INdustry, SCIence, and TechNOLogy!

[bloodyrosemccoy]

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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 Chances are that it won’t be long before these aliens’ great strides forward in technology look rather ridiculoulsy outdated.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.

Comments

[spotweld.livejournal.com]

The Hive? A hive of Hives?

Are you looking for the word that the Hive would use, or how it's being translated into a concept that is as close as possible to an already existing human term? If it's the latter it might be a hierarchy sort of thing. The team of "doctors" might be a neighborhood-hive. A group of doctor hives might a doctor city-hive. And ultimately all the doctors could be part of the world-hive that is all hives? Er?


As for the most radical surgery possible... total simultaneous skin transplant. It's the largest organ, and look at all the stuff it does. If someone's skin starts to fail... wow, bad stuff going on.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Well, the thing about cystic fibrosis-caused transplantation is that it's got a lot of stuff going on (skin is impressive, but heart, lungs, pancreas, and liver all at once is a pretty massive deconstruction-reconstruction), and the causing factor gives me some neat peripheral stuff like gene therapy and growing new, healthy (and genetically corrected) versions of the patient's own organs from a petri dish, and generally Doing The Impossible. But I'll keep the skin in mind for other scenes--that WOULD be something.

The Hive never used language before it contacted other people. I don't remember if you've read any of my stories, but it's a total hive mind; the species is a single individual with a few billion bodies. So with the language it has learned from others, it often gets careless and refers to all those bodies as "I" and "me" in a way that can seriously confuse people. Its specifications would be for the benefit of these other people, so it'd use terms they're familiar with. They'd probably come up with their own terms to refer to a group of Hive bodies.

Also, since it regards its bodies as interchangeable, there would be no real way to specify which body was THE doctor; if the one doing the doctoring suddenly died or something, another would just shove it aside and take over. So I'd say that a reference to a group of bodies would probably be in terms of where they were and their proximity to each other. And the whole species, as well as the character you're interacting with, is referred to as The Hive. So you could have "The Hive looked at me" or "The Hive was spread over all the planets in the Galactic Union."

... Sorry. I tend to get a little excited playing with this stuff. I LOVE THIS CHARACTER.

[dreams-cametrue.livejournal.com]

I love your approach to science fiction.

It's difficult to see now, since time has left the original Star Trek series so hopelessly outdated and campy, but that was the thing that made it easier to suspend disbelief when I discovered that series in first reruns in the early '70's. They treated tricorders and transporters and warp drive as ordinary technology, something to be used and abused and sworn at but never something that was treated with awe or overly effusive deference like some of the poorly written sci-fi of the '60's. I had the pleasure to attend a lecture by Gene Roddenberry when I was in college, he felt that it was important to treat the technology with that attitude and reserve the "gee whiz" stuff for the deliberately strange things they encountered in each episode.

Tom-

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

That was actually something I liked about Star Trek. I'm not so much thinking of their treatment of technology, which I agree was wonderfully "taken for granted" (because how often do you normally hear someone say, "I'm sure glad I have an electric stove!" while they're cooking?). I am thinking in terms of some of the shortcuts they had to take with it--Star Trek had a lot of budgetary constraints, so technology often looked like cheap special effects, for some odd reason. ;) And some shortcuts are taken for the sake of the story, like magical cures or warp drive or whatever, and that's understandable, too. Star Trek was not focused on the medical stuff, and so its shortcuts in that area were fine with me.

My stories are about doctors specifically and their world, so you get to see some of their technology peripherally, and I want it to look like these guys have a real job to do. That would make the POOF! FIXED! version of medicine too MUCH of a shortcut. It all depends on what you focus on, I guess!

[dreams-cametrue.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree. And also, they were constrained not only by budget but by the one hour format. I understand that your premise requires a much deeper grasp of the technology that exists and the technology that could be possible.

[10cents.livejournal.com]

Ooh! I've been waiting for you to make a post that referenced The Hive so that I'd have an excuse to ask a few of the zillions of questions that I've been wondering about it. I hope you don't mind my being excessively nosy, but this species/creature is FANTASTIC, and it tickles my imagination, and so my mind generates a whole bucket-load of "what if" situations, so I'm curious:

What happens if The Hive wants MORE bodies than it currently has? I mean, would two of its bodies go ahead and mate with each other, or produce a type of eggs, or would they create them through some non-traditional fashion? And on a similar note, do the individual bodies die of old age and need a steady stream of replacements (much like cells constantly dying off and growing anew), or would The Hive only create new bodies if something catastrophic happened? I'm also fascinated if you've given any thought to how this creature evolved.

I understand if answering any of this would give away pieces of information that you'd rather keep to yourself for now, and I don't mean to distract you from your current line of thoughts, so feel free to ignore any/all, if you'd rather. I'm just a mad fan of The Hive, and I can't help but ponder the implications of the species. /fangirl behavior

(Side note: I personally think that some modification on the phrase "cluster of hives" would work well for a group of its bodies; perhaps playing with the word "hive", to have something along the lines of "hivelets".)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I'm really happy you're so interested! It's a damn fun character. And actually, those are some of the things that I've been playing with. I'm not sure how many elements I'm going to get into this story, but I can tentatively say that I'm going to work in something on its approach to death and damage. (Early on I was going to have a birth scenario, but I may save that for another time.)

So, to answer what I can without giving things away: Yes, The Hive has two sexes and is oviparous. (Its eggs are about the size of your fist, look like medicine capsules, and are a color rather like red sandstone. No one knows how many it lays at a time because it refuses to let anyone watch it.) Its reproduction is generally a bit like a body's metabolic steady state, except instead of weight this regulation holds it as a certain population. When its population falls drastically for some reason (plague, disaster, etc.) it compensates--and as far as people can tell, this is all done without much conscious attention. No one's sure what it thinks about its own mating, but I'd guess it enjoys it. It's certainly not interested in courtship displays, but choice of mates seems to be more about convenience, or even a bit of selective breeding on The Hive's part.

Hive bodies can die of old age or any number of things, so replacement is usually constant. It describes a dead body as just being "gone," not there any more for it to control. I think it's as afraid of the time it will eventually go extinct just like we fear dying, but the death of an individual body doesn't phase it. (It can be traumatized and hurt by large die-offs, though.) Describing this feeling to people who are only in one place at one time and only die once is apparently difficult for it.

At the writers' group someone pointed out to me that I hadn't mentioned any other hive species on its planet, which was a gross oversight, since the idea is that that's one branch of the animal kingdom on its planet, and this mind is the one with that spark of self-awareness. I'm still working out its biology, but that's the basic concept.

(Hivelet! That might work!)

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

You are brilliant and made of entertaining.

But not "a hive of Hives," please. The very term makes me itch :)