The Scraper: Part 3 - Slow Progress

The scouting robot was at the entrance awaiting further instructions, the ViDoc could see through the robot’s sensors that the micrometeorite activity near the entrance had increased from one per hundred and fifty eight square metres per second to four.

This gave the scouting robot a sixty eight percent chance of being hit if it was sent out right now to save the human.

The robot was designed and manufactured in zero gee for subterranean work and was not armoured, if the robot was hit it would almost certainly break, meaning that the human wouldn’t be saved which was the ViDoc’s priority.

It made a few more calculations and realised that if it let the human carry on crawling for another seven point four metres, the chance of the robot being hit fell to just under fifty percent. The ViDoc had already ordered four more similar robots in the vicinity to make their way to the entrance, but it knew in all probability if the first rescue mission failed then the human would probably suffer Real Death.

The ViDoc waited with an inhuman patience as it watched the injured man painstakingly pull his battered and broken body inch by inch closer to the entrance.

Sam felt the moment his medichines took over all control of his body. One last effort of will allowed him to roll over onto his back, for some reason he wanted to see the sun but of course he was on the night side, his eyes slowly slid shut.

---

Sam sat nervously in the waiting room to the clinic, he was a week beyond his sixteenth birthday, his mother had finally acquiesced in allowing him to have medichines inserted inside him.

Sam had been born in 2072 a full ten years before the so-called Quantum Revolution, the point in human evolution at which technology became fully integrated with the human form.

Even though Sam’s mother had watched his father die from leukaemia in 2078, it had still taken her almost six years to fully trust the technology that practically every man; woman and child in the New European States had living in their bodies.

Sam had learned about the wonder of the medichines in school, how they had all but eradicated diseases such as the one that had killed his father and many more besides.

His mother’s reticence towards having medichines made no sense to Sam, from a young age he’d been implanted with the first chips into his brain that would later go to make up his neural net. At eleven just one year after the Quantum Revolution, he’d had the cancer gene T7001 removed from his genetic make up and so in some ways she’d embraced the new age.

Medichines however did not sit well with her, maybe being born in the 2030s had something to do with it; her generation were fine with mind enhancing tech.

But tiny machines that lived and evolved in your body was thought to be a step too far by Sam’s mother and there were plenty of books and films to fuel the paranoia of a technophobe.

Lately though he had been pushing for it more and had pointed out to her on many occasions that if she were to get medichines then her life-span statistically would be increased by at least fifty years.

Well for whatever reason she had agreed and Sam sat nervously in the too clean waiting room with his mother and a nervous looking couple who were clearly expecting a baby.

‘Sam Kendal.’

A tall beautiful nurse had come into the waiting area via a door that Sam hadn’t noticed when he’d initially sat down.

He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he had a vague air of familiarity about her. As Sam and his mother got up to follow her, he realised that it was because she had a certain genetic enhancement that was in fashion at the moment.

High Asiatic cheekbones, mixed with green eyes and red-blonde hair, her face was perfectly symmetrical and he’d dreamt about having girlfriends with bodies like hers.

He was glad her back was to him and that his mother was in front of him as he flushed red, as he entered the doctor’s office he wondered vaguely if he’d be able to use his medichines to control those kinds of embarrassing responses to beauty.

‘Come in, come in! I’m Dr. Julias Peterman and I’ll be your consultant today.’

A tall avuncular man dressed in a suit and short white doctor’s coat beckoned them into the office, the only thing that told Sam it was a doctor’s office was the slight tinge of disinfectant in the air and the bulky machinery in the corner of the room.

Sam half listened as his mother explained to Doctor Peterman that they were on European State Insurance level one and would just require the basic medichine suite.

‘That’s the beauty of medichines Mrs Kendal, they can be upgraded as and when you or your son goes up in insurance levels.’

He turned his attention to Sam

‘You’ll be able to exert control over most basic bodily functions, however the medichines do have fail safes in them to stop you doing things that might be dangerous to you. And of course there’s a whole suite of drugballs that come with the medichines, again you do have some control over the release of certain drugs into your system, but it’s all fairly automated.

I’ll download a full instruction manual to your neural net. Certain functions won’t come online till you’re eighteen but apart from that once these are in you won’t have to see another doctor unless it’s for an upgrade. Do you have any questions for me?’

Sam did have questions for him, but they were all pretty much related to how the medichines would effect sex, he’d heard that they could give you extreme sexual prowess, but he wasn’t sure if that was just his friends teasing because he didn’t have any.

Anyway he didn’t want to ask about that in front of his mother and she was showing no signs of leaving.

‘Right then, if neither of you have any questions then we’ll begin, if you could just go behind that screen for me, take off your clothes and put on a pair of the boxers in the top drawer.’

He pointed to where Sam could get the shorts; Sam gave his best could-you-leave-me-alone-please look to his mother and disappeared behind the screen.

Sam reemerged from behind the screen with his mother still there; he was shown to the Virtual Doctor which looked to Sam like a large electronic sarcophagus with the top open. Cables and tubing spilled from underneath leading to unseen connections under the floor.

It had various status lights that were either red or green dotted down one side of it and set in the middle of the other side was a screen with a display that was occluded from Sam’s view.

Dr. Peterman pulled a small step ladder from underneath the ViDoc and instructed Sam to climb inside, as he got in and was about to lie down, he caught a glimpse of his mother, she looked nervous, Sam’s palms started to sweat.

‘Right, just lie still for me; I’m just going to raise your head slightly. You’re going to feel a wet slightly sticky substance in there with you, don’t worry that’s just the antiseptic gel we have to submerge your body in. The ViDoc is programming your medichines with your genome and then we’ll be ready to go, shouldn’t be long now.’

Sam looked up at the ceiling; the gel covered his whole body up to his neck, just below his raised chin. He thought he could hear a slight whirring buzzing through the liquid.

‘You’ll just feel a series of slight pricks in your arms legs and upper torso, that’s the ViDoc delivering the medichines, the gel’s an analgesic as well so it won’t hurt, don’t worry.’

Dr. Julius Peterman looked down at Sam and smiled.

Cryptogee