The In-Betweener (Between Life and Death) (S) by Ann Christy Read Free Book Online

specialty and it looks like he’s got another winner.
    The standing man turns his head and gives his attendant a look, a cue for her to help him back into his chair. As he sits and the fabric of the cotton pants he wears tightens around his legs, I can see how thin his legs are. They’re wasted from lack of mobility and trembling a little from the effort of standing.
    Behind the doctors, a large video screen showing only the hospital logo suddenly flares into more colorful life and displays an image of the man in the wheelchair as he was. The contrast between the image and the man as he is now is startling. In the image, he has a tube coming out of his throat and a band across his forehead. The chair he sits in is more support structure than actual chair, and he appears to be entirely helpless.
    Because he was entirely helpless. Paralyzed from the neck down to such catastrophic extent that he couldn’t even breathe on his own or hold his own head up. And he’d been like that for over a year.
    I watch the rest of the press conference in rapt attention. My hair has grown back but my fingers still follow the path of the scar beneath the hair that hides it from view. Or, rather, hides it most of the time. Like me, the man in the wheelchair has been cured by very specialized nanites.
    His nanites were different, of course, but the effect is the same. A cure. A repair. A recovery of something that had been lost. In my case, I recovered my hope for a long life. In his case, he recovered his ability to feel his own body. His spinal nerve has been repaired and, while he shyly acknowledges that he has a long road to recovery, he is equally confident that it will happen, as are the doctors.
    His is not the first press conference. Because of our ages, I and most of the other children who benefited from the same procedure I underwent were not paraded in front of cameras like this man. But one girl, so radiantly happy that she almost glowed, had spoken for all of us on an earlier occasion.
    I’d watched that conference too, that time holding my mother’s hand with a patch over my right eye. This time, I watch the man, his excited family, and the doctors, but now I can see them with both of my eyes. My right eye isn’t perfect—too much nerve damage—but I can now see well enough with it that I’m grateful. And if it wanders off kilter now and then, well, that’s not such a high price to pay.
    Besides, Blue Cami says that nanites specializing in the repair of optic nerves are a few years away at most. I say it will be before then. The senses are too important for those to fall low on the priority list. I’d be willing to bet on that. I can wait for them. I’m alive and I can wait a few years. It still feels unreal to think that sometimes. I have time.
    Since my cure, the thousands of children who once felt life slipping away from their grasp as medulloblastoma grew inside their skulls have regained their hope for life. Very few suffer complications and almost none of them die.
    As one of the first to receive this treatment, my biggest problem was how much gunk built up in my cerebrospinal fluid as my tumor got digested away. They do it more slowly now. For my second treatment, they fed the nanites in over a period of hours, right into my spinal fluid rather than through my skull. I watched TV during it and didn’t feel a thing. My mother says that my kind of cancer is very close to being almost entirely curable.
    And now this man joins our nanite-cured throngs. And we’re not alone. Along with us for this miracle ride are those who once suffered from several other types of tumor, a few kinds of liver disease, and a host of bacterial infections. They’ve even got a nanite for sickle-cell anemia.
    There is no single cure-all, but it seems that every day a new form of tiny machine is created that will resolve some other vexing or dangerously life-threatening problem. Everyone, everywhere is making them. That’s where the