Camera shutters crackled like volleys of gunfire, and a strobing flash left afterimages swirling in Dr. Brandie’s view. As the floating, green spot started to fade, she let her eyes wander from figure to figure in the first few rows of seats. Hands scribbled furiously at notes on small notepads, while others tapped with impressive speed on laptop keyboards. They were all hunched forward, practically squirming on their seats.
“Any moment now,” she said into the podium microphone. It whined with feedback, the mic apparently as uneasy as the attending press felt, as uneasy as she herself felt. She was grateful that the podium obscured her feet, lest the whole of the press conference see her left foot’s nervous tapping.
She glanced at her phone: still 0 new messages.
She took a sip of her water, trying not to listen to the rising murmurs from the back of the room. After an uncomfortable span of heavy silence that felt like hours but might have only been a minute, of anticipatory breathing and jittering legs, her phone at long last buzzed in her hands.
DR. JORDAN, 12:07 P.M.: 👍
Dr. Brandie let out a puff of air that might have been a laugh, might have been a sigh, but whichever it was, it expelled her stress and apprehensions with it.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce the first successful installation of the KSE system—one small step for the paralyzed, and one giant leap for mankind.”
The room broke out into sudden chatter. Reporters stood, arms and notebooks waving in the air to catch Dr. Brandie’s attention.
“Yes, you, here in the front.”
“Damian Barrow, Seattle Daily News. How long before you know if the patient can walk again?”
“That’s the thing we love about our system, Mr. Barrow. That’s already known, already a certainty. KSE stands for Kinetic Semi-autonomous Endoskeleton. Unpacking those words, we’ve got ‘kinetic,’ which obviously describes the movement it enables. There’s ‘endoskeleton,’ the KSE supporting the patient from within. And there’s ‘semi-autonomous,’ which means that the system can run itself.
“Right now, the substrate has bound to his musculoskeletal system and is confirmed to be receiving signals from the Nexus processing unit. It’s not a matter of ‘if his body can use it’ or ‘if he can take to it.’ Think of it like… we’ve implanted a flashlight into his body, and you’ve asked me ‘when will we know if the light can turn on?’ We knew that from the moment we implanted the thing, and the answer is just as obvious—right away, needing only the signal to start.”
More hands shot up, notebooks wagging in the air. Camera strobes fired again, leaving a new wave of green afterimages drifting across Dr. Brandie’s view.
“Yes, you, woman with the auburn blouse.”
“Sharon Wallace, New Metro Times. Is it true that implanting the KSE led to the direct death of over 400 rodent recipients due to muscle hyperextension?”
Dr. Brandie let her face fall, knowing that it was the expected reaction to animal deaths. If she were being honest with herself, she was long past feeling remorse for the death of a mere lab rat, but she respected their steady contributions. When endoskeletons went awry, when the wrong muscle commands were executed, things got messy: images of the tiny creatures twisted into small tumbleweeds of fur and bone hadn’t caused her to lose any sleep, but she did feel disappointed that she hadn’t quite managed to configure the KSE right on her first animal trial, or even her fortieth. Their deaths were no tragedy, but they were consequences of Dr. Brandie’s own mistakes, and that, more than anything else, drew the frown to her face.
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“No medical advancement worth its research grant is without a pet cemetery’s worth of lost test subjects. Insulin to treat modern diabetes only came about thanks to trials on dogs; polio vaccines were only developed after intentionally injecting monkeys with the disease and trying out different curatives. While it’s true that the KSE—”
“But Dr. Brandie, what are the risks of your John Doe patient succumbing to a similar fate?” the same reporter interrupted.
“Mathematically zero,” Dr. Brandie assured. “The Nexus unit was added as an essential intermediary controller to moderate and regulate muscle commands. That component itself is the heart of the ‘semi-autonomous’ component of the KSE, and it keeps all of its substrate behaving properly. Malfunctions like those early trails are provably impossible under the new system.”
The reporters could sense the end of an answer, and so their hands shot up just as Dr. Brandie’s previous sentence wound down. Dr. Brandie glanced from reporter to reporter, settling on a mustachioed old man with a worn cap. “Yes, you with the hat.”
“Paul Creighton, Tacoma Enquirer. If the KSE-what-have-you uses nanobots, like they say, has your team done enough to prevent ‘grey goo’ scenarios? I’m no science fiction author, but—”
“The KSE cannot self-replicate. Grey goo concerns are thus moot. Next question.”
“Theodora Roush, Medicinal Globe—there are those who consider research into wildly expensive treatments like the KSE to be academic frivolity. What would you say to critics who believe the KSE’s price point makes it impractical for public treatment?”
“While speaking of finances—the Medicinal Globe, your publication, receives over 90% of its operating funding from Fitzpatrick Pharmaceuticals, does it not? The very same company pouring billions of dollars into its own nerve therapies?”
“I’m not aware,” said the reporter.
“Well, I am,” Dr. Brandie admonished, with all the stern firmness of a mother correcting a wayward child. “I invite you to ask that same question of your sponsor’s Project Cordell—despite being years from a workable prototype, their per-treatment cost is already looking to be double that of the KSE, if not more.”
“Can you offer a direct response instead of a deflection?”
Dr. Brandie glared at the woman—a look that normally sent lab techs scurrying away—but the reporter stood firm. “Then to answer your question, my team and I believe that there is no price too high for good health. To take someone with effectively no quality of life and give them their freedom back? The ability to walk around, care for themselves, feed themselves, hell, even wipe themselves? That’s damn worth any price if you ask me. Let the insurance providers and hospital systems figure out the finances—my team’s work is improving lives, not wasting time with economics.”
A new volley of hands shot up with a cacophony of dozens of overlapping follow-up questions. Skeletal failures, grey goo, financial considerations… these weren’t the topics Dr. Brandie had imagined the questions might focus on. She was no publicist, but she was socially attuned enough to read a room, and she could tell the tone here was falling to skepticism, negativity. It would take a miracle to make believers of them; fortunately for Dr. Brandie, allowing the paralyzed to walk again was one such biblical miracle.
“I believe the results of the KSE will speak for themselves,” she said to the reporters, “and so I’ll answer no more questions for today. I need to go visit the patient and ensure everything is in order… our media portal will contain updates to patient John Doe’s recovery, and we will remain responsive to selected email questions. Thank you all for your time and attention.”