Free Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling Page A

and what passed for defense. In what had once been called the private sector, biomedicine was bigger than chemisynthesis, almost as big as computation. Various aspects of the medical-industrial complex employed 15 percent of the planet’s working populace. The scope of gerontological research alone was bigger than agriculture.
    The prize was survival. Failure deterred no one. The spectrum of research was vast and multiplex. For every life-extension treatment that was accepted for human use, there were hundreds of schemes that had never moved beyond the enormous tormented ranks of the animal models. New upgrade methods were licensed by medical ethicists. Older and less successful techniques were allowed to lapse out of practice, taking their unlucky investors with them.
    There were a hundred clever ways to judge a life-extension upgrade. Stay with the blue chips and you were practically guaranteed a steady rate of survival. Volunteer early for some brilliant new start-up, however, and you’d probably outlive the rest of your generation. Keep in mind, though, that novelty and technical sweetness were no guarantees of genuine long-term success. Many lines of medical advancement folded in a spindling crash of medical vaporware, leaving their survivors internally scarred and psychically wrecked.
    Medical upgrades were always improving, never steadily, but with convulsive organic jumps. Any blue-chip upgrade licensed in the 2090s would be (very roughly speaking) about twice as effective as the best available in the 2080s. There had been limit-shattering paradigmatic breakthroughs in life extension during the 2060s and 2070s. As for the 2050s, the stunts they’d been calling “medicine” back then (which had seemed tremendously impressive at the time) scarcely qualified as life extension at all, by modern standards. The medical techniques of the 2050s barely qualified as common hygienic procedures. They were even cheap.
    As for the traditional medical procedures that predated the 2050s, almost every one of them had been abandoned. They were dangerous, counterproductive, based on views of biological reality that were fundamentally mistaken.
    Given these circumstances, it was wise to postpone your upgrade for as long as possible. The longer youwaited, the better your choices would become. Unfortunately, the natural aging process never stopped in the meantime, so waiting too long made you subject to serious cumulative damage from natural metabolic decline. Sooner or later you had to hold your nose and make your choice. Since the outcome of leading-edge research was unknown by definition, the authorities could make no guarantees. Therefore, the pursuit of longevity was declared a fundamental freedom left to the choice of the individual. The polity offered its best advice, consensually derived in endless open meetings through vast thriving packs of experts, but advice was nothing better than advice.
    If you were smart or lucky, you chose an upgrade path with excellent long-term potential. Your odds were good. You would be around for quite a while. Your choice would become and remain popular. The installed base of users would expand, and that would help you quite a lot. If anything went wrong with your upgrade, there’d be plenty of expertise in dealing with it.
    If you were unlucky or foolish, your short-term gains would reveal serious long-term flaws. As the years ground on, you’d become isolated, freakish, obsolescent.
    The truly bad techniques were the ones that complicated your transitions to another and better upgrade. Once your quality of life was irreparably degraded, you’d have no choice but to turn your attention to the quality of your death.
    There were various methods of hedging your bets. You could, for instance, be conspicuously and repeatedly good. You always voted, you committed no crimes, you worked for charities, you looked after your fellow citizens with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. You joined