Does it feel like twenty-five years? No, but I don’t think long stretches of time ever quote-unquote feel like however long they are. My daughter was born eighteen years ago. I look at her sometimes and it feels like she was toddler yesterday. Everything in the past gets compressed together. It’s compacted for easy sorting, maybe.
But every once in a while I remember how long it’s been. This year’s crop of internists includes a doctor who contracted Haden’s in the womb. She’s smart as they come, and her entire life has been spent in a threep. I think about that and I shudder; she doesn’t think about it at all. It’s just always how her life has been. Most of her fellow internists, none of whom remember life before Haden’s, don’t think it’s that unusual, either. That’s when it feels like twenty-five years.
Natasha Lawrence:
What bothers me after twenty-five years is that we still don’t have an effective vaccine. We still don’t have a cure. What we have are established protocols for locking down the spread of the virus when it surfaces, and a whole array of therapeutic machines to mitigate the effects of lock in. We can’t stop the disease. We just make it less awful when it happens.
And yes, that feels like a failure to me. In the last two and a half decades we’ve learned so much about the brain. We’ve made enormous steps in integrating these brain prostheses and have built entire industries around serving Hadens and making their lives easier and more tolerable. And still every year hundreds of thousands of Americans get sick with the latest strain of the Haden virus. Tens of thousands die. Tens of thousands experience lock in.
You know what it’s like now? It’s like car accidents. Even with automated cars, people still get into car accidents, because they try to overrule their autodrive or refuse to engage it. We still lose ten to twenty thousand people a year in traffic accidents. No one thinks of it as an epidemic. It’s just the cost of doing business. The cost of living our lives. Haden’s syndrome has become that now. A chronic disease of our nation, and of the planet.
Thomas Stevenson:
My understanding, or at least the way it was explained to me, was that the Haden virus is simply a highly adaptable and easily mutating virus; that enough changes about it from year to year and season to season that we simply have a hard time keeping up. One of the questions I had early on was whether this high rate of mutation was something we were seeing in the lab, or whether it might be that new strains were being designed or at least cultivate elsewhere and released into the population. We did see mutation in the lab, but not at the rate we would expect for the level of mutation in the wild. As with so many things about this virus, our data was ultimately inconclusive.
Elizabeth Torres:
They didn’t catch Margie Haden’s cervical cancer early enough, so by the time it had been diagnosed it had metastasized, into her liver and her lungs and brain. And I remember very clearly what she said to me. She said, “This is a victory, Liz. I lived long enough to die of something else completely.” And then she laughed.
I thought it was her lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness, if you know what I mean, but that night I understood what she meant. It was a reminder that the disease that she gave her name to—the disease that defined her in ways I know she wished it hadn’t—was not the only thing about her life. She lived long enough to die a “normal” death. Now, maybe that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. But it meant something to her.
Haden’s did give her one small blessing. Her personal transport allowed her to see people and be seen, right until the end. She never tried to hide what was going on with her physical body, but by then people were so used to her being in her threep that she was able to use it to say goodbye to the people who were important to her, and not trouble those who didn’t want to be troubled. It made it easier for her to make it easier for others. And that was Margie all over. When we laid her down next to Ben, I knew she had come to her happy ending.
Duane Holmes:
Nothing ever gets forgotten in Washington. David Abrams never forgot getting stuffed by President Haden over the HRIA and as soon as Haden was out of office, he started trying to get it trimmed back. A program here, a research initiative there, divots to the HRIA attached as riders to farm bills. The usual things. Sometimes he’d get something defunded, sometimes he wouldn’t. He was in a safe district, he could take his time about it.
By the time he switched over to the Senate, he’d gotten some real momentum behind scaling back the HRIA. He campaigned on it and he almost got the Senate behind him, but then Ben Haden died and at the funeral Margie Haden started talking about the HRIA as her husband’s “enduring legacy.” And that was pretty much that for Abrams’ first try. It’d take him a couple more tries before he could get enough traction in the House and Senate to cut it down.
But he did. The HRIA has been replaced by “Progress With Prosperity,” whatever the hell that means. Dave Abrams is enjoying his moment as the people’s champion—he’s lowered their taxes, which always plays, I mean, that’s how Haden got elected in the first place—but I think if you got Abrams alone with three or four drinks in him, the truth would come out. He got the HRIA defunded because he hated President Haden’s guts, end of story.
Rebecca Warner:
The HRIA didn’t have to end, not in the stupid way it did. And it wouldn’t have ended if the government would have allowed us to open sales of threeps, and other companies their neural networks, to non-Haden’s syndrome patients. The argument always was that implanting neural networks was too risky for people who were not already locked in and had their brains changed by the virus, and that the HRIA could only be funded, politically, if threeps and neural networks and everything else were medical devices.
Well, I always thought it was bullshit, and I wasn’t shy about saying that. We had all sorts of people wanting neural networks and threeps—people who could benefit from them. People who were neurotypical but paralyzed. Older Americans. I had eighty year olds yelling at me to give them threeps so they wouldn’t be trapped in their nursing homes. And I wanted to give them threeps! But as long as we were taking the HRIA money, we had to play by their rules. Money you know you will get is worth more than the money you might get. It’s that simple. But at the end of the day Hadens are still only a few million people. There’s a multiple more senior citizens in the United States. Set them up with a threep as part of their Medicaid package and we’d have another boom economy overnight.
The Abrams-Kettering Bill is the worst possible way to move from federal funding to private enterprise. We have almost no time to prepare. Our customer base is stranded because the federal funds they had incorporated into their budgets aren’t there anymore. We have no customer base outside the Hadens and the cost of R&D for designing products for new potential customers is going to kill us. I’ve never been ashamed to call myself conservative, and I don’t mind having the HRIA go away. But it should have been done intelligently. You don’t crater the economy just to make political points.
It’s going to be a tough few years. We’ll have to see what happens now.
Heng Chang:
If you ask me what the most surprising thing was in the last twenty-five years, I’d say it was our discovery that the neural nets didn’t just allow Hadens the ability to use computers and body prostheses like personal transports, but that they could under very specific conditions also allow one Haden to actually overlay their consciousness on another’s, in the same brain. We discovered by accident, and it doesn’t have any value for most Haden’s patients since their bodies don’t move. But then we discovered that a small percentage of people who recovered from the second stage of the virus had their brains changed enough to do it too.