In New York City, young Pok Morning is an excellent candidate for admission to any of the nation\u2019s top medical schools, all run by the Shepherd Organization, all AI-centered, and known as \u201cThe Prestigious Twelve.\u201d A drone delivers the message: admission denied. Initially, he blames his father for undermining his application. But Dr. Phelando Morning, who takes the \u201cgrossly inefficient\u201d 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\u2014a temporary, AI-generated version of himself\u2014advises 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 \u201cno residency in its right mind will accept me\u201d if he goes there. But he gets an urgent warning to \u201cget the fuck out of New York,\u201d 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\u2019s pace slows while he absorbs himself in his intense studies, but the writing shows the author\u2019s rich imagination. With bee populations drastically declining, for example, a company has bioengineered \u201cCarve Bees\u201d 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 \u201chuman-led medicine is like having monkeys fly a plane.\u201d Readers might blink at jargon like \u201cenantiomer,\u201d which is a mirror-image molecule and may also describe the hero and the villain.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In New York City, young Pok Morning is an excellent candidate for admission to any of the nation\u2019s top medical schools, all run by the Shepherd Organization, all AI-centered, and known as \u201cThe Prestigious Twelve.\u201d A drone delivers the message: admission denied. Initially, he blames his father for undermining his application. But Dr. Phelando Morning, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}