A Change Of Heart (Story)
A short-story: I went to a Transhumanist-themed Bad Idea "butcher-shop" a little while ago, and one of the short (short!) stories we looked at involved someone who is given an artificial heart. Since then I've wanted to write something like what is below, mostly just for the last line (please read the whole thing!) and this evening I finally got around to it. It needs editing, no doubt, and some more research into how the whole damn cardiovascular system works -- but please leave comments or email me! I'm going to try to write a little (raw) short story every week (although tonight reminded me: it's hard work writing!).
A Change Of Heart
When Clive Mendelson learned that he was going to die, his first thought, so lateral as to be nearly orthogonal, was how good it would be for his art.
Clive was sitting in a paper gown on a padded bench when given the news; cold textured plastic sticking to the backs of his thin, blue-veined thighs where they protruded beneath the hem of the flimsy garment, out-stretched toes just barely brushing the fractal-pattern tiled floor. Of course he knew he was going to die -- everyone does, after all -- but HE was going to die, and die soon. At age sixty-three. Sixty-three! Sitting there in the examination room surrounded by glossy white machines which hummed and chirped, shimmering displays turned away from the innocent patient, the true masters of diagnosis and disease. The fresh-faced doctor in a crisp, white coat was almost superfluous -- except perhaps for these 'you're going to die' conversations, since it wasn't something you could exactly drop in an instant-message or tweet. But apart from that, doctors were going the way of the stethoscope and scalpel, phased out by newer, better, quicker, cheaper. Which on balance is probably for the best, thought Clive, 'cause this kid looks about eighteen.
"Now Clive," a flash of a confident smile quickly replaced with sombre, serious-eyed and well-practised faux-concern, "the news is not good for your old ticker, I'm afraid." Clive supressed a snort. You haven't done enough to be afraid of a damn thing, he thought resentfully, and would it kill you to call me 'Mister'?. Oblivious, the young doctor proceeded through Clive's medical history: fainting spells, chest-pain, new drugs, arterial expansion surgery and finally a double-bypass. Old news, old scars. Each time they would suggest something new, and each time things got better for a while; Clive would get back to painting and try not to think about it.
As an artist, Clive Mendelson was a relative, if modest, success: he sold enough to buy paints, brushes and canvas, with enough left over to make up the difference from wife Jane's part-time data-cleansing salary to pay rent on the little two-bedroom cottage they shared. When he was younger he'd had a desk-job, or rather a series thereof, and they'd made enough sensible/lucky investment decisions to put their daughter Andrea through high-school. After which she joined one of those independent education communes: open content from local knowledge experts or from courses back when the big corporate Universities still reigned, guest lectures paid for by the campus community farms, micro-breweries, cottage industries and the sales of research.
Andrea grew up in a world so different from his own, and continuously evolving, that it was dazzling: at five she was "e-moting" smiley-faces wirelessly to friends across the street and across the world, sharing pictures, music, television and interactives. At ten she would happily explain to him how the "active yoghurt" bio-drinks she drank were strengthening her immune system against the various viral threats of the season, and cleaning her little ten-year-old large intestine of imagined toxic flora. At fifteen she'd snuck down to the mall to get her ears pierced, and tiny cochlear implants, powered by her own pulsing blood-pressure. (Clive, of course, freaked - it turned out easier to take out the ear-rings than the implants, but he noticed she was careful not to listen to her iPod without headphones whenever he was nearby.)
Clive had never thought of himself as a technophobe, but he just couldn't keep up with the new technologies and found himself increasingly distrustful of them. The phone Andrea had bought him for his fiftieth, no doubt, had a world of unexplored functionality -- but all he ended up using it for was voice-calls, video and email. He had come from a time when the Internet delivery protocols were unguaranteed, "best-effort" only, and always expected network outages, disappearing emails, lost connections. The rare times things did go wrong -- usually from infowar denial-of-service terrorism -- just served to convince him his mistrust was well-founded.
And then one day he'd driven past his old neighbourhood and found it gone: razed to the ground by controlled micro-explosives in preparation for the growth of a gated community by a swarm of nanomachines, curving walls and arches emerging organically from the rubble, growing invisibly and inexorably.
On reflection, the art was probably Clive's way of exploring and understanding what was happening in his world, the rate of change now so accelerated that it seemed a new miracle was announced every minute: brain-interfaces, flexible translucent 3D-displays, car navigation systems with more grunt than the weather-predicting supercomputers of the year before. At fourty-five, with a teenage daughter, he began to sketch in pencils and charcoal, which he hadn't done since he was a teenager himself -- pictures from a past half-real, half-imagined: the view across the suburbs from his grandparent's apartment, an empty playground in winter, the beatific, focused look on the face of a breast-feeding mother. He tried painting: oil on canvas in big, deliberate, immature strokes, the process slow and methodical and somehow grounding; it gave him a sense of history and of time, gave him both a gentle respite from the world and an active meditation.
His art was well-received by those who claim to know about such things, and he had his first gallery-showing within the year. His canvases sold, and two were selected by a print-on-demand greeting-card company. (Clive never understood why people still gave greeting-cards.) For a while he enjoyed the celebrity, being the centre of attention, but in the end the parties, the people and the fashions, were too much a reminder of the ever-changing world he was trying to avoid.
Clive resisted even trivial augmentations: he had no internal chronometer, no cochlear implants, no MEDEVAC sub-dermal ID chip. He took long-hand notes in a battered old Moleskine notebook, behaviour which itself went in and out of vogue. Like most artists, he had moments of true inspiration -- his Enlightenment, Now What? triptych warranted a gallery tour, and it's eventual sale to an ex-popstar of some notoriety paid for a holiday to a floating resort near the Maldives reclamation project -- distributed sporadically between long bouts of solid (and, his harsher critics would claim, pedestrian) work. Until one warm evening in May when he'd stood up from his low wooden stool and fainted into the drying image of the Taj Mahal festooned with satellite-dishes.
Janey found him there a few minutes later, a yellow smear sticking one eyelid shut, and took him to the hospital. High blood-pressure, arterial plaque, chloresterol: a genetic predisposition to heart disease and a fondness for the fried goods you could still get in the little lane off West Street. He was given a little blood-pressure arm-band and a diet-plan and sent on his way. He got better for a while.
And then he would go in for a checkup and it would be worse, every time worse than the one before. The diet wasn't working, it was too late to make any difference, the drugs, new drugs every time, weren't doing it either. It got worse each time until it was about as bad as it could get -- a paper gown covering his skinny butt while a baby-faced doctor explained his options in patronisingly simple metaphors.
Turned out there was really only one: the complete replacement of his laboring heart, and much of his cardiac system, with an artificial one, the latest in cyberbionetics. It was almost enough to trigger a heart-attack, hearing that -- Clive Mendelson, sixty-three and without so much as a sub-dermal, had to undergo major cyber-surgery, to become a modern-day cyborg in order to live. He let Janey drive him home, then sat alone in the spare-room-cum-studio staring at a blank canvas and listening to the pounding in his ears until the tears finally came: deep sobs that racked his body until his arm ached and the blood-pressure arm band beeped its concern. Then the tears, the sorrow, was gone, though the fear remained, and he crawled into bed beside his wife and -- eventually -- fell asleep.
Clive went in for the surgery the next day. Another paper gown, a different examination room (with the same fractal-pattern on the roof and wall), sitting up on a gurney while the young and pretty nurse delivered a quick shot of something clear into the big vein at his elbow, then he was out.
If he dreamed during the fifteen hour surgery he doesn't remember it. As far as Clive Mendelson is concerned, he lay back against crinkling crepe-paper on a thin, firm mattress, his pulse a stuttering staccato beat in his neck, ears and each fingertip; and awoke on crisp linen under a thin cotton blanket, sunlight streaming through the window of the recovery ward, feeling fatigued but better than he could ever remember feeling.
Maybe it's the drugs, he thought to himself, but he knew it was more than that: the background pain which he'd grown accustomed to, a feeling of wrongness about his chest and arms -- it was gone. The pounding in his ears, the tightness in each temple -- no more. Clive was relaxed, pain-free, euphoric (yeah, that's almost certainly the drugs, he thought.) Although tired, Clive could sense a certain ... vitality ... that he hadn't felt since he was in his twenties.
When he checked out that afternoon -- dear worried Andrea, stoic Janey showing her own feelings with relieved tears and shiny, animated balloons -- it was under his own steam: he stood, dressed, and walked out of the hospital with growing confidence in each step.
And each day he grows stronger, his cybernetic heart doing a better job of monitoring and filtering his blood than his organic one ever did. It can aerate the blood, flooding the tiny capilaries of his lungs to create an enormous active surface-area; energise via his digestive system; and control protein- and chemical-distribution with nanomesh filters in various parts of his cardiovascular system, growing new cells stronger, more efficiently, by providing exactly what they need.
At sixty-five, Clive is in better condition than he's ever been. If cut, he now heals quickly and without scarring. His frame, naturally skinny, has filled out; he can build muscle by controlling blood-pressure to specific muscle fibres and muscle-groups, and control his internal temperature and heart-rate for burning calories when he needs to. He is rarely sick, as the construction of antibodies and antivirals can be promoted, a micro-environment factory running incessantly inside his chest.
Clive Mendelson remembers, in a dim and distant kind of way, being worried or even fearful; his anxiety towards the reliance of something so foreign for such an essential task. The artist wanting to retain his 'humanity', whatever the hell that meant to anyone. To remain pure and unsullied by the technologies that daily shook the world, that took his job, his neighbourhood, his past, recycling it into novel forms for each new generation.
But Clive has since had a change of heart.