Free Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling Page B

civil support and served on net committees. You took a tangible wholehearted interest in the basic well-being of civilization. The community officially wanted you kept alive. You were probably old, probably well behaved, andprobably a woman. You were awarded certain special considerations by a polity that appreciated your valuable public spirit. You were the exact sort of person who had basically seized power in modern society.
    If you were responsible in your own daily health-care practices, the polity appreciated the way in which you eased the general strain on medical resources. You had objectively demonstrated your firm will to live. Your serious-minded, meticulous approach to longevity was easily verified by anyone, through your public medical records. You had discipline and forethought. You could be kept alive fairly cheaply, because you had been well maintained. You deserved to live.
    Some people destroyed their health, yet they rarely did this through deliberate intention. They did it because they lacked foresight, because they were careless, impatient, and irresponsible. There were enormous numbers of medically careless people in the world. There had once been titanic, earth-shattering numbers of such people, but hygienically careless people had died in their billions during the plagues of the 2030s and 2040s. The survivors were a permanently cautious and foresightful lot. Careless people had become a declining interest group with a shrinking demographic share.
    Once upon a time, having money had almost guaranteed good health, or at least good health care. Nowadays mere wealth guaranteed very little. People who publicly destroyed their own health had a rather hard time staying wealthy—not because it took good health to become wealthy, but because it took other people’s confidence to make and keep money. If you were on a conspicuously public metabolic bender, then you weren’t the kind of person that people trusted nowadays. You were a credit risk and a bad business partner. You had points demerits and got cheap medical care.
    Even the cheap treatments were improving radically, so you were almost sure to do very well by historical standards.But those who destroyed their health still died young, by comparison with the elite. If you wanted to destroy your health, that was your individual prerogative. Once you were thoroughly wrecked, the polity would encourage you to die.
    It was a ruthless system, but it had been invented by people who had survived two decades of devastating general plagues. After the plagues everything had become different, in much the way that everything was different after a world war. The experience of massive dieback, of septic terror and emptied cities, had permanently removed the culture’s squeamishness. Some people died and some didn’t. Those who took steps to fight death would be methodically rewarded, and those who acted like fools would be buried with the rest.
    There were, of course, some people who morally disagreed with the entire idea of technologized life extension. Their moral decision was respected and they were perfectly free to drop dead.
    Mia’s choice of upgrade was known as Neo-Telomeric Dissipative Cellular Detoxification, or NTDCD. It was a very radical treatment that was very little tried and very expensive. Mia knew a great deal about NTDCD, because she was a professional medical economist. She qualified for it because she had been very careful. She chose to take it because it promised her the world, and she was in a mood to gamble.
    Mia put 90 percent of her entire financial worth into a thirty-year hock to support continued research development and maintenance in NTDCD.
    NTDCD was considered a particularly promising avenue of development. Medically speaking it was extremely difficult to perform. In medical upgrades, the promise and the difficulty were almost always tightly linked. Qualifying for such a lavish upgrade required an intimidating level of personal