Ian Douglas - Bloodstar

Today, of course, the so-called sin of Onan is long forgotten, but orgasmic nanotechnics are very much with us. You can program one-micron nanobots, you see, to go into the brain’s limbic system and trigger the neurochemical processes that result in sexual orgasm. Sometimes we do this deliberately, as a treatment for certain types of sexual dysfunction, but there’s also a thriving underground business in providing doses of sex-programmed nanobots that can go into the brain and stimulate an orgasm, and then do it again , and again , and again …

That part, programming the ’bots to give you one orgasm after another every second or two is known as o-looping, and it can be addictive—very highly so.

Not to mention dangerous.

It turns out that drugs like cocaine and amphetamines either trigger or mimic the release of dopamine, and they affect the same areas of the limbic system that light up during an orgasm—the VTA and the brain’s mesolimbic reward pathway. In fact, a brain scan taken during an orgasm shows a process ninety-five percent identical to a heroin rush. Drugs and orgasms hit the same part of the brain, and that’s what makes cocaine and other such drugs addictive.

That doesn’t mean sex is bad, of course. It’s natural, normal, and healthy. But deliberately and artificially overstimulating dopamine production can lead to an addiction requiring higher and higher dopamine levels to get the same kick as the dopamine receptors begin closing down. And the program Howell had been running, evidently, had involved overstimulation of the parts of the brain responsible for muscular contraction as well. It was a way to boost the orgasmic feeling, yeah, but it could have killed him too.

The curious thing is that dopamine doesn’t give you the feel-good kick itself. Dopamine is the hormone that makes you want —it’s the craving .

But it’s the flood of dopamine that makes a heroin addict want another hit.

And it drives our orgasmic cravings as well.

“I take it,” Dr. Francis said quietly, “that you didn’t check him for dope levels at sick call this morning.”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t see any need. It looked like a cold or maybe flu.”

“Did you look at his eyes?”

I glanced down at Howell’s face. In the harsh light from the overhead, his pupils were so widely dilated that his eyes looked unusually dark.

“No, sir. He was complaining that the light hurt his eyes.”

“Uh-huh. Addicts will do that, to hide their pupils. They’ll look everywhere except right at you. Did you notice that he happened to have a monster hard-on?”

“No, sir.” The long bulge at the crotch of Howell’s skinsuit was fading, but still hard to miss. Marines shipboard tend to wear nano-grown skinsuits like work utilities, since they’re disposable and Marines wear them under combat armor anyway. The things are pretty revealing, which doesn’t matter since the old American nudity taboos have pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur, and service men and women sleep and shower communally anyway.

His erection was painfully evident, even now. But, no, I hadn’t noticed. There’d been other things on my mind at the time besides Howell’s crotch.

“Get a stretcher team and get him down to sick bay,” Francis told me. “He should be okay, but we’ll need to follow up the neuroleptics, and he’ll need a complete scan to check for internal injury, electrolyte balance, and lactic-acid buildup. Once things are back in balance, we’ll do a flush on the ’bots, get them out of there.” He pinched Howell’s arm as I had earlier. “Dehydrated. When you get him to sick bay, put him on IV fluids. Think you can manage that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hey, Doc?” Howell said. His voice was weak, and it trembled a bit. “Am I in trouble?”

“You’re on report,” Dr. Francis told him, “if that’s what you mean. Misuse of nanomedical technology is damned dangerous. I imagine Captain Reichert is going to have words with you about damaging government property.”

“ What government property?”

“You. Your body.”

I’d already used my in-head com link to call for a stretcher team. In the meantime, I helped Howell get up and into his bunk. The other Marines began dispersing, a little reluctantly. It had been quite a show.

And by the time we had him in sick bay, with an IV dripping Ringer’s lactate into his arm, we were sliding into Earth orbit, the tugs on their way out to haul us in and dock us with the Supra-Cayambe Starport Facility.

Later that afternoon, Lieutenant Commander Francis called me into his office. “Have a seat, Carlyle.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You missed some important shit with Howell, son.” He didn’t sound angry. He sounded disappointed , which was worse.

“I know that, sir.”

“Why?”

“I … no excuse, sir.”

“On board ship, our patients tend to be young and very, very healthy. Oh, you’ll get the occasional case of appendicitis or a sprained ankle or even a cold, but when one comes to you with vague symptoms like that, you need to consider the possibility that he did something to himself.

“Because our patients on board ship also tend to be very bored. They tend to be good at figuring out ways to subvert the system and apply technology to alleviate that boredom.”

I thought about Doobie and his lab-brewed hooch. “Yes, sir.”

“That’s especially true if he comes to you asking for a dose of nanomeds. Every technology can be misused in one way or another. It’s ridiculously easy for these kids to go on liberty and buy a handheld unit that can program ’bots to do damned near anything, just about. Onans are probably the most common. But they have them for programming a heroin rush, which is pretty much the same thing. Or cocaine. Or even, believe it or not, the feeling of contentment after a good meal.”

“Is that addictive, Doctor?”

“Can be. I saw one young enlisted woman a few years ago who was anorexic. She used an N-prog to feel full, like she’d just had a good meal, and stopped eating. We almost didn’t save her.”

“That’s just nuts, sir.”

“No, it’s just human . Humans do stupid things, or humans get screwed up in the head and that makes them to do stupid things.”

“Yes, sir.” I hesitated. “But—”

“But what?”

“I’m curious about Howell, sir. If he programmed the ’bots in his system to stimulate dopamine production … that’s just the craving, isn’t it? How did that cause the muscle spasms? And why did he go into convulsions? I didn’t give him any nanomeds this morning. Just aspirin.”

“Hm.” For a moment, he got a faraway look in his eyes, as though he were listening to something. “Do you know the term synaptic plasticity ?”

“No, sir. I know what a synapse is.”

“The gap between one nerve cell and the next, yes. Synaptic plasticity is the tendency of the connection across the synapses to change in strength, either with use or with disuse. Among other things, it means the ability to change the quantity of neurotransmitters released into a synapse, and how well the next neuron in the chain responds to them. It’s an important factor in learning.”

“Okay …”

“Aspirin can affect synaptic plasticity. One of aspirin’s metabolic by-products, salicylate, acts on the NMDA receptors in cells, and that affects the flow of calcium ions across a neural synapse.”

At this point, Dr. Francis was way over my head. I had absolutely no idea what an NMDA receptor might be.

He must have sensed my confusion. “Don’t worry about it. My guess is Howell had a resident population of nanobots in his brain, programmed to give him an orgasm anytime he wanted, okay?”