Home Directory

I am a student medical-scientist -- an MD-PhD, or "mud-phud." My MD will be in emergency medicine; my PhD in bioengineering. My dissertation work is a combination of neurophysiology and artificial-intelligence, and I am working on a new generation of intelligent diagnostic devices for use in emergency medicine. One day I might be practicing street medicine up a city alley or under some city bridge - the next day I will be back in the ivory-tower graduate lab hacking away at neural network code on a workstation. My academic advisor, who was also a mud-phud, assured me that my varied efforts served the same end. But, despite his wry encouragement, I lived in a despair of doubt, never believing that I would be good enough to work at the high-speed interface of medicine and engineering. Even in the apparently enlightened times of the late twenty-first century, I was one of the few women to enter the program. However, it would be wrong to say that the program was unfair or biased against women. The program was brutal to all the participants and most of us were too chronically over-worked to care about issues such as sex discrimination. Besides, with my chosen specialty of street medicine, I was far too overwhelmed with the daily multitude of inequities against my patients to notice any prejudices against myself, imagined or otherwise.

The next day, Freda and I were checking the Home Directory, the database of all the known members of the city homeless - some tagged only by their nickname - and their preferred hangouts, when the Homeless MedCare coordinator showed up in the office. She dropped a GIS printout next to my monitor and announced, "Jenny, one of our street contacts says there's a new encampment down by the river at the Southside Bridge." The Home Directory database was interfaced with the citywide geographical information systems utility. When it showed another hang-out of the homeless taking on some permanent characteristics, it was a matter of some concern, since that suggested that the homeless population was under some new stress. "Later this afternoon, why don't you and Freda go down there and at least let them know we're around and maybe see what it's like?"

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The site of the new settlement was not any different than many of the others we had seen. It took advantage of the artificial shelter provided by the span of the Southside Bridge, and was more or less out of the rain. But now that the weather was turning towards winter, I noticed that, like so many of the city's homeless hangouts, it would provide no refuge at all from the winter winds or snow. Visions of past discoveries of frozen corpses, half-buried in drifts, passed through my mind as Freda and I worked our way down the river embankment. A clutter of junk joined forces with the undernourished weeds and bushes to grab at our legs and jackets. The settlements of the homeless were usually close to the general traffic of humanity -- right there under our noses, but invisible to our eyes.

"Two...maybe three weeks, it looks," Freda commented on the development of the new settlement. We negotiated around a gutted washing-machine which was topped by the corpse of a media player monitor. The homeless had their own vital uses for the cast-off hardware of civilization. An early accumulation of cannibalized machinery and electronics meant that the settlement was still fairly new, but beginning to take on a permanence. From her own past experience of living on the street, Freda could offer up a complete, highly accurate, summary of a homeless settlement just by glancing around at the accumulation of junk, how it was placed, what parts had been salvaged, and what hardware preferences prevailed.