by John Gribbin
So, you see, Inside and Out™ really is inside and out. We can regulate your body, regulate your mood and regulate your lifestyle, complete homeostasis, all the while making sure that even the laziest person has to walk around each day to get to a Fountain. As a result, we’ve regulated out most childhood and adult diseases, and made wellness a daily norm. The only things we haven’t been able to change are death, the aging process and, of course, conception and birth. Although, as you will see when I present V.5 of Inside and Out™ in a few minutes, we have made some interesting progress.
It’s nearly time and I check my Vitals on the screen again, and my wife’s Vitals on my desk tablet. She’s Red, of course, and she looks stable at the moment. So all’s well and by the end of today I will have a son. I go to my private Fountain and step inside. I place my thumb on the pad. I don’t want anything to go wrong at the WMC, no clues from my Vitals that this has been the most stressful year of my life.
“Regulate.”
The familiar ‘psst’ of the vacuum extraction calms me, and then I see the Amber outer of my Vitals return to Green. The familiar gentle press of confidence fills my mind, and I let it filter through my senses as the worries for my wife and my irritation at Tendo disappear. My wall screen snaps into life and I am confronted with the full Council of the WMC.
Part 2
SIA Unit, New York City,
28th September 2095
Julia Farraday watched the pulsing of the red screen visual as the button stuck to her huge contracting stomach sent signals. Her room at SIA resembled a huge Fountain, and although she was free to move about she could hardly stand because of the pain.
“Aaargh! It’s here again. Tendo! Make it stop.”
Tendo took Julia’s hand.
“I’m sorry, Julia. You chose a Class 3 Authentic Birth, with just regular pain killer. Everything is progressing normally and the baby should be here very soon.”
Julia screamed again, then flopped back on the bed.
“Very soon? Minutes? Hours? I know about childbirth. I’ve researched it on the HistoryNet. This could go on for hours, days, even. Back in the old days women could have an epidural injection, with complete pain relief, and pethidine, and a midwife who would help. No offense, Tendo.”
“None taken, Julia. But you know as well as I do that things have changed. The Version 3 ‘Let’s Leave Lasers Outside Health’ initiative has all but ruled out Cesarean Section and epidural. According to my risk assessment...”
“I know, I know. My mother had breast enhancement and facial surgery when she was younger, and she ended up Culminating very early due to chronic pain.”
Of course, thanks to Fountains, such surgical procedures were now unnecessary: with The Aesthetics option, parents could choose the way their child would look before they were born.
“Who needs surgery these days? We’re all so damn healthy, survival of the fittest is a distant memory.”
“Yeah. I guess so. Darwin would be turning in his grave. But it’s better this way. Maximum wellbeing, minimum effort.”
“Is it, though? Is it, Tendo? I sometimes wonder. I read on the HistoryNet that there were hospitals and suchlike, with people to look after you if you were sick. That is, had a serious malcondition.”
“Just like SIA. No different, really.”
Julia frowned.
“But it is. Something’s missing. It’s like the Wall Screens. Since they’ve been introduced I could count the number of face to faces I’ve had. Angus, you, sure, but otherwise nothing. And my baby. He might grow up never seeing anyone except me and Angus. And you of course.”
Tendo laughed.
“But his educational outcomes will be fine. You can learn everything from the EduCloud. All children do it that way now.”
“Hmm. But what about touching? What about other people’s smells. You know what I miss? The caring. I know it sounds silly, and day to day I don’t think about it much, but I really miss something that’s invisible, that you can’t get onto a screen or a program. Another person caring. Yes. That’s it! Understanding. That’s what I miss. So isolating.”
“Isolating? We’ve never had such good access to other people, other parts of the world. Wall screens can take you to Africa and even adjust the ambient temperature in the room. You can sit with Gorillas and study their community. You can sit in your sister’s lounge with her virtually and share experiences.”
“But what about the other senses? I can’t feel the Gorilla’s skin or touch my sister’s hair. I can’t smell the trees or taste the wind. I miss actual things.”
“You’re making Darwin spin for sure now. But you must listen to me now, Julia. This is a part of evolution that we haven’t R&Ded out.”
“Not yet, anyway. Aaargh! Again. So close together, Tendo. And I don’t care about your risk assessment or Angus’ ideas. Where is he anyway? Aaargh...”
Tendo looked at the monitor and nodded. Julia was Red, but her Vitals were as expected in the final stages of labor. He pretended to busy himself around the birthing station to stall for time. Julia’s contraction faded. “So where is he?” she asked.
“He’s in WMC. He’ll be here as soon as he can.”
“Great. Just great. His first child and he can’t even be bothered to be here.” She wriggled a little, and Tendo felt a little sorry for her. Suddenly she sat up and stared at him. “Version 5. He’s telling them about Version 5, isn’t he? Is it that advanced, Tendo?” Julia’s monitor was glowing deep red, and a rosy hue filled the room. She tried to get out of bed, then flopped back onto the pillow. “Where are the other women, the other birthers? I can’t hear any more screams? Where are they, Tendo? Tendo?”
Tendo took her hand.
“It’s OK, Julia, you’re going into regression. You won’t remember anything about it after the birth. When a woman is about to give birth their hormones change quickly and we can’t risk a standard Fountain procedure, so we withdraw it for a week or so, restarting as soon as the baby is born. Very common in the authentic birth, which is the safest way and, I believe, why you and Angus chose it?”
Julia breathed heavily and perspiration pushed through her pores for the first time in over a decade.
“I know exactly what’s going on here. You’ve got us here so that you can study us, find out about life and death, how to make people live forever, so that you can fill them full of whatever concoction they need. And I know what goes on at culmination. I know it’s euthanasia.”
Tendo tensed.
“No Julia. It is not. It’s appropriate pain relief at end of life. Please don’t use the D word. And keep your voice down. None of this is going to do your son any good. And you won’t remember it in the morning.”
Julia sat up straight.
“My son. Yeah. My son. I’m not going to allow it. He’s not going to be chipped. Because if he is, I’ll never know who he really is. He’ll be controlled by Inside and Out™. No. He’s not being chipped.”
Tendo stood by the trolley, where the delivery kit and the chipping gun lay. This was going to be a tricky one. He’d attended thousands of births before he became a Grade 1 Keeper, and almost every one had tried to prevent the chipping process. He’d developed a method of completing the process during the delivery itself, then, whilst the mother was still in regression, he would agree that chipping was not necessary. When the mother was recovering from regression they would remember nothing and naturally assume that their child was chipped for its own good. He took the chipping gun and placed it in the top pocket of his overall.
He knew that soon Julia would demand that someone cut her open and remove the child, and this was the worst part for him. Tendo had been through surgery and all its side effects and suffered the consequences. He had been so ill that he had failed to get the Initial Diagnosis and chip at Inside and Out™ V.1 and, as a result had not attended the Fountain.
Eventually he had been found in his flat on the outskirts of town in the nick of time, minu
tes before death, and been brought to SIA. There, his wounds had been cleaned and his medical state assessed. The infection from surgery had set in and it was too late to save the dead tissue of his lower legs and his right eye. He had been one of the first people to try cybernetic implants and receive independently grown and harvested tissue. Tendo was, therefore, different. If he were to go to the Fountain and to place his thumb on the pad, the screen would turn gray. Because of the non-human tissue and the cybernetics, a true homeostatic level could not be reached and he could not receive the elixir that improved other people’s lives.
As a result he was a Keeper. He looked after the Fountain over which he was given jurisdiction and specific Level 3 Reds. Because Angus Farraday had supervised his recovery and his reintegration, Tendo had become his and Julia’s private Fountain Keeper for the last five years, after he had completed the highest level training; several years of speed learning the cumulative knowledge of the WMC in their specialist center at EduCloud.
Tendo knew that his gray status had advantages as well as disadvantages. On one hand he couldn’t enjoy the excellent health of the general population and his lifespan was much shorter than someone who was maintained. On the other hand he was committed to free thought and could never be tempted into buying Life Credits in order to dose up on happiness. Tendo was capable of sadness without it being detected on his Vitals, because for all intents and purposes he had no Vitals. He was, it seemed, dead. But, ironically, he was more alive than most, even Angus Farraday.
Tendo had many conversations with Angus about what life was and how it could be maintained forever. Yet Angus was the first to admit that, even now, no one knew what dark matter was, or what the essence of life was, or had solved the question of decoherence. Centuries of work had gone into trying to recreate life in laboratory conditions, but it was impossible. Despite Angus’ lapses in understanding over Inside and Out™ and its consequences, Tendo respected him in his basic assumptions.
Angus’ favorite statement was Nietzsche’s ‘What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’, and Tendo knew that with stringent risk assessments and ever-developing pharmaceutical treatments daily, the chances of dying grew less and less. Now, the only way to die was to be involved in a trauma, accidentally or voluntarily, that would cause immediate death. Or somehow become a Keeper. Otherwise, someone would take your injured body to the nearest Fountain or to SIA and it would be repaired with body parts that were either mechanical or built in a lab, and you would be at the mercy of the ravages of life without Inside and Out™. Just like Tendo.
Julia was contracting again, and the screen was almost scarlet.
“Get Angus! Get him.”
“You know I can’t do that, Julia. It will be time soon. Then you’ll have a baby to care for.”
She writhed on the bed and her face turned purple with the strain of pushing.
“He won’t have the chip. He won’t. Don’t give it to him, Tendo. I don’t care what Angus says. Don’t. OK?”
He could see the baby’s head crowning and he pulled out the chipping gun. Julia screamed and pushed, screamed and pushed. It was straightforward, the baby appeared and was pushed out, and Tendo breathed a sigh of relief. The baby boy looked up at him, eyes wide and mouth seeking food like a baby bird, and Tendo thought he had never seen such innocence. He pushed the gun against the tiny wrist and pulled the trigger.
Julia lay back, exhausted. Tendo procured the placenta and replenished Julia’s Vitals from the Fountain. In no time, she was feeding her baby, smiling and asking for tea. Her regression was over and later, when she asked what had happened, he would tell that of course her son was chipped, why wouldn’t he be? Any doubt in Julia’s mind would be dispelled by the healthy baby at her breast. He watched as the chip registered with the HealthCloud, where all the records were stored, and a small pulsing green square appeared on the screen, beside Julia’s now amber Vitals. Taking Julia’s LifePhone, he switched the program to MomMode, where she would be able to watch her baby son’s Vitals next to her own everywhere she went.
Still no sign of Angus. Tendo stepped out of the birthing station and into the huge expense of the SIA where the whole birthing department used to be. All the walls had been dismantled, save the ones that enclosed Julia, and a narrow passage at the back through which she would be taken home with her son.
Part 3
The Farraday Institute,
28th September 2095, World Medicine Congress
My screen brightens, and a five minute countdown appears in the corner. The WMC meeting is broadcast live to all world leaders, who have a major financial stake in the development of Inside and Out™. Back in 2015 the financial model of the pharmaceutical companies was changing, and most of the major pharmaceutical products were out of patent. With the human genome mapped in 2003, and major genes patented for ten years, many of the companies who had paid millions of dollars to ‘own’ a gene now found that, without interactivity from other gene owners, they were useless.
It was stalemate, with all the components of human life playing each other off. The patents lapsed and, for a time, I thought that the whole medical world would collapse. No research was undertaken because everyone was too busy trying to sell products to a market that was quickly saturated with generic drugs, available on the primitive Internet in the time before the WorldCloud and the HealthCloud.
The breakthrough came in 2020 when a consortium called 2020 Vision first suggested a meeting of the heads of the big pharmaceutical companies. I was fresh out of University with a degree in chemistry, when I was contracted to help them research a way to improve healthcare. Chronic illness was increasing, and with a change in climate the whole world population was experiencing a lagging health effect. It would take adaptation throughout generations for the human body to become accustomed to the warm, wet weather. Some areas were fast becoming uninhabitable, and with communication technology developing daily, for the first time we could all see death and deprivation live in our lounges on touch-panel wall screens, 24/7.
I’d been relaxing at a friend’s home when the idea first stuck me. A particularly harrowing scene of a severely dehydrated family escaping from floods was playing out live, and my friend was on the edge of his seat. During the footage, he fetched bottles of water from the kitchen and commented on his own health three times more than usual. I realized there and then that people are obsessed with their health status, and not just theirs but other people’s too. Until now I had been working on psychological risk assessment, that is, self-scanning and risk-taking. My focus had been alcohol and tobacco, and why people who knew they were pathological continued to use them. The answer that cropped up time and time again was happiness, it made them happy. In that moment, there in my friend’s home, I put together the triad of the basis of Inside and Out™: self-diagnosis, risk-assessment, happiness. If 2020 Vision could provide a system that allowed people to have constant sight of their health status, a quick and easy yet regulated way to self-medicate based on their health status, they would have more awareness of their health and an instant prognosis of what pathological substances would do to them They cease their risk-taking behavior, as they would no longer be able to ignore their consequent bad health. Therefore these substances would not be able to make them as happy.
The cost/benefit analysis was entirely positive, given a little help from technology and pharmaceuticals. Genetics and pharmaceuticals: evolution could be speeded up by forcing everyone to be ‘the fittest’ and therefore adapting only to the positive aspects of the changing world. Even I, in my youth, knew that eugenics was a flawed program, and cruel. No. To work, the program must be available to every single human being, and they must voluntarily take it up, or require persuasion only via ethical and legal means such as advertising, media influence or genetic modification of foods.
It took me ten years to work my way to the top of 2020 Vision, and then establish Inside and Out™. The program was developed and world governments, plus a
huge sample of people of every ethnicity and race, were consulted. In 2044 the first Fountain was opened and the program went fully online. Even the most cynical politician wouldn’t disagree with a program that would prolong his life indefinitely.
The five minutes has counted down and a green pulse now indicates that we are live to the world. A strip of Vitals appear on the bottom of the screen and, for now, everyone is Green. Marcus Pellas, the President of WMC, begins.
“Welcome to the 2095 meeting of the World Medicine Congress, convened on the day that Louis Pasteur, to whom we owe a great legacy, culminated in 1895. Many of the great minds of the past millennium culminated all too soon, often without reaping the benefits of their work. Here at WMC, our aim is to prolong life. Before we hear from Angus Farraday, who has an important update on Inside and Out™, I will appraise you of the world population figures.”
A WorldPOP chart, the main public outcome marker for Inside and Out™, flickers in the background of the screen and the overall color is green, with a few red dots.
“In 2012, when the world population was 7.041 billion, the United Nations predicted that the world population by 2095 would be 15 billion. Other estimates, which incorporated the effects of climate change and disease, estimated that the world population would fall to 5.065 billion. I am pleased to announce that the world population as of this moment is 22.078 billion people. As you can see from the chart, their World Vitals are Green.”
Most of the WMC are on their feet, applauding and nodding. Only a few members stay seated, but even these skeptics are smiling and nodding their approval. No amber or red on the strip.
“And now, in the light of this astounding success, please welcome Angus Farraday, Founder of Inside and Out™, who is going to explain Version 5 of the program.”
