Hundreds of People Have Obsolete Technology Implanted in Their Bodies Right Now

Second Sight Medical Products built something remarkable: a retinal implant that gave a form of vision back to people blinded by degenerative disease. Not normal sight — a low-resolution perception of light and shape, enough to make out a doorway, a kerb, a person moving.

Then the company ran into financial trouble, wound down, and stopped supporting the device.

The implants did not come out. They are still in the patients — hundreds of people worldwide with a discontinued product wired into their visual system, no upgrade path, no repairs, and in some cases no way to get a replacement for an external component that failed. Some have gone dark. As reported in the technology press, people who had been given sight found that whether they kept it depended on a company's balance sheet.

I did not have to invent anything for the world of Dead Man's Clutch. I just moved the clock forward.

The Pipeline Is Real

The book's antagonist made his fortune developing advanced prosthetics for wounded veterans, then moved into civilian enhancement when the market opened.

That trajectory is not speculative. Military funding has driven prosthetics research for two decades — programmes aimed at giving amputees from the wars something dramatically better than what existed, and producing genuinely extraordinary results: multi-articulating arms with individually controlled digits, devices driven by signals read from remaining muscle or nerve.

Then the same technology, the same firms, and the same expertise become available commercially. That is not a conspiracy. It is the ordinary path any expensive technology takes — defence and medicine pay the development cost, and consumer applications follow once the price falls.

What follows from it is the interesting part.

Whose Device Is It

When a piece of technology is inside your body, the ordinary rules about product ownership stop making sense, and nobody has resolved this.

The device runs software. The software is proprietary. The manufacturer controls updates, and updates can change how the device behaves. Diagnostics are locked. Independent repair is generally prohibited by the manufacturer, frequently on safety grounds that are entirely genuine and also very convenient.

So the ordinary state of affairs for a person with an advanced implant is that a company they have no relationship with controls the functioning of part of their body, and can stop doing so.

The right-to-repair argument, which most people encounter in the context of tractors and phones, arrives here in a form that is much harder to be relaxed about. When a manufacturer refuses to release service documentation for a phone, you buy another phone.

Where the Fiction Starts

I am a novelist, not an ethicist, so what I did with all of this was ask what a detective story looks like in that world.

The answer turned out to be about the gap between people who can afford to be upgraded and people who cannot, and about veterans on the wrong side of it — men and women who were given enhancement as part of recovery, by a contractor, under conditions they were not in a position to negotiate, and who now live with hardware whose support terms they never read.

My protagonist is a detective who is stubbornly analogue in a city that has moved on. That is partly a noir convention and partly the actual argument of the book: he is unaugmented, which makes him slower and worse at nearly everything, and also means nothing about him can be remotely altered, disabled, subpoenaed, or switched off.

In a world where capability is licensed, being obsolete is a form of independence. That is the trade the whole story sits on, and it is why it is called what it is called — a car you have to drive yourself, in a city of vehicles that drive themselves and log every trip.

The Part I Believe

The genre convention for this material is that enhancement is sinister and the resistance is heroic. I do not think that is right, and I tried not to write it.

The technology is good. Restoring sight is good. Giving a soldier back the use of a hand is good. The people building these devices are, in the main, doing something worth doing, and the version of this argument that treats augmentation as inherently corrupting has to explain why a wheelchair user should be grateful for less capability.

The problem is not the enhancement. It is that we have attached life-altering capability to commercial arrangements designed for consumer electronics — end-user licences, discontinued product lines, support windows, firmware that updates when the vendor decides — and applied them to things that are physically part of a person.

The retinal implant patients did not lose their sight to a villain. They lost it to a company that could not raise another funding round.

That is the future the book is actually about, and most of it has already happened.

Dead Man's Clutch is a near-future noir about a detective with no upgrades, a city that runs on them, and bodies turning up fused to their cars.