The future is already old

Two things in Falling are pivotal to the premise. The first is the haunting – the terrible thing that trapped the spirits of the people who died in such fear and violence and can’t move on.

But the second (and less obvious) one, something I really liked coming up with but which doesn’t get quite as much attention in the story apart from it being a plot device, is the machine I invented that puts paraplegic people on their feet again. Where the spinal cord is damaged or broken and nerve signals can’t reach the extremities any more, I wondered to myself one day why a powerful enough computer couldn’t sort out the signals from the brain and wires could transmit them to the correct nerves on the other side of the break.

The Electro-Abdonimal Spinal Brace, created by a medical team in Scotland and later taken over by 3M Corp in the US, was born. Two ceramic clamps encircle the spine either side of the injury, sensors in them ‘reading’ the nerve the impulse is emerging from, digitising them and processing them through a CPU.

The bending of the spine itself in the region of the injury is handled by a system of specialised gears and cogs that take over from the muscles. For the lower body, impulses sent from the brain and processed in the computer are reinserted back into the nervous system using the correct nerve fibres and signal strengths. Legs, feet, genitalia and everything else below the waist behave as if their orders have come directly from the brain like normal, and the muscles respond accordingly.

It’s all completely self contained, powered by long lasting onboard batteries and motors. As revealed in a sequence where a special demagnetiser is fitted to Dale, it even has hardware slots for extra modules, just like plugging a memory card into a PC.

It was a pretty futuristic idea back in 1991 when I came up with it… except it wasn’t. Just a handful of years later a German company introduced an artificial leg that uses microprocessors at the joints to adjust gait, range of motion, torque and ground orientation. Today you can even control it with an app.

But scientists were talking about myoelectric prosthetics as long ago as 1965, a concept one website describes as ‘a simple sensor structure (two metal conductors separated by a fixed distance), a sensor that can be applied equally well to many different muscles and the possibility of providing both on/off and proportional control’.

And today, nearly 30 years after first sitting down to write Falling, a large machine with an on-board computer and motor you have to install by slicing the patient completely open in a physically brutal operation is itself looking decidedly old fashioned.

Back in 2015, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging & Bioengineering at the US National Institute of Health successfully tested transcutaneous stimulation to allow paraplegic patients to make ‘step-like’ movement by delivering electrical current to the spinal cord through electrodes placed on the skin of the lower back.

Then, in 2018, I read about a product from UK company Medtronic called the RestoreAdvanced SureScan MRI Neurostimulator. Two people with lower body paralysis were able to use it to walk, touch their toes and do whatever they could before their injuries.

It’s done through a device – much smaller than my fictitious design – that’s put inside the patient’s abdomen and controlled by the user from outside by a remote control. It’s made of bio-friendly plastic, has a nine year battery and most importantly, it’s real.

But science might even be moving past implantable devices altogether, no matter how unobtrusive or easy to use. Several new techniques are going right to the source and repairing the damaged body itself. One Australian medical team successfully reconnected healthy nerves with damaged ones to let neural signals travel along them again, repairing paralysed arms and hands

And so, just like the global pandemic that more or less closed human society down for business for the entirety of 2020, new technology and an expanding work-from-home culture that’s enabling a bigger shift away from the 9-5 commute-style workday we associate with big cities, the machine in Dale’s back that reconnects his spine and gives him the power to walk again is a little bit out of date, years before the world of 2037 (when the story is set) even arrives.

Does that mean I have to rewrite the whole thing again to make the The Electro-Abdonimal Spinal Brace about nanomodules or wi-fi instead of big, clunky machinery and wires?

For f&%k’s sake.