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Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station
- Authors
- Name
- DeepHorus
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s “Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017” introduces readers to “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station,” an interactive dark-comedy tale edited by Charles Yu and series editor John Joseph Adams. Scheduled for publication in October 2017, the anthology uses the clinic story to turn an ordinary insect bite into a test of bureaucracy, alien biology, and poorly designed medical technology. Rather than following a linear plot, the narrative sends readers through lettered branches that repeatedly reward caution with worse outcomes. The result is both literary entertainment and a sharp satire of how automated systems can make urgent help harder to obtain.
The story begins aboard a relay station orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, where the protagonist notices insects infesting a hydroponics bay before one bites his hand. The injury develops into spreading purple swelling, prompting a frantic trip to the only available medical clinic. Artificial gravity allows the character to run through metal corridors, while the setting combines familiar space-station technology with deliberately absurd alien species. A sign tracking the number of hours since the last patient death humorously establishes zero as a reassuring baseline rather than proof that the facility is safe.
Inside, a multilingual announcement instructs visitors to sign a clipboard, join a queue, and expect a six-hour wait even in an emergency. The clipboard, coated in green Saturnian slug-monkey mucus, assigns the protagonist queue number 283 and offers a mobile tracker so patients with incompatible physiology can wait in satellite rooms. Even that alternative has a four-hour delay, and the likelihood of receiving a tracker is effectively nonexistent. These details frame the clinic’s technology as an interconnected but unreliable system in which registration, tracking, and communication create additional obstacles instead of reducing them.
The plan unravels when a predatory Tarmandian Spacemite eats the clipboard after a receipt starts printing. Patients are told to retain their numbers, but those without receipts must begin the registration process again, sending the narrative into a loop that the text explicitly asks readers to recognize. The protagonist eventually pushes past the waiting-room chaos and approaches two nurses: a tired human and a massive Uranian Doodoo who communicates using only five letters. Their contrasting physiology and communication styles further expose how a medical system built around standardized procedures may fail people whose bodies, languages, or sensory responses fall outside its assumptions.
The clinic’s database offers little reassurance, recommending amputation for the mysterious rash and directing anyone who refuses treatment to a horrible death. Its recorded message bluntly tells emergency patients that they are “probably screwed,” turning triage advice into a darkly comic admission of institutional limitations. At the same time, the narrative imagines recognizable medical technologies such as health databases, mobile trackers, quarantine procedures, artificial gravity, and interplanetary relay infrastructure. By placing those tools beside bureaucratic indifference and alien complications, the story asks whether advanced technology can improve care when governance, accessibility, and basic human attention remain flawed.
The excerpt anticipates a strong reader reaction through escalating absurdity rather than action-heavy danger. The zero-death counter, contaminated clipboard, queue numbers, repetitive announcements, and cannibalistic alien each transform a routine clinic visit into an escalating series of frustrations. Its inclusion in a Best American anthology also signals editorial approval, with Charles Yu and John Joseph Adams selecting a work that blends speculative fiction, comedy, and pointed institutional critique. Readers who enjoy choose-your-own-adventure structures may find the repeated loops compelling, while those sensitive to graphic references to pain, amputation, and death may approach its surreal tone differently.
Looking ahead, the clinic’s fragmented systems suggest opportunities for adaptation into an interactive game, serialized digital fiction, or immersive theater production. Such formats could preserve the branching decisions while adding alien interfaces, audio announcements, receipt-based queues, and choices that affect whether the protagonist receives help, dies, or remains trapped in the registration loop. More broadly, the story offers a futuristic warning about medical automation: a technically sophisticated system can still be functionally dangerous if it prioritizes procedure over urgency. Its future relevance therefore lies not only in entertaining readers, but in prompting closer examination of triage, accessibility, data privacy, and the design of critical healthcare infrastructure.
