THE HOSPITAL AT THE END OF THE WORLD
by Justin C. Key
Dystopian speculation about medicine years after AI’s great tech boom.
In New York City, young Pok Morning is an excellent candidate for admission to any of the nation’s top medical schools, all run by the Shepherd Organization, all AI-centered, and known as “The Prestigious Twelve.” A drone delivers the message: admission denied. Initially, he blames his father for undermining his application. But Dr. Phelando Morning, who takes the “grossly inefficient” humanistic approach to medicine, is innocent and explains that there is a better way to become a doctor. When Phelando dies unexpectedly in a hospital, his Memorandium—a temporary, AI-generated version of himself—advises Pok to attend Hippocrates Medical Center in New Orleans, the only med school in the country that refuses to use AI and may soon be the last human-run hospital. Pok believes “no residency in its right mind will accept me” if he goes there. But he gets an urgent warning to “get the fuck out of New York,” because the lie is out that he poisoned his father. He has a rough time leaving, as the states now have border controls, but he winds up riding the rails to Louisiana at the suggestion of Jillian, a woman he meets. Eventually they arrive in New Orleans, a city protected by electromagnetic spires. There, Pok is welcome. The story’s pace slows while he absorbs himself in his intense studies, but the writing shows the author’s rich imagination. With bee populations drastically declining, for example, a company has bioengineered “Carve Bees” that produce medicinal honey. And there is Agrypnia, or the Grips, a sleeping sickness that makes people crazy. Odysseus Shepherd is a worthy half-human villain whose brain is filled with microchips. He wants to bring New Orleans into sync with the rest of the country, because “human-led medicine is like having monkeys fly a plane.” Readers might blink at jargon like “enantiomer,” which is a mirror-image molecule and may also describe the hero and the villain.
An enjoyable tale about AI’s dark underbelly.