John Brunner by A Planet of Your Own

Author:A Planet of Your Own
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-08-26T13:44:24+00:00

IX

LOGICALLY, the first thing to do was to count the jaws of the trap. She already had her mental list of obvious pitfalls; now she turned it into a written catalogue, which grew with dismaying speed as she surveyed her surroundings.

They were taking no chances, for instance, with injury or sickness. She had never seen the threshold of an automatic medicare cabinet set so low. If she so much as slept the clock around, she would waken to find a snuffling servo making metabolic checks beside the bed, and behind it, alert for the trigger-signal, the prosthetics responsible for the fiction of "live human occupancy" and hence continued ownership of the planet.

Just a second, though. She narrowed her eyes as something half-shadowed at the base of the medicare master unit caught her attention. Even someone seriously enough injured to require hundred percent life-support of the quality available here was entitled to compulsory repatriation—Abdul Gamaliel Higgins versus the Systemwide Communications Company, 2018: "An individual legally alive in respect of the Celestial Bodies Occupancy Act is legally alive in respect of any other contract or obligation whatsover." That had been an interesting case—the only one on the galactic statute book where the proxies who had fought the case had been held unable to benefit from the success of it.

In short: you cant have it both ways.

But the Zygra Company seemed determined to do so. There was something at the very back of this medicare unit which she didn't think belonged. Cautiously she fetched a circuit-tracer and began to work out what it was. Before touching anything, of course, she spoke to the impersonal recorders monitoring her every movement.

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