INdustry, SCIence, and TechNOLogy!

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For the Doctors! stories, I really want a scene in which a whole group of The Hive’s bodies* performs a really complex surgery, something amazing and badass even to the other doctors who get to watch. I want to show off The Hive’s ability to be efficient, fast, and multitasky by making it into an entire surgical team on a dramatic surgery.

 

And I want it to be the sort of thing that would really work, not like a Star Trek solution of bombarding someone with magical rays.

 

So I’ve spent the last few days giving myself a medical crash course in cystic fibrosis, organ transplants, and gene therapy, and trying to put together the sort of things that really go on in our universe and time with the advances of Futuristic SpaceLand to make a cohesive model of what it might look like to replace some seriously trashed innards, fix a genetic disorder, and give the person a life expectancy of more than a few years. There’s a balance to be struck between believability and the advanced technology—the surgery is the same, but there are better meds, different therapies, and even different tools like suture materials and heart-lung machines. I’m also tossing organ synthesis into the mix. It makes for a suitably awe-inspiring bit of scalpel-wielding.

 

And the reason it’s so dramatic is the challenge. The Hive has to basically take the patient apart and put him back together again, and this is somewhat traumatic and involves a lot of knowledge on its part and, if I want to describe the surgery at all, a lot of knowledge on my part, too.** While it’s true that the biological body doesn’t respond well to Basic Repair Procedures,*** there’s a lot of banging around that goes on with any sort of surgery, and I’ve left this in. I just think it’s utterly amazing that we can actually do things like this—that we can chop people up and leave them in better shape to survive than they would otherwise be. It’s unutterably cool, and we do it all the time—I respect that so much that I want to leave all the hard work on both doctor’s and patient’s part in these stories.

 

Of course, it makes me wonder how my stories will look in even just a few decades. Chances are that it won’t be long before these aliens’ great strides forward in technology look rather ridiculoulsy outdated. People will be able to read it and say that this is back when gene therapy was in its infancy, or that it was when we were still doing crude organ transplants, or before every human’s immune system was bolstered by nanobots that repair damage on a cellular level or whatever. (The last of which is, for the record, going to come up in my stories in the future.) But hey, how awesome is that—that science really can outpace science fiction? We may not have our drink-serving robots or our jetpacks (yet), but god damn, some of the stuff we can do is incredible. And it deserves our respect.

 

 

*I gotta come up with a good descriptive term for that. It’s hard when the species is a collective. You’ve got a flock of birds, a herd of cows, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a pod of dolphins, an army of frogs, a building of Elvis impersonators, a network of nerds, a lick of lesbians, etc. … but what do you call a small group of bodies that make up The Hive? A hive of Hives?

 

**And I have to put up with a bunch of snotty space doctors griping about how if we had just given the patient some magic space gene therapy back when he was small it wouldn’t have come to this, but that’s why it’s a rare and cool thing for them to watch, dammit. The excuse is that he was off in some corner of The Galaxy where it wasn’t available …

 

***1. Turn it off and turn it back on. 2. Unplug it and plug it back in. 3. Wait for the problem to fix itself. 4. Hit it. 5. Swear at it. 6. Get a new one.