You know what sucks? Keri thought to herself, trying not to focus on the glistening tip of the needle that trembled in the corner of her vision as it approached her open mouth.

The clamps hooked into either cheek made it difficult to swallow, and the repetitive, synthetic muzak that was piped into the room from every cymatic surface served only to stop her from distracting herself from the archaic, Luddite machinations occurring within her defenceless jaw.

What sucked was that, in a world where machines manufactured objects of such fine precision that no ordinary person could even comprehend the nanoscopic level to which such perfection descended, where robotic appendages carried out surgeries so swiftly a previous era's doctor would still be putting on his gloves; what sucked was that when it came down to it, you still had to visit the dentist.

How old was this kid, anyway? Keri had almost pushed herself out of the reclining chair when she realised this youngster wasn't an assistant but the actual person who would be probing and scraping at her gums with the cruel-looking blades and barbs laid out beside her.

The flaw wasn't in the machines, of course. They carried out incredibly complex surgery every day, though this was becoming less and less necessary as the hangover of the poisons humanity had once been forced to, or had chosen to, ingest were cleared, the blood and cells of the species filtered, renewed. No, the flaw wasn't in the machines.

The flaw was in humanity.

The problem was what people chose. A person in need of major surgery had no choice; they could be put to sleep whilst their flesh was sliced and diced, carved and rearranged as necessary. They were essentially a lump of meat, all conscious and unconscious reactions dampened.

But people chose to remain awake for the dentist. Hell, Keri had chosen to do so herself, though now she was wondering why. It was just... unnecessary to be put under for dental work, and some point of unacknowledged, barely recognised pride meant that the majority of people still chose to stay awake. Which meant they needed a human to do the work, someone who could adapt and respond to the involuntary and voluntary movements made by people aware of and uncomfortable with what was happening to them.

Of course, she could just have her entire dental structure resculpted, teeth wrenched from the jawbone in which they lay and replaced by unfailing, non-decaying resins rendering visits such as this forever unnecessary, but then why not have the whole jaw bone replaced? Why not have your entire skeletal structure remade and neural network overlaid with lanthanide pathways while you were at it, slotting in broad-spectrum sensors where your pupils used to be for an encore? Why not carve new holes and ports into your body until you forgot what you were in the first place? You'd soon find yourself no better off than those who gave the Body-Butcher era its name.

No, she'd just have to grin and bear it. Though not literally, of course.

The muzak faded into the background as the livestream was overridden by a newstream; the dentist must have set it to prioritise such broadcasts.

She knew what it would be about, too. There was really only one thing the spheres had been talking about all year.

One month. That's all that was left. One month before Conception, before the singularity, before humanity gave birth to a new form of sentience. Before, according to opinion-threads in the spheres, a point in time would pass and nothing would ever be the same again.[1]

And indeed she was right. The voice overriding the music emanating from the walls and counters launched straight into talk of the event, as if continuing a conversation momentarily paused.

There was nothing new here; the same repeated facts about the infallibility of the countdown, about the beauty and simplicity of the equations that no human could have created yet would open the secrets of the human mind, the same incontrovertible calculation that showed a pure new form of consciousness would be born in 647 hours, a mind whose potential vastly outshone the entire mass of the human race to this point. The same old accounts of those small facets of the process the speakers had personally had a hand in creating. The same old postulations about what this machine's first thoughts would be, thoughts that would be open for all to see from the very start.

An AI. An artificial... no, that's not what they were calling it, were they? An alternate intelligence. Opinion-leaders had been very clear on that - too many examples in the ficto-spheres to make such a simple slip-up as alienating the new child by calling it artificial. Names had power, after all.

The feed wrapped up with a brief mention of an emergency evacuation drill near the Terminal. Apparently a hundred people had taken part in the exercise, which had been a great success and accomplished in record time. The timing of the Conception was unaffected, of course.

Keri didn't know what she thought about it all. Still, at least if it were everything it was made out to be, there'd be no need to visit the dentist anymore.

[1] They had no idea that they had already missed such a point.