The Last Rational Man Read online

helped. It was a little easier to breathe. But he felt bad about the sugar cubes. It wasn't fair to that sweet waitress who had shown interest in him. He got down on his hands and knees to gather them up.

  There were a few under the table. The leg of the table was in his way. He couldn't get his head under the table, but he managed to twist around and reach out with one of his hands. There really wasn't space to move between all of the table and chair legs. He nearly lost his balance, but if he put both of his hands under the table, and twisted his leg a bit to keep his balance…

  The waitress heard a crack, the sound that a watermelon makes when you first cut it open. The sound came from where that musician was sitting. Where was he, anyhow? Ah, he was on the floor. Maybe he had lost his contacts or something. He seemed kind of stuck. Maybe he hurt his back- that would explain the cracking sound.

  She walked over to J's table.

  She froze for a few seconds before she managed to scream. His back had split, revealing his vertebrae. His skull had split as well, and bits of gray matter had spattered out, covering the floor with, well, little brain quarter notes. Some of his vertebrae had blackened. That, and the way his body had twisted, made him look, well, like a piano.

  A Medical Image

  Sal looked up from her screen.

  "Jude- what did you say yours has?"

  "Brain Tumor. Touchy business. I'm down to the cell-by-cell level here. I should have it all erased in a few minutes"

  The equipment was expensive, so there was a lot of time pressure on the medical graphicers. The physicists had tried putting together a system that would separate the imaging from the curing, but they hadn't gotten it quite right, at least not yet. Organs tended to move around too much to allow the time gap between the two functions.

  Sal studied the CAT image of her next patient. Breast cancer. In her mother's day that meant major surgery, chemotherapy, and only a fair chance of survival. In her grandmother's day it was a good as a death sentence.

  Modern medicine had changed all of that. Three dimensional imaging had been around for decades, before somebody thought of what now seemed obvious. 'If only we could fix the image, and project it back into the patient.' It started as a dream, completely impossible. It took decades before the first experiments were done on rats in a university lab, and another decade before the first commercial use of such a device.

  Sal had been lucky to be chosen as one of the first graphicers. They had originally been called 'erasers', but it sounded too negative, so graphicers it was. She had planned on going into surgery from the day she started medical school, and this was the ultimate, cleanest form of surgery that there was.

  The breast cancer patient had a pretty bad case. A young mother, the typical victim of the disease. It hadn't metastasized yet, but it had spread pretty badly. She would have to erase some of the muscle tissue. It looked like she could work around some of the main blood vessels though, which would make recovery easier.

  If only they had approved the machine for reconstructive work. She knew that they were working on it. It was a matter of using the electromagnetic fields not just to destroy tissue, but to actually move it around. The literature was full of reports of experiments on rats. One researcher claimed to have amputated a rat's paw, and then moved bone, muscle, blood vessel and skin tissue to reconstruct the paw.

  She remembered the photos. The work was mediocre. The new paw was a caricature of the original one. It worked, more or less, but looked like a cartoon paw, not a real one. The rat had a hard time controlling it as well, though the researcher had rebuilt the nerves.

  Reconstruction was simple, in principle. You could thin out the bone in one part of the body, take ten or fifteen percent of the tissue, say, and move it to the desired location. Sal had no idea how the physicists got the fields to do that, but the plain fact was that they did. The thinned-out bone where you stole the material from would rebuild itself in a few months. What worked for bone would work for other tissues as well.

  The problem wasn't just in the graphicer work involved. The process just wasn't accurate enough to do practical work with.

  "Sal, you still day-dreaming there?"

  "As usual. Reconstructive work, as usual."

  "You have a fixation on that issue. You planning some major work on your man Bob? Maybe a little enlargement work? Huh?"

  Sal giggled.

  "Bob doesn't need help in that department. Maybe that's your fixation. But keep it down. This isn't the kind of talk I want my kid to hear."

  Sal nodded in the direction of her ten year old daughter Saffron, who was engrossed in something at the next station. She wasn't supposed to bring her kid to work, but could she do? Bob was off on one of his endless business trips, and she had the evening shift. She couldn't leave Saffy by herself or with friends every night for a week. Besides, Saffy liked it here.

  Saffron was one of those super geeks. She spent every spare minute of her time working on three dimensional animations. Right now she was on a nostalgia kick. She would take some ancient cartoon character, say Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny, and turn them into three dimensional holographic animated characters. She had developed her own programming tools to do much of the work, and now, following in her mother's footsteps, was building virtual skeletal and circulatory systems.

  Even though she couldn't bother her mother with technical questions while she was actually erasing, Saffron still liked to watch her mom work. The real attraction was that mom's machine had huge amounts of computing power, more than she could ever dream of having at home.

  Saffron played with Bug's Bunny's lungs a bit more. The airflow calculations were more complicated than expected. You could predict the behavior of a lung design using bio- statistical-mechanics pretty well, but that was a far cry from actually designing a working lung.

  Jude had finished with the brain tumor. She was shaking, sweat running off her nose. Jude had the most difficult job of all. Nobody would ever know if you erased a bit too much breast, but there wasn't room for wide margins in the brain business. As their professor had said, you needed a really sharp pencil for brain work, not the blunt crayon that the rest of the field uses.

  The steel treatment chamber slid out of the field coils and cracked open. Most patients could sit up by themselves, and after a few moments of regaining their bearings they would walk off on their own. The brain patients had a harder time. They underwent more serious anesthesia, and were taken out on a wheeled stretcher.

  "Tough one Jude."

  "They always are. I hope that his sight will be OK. I'm not too sure about his left eye."

  "You're the best Jude. The absolute best at brains. Nobody could have done better."

  "I know – but that doesn't make it easier."

  The attendant finished cleaning the chamber, and Sal's patient came in. An obvious beauty, even stripped of makeup and dressed in the hospital gown as she was. Her long brown hair was tied back, to keep it out of the way during the procedure. Sal tried not to look when she took off the gown and lay down naked in the chamber, but as usual she couldn't help herself.

  Sal winced. An amazing figure. Hard to believe that she had gone through two pregnancies. She wouldn't look that good after the erasing. That full left breast wouldn't be much more than an empty bag of skin by the time Sal was done with her. Only real surgery, the kind with knives and silicone implants, would make it look anywhere near normal. She wished they would hurry up and finish the reconstructive methods, so she wouldn’t have to go through this thought process for every patient.

  "Saffron, stay out of trouble while I am treating the patient."

  "Yes, mommy."

  Saffron was a good kid at heart, but she was bit too bright and far too curious to stay completely out of trouble. Sal didn't like to think of her daughter as a hacker, but her daughter's bedroom was papered with 'borrowed' schematics and blueprints. Not to mention that embarrassing bit last year when the entire Idaho potato crop was almost delivered a
t their flat. Sal managed to stop it after the first hundred tons, but she ended up paying for the return shipment, not to mention the legal fees it took to keep Saffron from ending up in juvenile prison.

  Saffron went back to her Bug's Bunny, and Sal turned back to her station. The current live images were very close to the preparatory set she had been given. There would be some trouble with that artery, though. It would have to go. Jude would have gone to a lot of effort to save it, but that was brain. This was breast, and Sal had a blunt crayon, not a sharp pencil. It was a question of expensive machine time. The high resolution work took a lot more computation and radiation time, and it just wasn't justified for breasts, pretty as they might be.

  It was over an hour before Sal finished the erasure design and computation. It would take another hour for the actual tissue erasure. She had to keep an eye on things while it was happening, but there wasn't much she could or would do unless there was a complete disaster. There was essentially no feedback from the patient during the process. The fields were too strong for any of the imaging or monitoring devices to work.

  She entered the code that started the process, and listened as the hum of the generators kicked in. Saffron came over to her station.

  "How did it go, Mom?"

  "I think well. She'll need some reconstructive work afterwards, though. She should have waited a few years with