Sequence Six: The Medicine Machine

Staffers, lawyers, engineers, and technicians were scurrying throughout the building's lower levels, while in the penthouse atop the headquarters of Transformative Technologies, the company's founder and genius CEO looked critically into a mirror.

Three days earlier, Dr. Duong Nguyen's "medicine machine" had been poised to eradicate a great many forms of human illness and infirmity -- maybe even the universal affliction of aging. Such was the narrative that, for years, had been promoted by press releases, pundits, and -- more to the point -- grant proposals.

After so many years of fevered speculation (both in the imaginations of the common men and women, and the portfolios of the wealthy elite), the outcome had sent shockwaves through psyches and stock markets alike. Transformative Technology's cadre of lawyers were armoring up to take swift and punitive action against anyone who might issue defamatory remarks about the company, its products, its affiliates, or its prospects; meantime, its engineers were frantically reviewing the machine's specs and software. The accounting department was in full crisis mode, and the personnel department had updated its cut lists while shelving schedules for promotions, bonuses, and division expansions.

No one dared disturb the visionary scientist in the penthouse. None dared even speculate on whether Dr. Nguyen was happy, angry, disappointed, or merely fascinated with the result of the machine's first use on a human being -- Dr. Nguyen himself.

***

Skipping from rats, rabbits, and monkeys straight to a single human being of such prominence was unheard of in the annals of medical advancement. But times had been so hard for so long, and the declaration that so many forms of illness and misery were on the verge of eradication was met by such universal elation, that the government's ministries of health and science -- usually quite conservative -- found it impossible to fend off Dr. Nguyen's demand that he be allowed to test the machine on himself, and do so in full public view.

Some grumbled that this demand was arrogant at best, and showboating at worst; others took it as a sign that the machine's inventor had complete confidence in its restorative powers. Almost no one in the scientific community, however, quite believed that the device could possibly work, given the widely available thumbnail descriptions of how it functioned.

Popular sentiment being what it was, however, that expert opinion held little weight. The workers gave voice to the view that scientists were elite snobs with little interest in helping the ordinary person; business leaders looking for the next "big thing" opined that Dr. Nguyen's peers in the scientific community had no right to issue calls for the design of the machine's proprietary components to be made public and subjected to analysis and consensus.

" 'Consensus?' one editorial in the Wall Street Journal scoffed. "How can vision possibly be accommodated or realized by 'consensus?' "

The online buzz was heatedly partisan, with believers hailing a fresh step toward so-called "singularity" (a point of arrival anticipated for almost a century and still predicted to hover at something like forty years in the future), while the skeptical dismissed adherents as "trekkies" (a pejorative that had its roots in an antiquated video entertainment; it meant that a person was investing hope in ludicrous or plainly impossible forms of technology).

Indeed, the machine had some similarity to science fiction tropes of old. Put simply, the machine was a genetic reader that used emergent teleportation technology to restore a living organism to its most vital self, as dictated by its genetic code. The word on both the commercial talknet and the private circles of the thoughtnet was that the machine essentially picked a sick person to molecular bits like a mechanic pulling apart a museum piece internal combustion engine, and then cleaning and restoring the component pieces before putting them all back together again. Except in this instance, the "mechanic" was an assemblage of six crux-linked quantum computers, and the component parts being dismantled, inspected, repaired, and then restored into a functional whole were the molecules of the patient.

Living tissue had long been demystified, of course, and it was routine for human tissue to be regenerated and repaired using modern medical techniques. Damaged organs could be stimulated to regenerate; missing limbs could be re-grown. The promise of teleportation was that entire live creatures could be reduced to a stream of quantum-computed information at one site and then reassembled at another site; it was a concept that, in its bare bones essence, was as old as radio, with similar terminology regarding "transmission" and "signal."

What Dr. Nguyen had done (or so went the common understanding) had been to jump the gun. He didn't care about sending a stream of human information anywhere; he cared about combing through that information and correcting errors from cellular over-proliferation (cancer) to cellular telomere shortening (another term for the aging process). Heart disease, vascular plaque and calcification, arthritis, diabetes... all of the persistent maladies that medical science just couldn't seem to lick, all of them might at last be defeated.

Not that Dr. Nguyen had any obvious infirmities. He was only in his mid-50s, and the picture of robust health. But he insisted that he did, indeed, have a malady with which he was grappling; all he would say was that it was a congenital condition, that it had caused him considerable pain throughout his life, and that he regarded the affliction's exact nature to be his business, and his alone.

This, of course, sent the gossip-sphere into wildspin. Everyone had a take on what the problem was, from impotence to schizophrenia. Such speculations, in turn, launched fresh volleys of claims from believers and rebuttals from skeptics; even now, no one knew exactly what schizophrenia was, physiologically speaking, or how to cure it. The same was said of impotence, and insomnia, and agoraphobia, which some whispered the good doctor suffered, clinging as he always did to labs and indoor spaces and shunning the open spaces and public areas. How much of such maladies was physiological, and how much psychological? How much of human psychology could be boiled down to physiology? The debate was intense, and grew hotter still as the test day approached.

It was with no little sense of occasion, then, that Dr. Nguyen entered a gleaming, high-tech looking booth, was reduced to quantum fuzz right on camera, and then, after three hours of high-energy, data-intense processing, restored to his intact living self.

Or rather... her intact living self. Somehow, in the course of the procedure, Dr. Nguyen had changed from a man into a woman.

***

"The engineers and technicians have nothing to report," a nervous aide said, as Nguyen studied himself... studied herself in the mirror, clad in a Frommiere gown and Biannaci shoes. Her hair had been meticulously styled by none other than Ernesto Gaubion, and was as smooth and elegant as though sculpted from sheer night and lacquer.

Nguyen's eyes met those of her aide in the mirror. "Meantime, the results of my own scans and probes?"

The aide held out a dataflex, which she waved away. He set the scrolled flex on a side table. "The reports are all there. They say you're fine -- not a trace of any sort of dysfunction, disease, cellular degradation, nothing at all. You're in amazing, perfect good health. Not even any intestinal scarring, not even trace ocular degeneration, nothing. You even seem to have been reverse-aged to... well, no one can say, because none of the usual metrics apply. There's no dental wear, no solargenic skin damage, no fascial clumping, no lymphatic -- "

She silenced him with an impatient tilt of the head.

"What I mean to say is, as far as anyone can tell you are the most physically perfect specimen of manhood... womanhood..." The flustered aide took in a breath, held it for a second or two, and started again. "You're the healthiest person on the planet. Maybe in the history of the planet. But there's no accounting for why the genetic reader reconstituted you as a woman instead of as a man."

Dr. Nguyen returned her full attention to her own reflection and the aide retreated, getting gone while the getting was good.

"Only because the machine did its job," she murmured, turning this way and that for the thousandth time and still astounded, delighted, and gratified.

There was more to the machine than anyone had supposed. Nguyen's medicine machine had worked perfectly, bringing health where, for fifty-four years, there had been dysphoria; granting happiness where there had only been a sense of desperate wrongness.

Duoung Nguyen had never felt that he was a man in a man's body. Rather, he... she had lived imprisoned in the flesh of the wrong gender, oppressed and brutalized by her own inappropriate body and the cultural expectations that it had brought down upon her.

But now her health -- emotional and spiritual as well as physical -- was granted to her for the first time in her life. She was the woman she was always meant to be.

There would be media and talknet firestorms over this, but within that cauldron of public debate there would burn the sparks of realization. Those who needed hope would have it, even as the naysayers smugly touted their self-congratulatory dissections of her work. They'd call it a failure, only to realize in time what a success it had been. The machine's first principles were sound, but they went far deeper than the popular suppositions about how it operated.

Dr. Chau Nguyen smiled a radiant smile at herself in the mirror. Her machine had worked perfectly. She was now the woman she was always supposed to be. Here, in this beautiful body... this, her proper body... she was finally home.