No Contest

They don’t know how angry I am.

Nanobot technology was supposed to heal bodies, right? Knit up torn tendons, fix broken bones faster, snip out those nasty cancer cells. Once the side effects were made known, hunh, suddenly no one without a couple million in the bank could even hope to find it available.

Then it was a few billion in the bank, and “mere” millionaires can go whistle.

Now, I did enjoy watching the private healthcare system collapse, but this is what replaced it? The Haves and the Have Nots, all over again, but this time with highest stakes.

We didn’t need walls between Us and Them, they were there already in intangible ways. But They built those walls anyway, with bricks and guards and horrible working conditions and withdrawal of proper medical care. Rebellion? Suppressed with prejudice and violence. And bigger walls.

Those early procedural guinea pigs were whisked away, tested. Disgustingly healthy after the experimental treatment, astonishingly so. Set up with their own little kingdoms behind the Wall of Riches. Bring their families along? Their kids? Unheard of! They would become Us! How dare They!

I’ve heard the latest single treatment guarantees a thousand years with no renewals.

I am not looking forward to the next centuries alone.

How did I get wrapped up in this crap? How did I luck out?

You might call it lucky, but I call it prison.

I refused it when I was told I’d won the “contest.” Sure, every ten years or more they do a sweepstakes to keep the hope of the poor alive. It’s rigged, of course; I certainly didn’t sign up.

They didn’t care, also of course. I was kidnapped on the way to work, knocked out, “treated.”

I’m assuming they wanted to preserve my knowledge. Some things have slipped badly in the intelligence department, and education is at the top. What happens when colleges have the same professors teaching for centuries? The worst kind of echo chamber. I remember the times before, and I loathed some of my profs and their masturbatory lectures. They’re still there, teaching the kids of the kids of the kids.

Well, what few the rich can actually produce. That’s one thing that the treatment screws up. Only wenty to forty years of possible fertility, because the treatment keeps restoring the eggs into the ovaries – and then not letting them get fertilized by a foreign object. Implantation is a dicey crap shoot. Whoopsie! Piercings and tattoos get erased, too. It screws with melanin production as well, so the rich are now a uniform shade of mocha brown.

Which is the other reason they keep the poors around. Manufacture all the things we want, and hand over your healthy kids, because we can’t have any after the first century. All those “I just wanna keep having babies” people? Ugh. That nutjob who tried to give the treatment to her babies, to keep them that way forever… The treatment itself is a secret, they knock you out for it, keep you in recovery till it takes hold, the bastards. Ideally administered around the age of fifty, and your body re-sets to a healthy twenty-five or so, and freezes. But it freezes teens and babies at the age they get the treatment. It’s insane. Try undoing that on freaking children. They recorded the screams for us to listen to in med school, and the screams of the techs when the nanobots revolted against removal and attacked the techs. Nightmare fuel, and made me all the angrier.

Innovation isn’t made in stagnant water. Rich people don’t want the system to change, and they certainly don’t want to spend those billions they’ve stolen from the poor’s futures to fix their environmental nightmare. Global warming? What’s that? Doesn’t happen on our manicured lawns, populated by bristlecone pines, because dying vegetation harshes our mellow.

Of course I couldn’t bring my husband and parents with me.

Then what the hell do I have to live for?

You took away my family, I had to watch them die, and I couldn’t save them. What did you think I would do?

So I learned the process, despite them trying to hide all the information. A scrubbed internet was no match for someone who married a coder, and one who knew how to cache information. He might be dead, but he taught me well, and I’m good at it.

And when I learned how simple the treatment was, I slipped away from the fortified mansions.

I’ve heard that they’re now implanting recording chips in the “winners” to prevent them from doing exactly what I’m doing. Download all that data to their computers, edit memories to their liking, upload or create a data bank to put it all in virtual reality. Sorry, I’ve seen those movies. Not playing. Two thirds of the world dying young to keep the other third virtually immortal? Over my dead body, which I know full well is almost impossible.

I live in the slums.

They don’t look for me here, because they don’t dare come out of their ivory towers. Not even the police are willing to do it, they just stick to their patrolling those high walls.

I don’t worry about contamination or disease, because the nanobots keep me quite healthy.

I work at a clinic, and I teach what the rich medical schools won’t – how to heal bodies, cleanliness, surgery. Tools are hard to come by, but centuries ago, I was in a re-enactment group, and we knew things like how to make tools. Most mechanics and artists are kept like pets behind the walls, but there’s certainly enough scrap lying about that we can use, given some sweat equity.

What else do I have but time?

So I teach.

And, once a month, I donate blood.

The nanobots replicate themselves, you see.

All this “secrecy” and “difficult procedure” crap is just a smokescreen.

Sure, if they catch me, they can figure out what I’m doing, and try to strip the nanobots from my system. I’ve heard it’s a painful death, but they shouldn’t threaten me with a good time – if it’s even true, which I sincerely doubt. My husband and parents are dead, remember? Mom remembered back to her fifth year without memory-enhancing drugs, and told stories that her dad had told her, and he remembered back to the Wrights’ invention. Mom was practical, heaping doses of common sense, taught elementary and middle school, learned there are fourteen ways to teach and used all of them to reach all her students. I learned everything I could from her, and have done my best to do the same.

The rich thought they were creating a system where they could dominate the poor from rebellion. Save all the money you can, sell your kids, maybe you’ll win the sweepstakes and get pulled out of the pollution created for the rich’s pleasure.

Instead, by giving transfusions to the people I know will use it for good, who are also spreading it around, it won’t be long till the only limiting factor is food.

The first thing I did, when my husband died, was start reading all the books we’d collected. How-to manuals – building houses, making furniture, jewelry, furnaces, machines. Of course libraries were one of the first things to be neglected, why would the rich want the poor to have knowledge? Waste of resources better spent working for themselves, right?

I read all I could. The nanobots insured I remembered most of it.

Then I started lending the books out to those who need them.

Some of the first people I gave blood to, started making their own paper. Others made ink. Some had excellent writing skills.

The original books are long gone, but the duplicates we’ve managed to re-create have been circulated widely.

Old knowledge. Forbidden knowledge.

The rich don’t see it, so they don’t care, and don’t invade to stop it.

I have centuries left, do I? Time enough to save as many as I can, and spread it like some bizarre reverse vampire.

I know the revolution’s coming. Those guards won’t know what’s happening, since they’re so used to firepower putting the fear of sudden violent death in the poor people.

I wonder what will happen when the prison sentences start being handed down, for genocide by neglect. Sure, we can’t kill them, but we can confine them in little cells. Bet none of them have learned how to pick a lock.

They put me in an emotional jail, by taking away everyone I loved. For no other reason than utter selfishness. They tried to confine the nanobots in their own cells, but with organic walls.

I cannot wait to return the favor.