Cheating Time

Carles "Carlie" Enoch's world was one that could barely be imagined. In it, babies had micropharmeceutical devices inserted in their hearts within hours of birth. The MicroPharm implant held code that secretly counted down until the date of that baby's death (as determined by its genetic analysis) and contained drugs that were released in such a way that chemicals and hormones were in perfect balance at all times, making illness almost unheard of. Theoretically, the known but unexposed date of the babies' deaths and the maintenance drugs geared toward giving the baby a long life had benign consequences. It was the unknown and unbelievable and unexpected way President John Barone gathered data about every child and the way he released contraceptives from the device in order to control the population and terminate pregnancies when embryos were identified as weak or mutated that made the device and its technology as dangerous as any malignancy.