A bleak tale of future signs of life screening #Specfic

Warehouse
Wednesday, Admissions and Discharges. Asad braced himself for the ward rounds. At least Cheryl would be there to share the burden of responsibility. Or to pick up the buck, she might judge. This was a specialist facility, one of six nationally, that assessed severe brain damage. Admissions came from across the country depending on vacancies, and were evaluated by his team for suitability. Discharges were essentially onward referrals, a few going back to local services having shown signs of improvement, the majority ending up in government type-classified redeployment units. Some of the admissions went straight there if screening showed no evidence of cognitive function. That was why relatives were excluded from the process, too much emotional fall-out. They would be notified a few days later and invited along to perform whatever ritual they needed before their person went off for type coding. One of the team was usually present, not to offer sympathy or actually do anything but to ensure there was no foul play. Families had been known to contaminate the feeds or IVs with biological or even nuclear agents to make their loved one unviable even though technically that constituted murder and they could be prosecuted. A guilty verdict, and it usually was guilty, would mean they were shipped off for redeployment themselves which, at one level was a personal tragedy but at another a definite service to the community. The older he got, the less Asad liked his job but he wouldn’t leave, not while it conferred immunity from the process for himself and his family, and so he braced himself and left his office for the short walk to the Eval Lab.
Thirty-six people lay in pods down the left hand side of the room. Video screens opposite each pod played and replayed images obtained from the optic-occipito-limbic streams of each occupant while composite mental mapping systems tracked their responses. The screens played out their lives and the CMMs displayed their recognition with repeated replays controlling for random activity and habituation as the system churned out data. Unlucky for you if your habituation kicked in before a pattern emerged, government guidelines were tight with only 10 repetitions or 2 hours allowed after which you were judged to be either ‘in’ or ‘out’.
Their most spectacular ‘in’ had been a 20 year old who had arrived after 5 years in a head injury induced coma and woken up in the pod just as his assessment was ending without a positive result. Bureaucracy being what it was, Asad had found himself up against an administration that insisted on taking the negative result as incontrovertible evidence that the patient was ‘out’ while said patient was clawing at the inside of the pod and yelling to be released.
That incident had shaken all of them and representations had been made to government for a review of the process but they had been unsuccessful. Of course these rules did not apply to them any more than to the staff of the lab whose continued compliance could be ensured by self-interest. So the boat was not rocked and the undistinguished public trickled in as local services became oversubscribed and needed to move people on.

Conboy-Hill 2024, date of writing lost in the mists of time.