INFECTIOUS <strong>FUTURES</strong> Stories of the post-antibiotic apocalypse Sting Madeline Ashby 40
Sting “YOU’RE FAT,” his mother said. She was wearing her pink tweed suit today, with a giant set of Thatcher pearls. “You’re just as fat and sad as your dad was, at the end.” “You should have told us, before you went on your trip,” his physician said. His physician had yet to meet his eye. Had she ever looked Gregor in the eye, though? Really, in all the years she’d been Gregor’s doctor, had that ever happened? “Mosquitos, you know. We would have warned you.” He’d felt it. The mosquito bite. It wasn’t a bite so much as a sting, though, a needle sliding down past barriers of sweat and sunblock and dermis to get at the sweet nectar blushing up underneath. He felt it and it was like all stings, like getting picked last at a game, like showing up late for an interview, like watching his ex-wife announce her engagement to another man to her gaggle of online “friends”. “How could you do this?” his mother asked. “How could you let this happen? No wonder she left.” “How are you feeling?” the physician asked. “Any issues?” Gregor didn’t know how to answer that. Of course he had issues. The fever, of course. The pain. He had never really felt the implant before. Not until now. Now it felt like something nesting inside of him. It throbbed with life like a new heart, just an inch or two below his clavicle, and every time it pulsed he felt sweat roll free of his forehead like drops of rain streaking down the windows of a moving car. “He has plenty of issues,” his mother said. “Sometimes there are hallucinations,” the doctor reminded him. “Are you experiencing anything like that?” “It’s this job of yours,” his mother said. “I told you. I told you when they offered it to you, there weren’t enough sick days, you’d be forced to work while you were ill, and you’re always ill, because you’re so fat.” The implant was supposed to help with that. Deep brain stimulation, they said. It worked for people with epilepsy, and there was evidence it worked on depression. And the depression was why he ate so much. They were certain of it. “If we can change your mind, we can change your body,” they said. “I’m not so sure,” Gregor said. The doctor frowned, and now she met Gregor’s eyes. It was just for a moment, though. She jotted something down on his display and he said something nice and then she was gone. After that a nurse came and changed something in the sacs – Gregor felt like a hamster with a big bottle 41
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