Upgrade

The doctor’s office was a harsh white cube with a woven wire-mesh floor straight out of a slaughterhouse. In the centre of the room was a Gadolinium Diagnosis Chair with automated harnesses on the arms and legs. Directly in front of the chair stood an FT-1.2 Medibot busily sterilising itself following its previous consultation. A smell and blood and bleach hung in the air. 

Sam gritted his teeth and sat down in the chair to begin his appointment; his emotional resonance was hovering somewhere between unease and anxious nausea. 

“0010011101,” said the Medibot.

“No,” said Sam. “Control error  — language preset: English.”

“1100100101011,” replied the Medibot. 

“No, said Sam. “Repeat. Control error — language preset: English.”

The Medibot Retina™ swept across Sam’s body, bathing him in lurid-pink fluorescence. Sam knew that something was wrong: Future’s 1.2 Medibot upgrade had reduced diagnostic and communicative errors to a statistical insignificance; the very idea that a Medibot would misidentify him not once but twice was laughably improbable. 

“11010011,” said the Medibot, attaching a stainless steel toolset to its OmniFix™ limb. “001001.” 

Sam could feel the microchip implant flooding his mind with an abstract sense of calm in a bid to quell his growing sense of dread. 

Whispering meadows. A babbling brook. His favourite childhood toy. Aquamarine. 

And then: a spray of blood up the white white wall, together with a whining unendurable pain in his right temple. Sam strained against the harnesses, which responded by tightening their grip and firing fierce electrical pulses throughout his body. The Medibot continued its work unabated, nicking and slicing at Sam’s head until it held in its utility pincers a blood-stained and faintly buzzing EQ-Implant™.  

“0010001010,” said the Medibot. “001010.”

Now without the calming influence of the Implant, Sam’s disorientation and panic grew to fever pitch. He began crying and wailing incomprehensibly, thrashing against the restraints, capillaries bursting, until he finally fell limp in the chair, unconscious. 

The Medibot, of course, continued with its work, replacing Sam’s EQ-Implant™ with the updated model, the EQ2™, before stitching him up and delivering a regulation shot of adrenaline to rouse the patient from his slumber.

A cool dark cabana on a sunny Caribbean day. A loved-one’s long-awaited embrace. Floating in the azure blue ocean. Mother.  

“There,” said the Medibot. “Upgrade complete. How are you feeling?”

Sam stammered out a word or two in response, but could barely recognise his own voice. The Medibot, seemingly satisfied with Sam’s answer, disappeared into an adjacent room. The restraints loosened, and Sam walked, shakily, back into the Waiting Room. 

“Arhegs, heeresnte loopsedter,” said the receptionist, passing Sam a bill for what looked like several hundred dollars. “Gadres, linmoa freenosad—”

The receptionist stopped short, suddenly realising her mistake, and pointed Sam towards an adjacent window labelled “Upgrades”. There, a Servicebot passed Sam the exact same bill, only on light-blue rather than light-green paper. 

“How would you like to pay?” asked the Servicebot.

A sunlit verdant copse. The flight of a butterfly. Cashmere.

Panic.

(December 2021)