The Human Touch
by H. G. Stratmann
Illustration by Arthur George
“Congratulations, Mr. Jackson! You’ve won—a trip to the hospital!”
William M. Jackson, attired in tattered shorts and sweat-stained T-shirt, gurgled, “Wha—? Who—?”
The man standing in the open doorway of Jackson’s apartment grinned at him with pearly shark-like teeth. He had blow-dried white hair and wore an expensive custom-made suit. Fastened to its lapel was a gold badge with the legend “Hospital Administrator.”
The administrator turned toward the Mobile Unit squatting beside him on hidden wheels. The MU, a meter-wide metal hemisphere resembling a spider, pointed a holocamera at him with one of the many tentacle-like appendages protruding from its “body.”
“Yes,” he told the camera, “William M. Jackson has won a trip to St. Dismas Hospital to have the operation of his dreams. The painful illness he’s suffered with so long will soon be cured. Would you tell our millions of viewers what that excruciating condition is?”
Jackson muttered a word.
“Could you speak louder?”
“Hemorrhoids!”
The man chortled, “Hear that, viewers? Soon, courtesy of the skilled staff at St. Dismas, Mr. Jackson will no longer suffer the heartache of hemorrhoids. He’ll be able to lead a happy, healthy—perhaps even productive life!”
The administrator continued with a glowing paean to the superlative quality of medical care at St. Dismas. Jackson absent-mindedly rubbed the burning spot deep in the seat of his pants before noticing the MU’s holocamera was now pointing at him.
The man handed him a small plastic card. “As hospital administrator of St. Dismas, I’m proud to present Mr. Jackson with his passport to better health. Using the access code printed on this card will let him schedule the operation of a lifetime! Viewers, check your insurance plan to see if you qualify for care at our hospital. Or do what Mr. Jackson did—enter our weekly lottery for a free operation! Either way, remember our motto—‘If you want to get good treatment at St. Dismas, you have to be sick!’ ”
The holocamera blinked off. The administrator shook Jackson’s hand. “That recording will be downloaded to the Net today. And once again, congratulations! As one of our lucky winners, your stay at our hospital will be completely free. Except, of course, for incidental expenses your insurance plan doesn’t cover. We’re looking forward to having you as our guest soon!”
The man and his MU disappeared around the corner. Jackson closed the door and examined the administrator’s card. It showed a holo of a gleaming white building and the words “For a good health time, access this number!”
He sat on his couch, squirming uncomfortably until he found a position that made the burning better. First time I ever won anything in my life. And it has to be this!
Well, he shouldn’t complain. Outside of being born in one, he’d managed to get to age thirty without needing to go to a hospital. Hadn’t even seen a doctor since a routine exam in high school. Never really been sick a day in his life.
Until the hemorrhoids.
They were an occupational hazard. His fellow programmers, sitting entranced for hours at a time linked with artificial intelligence systems, got them too. Yes, the company health plan covered treatment for them. But there was a catch. They put your name on a waiting list to visit a doctor. And last time he checked, they estimated it’d be a year before he could see one.
At first he hoped the hemorrhoids would go away on their own. But they only got worse, interfering with his ability to concentrate at work. The human resources AI said he could switch to another company-approved health insurance carrier like Black Crescent, or a medical syndicate like Docs “R” Us, Inc. But their waiting lists weren’t any shorter.
He’d resigned himself to months of misery when he’d found that notice on the Net. Do long hospital waiting lists make you ill? Dying to get an operation? Enter our contest for a free stay at St. Dismas! Hundreds of winners every month!
And he’d got lucky. Must be a public relations gimmick to get satisfied people to spread the good word about the quality care they got at the hospital, and encourage others to go there too.
Staring at the number on the card, he linked with the Net through the AI interface in his apartment. One perk of working as a programmer for Cybergates was they gave you a free cerebral implant. At first he’d been leery of having one of the new “living” chips inserted under the skin at the back of his neck. The thought of it “growing” fibrocrystal nanotendrils programmed to bore submicroscopic holes into his skull, and infiltrate his brain as a fine mesh of neural nets, was frightening.
But it hadn’t hurt at all—and now he didn’t know how he’d ever gotten along without it. No need anymore for awkward VR hardware—voice interfaces—or even holoscreens. Now all it took was a “thought” and he could interface directly with any modern AI—“seeing,” “hearing,” transmitting and receiving information by direct stimulation of his brain. He wondered how the computer pioneers of the last century got anything done using keyboards and primitive pointing devices.
A millisecond later his auditory and visual cortexes produced sounds and images that seemed to originate from two meters in front of him. An initial scene of the building depicted on the card dissolved into the likeness of a grandmotherly woman seated at a reception desk. The bespectacled holosim smiled at him.
“Congratulations on winning a free stay at St. Dismas, William N. Jackson. I hope you’ll take advantage of our offer to come here. To encourage you to do that, we’d like to conduct a brief interview. Is your sexual preference for women, men, or both?”
What? Startled, he stammered his answer rather than thinking it. “Women.”
The image changed again. Jackson’s lower jaw dropped.
The sexy young blonde standing in front of him was all his secret fantasies wrapped up into one bodacious bundle of feminine pulchritude. Tall, statuesque, with violet eyes and ruby lips eager to devour him. She wore a small white nurse’s hat, and a creamy curve-hugging skirt that ended just below her waist. Her fulsome bosom tried mightily to escape the low-cut front of her uniform.
“Hello. I’m Nurse Colette. I get so lonely here. I’d love you to come to St. Dismas so I can take care of your every need!”
Entranced by this angel of mercy, Jackson yielded to her sultry requests for his insurance policy and credit card numbers, and the name of his next of kin. Finally Colette purred, “When can you come see me here?”
“Uh—the 13th?”
Colette smiled invitingly. “Wonderful! I can’t wait till you get here! I’ll do everything I can to satisfy you! Bye now!”
The link ended. Jackson exhaled slowly. Strangely enough, his hemorrhoids weren’t aching anymore.
He squirmed. But a neighboring area was.
“How do you like our hospital?”
Jackson frowned at the hospital administrator. “It’s not what I expected.”
When he’d arrived at the hospital that morning an ebony-colored MU escorted Jackson down a long dark hall lined on both sides with identical gray rooms. Each consisted of windowless solid stone walls four meters on a side, except for a single wall and locked door made of crisscrossing steel bars facing the hall. They were furnished only with three crude wooden bunk beds and a bare odoriferous toilet.
Jackson lay on the bottom of a bunk bed in one of these chambers the MU called “mini-wards.” The four men crammed into its other two bunk beds stared dazedly at the crumbling plaster ceiling or mumbled to themselves. His own bunkmate—easily 200 kg—snored heavily in the bed above him. Jackson glanced up nervously at its precariously sagging mattress.