For Enhanced Workers, a Clinic Visit Is Now Half Paperwork

NAIROBI — The augmentation is the easy part; the paperwork is the rest of your life. At a neural-maintenance clinic in Nairobi, where a steady line of augmented patients — part of the roughly 5 percent of humans now living with some enhancement — come for routine interface checks, technician Baraka Otieno spends more of each appointment on documentation than on hardware. Under the augmentation industry's still-open and contested safety review, every implant of a certain class must log its diagnostics, and patients must carry proof of a current review status they had no hand in deciding. "People think enhancement is about superpowers," Otieno said, running a scan on a schoolteacher's temple port. "Mostly it is about keeping records so a committee somewhere stays satisfied." The review remains unresolved — neither cleared nor halted — leaving patients in a limbo of maintenance without conclusion. For the schoolteacher in the chair, it means an afternoon off work every quarter, a small tax of time levied on being, in the paper's careful phrasing, one in twenty.