Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Medical Sci-Fi Contest: Please Meet the Winner!
Filed under: Medgadget Exclusive
When results of the voting come in, and when we announce the winner, it is the most special occasion around here. We yield our site to pure fiction, imagination, and literary talent. We yield our journal to the future of medicine.
First of all, we would like to thank Mr. Aaron Rubin from ScrubsGallery.com, a sponsor of the competition, for offering the prize, an Apple IPhone. We would like to thank the honorable judges that joined Medgadget editors: Allen from GruntDoc, Steven Palter from docinthemachine, Sydney from Medpundit, and Enoch Choi from Doctor Geek, M.D.. And most of all, we would like to thank all the talented authors who submitted their entries, for their wonderful imagination, for their original thoughts, and so many well-written entries.
And now, the moment of truth... The winner, is A'Llyn Ettien with a story called Immigrants, a tale of ethical dilemmas of child bearing and parenting in the potentially bleak realities of the future.
The first runner-up writes under the pseudonym Phredd Serenissima, who submitted an amusing, imaginative story that takes you for a fun ride on a tricycle alongside an anti-socialite of the future.
The second runner-up, who uses the pseudonym Lane Billaes, tells an old tale of perils of immortality with a modern nano-technological spin.
UPDATE: For your convenience, you can print all three stories and have them on the go.
UPDATE: The winner A'Llyn Ettien tells us about herself:
I live and work in the Boston area, and am in school for a Masters of Library and Information Studies. I'm taking a class on health librarianship this semester and am fascinated by all the cool tools available for accessing and presenting information. (I'm getting my degree at the University of Alabama, through real-time online classes, speaking of cool technology.) As part of the class, our professor has us reading medical-related blogs, both with and without library connections, to get a sense of the healthcare culture online. I'm learning a lot and am really enjoying the class and the reading (though it's dangerous because when reading blogs is part of your homework, that's way too good an excuse not to get anything else done!).I was reading GruntDoc one day, saw the announcement about the contest (I wasn't reading MedGadget regularly at that point), and decided instantly that I had to enter. I love science fiction! I love writing! ''m studying healthcare information! I've dabbled in writing sci fi on and off for a while, and have had three little stories published here and there on web-zines, so aside from librarianship, science fiction writing is my secret love...
Best contest ever!
Immigrants
by A'Llyn Ettien
"Hm... caffinex blue, double stim," said Rin, flicking her finger to scroll the menu down the table, and tapping her selection. "You?"
"Good, but no stim," said Liena. Rin looked up in mild surprise, and Liena, feeling herself flush, laid her hand on her stomach.
Rin's face went still, with the carefully expressionless look she used, not entirely successfully, to avoid the impression of passing judgment. "So you did it."
Liena nodded, cheeks pink. "It will be six months. From now. So, you know, I'm only drinking the prenatal tonic." She produced a vial of whey-colored liquid from a pocket.
Rin, still expressionless, regarded it.
"It's medicine, Rin, not one of those potions from the buyer's-risk pages."
"And what benefits do you expect to see from it?"
The phrasing was strictly neutral, a doctor's attempt to gauge the extent of a patient's seduction by quackery.
"Well, not-it's just an optimal balance of nutrients, I know it won't, well. I *know* the science." Liena made herself stop talking, aware that she sounded like a flustered student at an unexpected exam.
Rin flicked the menu around the table screen. "Of course you do."
She seemed about to say more, then stopped, ordered something from the menu and cancelled it, and finally said, "The women who work outside the clinic and do it, I assume they just don't completely understand, they think the magic charms will save them somehow, or they'll be the 10%, but--"
With a soft chime, the delivery door by the table opened. Rin took her drink. "I'm sorry, I'm staring at the screen but forgot to order yours. Flat caf-blue?"
Liena nodded, and Rin tapped the order and looked up again. "But I don't understand, really, why are you doing this?"
Liena sighed. "It's not the same, adopting from Arkenny. When you can even get a child, you know what the waitlists are like, now that their crops are over the wire blight. That's good, of course, I don't wish famine on them. And doesn't it seem wrong, too, to depend on the misfortunes of other planets to give us children?"
Rin looked out the window. The hot season was coming, and the betten trees were sealing their leaves, turning into bristling towers of spines. Like most women on Kanisek, she had chosen sterilization as soon as she reached adulthood. Liena had gone with her, but held back for some reason she had never really been able to explain.
Knowing she was dodging the real question, Liena waited for Rin to look back at her, and spoke as honestly as she could.
"I suppose I just want to bear a child, Rin. I mean, it ...it's sort of a biological urge, isn't it?" She tried a smile, but Rin seemed to consider the question seriously.
"I don't see how any of us really knows. It's not an area we study. What's the point?"
"I think there must be something. I just *want* it. A child that's from me. At 10, children are already half grown. They already have lives, they remember parents that aren't you. They aren't *yours.*"
"That's an interesting way to put it," said Rin. She took Liena's drink from the delivery door and pushed it across the table. "What are you going to do, then?"
"It's getting so warm, " said Liena, blinking and looking out the window in her turn. A pale child, five or six years old, was wandering past, staring fixedly up at the sky. She winced and turned her head.
Rin was watching her. "Serves you right for trying to change the subject," she said, but gently.
Liena emptied the vial of balanced nutrients into her cup. "That's the ironic world for you."
"You must have made a decision. You can't just leave it to the last minute." Rin made a wry face to soften the sternness of her words. "Or such would be my official advice as a physician."
"I can leave it a little while longer," said Liena. She put her hand over her stomach again, a protective gesture from a maternal instinct she had never actually seen in another person. She wasn't sure if it came naturally, or from watching too much foreign videodrama. She imagined the dialogue: "If the still-imperceptible child taking shape inside me could only stay within, protected by my own immunity from the horror of the K41 nanovirus, not needing the cruel decision of which slim chance to take!" It cast a pall of stupidity over the whole thing.
"Am I a bad person, do you think?" Her voice was low, and she cleared her throat as if to repeat herself, but did not say it again.
Rin was silent a moment. "I think you made a bad decision," she said at last. "But people have made worse, without being *bad*... people are just imperfect." She took a hefty sip of her drink, blinking rapidly as the stimulant reached her system. "And if you're going to go through with this, you'll have to make another bad decision, because there's no good one to make. It's not an easy situation for a good person."
"They're still our children, the ones who get stabilized," said Liena. She had regained control of her voice, and her tone was level, but there was an undercurrent of pleading in it. She had heard this before, in would-be birthparents, arguing with her for the chance of hope.
Rin half nodded, half shrugged. "We don't know what they are."
A young man hurried by outside the window, caught the wandering child by the hand, and said something they couldn't hear, his face earnest. The child looked at him with a sort of distant tolerance and allowed itself to be led back the way it had come.
"So I should just take the chance? That mine will be one of the ones that survive infection naturally?"
"You know I didn't say that." Rin, normally intensely resentful of any attempt to put words into her mouth, now only smiled sadly at Liena. Her gentleness was unnerving.
"I know," said Liena. She sipped gingerly at her own drink, the flavor gone off subtly due to the prenatal additive, and watched the man and the child retreating up the street. In the long evening shadows between buildings, bioluminescent dust sparkled faintly.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," she said bluntly. It felt strangely satisfying to admit it. "I think I'll have it stabilized, how could I do anything else? How could I let a baby I grew inside me take a chance with something that kills 90% of infected children? A *baby*. Have you ever seen a baby, Rin, they're so tiny."
Rin shook her head. She worked in general maintenance medicine, while Liena had specialized in childhood vaccine research and had occasion to deal with infants. The vaccine had seemed promising when they finished school; if they could only keep the virus at bay for a few years, until the child was 8 or 9, the odds of survival neared 99%. It was still tantalizingly possible in theory, but K41 mutated too quickly and too well, evading everything they tried, and Liena knew better than most how far they were from success. If she-if anyone-could study at the advanced institutions on the up-tech planets, she would be more optimistic, but of course the quarantine was absolute. No one else wanted the nanovirus, and Kanisek was not interesting enough for anyone not from its surface to devote any particular effort to studying it.
"You couldn't let your child take that chance, could you." Liena stated it as a fact. "You'd have to give them the gene therapy and let them incorporate the virus. Because then they live. They take it into their structure, it's part of them, like it is of plants. It never hurts them again. They don't even need maintenance treatment, like people who are exposed later, and hardly ever die of it. Like us."
Rin's face was sympathetic. "But if you want something that's yours?"
"But if you want something that's yours, how can you do that?" Liena's voice rose a little, a kind of desperation creeping into it. A few faces in the café turned to her and Rin, read the signs of a personal and emotional discussion, and politely turned away again.
"I think I couldn't let *my* baby turn into something else," said Liena. She felt tears well in her eyes, and let them stand. Low pink sunlight fractured into bright splinters, scattering the image of Rin's face. "You don't even know what they'll turn into. Maybe they grow feathers and fly away in the night. Maybe they turn green and hunt bugs in the trees. Even if they're still shaped like people, they look at you like something from another world."
"We are from another world," said Rin, softly.
Liena took a breath, wiped her eyes with her fingers. "It *is* biological, you know," she said, putting on a normal voice and giving a small laugh to show she was coming around. "I'm saying exactly the things I've had 15 other people say to me in the last 10 years, and we all know better, even the ones who don't work in the clinic. If it wasn't something innate, we'd all be smart enough that this wouldn't happen."
Rin smiled again, her face still sad. "Well, drink your prenatal nutrients. You can wait a while to decide."
"To decide whether it's better to let my child almost certainly die, or just mutate into another species." Liena's voice wobbled again. "It's not as if they have family. They can't even interbreed, with humans or each other. They're not ours, they're all alone. Maybe it's better to let them take the chance, and if they survive, at least they're *us*."
Rin folded her arms on the table, shrugging resignation. "That is the choice the world has given us, and that we accepted when we came from the Arkenny foster system."
"We didn't know." Liena sounded almost angry. "We were 10 years old, and alone, and hungry, and we had no way to understand what we were giving up." She coughed, and the medi-strip blinked mutely on her forearm, signaling an adjusted dosage to soothe her airways. Automatically, not really registering the readings, they both glanced at their strips, absent-mindedly confirming health status.
Rin sighed. Her natural state - impatience with wishful thinking - was reasserting itself. "No one ever understands the full effects of the choices they make. But this is where we live, even if we weren't born to it and it's not completely hospitable to us. We have comfortable lives and good jobs and edible crops. More to the point, we can't leave even if we want to, because of a certain giant military quarantine. There's nothing we can do but take the choices this world offers and make the best of them. No one has ever been able to do anything else."
She frowned to herself, her habitual apology when she felt she had been unnecessarily sharp, and reached across the table to touch Liena's arm. "I'm sorry. It's hard to be human."
Liena smiled a little. "I suppose it's good to at least understand the choices you have to make."
"Having devoted my career to the pursuit of knowledge, I hope so," Rin said dryly.
"Anyway," Liena added, making another point in the ongoing, cyclic argument she had been having with herself, "we don't know they can't interbreed. Most of them disappear into the wilderness when they get older, they could be building a civilization out there."
Rin looked noncommittal, but did not argue.
"They're still our children," said Liena, looking into some far distance. "Children always live in different worlds from their parents, one way or another. They have friends you don't know, they move away, they do things their parents don't understand. They leave their families and settle strange planets too far away to ever come back, and parents have to let them go."
They sat quietly for a while, and then Liena looked at Rin. "Will you midwife for me?"
Rin closed her eyes, her lips pressing together in a disapproving line, then sighed and nodded. "I'll hook in the standards on childbirth."
"It's a privilege to be able to know," said Liena. She blinked, and tears sprang loose to slide down her cheeks. "We want to know. To choose. It's what we are. Maybe them too."
The sun disappeared behind the horizon, light vanishing from the sky as if a switch had been flipped, while the ground glowed cool contrast. Outside the window the pale child ran by, laughing, eyes bright, skin lit up like the dust.
And now, the runners up...
(2)
examples: <b>Bold</b> <i>Italic</i>
