Night of the Animals by Bill Broun Page A

Bonhomme nodded.
    There was another pause. Dr. Bonhomme nodded and put his hand on his peer’s shoulder.
    â€œLook, I won’t claim to understand how you feel,” he said. “I’d react the same way, honestly.” He switched off the ultrasonic camera, and the screen popped off with a tiny shriek. “But it’s not like the twentieth century, is it? I’m sorry, Baj. But it’s not a death sentence. And just thank bloody god you’re in Legacy.”
    â€œGod couldn’t give a fuck about me,” said Baj.
    Dr. Bajwa had an incipient lung tumor. Treated, it wasn’t necessarily terminal, he knew, but the five-year survival rate was still only 50 percent. Whole new metastasizing cancers and newly aggressive viral syndromes remained significant medical foes, even in thisera of 120-year-plus life spans. The problem was, for the rich, the development of a variety of new, improved, salable BodyMods—especially CoreMods (through which most major organs, apart from brains, could be easily refurbished), and EverConnectors (synthetic, fibrous connective tissue-sleeves)—as well as new cartilage chemotherapies—had long supplanted the search for cures in terms of much research. For everyone else, and especially Indigents, Nexar hoods as well as ordinary intoxicants—even Flōt—made cancer less menacing.
    As Baj left Dr. Bonhomme’s office and headed toward his parking spot, he found himself silently running through part of a prayer from his childhood. Gaavai, kotaan. Havai kisai taan , he remembered. Some sing of his power. Who has that power?
    An advert for Lucozade suddenly appeared on his corneas—the usual unwanted Opticalls you got walking through central London. There were dozens of grades of freedom from daytime Optispam bursts (after dark, the burst-rates fell considerably). You had to pay a huge monthly fee to keep all the adverts off your eyes, and even with his comparatively good income, he couldn’t afford the top service (although in recent years, many brains had adapted to Optispam and begun, partially, to block it out—a neurological “anomaly” the authority’s tech teams remained unable to defeat). A nude, dark-haired woman with absurdly large breasts and a startled look was shaking a Lucozade bottle in an obviously raunchy manner. “Great performance is easy to get into your hands,” she cooed. The images broke Baj’s attention, of course, and with that came a ferocious urge to bite out his own eyes.
    And the king wonders why the suicide cults grow? he thought to himself.
    He did not feel sad about the cancer—not yet. He felt unholy rage, and this, in turn, drove him to tamp down the full range of his emotions, as if intense feelings and the confusing thoughts accompanying them were cellular mutations to be understood, controlled, and dissolved. He felt a sudden, fierce urge to get to the Philip K heliport in Kent where he took, as time permitted, Saturday solarcopter lessons. If he could get above the earth, he imagined, and get strapped into a copter’s fleshy bio-seats, he would shoot through Britain’s raw blue air, working his thoughts and his hands at the solarcopter controls, and maybe, just maybe, he would begin to rule this new foe.
    Cuthbert, on the other hand, seemed to have no interest in regulating his mind or body; Baj felt he needed to do it for them both.
    For as long as he could, Baj told himself, he would try to keep Cuthbert and his bright blooms of psychosis from EquiPoise, whose psychologists showed little patience for good-hearted GPs or citizens carrying what it termed “unhygienic content,” a phrase kept menacingly vague by His Majesty’s Government. (Flōt was legal, but EquiPoise’s functionaries were well known for their special hatred of Flōters, who were viewed as little more than socioeconomic parasites.)
    He would not give up on this old man. Here