by H. G. Stratmann
What does a “system” do to the people who run it?
The tall trim man in the cream-colored coat stood looking down at me with a sinister smile. His bristly graying hair and piercing eyes enhanced an air of professional superiority and power. He toyed with the knot of his tie as if eager to start his work. Sardonic lips curled around ivory teeth as he spoke to me.
“We have ways of making you well.”
A whiff of wintergreen mouthwash wafted toward me on his breath. The sickly scent of musk cologne grew stronger as he leaned over me with an expression of oily confidence—examining my face and flesh with scientific interest as I lay cowering on the bed. His pupils dilated, as if he could see completely through the coarse, flimsy gown I wore that barely covered my nakedness.
Behind him, lurking in a corner of the shadowy room, two men waited to carry out his orders. They’d already prepared me for his ministrations—stripping me of my clothes, attaching devices to monitor the inner workings of my body, and inserting sharp needles into my veins. Their starched alabaster uniforms made them blend into the room’s dingy pale walls with chameleonlike concealment. But one word from this man who held the power of life and death over me would bring that well-trained pair back to my side.
My captor extracted a heavy metal cylinder from a pocket in his lab coat. He twisted the end of the silvery instrument and turned a clicking wheel to adjust the device’s dazzling beam for proper focus. Satisfied it’d be ready when needed, he returned the cylinder to his pocket and pried a tablet computer from its dock at the foot of my bed.
His manicured fingertip touched the computer’s screen with delicate precision, studying the intimate information it contained about me. Though he’d shielded the screen from me, I imagined my record beginning with the data printed on the plastic bracelet encircling my left wrist.
Name: Thompson, Esther A. Gender: F. DOB: 9/15/2030. Age: 28. IDN: 398457820.
But while he learned every documented detail of my life and misdeeds, the only information about himself he’d imparted was his name—sewn in blood-red cursive above his coat’s left upper pocket.
Hans G. Schuller.
Then the interrogation began. Schuller’s cold visage shifted from the computer’s screen to me. I pictured him squinting down on a monocle and speaking with a Prussian accent. “Your file contains disturbing information, Ms. Thompson. We have a great deal of work to do on you. It will go much easier if you cooperate.”
I shivered and shrank back in the bed.
A wolfish grin creased Schuller’s face as he glanced at his computer. “The toxicology screen we performed on you shows numerous abnormal values. Your LDL cholesterol is well above the prescribed upper limit of 100 mg/dl. Blood levels of apolipoprotein B, hemoglobin A1c, and triglycerides are equally dangerous.
“Even if you hadn’t been caught in possession of illegal substances, your addiction was obvious. The clothes you were wearing when you were arrested were several sizes too small. Even a layperson could see your BMI was above the legal limit of 29.9.”
The two nurses standing behind him frowned as Hans Schuller, M.D., pronounced his diagnosis. “Ms. Thompson, you are guilty of Class I Obesity. Before I’m finished with you I’ll know how and why you committed your crimes.”
* * * *
The physician placed the computer back into its dock. “Fortunately, your condition can be reversed. We’ll treat you using a standard protocol to purge the toxins you’ve ingested from your system. You’ll be injected with atherophilic nanobots to remove the fatty streaks and minor plaquing our diagnostic probes found in your coronary arteries and aorta. Carrier bots will transport activated stem cells obtained from your blood and bone marrow to your heart and other organs to repair the early damage we detected in them. Within a few days your circulatory system and viscera will be healthy again.”
He studied the fatty folds quivering on the bottoms of my upper arms. “Dealing with the hyperadiposity and cosmetic components of your medical problems will take longer. Lipophagic nanobots will selectively eliminate the largest collections of adipose tissue. Then weight-adjusted doses of medications will make your body catabolize remaining excess fat stores. Our goal is to reduce your body mass index to a normal range of 18.5 to 24.9. You’ll also be placed on a regimen of diet and exercise to improve your overall conditioning and help you maintain your ideal body weight in the future.”
I looked at him innocently. “That all sounds very technical, doctor. But I know you’re trying to help me.”
“Naturally!”
The physician gave the two burly male nurses behind him jargon-filled orders beyond the understanding of anyone who wasn’t a medical professional. As the pair left to carry out his instructions for my treatment, Schuller’s gaze bored into my pudgy face.
“Everything I’ve described so far is designed to treat your symptoms and not your underlying problem, Ms. Thompson. And we both know what that is, don’t we?”
I lowered my eyes. “Yes . . .”
The doctor sighed. “It’s bad enough that what you did is antisocial and illegal. But the worst thing is the damage it’s done to your health. For the sake of tasting the ‘forbidden calories’ you’ve put your life at risk. You’ll need intensive behavior modification treatment to prevent you from harming yourself again.”
I tried looking penitent. There was no concealing my guilt as Dr. Schuller performed a physical exam. I winced when he extracted the silver ophthalmoscope from his pocket again and shone its blinding light in my eyes. Thick layers of fat lining my chest and abdomen were exposed to his scrutiny as he brushed a frigid stethoscope head across them. My overstuffed thighs and buttocks lay bare to his sight and touch.
The doctor retrieved his tablet computer, then pressed the tip of his right index finger against the thick disc a centimeter wide implanted just above my left breast. His fingertip massaged the skin over my pill-sized MNM as he watched information appear on the computer’s screen.
Schuller stopped palpating me. “Now I know how you became fat, Ms. Thompson. Your Metabolic NanoMonitor maintains a continuous record of your body chemistry and overall health. I just made it turn ‘informer’ on you.”
He flexed his right index finger. “There’s a programmer the size of a grain of rice implanted in my fingertip. That device communicated with your MNM using a coded ultra-short range radio signal. I had it command your MNM to download all the data it has accumulated on you over the past year.”
The doctor showed me graphs and tables of information on the computer’s screen. “Here’s what your MNM recorded about your physiological status over that time, its analysis of the types and amounts of foods you ate, and your daily activity level. Now I have all the results I need to deal with you. It would be in your best interest to give me the details of what brought you to this sorry state.”
I brushed blond bangs from my perspiring forehead. “You must’ve heard this kind of story before, doctor. A friend invited me and several other people to a party about a year ago. After we’d been munching on fresh fruit and soy snacks for a while, our hostess brought out a small white cardboard box. It was filled with doughnuts dusted with powdered sugar.”
The doctor nodded. “Simple doughnuts like that are still legal. Anyone at least twenty-one years old can buy them in a grocery store that has a confection license. Eaten in moderation, with proper attention to one’s daily nutritional and calorie limits, they’re really not harmful. But after trying one, some people get hooked on them.”
I sniffled. “I know that now . . . but it happened so gradually I didn’t realize what was going on until it was too late. At first, we all limited ourselves to the one doughnut our MNMs allowed us to eat. But later I saw my friend sneak a second doughnut out of the box. Yes, she paid for it later that evening. I saw her turn pale and sweaty before rushing to the bathroom and emptying her stomach. But she survived and didn’t seem remorseful. She told me that second doughnut was so delicious it was worth getting sick to eat it.
“For days afterward I couldn’t get the taste of that doughnut I’d eaten out of my mouth. It’d been so flaky and sweet! I kept fantasizing about eating another. Later that week I bought a packaged doughnut at a grocery store. I took it home—planning to just nibble at it to stretch it out over the entire evening. But seconds later there were only crumbs on my plate.”
My eyes moistened. “Before long I was starting every morning with a doughnut. I visited websites that told what else you could do with one and tried every perversion possible. Sometimes I licked the powdered sugar off first before devouring the doughnut’s naked crust. Others I dunked in coffee. I even broke the doughnut into bite-size pieces and gorged myself on those chewy chunks.
“As long as I was careful about what I ate the rest of the day, I felt fine. No—the ‘sugar rush’ they talk about made me feel great. But after a while a single doughnut a day wasn’t enough. I tried to buy more than one doughnut at a time, but I couldn’t—at least not legally. Every store I went to obeyed the ‘one to a customer per twenty-four hours’ rule. And since all stores’ computer systems are connected to the national financial network, going to a different store the same day to buy another doughnut didn’t work. When I tried, the second store flagged me as being over my recommended daily allowance.”
The doctor said, “Let me guess how you got around that. You bought a doughnut one day—but didn’t eat it until you could buy a second one the next day. Then you had a ‘twofer’ orgy.”
“Yes. But then my MNM made me pay for my sin.”
Schuller grunted. “A Metabolic NanoMonitor is programmed to react when a person’s diet deviates from his or her optimal nutritional profile. The reaction you had to eating two doughnuts at once was caused by your MNM detecting excess carbohydrate absorption and a surge in your serum glucose. It also analyzed levels of trans fats and other dangerous substances in your blood, then ‘reconstructed’ what kind and amount of food you’d ingested.
“After determining that what you ate was above healthy limits, the MNM activated chemoreceptors and mechanoreceptors in your stomach and other areas of the gastrointestinal tract. That in turn stimulated parts of your central and peripheral nervous systems to cause the smooth muscle contractions, reverse peristalsis, and other effects you experienced.”
My eyes widened. “That sounds so complicated, doctor. All I know is I felt sick and threw up.”
The physician explained, “Although what the MNM does makes you feel bad at the time, ultimately it’s for your own good. First, it expels those harmful materials from your body. Second, it helps condition you to avoid performing that unhealthy behavior again. It’s similar to the effects of an obsolete medication, disulfiram, which was once used to treat alcoholics. People taking disulfiram experienced symptoms similar to yours if they drank alcohol—and would thus be motivated to not drink it again.
“But the MNM does more than that. When working properly, it also monitors your body continuously to make sure it’s ‘tuned up’ for optimal health. The MNM checks and regulates your entire body chemistry—electrolytes, hormones, et cetera—to keep all your organ systems working well. It even initiates first aid when it detects malignant cells or other life-threatening problems. When it can’t repair a particular problem, such as if someone were injured in a serious accident, its transceiver automatically notifies the local healthcare system so a person can receive definitive help.”
I lowered my head. “I found out about that the day I discovered how serious my addiction was—and did something that nearly killed me.
“I hoarded two extra doughnuts and ate three at once!”
* * * *
The doctor’s face showed slight sympathy. “After the initial ‘high’ you must’ve been very ill.”
“Yes. But besides making me feel miserable my MNM also notified Emergency Medical Services. I was rushed to the nearest hospital and treated for my overdose. Then I was admitted to an intensive care unit and evaluated by a psychiatrist. After she determined I wasn’t suicidal I was released. Of course, the emergency room doctor had to report what I’d done to the authorities. But since this was my first offense they decided not to prosecute.”
I drew my knees up and hugged my legs. “I should’ve learned my lesson and sworn off illicit amounts of sweets—and for a while I did. But then my craving got the better of me again. My doctors had cautioned me to avoid doughnuts and anything with above-average amounts of sugar or other carbs, because they were afraid I couldn’t eat just one.
“They were right. Maybe I would’ve stayed sober if I hadn’t convinced myself it was all right for me to read about and see pictures of doughnuts and pastries. I found websites that—for a fee—let you download images and information about them. You’re a doctor and have to study such things, but most people my age have probably never heard of some of the names I learned. Cream puffs and crullers. Cobblers and éclairs. Baklava and Napoleons—shall I go on?”
The doctor licked his lips. “Some basic bakery goods are available licitly, with strict limits on how much a person can buy.”
I shook my head. “That wasn’t good enough for someone as addicted to them as I was. And the few pastries sold legally are so healthy they’re nearly tasteless—like putting a dab of frosting on the plastic they’re sealed in.
“So I did some checking. The ‘double-dipping’ friend whose party had started me on my road to ruin told me she knew a dealer—a former baker who’d worked for Gooey Glaze Doughnuts before the government outlawed them. She told me he gave the first one for free. . . .”
I turned my face away from the doctor. “I’m ashamed to admit I’d become so depraved I would’ve sold my body for a Long John with white frosting and rainbow sprinkles. What that dealer offered me was more alluring—a genuine Gooey Glaze! It wasn’t that I’d be doing something illegal or immoral that held me back. I knew how my MNM would react if I became addicted to those delicacies. So I did the only thing I could to let me feed my doughnut habit without fear of exposure—at least not right away.”
Schuller glanced at the computer screen. “It’s all here in the data I downloaded from your MNM. You committed the most serious sin against your health imaginable. You had an illegal MNM operation performed—reprogramming your device so it could still analyze what you were eating but not respond appropriately to the harmful substances you ingested. That way you could gorge yourself without fear of sickness or detection—until your fat-filled body itself exposed your crime.
“Fortunately you didn’t have your MNM explanted. Everyone is warned of the danger of doing that when the device is inserted. Yet each year, thousands die at the hands of backstreet butchers who claim they can safely remove it—for a price. Those illegal operations are uniformly fatal because the MNM, like the CPU in a computer, is only the coordinating component of a vast data processing and control system within a person’s body.”
The doctor continued, “Some people forget that when their MNMs were implanted they were also injected with nanoscale replicators. Those tiny machines produce fibrils and other materials that infiltrate a person’s nerves and major organ systems—acting like the wires in an electrical system to feed information back to the MNM and carry out its commands. That network the replicators create can’t be removed. It’s like a spider web pervading a person’s body. And if its connection with the MNM is suddenly disrupted when someone cuts out that device, the effects on the brain and other vital organs are catastrophic.”
He shuddered. “Maybe, instead of just telling people what happens when an MNM is removed, they should be shown the look of indescribable agony on a dead victim’s face. Perhaps then fewer would inadvertently commit suicide by having that illegal procedure.”
As Schuller finished his cautionary tale, the two nurses returned. One of them held a pistol-like injector. The doctor said, “I’m glad you didn’t make the mistake of having your MNM removed, Ms. Thompson. But now we must correct the mistakes you did make. Don’t worry, the injection won’t be too painful. . . .”
I cringed as the injector’s cold metal tip pressed against my arm. There was a snap and hiss—followed by a sensation like cobra venom coursing through my body.
* * * *
“What are you in for?”
I glanced at the elderly man speaking near my right elbow. He was walking on a moving treadmill beside me, identical to the one where I struggled to maintain a brisk pace. My partner in the large exercise room wore the same style of fluorescent-orange jumpsuit I did. His white hair and fluffy beard were damp with sweat. A smile beamed from his rosy face.
My gaze flitted to the front of the room, where two dozen of our morbidly obese compatriots walked silently in side-by-side pairs on their own individual treadmills. The three brawny physical therapists seated far away, supervising this session, weren’t looking toward us. I took a chance they wouldn’t hear my reply above the rumbling motors powering our treadmills and direct their attention my way.
I whispered, “Doughnuts. They’re so scrump-tious I couldn’t get enough of them!”
The man’s round belly shook like a bowlful of jelly. “I’m too fond of cookies and milk.”
His eyes twinkled as he gripped the horizontal iron bar in front of him. “The name’s Nick. I’d shake your hand, but this treadmill’s moving so fast if I let go I’ll fly off the end!”
The therapists guarding us were suddenly preoccupied hoisting up a rotund wheezing woman who’d fallen face-down on her own machine’s moving belt.
“I’m Esther. Been here long?”
Nick groaned. “They nabbed me three weeks ago—the night before Christmas. I should’ve stayed in my house, but the snow falling outside my window that evening looked so beautiful I went out to enjoy it. Just my luck a patrol car spotted me giving toys I’d made to the neighborhood children playing outside. I told the police I looked so round because I was wearing extra layers of clothing under my coat to keep warm. They knew better.
“Then the cops raided my house and found my secret stash of goodies. They booked me, then brought me here.”
He glanced down at his jiggling midsection. “You should’ve seen me before they injected their fat-munching nanobots into me and put me on a strict regimen of diet and exercise. Dr. Schuller says it’ll be at another ten weeks of treatment before I’m ‘normal.’ And before we leave he’ll make sure our MNMs are working again—unless we do something about it.”
I sighed. “What can we do? Everyone here is guilty of the same crime—having our MNMs illegally modified so we could eat what we want. A nurse told me that when we’re released we’ll always be on a ‘convicted overeater’ registry. Each of us will also get a small reader to place over the MNM every week. It’ll transmit a summary of everything we’ve eaten to a central monitoring station. If we don’t do it, we’ll wind up back here!”
Nick’s snowy beard shuddered. “And if we have our MNMs illegally disabled again and get caught, they’ll put us someplace worse. There’s a special Limbic System Aversion Therapy ward here for repeat offenders. They use techniques that will definitely ‘cure’ us—if we can stand the pain and survive the treatment. Afterward we’ll never be naughty again . . . or good for anything either!”
I looked up and saw attendants wheel the fallen woman at the front of the room out on a stretcher. Soon the therapists would be focusing their attention back on us. I murmured, “I guess we have no choice but to be nice and let our MNMs alone when we leave here.”
Nick shook his head. “That won’t work either. Our MNMs are supposed to keep us healthy and help us live longer. But that’s not all they do.
“They’re also programmed to kill us!”
* * * *
I didn’t learn what he meant—at least not then. Before I could ask him, the therapists announced our exercise session was over and herded us all out to a gray room with concrete walls for our communal lunch. There guards marched us to several rows of long rectangular steel tables. Each of us was directed to a preassigned seat where scowling orderlies placed a meal individualized for our nutritional needs.
Nick was ordered to a chair well away from mine. I could only exchange glances with him as I chewed the chalky chicken-flavored protein patty, soggy squash, and wilted lettuce leaves on my aluminum plate. Sipping my vegetable juice from a tin cup, I wondered what he knew.
I didn’t find out at our next destination either. The guards were more laissez-faire about where each of their charges sat in that lecture room. But although Nick was able to squeeze into the hard wooden seat on my left, we couldn’t share any private words due to the unremitting attention of our lecturer. She was a prim matron with hair stretched taut like barbed wires. A white lab coat buttoned in front like a cassock reached down to her ankles, sheathing an ectomorphic figure. Her face resembled a grinning skull dabbed with cyanotic eye shadow and blood-red lipstick.
Her enthusiasm for the subject matter didn’t spread to her captive audience. Ms. Natural’s encomium to a healthy diet and exercise induced head nodding and snores in the warm room. Hard nudges from our guards terminated those naps.
Our instructor made holographic calorie charts, nutritional information, and anatomical models float before us. She contrasted the gigantic 3-D image of a ruddy, healthy kidney cheerfully filtering blood, to its shriveled, waste-clogged twin. A green gallbladder, steaming intestines, and juglike stomach introduced us to the mysteries of digestion. A rotating life-sized overweight body showed disgusting yellowish fat globules foaming up under the skin of its trunk, buttocks, and thighs—just like those, our lecturer explained, we reprobates had created in our own bodies.
She concluded today’s reeducation session with a sobering suggestion. “I suspect many of you don’t realize how ugly and misshapen your bodies are. Perhaps, standing unclothed in front of a full-length mirror after a shower, you mentally filter out what your reflection shows and don’t see yourself as obese.
“So I want each of you to picture how the rest of your comrades in this room would look naked. Imagine how unappetizing those mounds of fat, sagging skin, and bloated bellies are! And as you visualize how repulsive your neighbors look, remember—you look just as repellent to them!”
As we ruminated on that disturbing vision, our instructor continued, “What you’ve done to your bodies shows what happens when an MNM is prevented from doing its work. Modern medicine can stabilize or cure cardiovascular disease, cancer, and other major killers of the past using high-tech methods like nanomedicine, genetic engineering, and stem cell therapy. Average life expectancy is now nearly one hundred years.
“But it’s much more effective and less expensive to prevent people from becoming ill than to treat them when they do. Without MNMs helping people stay healthy, the cost of medical care might still be as outrageously high as it was decades ago. In the 2010s, our country spent several trillion dollars annually for healthcare, mainly to treat chronic diseases, provide end-of-life care for the elderly and terminally ill—and deal with illnesses caused by poor lifestyle choices, such as tobacco use and overeating.”
She looked at us accusingly. “All of you have a responsibility to keep healthcare costs as low as possible. Medical treatments are now more effective than they were decades ago—but like then, they’re still expensive. Because millions of your civic-minded fellow citizens have let their MNMs help them stay healthy, society now spends far less money to treat preventable health problems.
“MNMs are so cost-effective that the number of dollar-draining clinics and hospitals required to treat the seriously ill has also fallen dramatically. Far fewer medical professionals like physicians, nurses, and technologists are needed, saving billions more in salaries. Hospitals like this one keep only several surgeons, trained in using robotic tools to perform operations like reattaching a severed limb. A handful of internists manage medical problems more complex than your MNMs can treat. And because you made bad health choices, we still need specialists in rehabilitation medicine like Dr. Schuller.”
Nick’s voice boomed beside me. “So if we all lived healthy lifestyles and let our MNMs regulate what we eat and do, there’d be even less need for doctors and nurses than there is now?”
The instructor nodded. “Precisely!”
My companion gave a jolly smile. “Thank you for enlightening us. If we all followed your advice, there wouldn’t even be a need to pay people to deliver lectures on the virtues of healthy living!”
Our instructor focused a toxic gaze on Nick as our corpulent comrades laughed. It seemed they too had a hard time swallowing the ideas she’d fed us.
I didn’t get to speak with Nick until the next morning. Fortunately, we were assigned to chairs next to each other in the dining room for breakfast. As my fork poked at the clay-colored tofu links and ersatz eggs lumped on my plate, Nick nudged me. “Look who walked in.”
Dr. Schuller strutted through the parallel lines of seated patients in a majestic one-man parade. He paused occasionally to reassure one of his charges that the glistening gelatinous globs on her plate were indeed edible, or to praise another for looking less cetaceous than yesterday. With the sleeves of his white coat gesticulating like flapping wings, he resembled a hungry hawk hovering over a family of field mice reassuring them of his benign intentions.
As the physician strolled near us, Nick bellowed, “We appreciate what you and your staff are doing for us, doctor. That talk yesterday about how doing everything we can to stay healthy is good for us and saves money was fascinating.”
Schuller grinned. “I’m glad you thought so. As the saying goes, ‘A dollar of prevention is worth a million of cure.’”
He glanced approvingly at the morsel of wheat toast a grandmotherly patient nibbled. “Most of you are old enough to remember when millions of people had heart disease and other serious medical problems at least partly caused by them making poor choices about their health. They cut years off their lives and made their remaining ones unnecessarily miserable for themselves and costly for society.
“For example, when the Surgeon General issued his landmark report on the hazards of smoking a century ago, around half of Americans were smokers. Before MNMs became available, about a quarter still used tobacco. Now only a masochist would try it. The way MNMs make you react when you eat two or three doughnuts is nothing compared to how terrible a person feels after lighting up!”
Nick smiled. “Now that we’ve been shown the errors of our ways, I’m sure we’ll all follow your recommendations for diet and exercise. So why are we still required to have our MNMs reactivated before we leave?”
The doctor raised his voice to ensure all the room’s occupants heard his words of wisdom. “Technically, you aren’t required to have your MNMs working properly. However, the reasons for doing that are so compelling it would be foolish to refuse.”
A pineapple-shaped woman younger than me piped up, “I had to get an MNM put in before I could start high school.”
Schuller nodded. “Yes, it’s the law now that everyone is required to have an MNM implanted during early adolescence. Good health habits need to start early. But when a person reaches eighteen years old and becomes a legal adult, it’s possible to file a request to have the MNM deactivated. And everyone who was at least that old when the law was passed can still choose whether or not to have an MNM placed.”
A potbellied gray-haired man old enough to be my father said, “Some choice! Getting an MNM is supposed to be optional, but my company told me that if I didn’t I’d lose my job!”
Several other speakers shouted their own stories. “I couldn’t get a loan to buy a car unless I had an MNM put in!” “They wouldn’t renew my driver’s license if I didn’t get one!” “You can’t even register to vote if you don’t have an MNM!”
Nick added, “Wouldn’t it be better if people could freely choose to have an MNM or not without all those punishments if they don’t?”
The physician nervously tried to drown out the grumbling in the room. “There are good reasons for incentives like that. Certainly individual freedom and the right to choose how we live are important values—but sometimes they aren’t the most important. One of the old poets was right—’No man is an island.’ What each person does affects not only that individual but also to some degree the people around him, for good or ill. And when enough people freely make bad choices, both they and society as a whole suffer.
“In the past, society was more lenient about where it drew the line about allowing harmful behaviors. A century ago there were virtually no restrictions on tobacco. Then some types of advertising were banned. Largely because of the hazards of second-hand smoke, many public places became smoke-free. But despite those efforts millions of people were still smokers. Society paid billions of dollars to treat cancers and cardiopulmonary disease in individuals who freely decided to smoke. And their exercise of that right also meant exposing others who didn’t choose to do that, like children living in their homes, to carcinogens and other poisons in tobacco smoke.”
The doctor’s words seemed to placate his audience. He continued, “When I was a child, people could eat any kind and amount of food they wanted. Despite the costly health problems overeating caused, and the ‘obesity epidemic,’ people were only encouraged to make healthy choices—and far too many of them didn’t. Even when the first MNMs came on the market, having one implanted was voluntary. But despite financial incentives for having one placed, like lower health insurance premiums, for the vast bulk of people saving money wasn’t reason enough to limit what they ate.
“It’s because so many individuals still freely made bad choices about their health—even though they knew better—that MNMs have effectively become mandatory. If enough people ever learn to freely make good choices instead, those devices may not be required anymore. And though we Americans may have lost a little freedom, we’ve gained something more important. By letting your MNMs do their jobs and cooperating with us who want to help you, each of you has an excellent chance of enjoying good health throughout your natural life-span!”
For a moment I thought some of my fellow patients were about to applaud Dr. Schuller’s stirring defense of the modern healthcare system and his profession. But Nick interjected, “That was very inspiring, doctor. But you forgot to mention several other things. We get our MNMs and other preventive medical care for free. But the Universal Health System gives all of us only a fixed amount of money as an ‘allowance’ to pay for any treatments we receive if we do become sick or injured anytime during our lifetimes.”
He smiled at our colleagues. “In case any of you didn’t know, each one of us is paying for our current therapy out of that allowance. And when it’s used up, we’ll have to spend our own money to buy any additional medical care we need for the rest of our lives. In the bad old days, there were lots of different health insurance plans available. They were expensive and far from perfect, but at least they gave people some degree of choice. Now, under the current system, it’s one-size- fits-all.’
“And no matter how healthy a lifestyle we live, whether from bad luck, accidents, or our bodies just wearing out as we get older, eventually every one of us will get sick or hurt and need some of those high-tech but expensive treatments our doctors have. At some point, even if it’s many years from now, each of us will use up our medical allowance and no longer be able to pay for the care needed to keep our damaged, decrepit, or senile bodies alive. Who’s going to decide if it costs more to keep a person alive than it’s worth—and what happens then?”
Schuller began, “Every individual has a right to refuse extraordinary care—” But as the angry murmurs from our fellow patients grew louder, Nick interrupted him. “What if we don’t have that choice either? Our MNMs condition us to avoid overeating and other unhealthy activities by making us nauseated and feel bad if we do them. But what if they can do more than just punish us? What if, when the MNMs detect we’re too sick, too old and frail, too expensive to keep alive or cure, they put us out of our misery permanently—”
The doctor winced as a dried-out waffle hit his forehead. Stains blossomed on his impeccable white lab coat as scrambled artificial eggs, cupfuls of cold coffee, and nutritious vegipatties pelted him. He scampered for the exit leaving his dignity behind—escaping before any of his lumbering pursuers could catch him. I joined my fellow rioters as we threw our weight around—overturning tables and chairs, splattering the walls with half-eaten food, and sending plates and utensils crashing to the floor. Someone shouted we should storm the cafeteria where hospital staff ate and see what they were having for breakfast. Somebody else yelled he’d heard doctors and nurses dined on real food like bacon and maple syrup-drenched buttermilk pancakes, and we needed to protect their health by eating that stuff ourselves.
But before our raiding party got organized, a counterattack by security guards and orderlies stopped it. The cattle prod-like neuralshockers they brandished as they corralled my comrades and me curbed our enthusiasm. But as we huddled in the middle of the trashed room, the smiles creasing our broad faces showed that this frustrated putsch had been worth it.
* * * *
They put us on lockdown in our tiny windowless rooms for two days. During that time in solitary, like my fellow prisoners I had nothing to occupy my time or entertain me except for a small TV monitor. Unfortunately it only showed one thirty-minute program that repeated continuously twenty-four hours a day. Its endless message of how eating generous servings of vegetables and fruits would help keep me healthy was a worthy one. However, even a kindergartener would’ve found the animated “Adventures of Rudy Rutabaga and Katie Kumquat in the Magical Land of Gardens and Orchards” thin on plot and lacking in sophisticated dialogue.
It was almost a relief when they herded us back to the exercise room for more sessions on those hyperkinetic treadmills. But after the extra workouts they made us do to make up for those we missed during our recent “time out,” my legs felt like hunks of tenderized beef brisket. As we settled in for an insipid supper of soy steaks and Styrofoam-like vegetables, Dr. Schuller entered the dining room. His lab coat had recovered its ivory gleam. But if anyone was tempted to sully it again by throwing the asparagus spears served with our meal at him, the menacing orderlies accompanying him were powerful dissuaders.
The shriveled, browning apples attendants tossed on our plates for dessert failed to keep the doctor away. As Schuller exhorted us to serve our sentences without further disruptions Nick whispered in my ear, “We’ve got to talk.”
I nodded—but we couldn’t converse with our keepers so close. We finally had a chance to communicate during a lecture that evening. Nick and I sat in the back of the room as a professorial gentleman who made Rudy Rutabaga look like a steroids-stuffed action hero expounded on the importance of a well-regulated colon.
Nick extracted a small notebook from his pocket and showed me a handwritten page.
We’ve got to escape from here before they reactivate our MNMs. Are you with me?
I thought about what he was suggesting. Then my lips silently formed the word, “Maybe.”
Nick was an optimist, for he turned the page to show me what he’d already written. I’ll come to your room tonight and talk with you.
I didn’t know how well he could read lips, so I didn’t mouth my question as to how he could do that considering they locked us in our rooms before “lights out.” Instead I just nodded as our lecturer showed us his personal collection of fecaliths.
Later that night, I lay down on the bed in my room after getting everything ready in case Nick did miraculously show up at my locked door. Still waiting for him, I fell asleep. But I jerked awake when my door swiveled slowly open. I turned on the only light in my room and blinked at the rotund apparition in the doorway.
Nick padded into my room and closed the door. He was dressed in an extra-large set of scarlet hospital scrubs. A pale burlap laundry bag was slung over his right shoulder.
He smiled down at me from beside the bed and whispered, “I bet you thought I wasn’t going to show up.”
I kept my voice low too. “How’d you manage to escape from your room and get in here?”
Nick laid a finger aside of his nose. “Trade secret.”
He opened the bag. “I brought some presents for you. Everything you need to look inconspicuous on our way out.”
I frowned at the green scrub suit and pair of white slip-on shoes he pulled from his sack. “Are you serious, Nick? Do you really think we can get out of here?”
“No guarantees. But I think we stand a good chance.”
I kept my blanket wrapped around me. “I’m not sure this is a good idea. I don’t know what they’ll do to us if we’re caught, but I bet it won’t be pleasant. Even if we do escape, what comes next? They know who we are, and the police will just track us down! Maybe it’d be better if we stayed here and finished our sentences.”
Nick shook his head. “If we play by their rules, they’ll reactivate our MNMs before we leave. Do you really want to go back to having that nanotechnology nanny controlling your life? And I wasn’t kidding the other day when I said that MNMs can also act as executioners!”
He scowled. “There are people on the outside who agree with me that it’s better to be free and make our own choices, even if we don’t stay quite as healthy or live as long. Once we get out, they’ll help set you up with a new identity far from here.”
My face showed fear. “You make it sound like you’re part of one of those terrorist organizations I’ve heard about!”
“No, we’re not terrorists. But we do have an organization—the Eaters Liberation Front. Several of the hospital staff who’ve been working with us here are actually on ELF’s payroll. They aren’t part of our group, but they’re willing to take our money to supplement that pittance the hospital pays them. In return for those bribes they’ve been helping me and the rest of you when they can—like getting me the scrubs I’m wearing and this set for you.”
“Considering how everybody here has treated us, it’s hard to believe any of them is really trying to help us! Which members of the staff are working with you?”
Nick grinned. “I’ll keep that information to myself until we know each other a little better.”
“Have you talked with anyone else about escaping tonight?”
“No, just you.”
I took the scrub suit from him. “Why’d you pick me? How do you know I won’t scream for help and turn you in? Maybe they’d give me some real food for a reward!”
Nick’s smile faded. “I am taking a risk by bringing you in on my plan. But, as I’ll explain later, I need help to do what has to be done and get us both out of here. And you seemed like my best candidate for a new recruit.”
“Why’s that?”
His gaze settled on my overstuffed form. “I’ll tell you what convinced me you’d do anything to keep from having your MNM reactivated. I could see it in your eyes when you talked about how you feel about doughnuts. To be honest, you look like someone who loves to eat!”
* * * *
Nick stood in a corner of the room facing the wall, discreetly respecting my modesty as I put on the scrubs. He murmured, “We’ll have to pass through the hospital itself to get out. The rehab center we’re in is connected to it through an underground tunnel. There’s an isolated fire exit on the first floor of the hospital that we can use to escape.”
I wriggled into the wide pants and tied the drawstrings in front. “What if we meet somebody along the way? They might have a video surveillance system too!”
“That’s why we’re wearing these scrubs—so we’ll blend in to look like the real staff. Yes, there are video cameras with microphones everywhere—but except for a few places we’ll avoid, nobody monitors what they see and hear in real time. They’re just connected to a recording system in case Security needs to review something later.”
I slid the scrub top down over my head. “I’m decent now.”
Nick turned around and pulled more goodies out of his bag. “Here’s a surgical cap for you, and one for me. I’ll help you tie the strings on the back of it.”
“That’s okay. I can manage.”
He put on his own aquamarine paper headwear as I secured mine, and said, “These caps disguise us a little. It’d be nice if we could wear surgical masks too, but nobody does that outside the operating rooms—and we’ll be avoiding them. One thing in our favor is that it’s three a.m. There’s only a skeleton staff on duty now. Some of them might be taking catnaps at their stations.”
Nick extracted two last items from his sack. I examined the hospital nametag he gave me. The picture on it was mine, but its black lettering read “Cherry Ames R.N.”
He clipped his own nametag to the upper left pocket on the front of his scrub top and motioned me to do the same. His badge identified him as “Konrad Styner M.D.”
Nick said, “The pictures on these things are the front views of the ‘mug shots’ they made of each of us when we came here.”
“Let me guess. One of your accomplices in the hospital accessed them on its computer system and forged these nametags.”
Nick chuckled. “Now you’re catching on.”
After turning off the light, we slipped out of the room and quietly closed the door behind us. Padding down the hallway, we listened for the approaching footsteps of any guards. Soon we reached a closed metal door with “Stairway” printed in red letters above it. Slowly, keeping its hinges from creaking too much, Nick pushed in the horizontal metal bar mechanism spanning the heavy door’s middle to open it. Closing the door just as carefully, we descended a stairway whose concrete walls looked filthy in the dim fluorescent light.
The tunnel we entered through another door on the building’s lowest floor was a bit wider and higher than the hallways in the rehab center. Its painted stone sides, linoleum floor, and foam ceiling panels were all shades of dirty white. I pictured this tunnel being used to wheel a stretcher holding that woman who’d fallen on the treadmill several days ago from the rehab center to the hospital’s ER. It was as if we were entombed inside a catacomb—quiet as a grave except for our panting and footsteps. But as we rounded a shallow bend a sudden brief whirring sound startled me.
Nick pointed up at a small video camera that had just swiveled to look at us. He whispered reassuringly, “Remember what I told you. It can see us, but nobody’s looking at its display right now. By the time anybody reviews the recording we’ll be long gone.”
Just then a hulking shape rounded the sharp corner about fifteen meters ahead of us. There was no place to hide from the man walking toward us on shiny black boots. His ebony uniform and gold badge conferred an aura of menace intensified by the clublike neuralshocker clipped to his belt and swinging at his side.
Nick nudged my shoulder to keep me walking briskly beside him. As we reached the man, my companion shouted, “What’ve they got in the cafeteria this morning?”
The guard shrugged as he walked past us. “The usual mystery meat.”
Nick bellowed back, “Yum-o! We’ll have to scarf it down fast before our break is over!”
Seconds later we turned the corner that the guard had appeared from and were alone again. Nick murmured, “See, you just have to act like you’re not doing anything wrong!”
A sign on the wall indicated the main hospital complex was just ahead. I whispered, “How far are we from the exit?”
“It’s on the other side of the hospital. We have to make a little detour to reach it.”
Soon we came to an elevator and went up two floors. Its doors opened onto a drab hospital ward. I tried to look as nonchalant as Nick as we strolled down a long hall lined with dark silent patient rooms. The two nurses’ stations we passed were centers of inactivity. Several staff members wearing scrubs similar to ours sat at each station. They glanced at the alarms intermittently chiming from the patient monitors to make sure the problem wasn’t too life-threatening and ignored us as they entered data into computer workstations.
We’d almost reached the end of the hall when Nick and I stopped abruptly. Our path was suddenly blocked by three nurses wheeling a stretcher straight out from the room just ahead of us on the right. A human form with a bulging abdomen lay atop the stretcher, covered completely by a thick white sheet. As the nurses struggled to turn that cart with its heavy burden in our direction, a bare arm with rolls of fat slipped out from beneath the covering cloth. Its pudgy fingers dangled near one of the stretcher’s squeaking wheels before a nurse noticed it and tucked the lifeless limb back under the shroud.
As they passed us with their burden one of them muttered sadly, “Another one bites the dust.” Nick and I kept walking as I realized that nurse’s comment was more literally true than she knew. I’d recognized the ornate gold ring on the deceased hand we’d glimpsed. It belonged to the woman in our group who’d fallen on the treadmill several days ago.
Nick led me into another elevator and pushed the button to descend one floor. As its doors closed I whispered, “Are we near the exit yet?”
“It’s close. But there’s something important we need to do before we leave.”
We exited the elevator into another empty hallway. Nick led me to an inconspicuous closed door. He unlocked it with a key from his pocket and motioned me to follow.
It was pitch-black inside the tiny room after he closed the door. I heard the click of a light switch and blinked in the dim light.
We were squeezed together into a storage closet. Its walls were lined with skeletal metal racks stuffed with boxes of sterile surgical gauze, scalpels, needles, and syringes. This surgeons’ toy chest had little free space in its center to begin with, and our larger-than-average bodies made it an even tighter fit.
Nick’s face was of necessity close to mine in our cramped quarters. “I bet you’re wondering why I brought you here. Remember that detour I mentioned we had to make before we escape? This is it.”
I looked around at this prison cell he’d trapped me in and wondered what he was up to. He said, “Look up at the ceiling.”
All I saw was the typical institutional foam panels, with a silver ventilation grill right above me. Nick confirmed my suspicions when he continued, “Yes, our way out leads through the ventilation system.”
He glanced down at his fulsome belly, then at the significantly smaller opening above us. “Obviously I can’t get through it. But you’ve lost enough weight now that I think you can. That’s the other reason why I chose you. You’re the only person in our group who’s young and thin enough to get up there and go where I tell you for my little mission. There was another person in ELF who was supposed to be brought here with me. Unfortunately, the hospital filled its last empty bed and went on diversion just before my friend was arrested too. She must’ve been taken to another facility.”
I frowned. “You sound like you got yourself arrested on purpose—and that you’re really here for some kind of sabotage! I don’t want to be involved in anything violent!”
“Neither do I. What I want you to do won’t hurt anyone. In fact, it’ll help countless innocent people who’ve been persecuted for their eating habits just like us! It’s a little dangerous, but I’m hoping you’ll agree to do it . . .”
* * * *
Moments later I was crawling through a tight horizontal shaft in near-darkness. The penlight Nick had given me was clutched in my right hand, but its glowing tip gave little light. My left held another item pulled from his pocket—a scrap of paper with lines drawn on it as a crude map, showing me which of the ninety-degree turns in the shaft I had to follow to reach the destination he’d given me.
Back in the storage closet, while I was still deciding what to do, Nick had pulled three sturdy boxes from a nearby shelf. He’d stacked two of them on top of each other and used the third, pushed against the side of the bottom member of that pair, as an impromptu stepladder. Reaching up from his perch atop the two boxes, he’d yanked the grill off, exposing a gaping square hole that, he’d said, I should just be able to slip through.
I decided to keep going along with him and see what his plan was. He’d given me one last item to put in my back pocket before boosting me up through the opening. It was a thin, narrow card made of blank white plastic he told me he’d smuggled in when they’d brought him to the rehab center. I asked Nick how he’d managed to keep it from being discovered during that thorough search they’d done on us and our possessions when we’d arrived. He smiled and said it was a good thing Dr. Schuller had deferred his prostate exam.
Finally I reached the vertical shaft Nick told me about. It dropped down the height of two floors to my target area. After stuffing the flashlight and map into a pocket, I wedged myself legs first into that dark opening. Then, like my companion’s saintly namesake descending a chimney on Christmas Eve, I carefully scooted down it. The shaft was just wide enough to let me bend my knees and press them along with my hands and elbows against its slick metal sides to keep from falling through it.
It was tricky to coordinate those cycles of pressing and releasing the shaft’s walls with my limbs just right so I slid down it only a little at a time. After kicking out the shaft’s covering ventilation grill, I lowered myself about two meters through the ceiling to the floor of a new, brightly lit room. It was smaller than the storage closet I’d started from but seemed bigger because it wasn’t stuffed with metal shelving or anything else.
The chamber had four gray metal walls like a bank vault’s. Two walls were bare, while the other pair had closed doors centered in them and set opposite each other. Both doors were made of clear, thick plastic that looked bulletproof. Through one I saw another room unlit except for tiny red and green lights blinking along its walls. A peek through the other door showed a well-lighted anteroom. It contained an empty chair at a desk topped by a computer workstation.
Nick was right when he’d said the security station outside wasn’t manned this early in the morning. As I watched he entered through an outside door and waved to me. Several more steps and we stood facing each other, separated only by that clear door between the two rooms.
He pointed toward a small slot near me. I swiped the white card he’d given me through it. There was a brief buzz, then Nick pushed the door open. After closing it he whispered, “There’s a key pad outside that door they use to open it from the security station’s side. Unfortunately, they change the access code every day. There was no way my fellow hackers in ELF could find out what the code was and get that information to me soon enough for me to use it.
“That’s why you had to do all that crawling to get in here. Once somebody’s inside this room, unlocking it on this side just requires a key card whose code stays the same for months at a time.”
I said, “You haven’t told me why we’re here.”
He pointed to the darkened room behind me. “That’s ELF’s holy grail—the hospital’s server room. Those computers contain the programs and data we need to cripple this corrupt healthcare system that treats us like numbers on a balance sheet instead of human beings!”
He took the white card back from me and walked to the server room’s door. A swipe through a slot identical to the one at the other door made this one open too. There was a similar door and wall a meter away from that one. Nick motioned me to follow him into that cramped space, then let the first door close and lock behind us.
He said, “This little area is called a mantrap. To get into the server room itself, you have to open and then close that first door. Now, if I can’t get through this second door, we’re trapped here until security ‘rescues’ us.”
Nick took a deep breath. “Here goes!” He pressed his thumb against a small plate beside that second door.
He sighed in relief as, with another brief buzz, this final barrier opened. “You have no idea how hard it was for me to get my fingerprint into that thing’s database. But it worked!”
I followed Nick as he flipped a light switch to illuminate our surroundings, then moved to one of the metal racks holding squat rectangular server units. The room was uncomfortably cool. My teeth chattered as I asked, “What are you going to do now?”
Nick didn’t answer but went straight to his work. He pulled a server unit out on sliding rails from its rack and flipped up a monitor screen. His fingers raced across a keyboard sitting atop the unit.
Finally he replied, “This server unit is connected to only an extremely restricted part of the hospital’s intranet. Hackers like me can’t access it from the outside or even from hospital workstations. Special server systems like this one store the secret programs and codes used to control MNMs and those implanted devices doctors use to interrogate them. All those files are classified as ‘top secret’ and heavily encrypted. However, I’ve managed to fake a high enough permission level to copy them, even though I can’t use them yet. Once I get them back to my fellow hackers with ELF, we have a distributed computing system powerful enough to crack the encryption on those files.
“After we do that, we’ll be able to create our own working programmers and deactivate anybody’s MNM! Even better, we’ll have a copy of the Thanatos program inside every MNM that the government doesn’t want the public to know about. We’ll send proof of its existence to the media and broadcast it every way we can. Then people can decide for themselves whether they want something inside their bodies that will kill them when they become too expensive to keep alive!”
Nick stopped typing. “May I have my penlight back?”
I complied. He unscrewed the penlight’s back end, removed a small black disk concealed there, and inserted the disk into a shallow depression in the server unit’s top. “It’ll take just a few minutes to save the files I need onto the storage disk. Then we’ll be through with this detour and on our way out. I have a friend waiting for us in her car outside in the parking lot. Before long we’ll be making our getaway!”
I frowned. “You’d think, considering how sensitive this information is, that the security here would be even tighter than it is. Not that anything we’ve done has been easy or simple, but I’m surprised we’ve been able to get this far.”
“Until recently, security here was too tight to do this. Then the powers-that-be decided to save some money in their budget by scrimping on tighter measures. That’s why, in a classic case of bureaucratic shortsightedness, that station outside isn’t guarded anymore between midnight and six a.m. Everything we’ve done is being recorded by video cameras. But, just like in the rest of the hospital, they’re not watched in real time.”
He tapped the keyboard several more times. Then he extracted the storage disk and secured it back inside the penlight before slipping the instrument into his pocket. After returning the server unit and other equipment to their original locations, he turned off the light. We retraced our steps through that series of now unlocked doors, placed the ventilation grill I’d kicked out back where it belonged, and then exited this “secure” area leaving no obvious sign any unauthorized personnel had been there. Soon we were once again in the unrestricted part of the hospital.
As the two of us sauntered through a hallway on the first floor, Nick smiled at the few people we passed. He even whistled the opening bars of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” as we strolled past a wall-mounted security camera.
Then we arrived at a secluded fire exit door. Nick held it open for me, and for the first time in days I walked free beneath a starry night sky. A refreshing breeze caressed my face. Though it was cold enough on this winter night for me to see my breath, I felt warm inside knowing everything was going to work out fine.
There weren’t many cars in the hospital parking lot we soon reached. Scattered lights dangling from poles shaped like gibbets cast a faint pale glow over our path. Nick nudged my arm happily as he spotted his friend’s car nestled in a small cluster of other vehicles. He trotted ahead of me and tapped merrily on the window beside the shadowed driver—
Suddenly the lights around us flared like white-hot searchlights. I squinted through that dazzling glare to see the doors of the vehicles nearby swing open and uniformed men brandishing neuralshockers pour out into the parking lot. They grabbed Nick and handcuffed him before I could say a word.
Then the driver’s door of the vehicle belonging to Nick’s friend opened. My vision had recovered enough in the radiance surrounding me to recognize that familiar white lab coat and its wearer.
Dr. Schuller stood a close but safe distance away as Nick struggled in the arms of the police officers. The doctor said, “Look who’s out for an early morning stroll. Don’t you know it’s important to get enough sleep every night to stay healthy?”
Two officers removed Nick’s forged name-tag, penlight, and other incriminating evidence. Schuller smirked, “I understand you have a special interest in how MNMs work. Let me give you a demonstration.”
Nick’s frenzied attempt to twist away from the doctor ended as the touch from a neuralshocker made him go limp. Schuller raised the black glove sheathing his right hand. Nick’s eyes bulged as the glove came ever closer until the tip of the doctor’s right index finger rested over his patient’s MNM.
Seconds later Nick’s eyes rolled back into his skull. His mouth sagged open and exposed a lolling pink tongue. Even the white whiskers on his face seemed to droop as his head listed to one side—suddenly grown too heavy for his neck.
I doubted Nick heard the doctor reassure him, “Don’t worry. I gave your MNM a command to give your heart extra vagal stimulation and stop it for only ten seconds. It should be beating fine again now. You’ll recover soon.”
Then Dr. Schuller grinned at me. “Now it’s time to give you your just desserts . . .”
* * * *
Three weeks later I stood barefoot in my room, admiring my naked body in a full-length mirror attached to the back wall. The fat-devouring nanobots and other medicines Dr. Schuller prescribed during my stay had indeed sculpted my body back to centerfold standards. Those painful exercise sessions had paid off by toning my limbs, abdomen, and buttocks to athletic levels. The doctor’s expert medical regimen had even enhanced and firmed my bustline. And I was sure my internal organs were just as beautiful and in tip-top shape from those treatments too.
The alarm clock on the cute nightstand they’d given me showed ten a.m.—time for me to finally check out of this “resort.” I’d laid out all the new clothes a smiling orderly had brought me this morning on my bed. The underwear, pantyhose, frilly flowered skirt, and scarlet blouse looked like they’d fit my svelte figure perfectly. After I dressed and finished dabbing my face with the contents of the makeup case on my pillow, I’d be a vision of loveliness.
Without a warning knock or greeting, the door to my room opened. Dr. Schuller closed it—and blinked when I turned around and smiled at him. But he seemed to recover his professional insensitivity to nudity and focused mainly on my face as he spoke.
“I hope you had a good night’s sleep, Ms. Thompson. This is a big day for you. Think of it as the beginning of a new, healthier life.”
I interlaced my fingers behind my neck and arched my back to accentuate the fine job he’d done on my breasts. “I’m ready, doctor!”
I bent over to retrieve my panties from the bed and slip them on. Behind me the physician stammered slightly, “Of course, before you leave your MNM has to be reactivated. That’s what I’ve come here to do. Let your MNM help you, and you’ll stay as healthy as you are now.”
The mattress creaked as I sat on it facing him and raised each leg in turn to slide into my pantyhose. “I appreciate what you’ve done for me, doctor. With the way I look now, I won’t have to worry about spending my nights alone anymore. But after all those wonderful lectures we received on good eating habits and exercise, I don’t think I need my MNM to help me. I can watch what I eat on my own.”
The physician shook his head as I took lots of time putting on my bra. “I’m sorry. You can file an application to do that, but processing it typically takes months. Until you get official approval to keep your MNM deactivated, the law says it has to be working. And don’t forget all those penalties like not being able to get a job or have a bank account if your MNM isn’t activated. Plus, no matter how motivated you feel now, there’s a high rate of recidivism back to bad eating habits without that device to help you!”
As I wiggled my skirt on I leaned over and displayed a generous helping of cleavage. I murmured, “I bet there are ways around those rules. If you were to certify you reactivated my MNM without really doing it, who would know? I imagine you even know how to fudge the monitoring reports it’s supposed to send on me to confirm I’m behaving myself.”
My lustrous golden hair fluttered breezily after I pulled the blouse down over my head. Slipping on a nice new pair of Mary Janes finished my reverse striptease. The doctor seemed unsure what to say as I applied my pink lipstick and other makeup. Then I stood up and displayed my fully clothed and preened glory to him.
There was only a single entendre in the coy smile I flashed at him. “Remember that first time you interviewed me, doctor? I wasn’t joking when I told you what I’d do for a Long John with frosting. If you help me with my MNM, I’ll give you a treat too.”
I nodded toward the bed. “I can get undressed again so you can give me a very complete physical right now and make house calls on me after I’m released. What do you say?”
His first response was wordless. He shoved his hands into his lab coat’s side pockets and pulled its flaps together in front—as if trying to conceal any anatomical evidence my words and actions had produced an effect on him. But what he said sounded coldly matter-of-fact.
“What you’re suggesting is illegal and violates professional ethics. I’ll ignore what you said this time, but if you persist I’ll have to take further action.”
I doubted his refusal was based on moral qualms—merely the risk of getting caught. But I was confident that Plan B would win him over.
I smiled sweetly. “I never told you how I got my MNM deactivated. The Gooey Glaze guy gave me the name of someone who helped people like me. One night, after blindfolding me so I couldn’t see where we were going, she drove me someplace where I could get ‘fixed.’ I pictured her parking in the alley of some backstreet and leading me through the rear door of a slum building.
“When she took off my blindfold we were in a darkened rundown room. I sat in a wooden chair while we waited. My contact told me even she didn’t know who the guy coming to treat me was. They’d met and arranged these appointments online.”
I sat on the bed. “Finally he showed up. The room was so badly lit I never got a good look at him, but he seemed tall and trim. His clothes were nondescript and covered him from head to toe. He wore the same kind of black hood with eyeholes that medieval executioners did. His black gloves kept him from leaving fingerprints.
“The man never spoke. He pressed the tip of his right index finger over my MNM for several seconds, then nodded to my contact. She paid him his cut of what I’d given her—then he was gone. We had to wait ten minutes to give him time to get away. Then she put my blindfold back on and we left too.”
I grinned innocently. “I’ve read that those programmers like the one he had implanted in his fingertip are issued legally to only specially licensed doctors. Each device is designed to work only when it detects that physician’s individual genetic code in the surrounding tissue.
“I’ve heard some unscrupulous types once tried to hijack a programmer by severing a poor doctor’s finger. But the device is clever enough to recognize the change in body chemistry that occurs when that’s done and it automatically self-destructs. Other drastic steps like kidnapping the whole physician or threatening that poor professional’s loved ones don’t work either, because the programmer senses the surge of neurotransmitters and hormones those stresses cause and destroys itself then too.”
I winked at him. “In fact, the only way one of those devices can be used for an illegal MNM deactivation is for the doctor to do it voluntarily. Naturally, the physicians who have them are supposed to adhere to the highest ethical standards and not even think about doing that. But if one ever did, I’ve heard the penalties for such a breach in professional conduct are very severe—perhaps even fatal.”
Dr. Schuller rubbed the tip of his right index finger against his thumb. “Everything you’ve said about programmers like the one I have is correct. But I don’t see how this is relevant to—”
I interrupted him. “You know, I feel sorry for doctors like you. Once you were treated almost like gods—respected for your knowledge, training, and compassion. Now you’re just underpaid pill pushers and technicians. The only way you can get your jollies these days is by lording it over the defenseless patients entrusted to your tender mercies. No wonder some of you might be tempted to supplement your income by using the very system that’s ruined you for your own ends.
“Of course, I can’t say for sure who the poor doctor who treated me was or why he did it. However, I do remember that, when he leaned over to deactivate my MNM, I caught a strong whiff of wintergreen mouthwash and musk cologne. That might be enough of a clue for the authorities to track him down. I might even get a reward for doing my civic duty and helping to bring him to justice!”
Dr. Schuller studied me with the cold glare a pathologist might direct at a messy corpse before starting an autopsy. There was no fear in his voice. “I don’t recall you ever asking what happened to your erstwhile partner in crime, Ms. Thompson. He proved obstinate when the authorities questioned him about his other accomplices.
“Eventually they brought him back here for further treatment. As per protocol, I initiated Limbic System Aversion Therapy. He proved unusually resistant.”
A whiff of wintergreen mouthwash wafted from the doctor’s lips. His musk cologne made me nauseous. “The last time I saw Mr. Myra, he was sitting in a comfortable chair and smiling. Unfortunately, that’s all he does anymore. We give him just enough water and enteric feedings through his nasogastric tube for him to maintain a healthy rate of weight loss.
“It’s a strain on the nurses and orderlies to shift his position occasionally and clean him after he soils himself. But they won’t have to do it much longer. Soon he will exhaust the money in his personal Universal Health System account. When that happens, his MNM will ensure that, the next time he goes peacefully to sleep, he won’t wake up.”
Schuller indicated the mirror, alarm clock, and other little luxuries in my room. “Three weeks ago you told us Mr. Myra was coming to your room. You agreed to play along with him until we found out what he had planned and collected evidence against him. We monitored both of you using the video surveillance system and the staff members you encountered during your excursion.
“You’ve been rewarded for informing on him. Don’t jeopardize the good will the hospital and I currently have toward you by trying to seduce or threaten me. If you don’t let me reactivate your MNM, I’ll have to refer you for LSAT too. Perhaps you and Mr. Myra can sit together and smile at each other before he leaves us.”
I laughed. “I guess what happens now depends on how big a gambler you are, doctor. For one of us to be a big winner, the other has to be a big loser. Or we could cut a deal where we both get some of what we want. If you don’t reactivate my MNM, I’ll eat just enough extra doughnuts and other goodies for me to be able to exercise the excess calories off and stay just below the legal weight limit. That way no one will know it isn’t working, and we’ll both be safe.
“What’s in it for you is that you won’t have to defend yourself from accusations about illegal moonlighting. Maybe nobody will believe me—but what if the authorities start checking on what you do in your spare time? Do you want to take even a small chance of that? Even if I’m caught, you can claim I had somebody else deactivate my MNM again after I left here—and leave just me holding the bag!”
I lay down on the mattress. “And that offer to let you play gynecologist with me still stands. For you, I’d be a very nice partner in crime.”
Schuller glowered at me. I waited as he calculated the risks and benefits for each of his choices. Finally he said, “Sit up.”
There was a softness in his voice that motivated me to obey. While his right index finger pressed down on my MNM, his palm rested below it against my left breast and gave it a furtive massage.
Then he leaned away and said, “Your MNM is now registered as being activated on the national monitoring network. If anyone discovers that it’s really still deactivated, I’ll deny everything. As you said, it’s in both our interests for you to follow the rules for healthy living you learned here. Don’t overeat, exercise regularly—and I’ll be visiting you soon to see how you’re doing.”
I stood up, wrapped my arms around him, and gave him a long lingering kiss that he returned hungrily. Then I sighed in his ear, “You don’t know how much that means to me.”
The doctor started to walk me backwards toward the bed. But I giggled away from him and said, “Maybe we should be a little more discrete. Somebody might walk in and be shocked by your bedside manner. I’ll call you tomorrow to set up a private consultation at my apartment.”
Schuller reluctantly accepted the wisdom of that plan. He wiped my lipstick from his face with a handkerchief before regaining his usual professional air. Then he pressed the call button near my bed and informed the nurse who answered it that I was ready for discharge.
The two male nurses who’d accompanied him on my first day here arrived a moment later. Schuller said, “I’m going out to write the discharge orders for Ms. Thompson now.”
The taller of the two burly nurses smiled. “No, you aren’t.”
He pulled a badge from his back pocket. “CDC. You’re under arrest.”
They grabbed the doctor and wrestled him to the floor. Schuller screamed like a terrified toddler as one of them rolled him into a prone position and held him down with a knee in the back as the other handcuffed his arms behind him.
The physician spluttered expletives and threats as the pair dragged him from the room. I followed behind as they transferred him in the hallway to three other Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agents dressed in conventional garb. As Schuller and his trio of traveling companions left, he glanced back at me as if he were confused why I wasn’t in custody too.
Jim Rhodes retrieved the badge he’d dropped in my room during that violent arrest and stood beside me. He grinned, “There’s no way Schuller can squirm out of this. Besides the testimony you’ll give at his trial, we watched and recorded everything you two said and did through the miniature video camera and microphone hidden inside that full-length mirror in your room. I’m sure the judge and jury will find that recording very interesting. I know I did.”
Tom Colby, the other undercover CDC agent, piped in, “Ditto!”
A maidenly blush warmed my cheeks. I tittered, “All in a good cause. Just call me Lady Godiva.”
Jim said, “I bet you’ll get a commendation for this. Not only are you responsible for catching red-handed the doctor suspected of being one of the top MNM bootleggers in this state, but you also prevented what would’ve been a major terrorist attack by ELF!”
I shrugged modestly. “I’m glad Schuller will get what he deserves for all the harm he’s done by deactivating MNMs. He must’ve performed so many illegal deactivations he’s lost track of whom he’s done, because he didn’t realize I was bluffing when I told him he’d done mine. Maybe he even believes that garbage I told him about how doctors have fallen from grace and used it to rationalize his crimes. His biggest mistake was that he couldn’t adapt to how times and his profession have changed—and now he’s going to pay for it.
“But I feel bad about what happened to Nick. Yes, he and terrorist organizations like ELF are responsible for poisoning people’s minds, and they have to be stopped. But I don’t think they’re intentionally evil—just misguided. Maybe, with the right kind of persuasion, some of them might come around to the correct way of thinking before it’s too late—like it is for Nick.”
I sighed. “But all I want to do right now is to go home and take a nice hot shower. After being around a dirt ball like Schuller for so long and giving him those cheap thrills to trip him up, I feel all scuzzy on the inside and outside.”
Jim and Tom seemed ready to volunteer to accompany me and help lather me back to cleanliness. But though I appreciated their interest, right now I needed some quality time alone. They could read my full report after I filed it online at home after my shower.
Moments later, as I walked out into the hospital parking lot on this comfortably cool morning, I reveled in the warm sunshine bathing me and the leers young males bestowed on my new and improved body. But after I entered the empty car reserved for me and blended into traffic, I mulled over everything I’d done the past few weeks.
There were pros and cons to being an undercover agent for the CDC. Although I was doing my country a great service, it meant I had to consort with the most pathetic members of the society I was protecting. Despite their differences, Schuller and Nick had one flaw in common. They were both living in the past—refusing to accept the changes that were today’s new reality. They’d been tilting against windmills and, as always, the windmills won.
I was smarter than them. I’d accepted the system as it was and come out the winner. After I graduated from medical school, I could’ve gone down the same dead-end path Schuller and other physicians did. I could’ve become a pill pusher like him, or maybe a surgical robojockey—an insignificant lordling of a tiny domain, eventually brought low by wounded pride, frustration, and greed. But instead I’d used my M.D. degree as a stepping stone to becoming a satisfied cog in a great healthcare juggernaut.
No, the system I’d embraced wasn’t perfect—but it was much better than it used to be. MNMs really did dramatically improve everyone’s health and lower the cost of medical care. And when cure was impossible and quality of life was gone, those devices impartially gave a quick and painless death with dignity—with no difficult decisions for those individuals or their loved ones to make. Surely a little loss of freedom about what people ate or how they behaved was worth all that.
And I’d put myself in a position where I didn’t have to choose between good health and the freedom to indulge my appetites. It was part of my job as an undercover agent to temporarily adopt the depraved lifestyle and look the part of the overeaters and couch potatoes I worked among so I could root out those who helped corrupt them. Before my next assignment, I’d have carte blanche from the CDC to order every controlled and illegal substance I wanted. Dozens of doughnuts, cases of cookies, gallons of ice cream—my bosses encouraged me to gorge on them so I’d be ready that much sooner to go underground again.
The nice figure and glowing health I now enjoyed had its pleasures and perks. But so did sitting on a sofa watching soap operas and talk shows on holoTV while munching on chips and guzzling soda.
As I drove home to that relaxing shower, I felt a bit smug knowing how lucky I was compared to everyone around me. Their MNMs gave them good health bought at the price of a bland and boring existence. Most would never thrill to the taste of the forbidden doughnut.
But I had the best of both worlds.
Copyright © 2010 H. G. Stratmann