Impostors : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
In this age of cyborgs and clones, when movies and rumors scarcely
stay abreast of what's being concocted in laboratories every
day, we don't know how to refer to "normal" anymore. How many
people do I know who, physiologically speaking, stand as miracles of
interior decoration—who are, for that matter, standing solely
because of it? Thanks to the precise violations of surgical engineers,
some of my closest friends have all sorts of technology sewn up inside
them. An alarming percentage of them have replaced an alarming
percentage of themselves with hardware. Just a month ago, Jack's
chest was the site of an impromptu medical conference. Half a dozen
doctors prodded about in there the way that, back in the Sixties, we
used to fish for errant crusts in the fondue pot. They inserted a
pacemaker to thrum alongside his discreetly metered heart, and then
they restrung him like a tennis racket. He's up and walking
already, feeling more or less like his old self, he says, and in some
ways better than ever, or at least other than ever. I am perforce
pleasant about it with him, and I know that the doctors are optimistic
about a full recovery of what remains of him to be recovered.
Nevertheless, I have to admit that when I encountered him outside the
hospital, putting my arms around his retrofitted body gave me a
sensation similar to bumping into a refrigerator.
And this is only the most recent example. Somewhere below and behind
the belt, Bill is held together by a special mesh; although the
reality is far more elegant and complex, I can't help but
picture his renegade innards being caught in the webbing of an
infielder's glove. Definitely I am at the age when I am
surrounded by friends who because of sports injuries sport joints
alloyed with polymers or bend plastic knees, who, having worn away
shoulder sockets and gnawed sugars for fifty years, now lick, speak,
and kiss through silver and shoulder steel. You could count enough
pins in the ankles and wrists at the gym to practice voodoo against
half of Congress if you wanted to. In all of us still going around,
there isn't all that much of us still going around.
You may have heard about the prospective medical student who had a
computer chip installed in the side of his head as a kind of upgrade
of his natural RAM. It's a cognition switch of sorts. During a
test, he might scratch above his ear to access relevant binomial
equations, wince to trigger an annotated display of the human skeletal
system for private viewing by his mind's eye, or blink on
keywords flashing against his cortex to download crucial histories.
Both university officials and board exam manufacturers have tried to
prohibit these tactics, just as they once outlawed the use of
calculators during SAT tests when I was taking them and the way they
still police casinos to detect and remove blackjack players who
illegally count cards. The student himself maintains that he is not
cheating at all since the answers are, quite literally, in his head.
Furthermore, he suggests that as a practicing surgeon someday
he'll be all the more effective if he can review thousands of
procedures on the spot simply by having a nurse deliver a couple of
well-aimed pokes along his hairline. He goes so far as to predict that
some day these chips will become mandatory accessories—a day he
eagerly awaits. Thus may we eventually become multiple: fastidious,
aswarm, and perpetually involved in consultation.
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