anything could be healed, once it was understood.

  Sterling to Kessel, 7 April 1986:

  “Actually I’ve been wanting to do something on BOFFO [aka humanist sf] for some time…. I was further stimulated by the appearance of [Kim Stanley] Robinson’s ‘Down and Out in the Year 2000’ in the April MOV’S, with its long Gibson parody and slashing backhand to Sterling. This was one of Robinson’s best stories, I thought, and a point well taken. His attempt to seize the moral high ground in the debate seemed a canny attempt to use BOFFO’S perceived strengths — at least vis-à-vis the anomic medical objectivity of true chrome-and-matte-black cyberpunk. Also, Shepard’s amazing ‘R&R’ in that issue seems to capture a kind of Mirrorshades incandescence without in any way kowtowing to shock-effect high-tech.

  It seems to me that ‘R&R’ and ‘Down and Out’ both represent a kind of elastic and powerful reaction of other 80s writers to the impact of cyberpunk. A kind of waking from dogmatic slumbers which, without following the c-p line at all, still shows a new kind of alertness and commitment. A sense that the stakes have been raised. A healthy and very encouraging reaction to challenge — and not a blind reaction by any means, but an intelligent and wide-ranging response.”

  The Final Remake of The Return of Little Latin Larry, with a Completely Remastered Soundtrack and the Original Audience

  Pat Cadigan

  Pat Cadigan gives us a variety of VR that aspires to historicity in this witty piece; “fraudulent pasts and faked memories” will get you a kick in the teeth from the authorities. The surface of this story is ornamented with all the bedazzlements of classic cyberpunk: drugs and rock and roll and cyborgs and a technophilic art form. Narrators with an attitude have always been a specialty of Cadigan and here Gracie lays down a line of pharmaceutical quality wisecracks and caustic insight. But what informs this story is its pervasive sense of irony: this culture, so desperate to recover a lost past, has got it pretty much all wrong.

  So! Fix yourself a smell and sit down!

  There’s a wet bar, too, if you go that way. You know, for years I told myself I didn’t, even though I always kept a full complement of cheers, vines, and the hards and their pards. I’d say to myself, Oh, but of course the hooch is strictly for hospitality and nothing else.

  But now, I’m out about it and I really feel much more non-bad about it. And wasn’t it Elvis who said, “Drinkers, like the poor, we will always have with us”?

  Or was that Dylan? Might have been — Dylan was the big expert on drinkers, wasn’t he, dying as he did face down in the gutter — lucky beast! — not fifty paces from the Tired Horse Tavern where he came up with his biggest and best — “All the Tired Horses” (of course!), “Knockin’ on Fern Hill’s Door,” “The Hand That Signed a Paper Got to Serve Somebody,” and, my personal favorite, “Do Not Go Gentle into Those Subterranean Homesick Blues.” “Rage, rage against the leaders, watch the parking—”

  Sorry, sorry, sorry! I can barely hold still, this is such an exciting time for me. I think my man Dylan put it best when he said, “I sang in my chains: everybody must get stoned.” One of his most evocative lines, at least for me. Even now, long, long, long after I first read it, it still stirs up for me the sensation of that state where you’re practically thrumming in excitement, and the only thing that keeps you from flying up in the air and dragging the whole world after you like a cape tied around your shoulders is the incontrovertible fact of your just-that-much-too-heavy flesh —

  Sorry again! The human condition tends to make me wax poetic. Rather, it makes me want to wax poetic, except I can never think of the poetic counterpart to words like “incontrovertible.” Got a drink now? Good, good, sit, sit. Did you smell anything you liked? No? Ah — you must tell me the truth here: did the aromabar intimidate you, or are you just not olfactory? I vow that either way, I’m not insulted, truly I’m not. Not all senses can be our senses, can they? And when you’re retro besides — well, some people can get that so wrong.

  Like the other day. Packed in my usual buzzbomb was a silly tag from one of my sillier friends telling me that everyone was saying behind my back that I was the most retro creature they’d ever heard of. I tagged back to tell Old Sillyhead that not only were they saying it behind my back, but also behind my front, too, and in front of my back and all that, and so what.

  Anyway, it’s not like I’m detoxing and then relapsing just for the wallop that first sinful sip will give you. I know people who have gone through three and four livers that way, even with top-of-the-line blood-doping. But I don’t consider them drinkers. And personally, I think Teflon™ on the central nervous system is cheating.

  And in spite of what you may have heard, the aromabar really is just for amusement, I don’t do aromatherapy of any kind. Of course, anyone who does is welcome to mix themselves a bouquet with my essences and if they want to claim it gives them some kind of therapeutic fizz, I’m not going to argue with them. After all, we all sing our own particular song in our chains, don’t we.

  But you’ll want to know about the last remake, won’t you. That last remake. Everybody always wants to know about that. I swear, I’ll do a thousand projects before I go gentle into my subterranean homesick blues and the one thing I’ll be remembered for is that damned remake. Everyone’ll still be mad at me for one of two reasons and by god, they’ll both be wrong.

  So, one more time, for the record and with feeling: I did not rediscover Little Latin Larry, and I didn’t kill him.

  Who did?

  Well, I was afraid you’d ask me that.

  First of all, let’s get all the facts we know — all right, all the facts I know — straight. You’ll pardon me if I go over to the bar and fix myself a few memory aids. This brown stuff here, this is an esoteric drink called Old Peculier, which is the liquid equivalent of wrapping yourself in a comfy blanket on an uncommonly bad day. Fair Annie — you wouldn’t know her, she liked the low-profile life—introduced me to it. But this other stuff that looks a lot like, well, frankly, urine—it’s no-class lager. Cheap beer was the term for it then and it was sought after for both its cheapness and its beerness, if you see what I mean.

  The Old Peculier is for drinking, just because I like it. But the lager is for smelling, because I can remember Larry best when I smell cheap beer. It was just about the only thing you ever smelled around Larry.

  And let’s get something else straight: the full name of the band was Little Latin Larry and His Loopy Louies, His Luscious Latinaires, and His Lascivious Latinettes.

  Little Latin Larry was, of course, lead vocalist, conductor, arranger, and erstwhile composer. Which is to say, for a while, he was trying out some originals on the playlist. I’ve heard them. They weren’t too bad, you know; they were just meant to be songs to dance to, or jump up and down to, or puke to, if you went that way (not like the Bulimic Era stuff — that was later, and didn’t have much to do with having a good time). But every time Larry tried to slip in an original, everyone would just kind of stand there looking
puzzled. There’d be some people dancing, some people nodding along, a few of the hard-core puking, but most of them just stood around with these lost expressions, and you could tell they were trying to place the song and couldn’t. So Larry forgot about being even a cheap-beer ditty-monger and went back to covers. There were skintil-lions of bands that played covers for anyone who hired them, but when Larry and the band did a cover it was…I could say that when Little Latin Larry and Co. covered a song it was, for the duration, completely their own, as if no one else had ever sung it. And if I did put it that way, I would be both right and wrong. Just as if I said, when they covered a song, it was a complete tribute to the original artists. That would be right and wrong as well.

  It was both. It was neither. It was an experience. It was all shades of one experience, a million experiences in one. In other words, you had to be there. Yes. You had to be there at least once.

  But no, I won’t try to wiggle out on that one. Even if there is so much truth to it that most people were there once. Whether they were there or not.

  I don’t expect you to understand me. I’m a visionary. No, just kidding, just shaking your leg, as (I think) they used to say.

  All right, back to it, now. The Larry people came to me. I don’t care what they told everyone later about my chasing them over hill and dale, or chip and dale, or nook and cranny. The Realm of the Senses Theatre kept me busy enough that I didn’t have to chase anyone. People were always beating down the door with sense-memories. My staff at that time was a mad thing named Ola, about three and a half feet tall — achondroplasia — who usually kept most of her brain in her sidekick, and vice versa. Half the time, you never knew exactly which was which. It wasn’t really any kind of intentional thing, or a statement or anything. Ola just went that way. A happy accident. Happy for Ola. So she mated with a machine, so what. I may be retro, but I’m not that retro; I certainly wasn’t then.