All Chapters of The Public Health Oracle: How One Man’s Outbreak System Chan: Chapter 11
- Chapter 20
91 chapters
Chapter 11: Growing Trust
The victory over the mosquitoes was not marked with parade or feast but with a quiet, profound shift in mood in Riverside. The slums in the east, once a place of resigned terror, now hummed with new energy—purposeful, watchful, and warily hopeful. That incessant, maddening hum was silenced, replaced with kids playing and laughing in the cooler evening air without being overpowered, with women socializing outside their homes without constantly slapping their arms and necks.Reuben Stone felt the change as a stab of barometric pressure. It was in how other people viewed him. The fear and suspicion that had followed the miraculous return of the well were gone, replaced by a deep, uncomfortable reverence.It started with the children. They would see him walking between his institute and the clinic and would stop their play to watch him pass by, their eyes wide with a mixture of wonder and interest. Then a young woman carrying a baby in her arms approached and said hello to him in the mark
Chapter 12 – Collins Notices
Capital Heights was lightyears away from Riverside. There, rather than humid air and woodsmoke, the air reeked of polished mahogany, expensive cigar smoke, and ambition. Government buildings were monuments of glass and steel, their air-conditioned hallways thrumming with the quiet, hard energy of power brokers and deal-makers.High above the city, in a corner office, Edward Collins surveyed his kingdom. The view was unblemished, a panorama of progress and prosperity that deliberately shunned the sprawling, less-sightly edges on which most of the city itself lived. Collins himself was a man cut for this environment. Collins was in his late fifties but had the healthy build of a much younger man, his hair silvery and set neatly, his suit pressed to accommodate the least softening around his waist. He seemed like a leader. He cultivated the image with the skill of a master gardener.He was no minister, not on any ballot to which the public had a clue. His influence resided elsewhere, and
Chapter 13 – The Typhoid Signal
The warning of the disinformation hummed in Reuben's mind, a low, persistent amber beat beneath his normal routines. He found himself studying faces at the market, hearing the sound of a seeded lie in loose conversation. He saw the subtle signs: a woman with her friendly smile who would typically greet him now a grudging nod; a group of men dissolving too quickly as he passed by. The trust that he had built was a delicate equilibrium, and a poison was infusing its roots. He was preparing for a war of shadows and denials, a guerrilla war fought on the level of neighborhood meetings and open statistics.He was with Anna in the clinic, making arrangements for a public meeting to clear up the rumors about the nets, when the pressure shift caught up with him. It was not like before—more sudden, more insistent, pulling his mind away from Riverside with a physical force.Blue interface confronted him, but what flashed on it was a warning that did not pertain to his village. The location tag
Chapter 14 – First Moral Test
The quiet after Anna left for Harbor City was the loudest sound Reuben ever heard. It was a hollow haunted by the ghost of the typhoid alert, a nagging, ticking clock that echoed inside his head: 116:42:18. Every whir of the fan in his office, every shriek of the children racing past the well, was a betrayal. Life went on in blissful ignorance in Riverside, while a sword hung over the head of a hundred thousand people a few hours away down the highway.He tried to work himself out of it. He gave the public forum, using charts and the new water from the well to reason patiently, logically separated the gossip regarding the nets and the water. He showed them the test results, the safety stamps on the insecticide. The majority of the villagers were persuaded. The trust erosion alert dropped to 3% from 5%. It was a victory, but it was bitter in his mouth.His thoughts were in Makoko. Was Anna okay? Had she located Sister Agnes? Were individuals already becoming ill?The System's initial w
Chapter 15 – Slum of Shadows
The resolve that had maintained Reuben calm on the mission's rickety porch evaporated the moment he was out. It was easy to witness suffering in the tightly controlled setting of a clinic; another thing entirely to be amid the setting that created it.The smell was a physical entity, a warm, heavy blanket that stuck to the back of his nose and mouth. A rich, layered stink: the sweet, cloying stink of garbage dumped directly into the lagoon; the bitter, searing nip of ammonia from urine; the underlying, fundamentally wrong odor of raw, untreated sewage. His senses toughened to it in a few minutes, which was worse than the shock.Anna pulled him out of the comparative solidity of the mission, onto a lattice of rickety, narrow boardwalks that were streets. The boards were slick with algae and some other material he preferred not to consider. Beneath his feet, the black water churned.Makoko was a city of shadows and brutal, poignant contradictions. The vitality of a nation that would not
Chapter 16 – Street Education
The Holy Mother Mission roof was a strange, innovative style of farm. Rows of transparent plastic water bottles, filled with the dark lagoon water, lined up neatly, drying in the blistering Harbor City sun. It was the initial harvest of hope in a soil that yielded few other things but hardship.Within, Reuben, Anna, and Sister Agnes had turned the clinic's main room into a classroom. A chalkboard, rescued from a collapsed schoolhouse, stood against a wall. Drawn on it were crude, bare diagrams: a stick man drinking from a puddle, then a face twisted in a frown and cramps; the same stick man drinking from a bottle with a sun radiating from it, then a smiling face.They were today's patients' mothers and grandmothers—women with worry and exhaustion etched on their faces, their infants strapped to their backs with tattered cloth. They heard him patiently, in deep doubt. For them, Reuben was just another oyibo, another foreigner with concepts that would soon disappear as soon as he left.
Chapter 17 – First System Penalty
Air in Makoko was thick, pulpy poison, and within five days, Reuben felt it burrowing into his bones. It was not the smell of sewage and rot; it was the weight of the place, the unbelievable, endless size of its desperation. The frantic early energy that had propelled him from Riverside had drained away, leaving a lethargic, bone-weariness.They and Anna were automatons now. Their world had contracted to the little clinic, the endless queues of patients, the same SODIS technique, repeated endlessly, the dismal nightly tally of fresh cases on their paper map. The red pins were accumulating, an unstoppable, spreading blot. Their blue pins—the families adopting the sun-water treatment—were spreading, but so slowly that compared to the tide of disease, it seemed glacial.The System's typhoid alarm was a constant, throbbing hum in his brain, a countdown long since completed and now simply monitoring the accumulating catastrophe. ACTIVE CASES: 187. ESTIMATED FATALITIES: 4. The numbers were
Chapter 18: Redemption Effort
The hush that had followed the System's maelstrom of punishment had been colder than the alarm. Reuben rested on the planks, the rough wood firm on his cheek. The ghostly glimmer of red dissipated from his eyes, but it was seared onto the back of his eyelids. He blinked and saw it: LIVES LOST: PREVENTABLE.Anna's hand lay on his back, a solid, comforting weight. She didn't speak. Nothing could excuse this. All she could do was give him her silence, which acknowledged the depth of the failure without diminishing it.And then, finally, after what felt like an age, Reuben struggled to his feet. His movements mechanical, like a puppet whose strings had been severed and hastily re-knotted. He looked at Anna, and the devastation in his eyes was so great that she flinched."It was my fault," he panted, the words raw."We are exhausted, Reuben," Anna whispered, her voice hard and low. "We are two people trying to stop an ocean from coming in with our bare hands. The city is to blame for letti
Chapter 19: Media Stirs
The revolution in Makoko was not sudden, an alteration of the very climate. The general fear that had gripped the slum began to fade, not because the risk was over—the poisoned water continued to flow, the filth continued to bubble—but because power had been woven into the community. The rows of sun-kissed water bottles along the rooftops were no longer newsworthy; they were a statement of defiance. The mission clinic, once a last hope, thrummed with a sense of focused purpose, as Chiamaka and several other teens functioned as Reuben and Anna's unofficial public health corps.Reuben himself had changed. Guilt over the Johnson children was a wound that could not be healed, a block of hard lead in his stomach that he carried everywhere. But it no longer held him back. Instead, it fueled a relentless, almost grim efficacy. He slept in short, troubled intervals, nightmares illuminated by flashing red text. He moved through the slum with increased ferocity, his rationales sharper, his focu
Chapter 20: DP Investment
The meeting with Adeola had created a new kind of tension in the air regarding the mission. It was no longer fear of disease; it was anticipation of a political retaliation. Reuben knew that his denial had been a declaration of war. Collins would not respond with a second smile and handshake. The next move would be harder, sharper.The need for mobility and adaptability had never been so clear. They were bound to the mission, an immovable object. The south-west quadrant debacle had demonstrated to them that speed of reaction was important. They needed to be able to move their operation, to respond to outbreaks where they occurred, and to vanish from the administrative bullseye if necessary.Reuben was in the mission's storeroom, temporarily their command center. The paper map of Makoko had an intricate pattern of red and blue dots superimposed upon it, testimony to their long, block-by-block battle against typhoid. His DP balance was 305. A small fortune, earned through the bloody, pa