All Chapters of Pharmaco System: Pills of Progress A Professor's Redemption : Chapter 21
- Chapter 30
40 chapters
Chapter 21. Siege of the Chapel
The world fell apart in a whirlwind of splintered oak and wailing light. The centuries-thick old door did not just open; it shattered beneath the concentrated rage of a ram. Beyond the ripped opening, black-robed intruders poured in, moving with coordinated, lethal ballet, their faces obscured behind tactical headgear and gas masks. They were not police. They moved with the smooth, corporate drive that was unimaginably more terrifying than state-sanctioned violence.The first bullets weren't fired at them; they were feelers, stitching across the stone walls, shattering the remaining panes of the stained-glass saint into a thousand glittering shards that rained like crystallized blood and sapphire.Richard didn't think. He acted. He threw himself back, pulling Elizabeth down with him behind the unyielding bulk of the stone altar. It was their only cover."The System!" cried Elizabeth over the din. "Can it—"Before she was able to get the words out, a globe of power, appearing as a blin
Chapter 22. Underground Movement
The hush that succeeded the siege was a different noise. It was the hum of a world breathing quietly in expectation of the next shock. The burnt chapel, now overrun with dazed official examiners and hastily recalled Medicon agents, was bereft of its saints. Richard and Elizabeth had vanished into the knotted heart of Oxford, ghosts fueled by a growing legion of the thankful and the rebel.The broadcast, the fire, the siege—they were not losses. They were a spark. The secret was no longer a secret; it was a seed, and it had landed in fertile ground in the seams of a broken system.A young virologist by the name of Anya, based in a dusty basement in Prague, sat for months studying Richard's anonymous documents. She stared at the schematics on her monitor. They were patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle of chemical trails and resonance patterns Elizabeth had managed to send. Using a hijacked microwave and powdered samples of donated herbs, Anya had successfully managed to create a thin, shimmering
Chapter 23. The Betrayal
The safe house was a vacant accountant's office above a shuttered bakery, the air still thick with the ghost of yeast and paper. For a week, it had been a sanctuary of frenetic, hopeful motion. The coded channels hummed with news from Healer cells all over Europe. It appeared, finally, that they were producing something that could not so easily be torched or shot out of the air.When the courier turned up, he was just another thread in that widening tapestry. A young, sincere-looking man named Leo—the very same Leo whose septic leg Richard had saved in the chapel—now worked as a runner for the London cell. He wore a closed cold-storage box and had his eyes aglow with pride.From Manchester, Professor," Leo said, putting the box down carefully on the improvised lab bench they used as a desk. "They've got a reproducible synthesis of the neuro-regenerative compound. They're estimating they've boosted the yield by twenty percent. They want you to verify it."Elizabeth accepted the box wit
Chapter 24. System Upgrade: Rebellion Protocol
The quiet after Elizabeth's arrest was a palpable thing, a suffocating weight in the new, cold, secure place—a derelict maintenance room beneath the Oxford Botanic Garden. The air stank of damp earth and ozone. Richard Clark stood frozen before a line of reappropriated displays, the light casting its beam across his face in shifting hues of blue and green. The despair was an emptiness in his chest, but he did not drop into it. He wired it into the System instead, a poisonous new fuel for a remade engine.[HOST OBJECTIVE REVISED: PRIORITIES: PRIMARY: SAVE ELIZABETH BEN. SECONDARY: EXPOSE MEDICON. THREAT LEVEL: MAXIMUM. ETHICAL GUIDELINES: SUSPENDED.]It was an immediate metamorphosis. The System's interface, hitherto a clinical display of chemical equations and medical data, was renovated in a raw, aggressive fashion. There were no more clinical fonts and tidy lines; instead, there was a strategic, holographic display that floated before him. A map of Oxford, then the UK, then Europe u
Chapter 25. Operation Dawnlight
The storm that had struck against the London skyscraper was more than meteorological; it was an appropriate backdrop for the tempest about to be unleashed inside. The Medicon information fortress, a glassy black spire piercing the bruised belly of the night sky, was believed impenetrable. Its security was a legend, a marriage of the latest technology and cold-blooded human muscle. To the world, it was the thumping heart of a benevolent giant of medicine. To Richard Clark, it was the dragon's den, and Elizabeth was stuck in its deepest dungeon.He was clinging to the roof of a nearby building, his coat flapping in the wind, rain pounding his face. He was not alone. His team was a reflection of his own transformation: a handful of men and women who once donned lab coats now brandished weapons of war. There was Anya, the Prague virologist, her gaze set in a hard mask as she configured a drone disruptor—a device that emitted a frequency that caused commercial drones to shudder and plummet
Chapter 26. Medicon Collapse
The fall of the Medicon empire was not a gradual decline, but one of collapse of structure, as though overnight the pillars had been blown out. The Operation Dawnlight data dump was a neutron bomb of truth that obliterated the corporate building while leaving it intact, bathing every one of them in guilt. Governments, eager to contain the popular wrath and distance themselves from the scandal, moved with a record speed. Assets were frozen. Federal authorities raided offices in London, Zurich, and Tokyo. The board of directors, those industry titans who had made the "Variant X" decision, overnight became global pariahs, their private planes tracked by intelligence agencies as they fled to non-extradition countries.For a single, gasping day, it was a triumph. In the fresh, sunny safe house—a clean, sterile room provided by a sympathetic, now justified, member of Parliament—Richard and Elizabeth granted themselves an instant of quiet. They sat at a plain table, drinking genuine tea, mor
Chapter 27. The Viral Reckoning
The world had tumbled back through the looking glass. The brief, glimmering instant of victory turned bad into a worse nightmare. Hospitals, which had begun to thin out, were once more packed. But with different kinds of crowding. These were not the hopeful ones, carrying in their near and dear ones to be provided a miracle. These were the betrayed, the already healed who came back with an illness that was a vile mockery of their cure.A man whose regrown skin from a burn now sloughed in weeping, necrotic ulcers. A child, once blind and now seeing, whose eyes opacified behind a milky, prion-killed veil. The Chimera virus did not infect the sick; it targeted the healthy. It was a predator that used the signature of their healing as a homing beacon.Panic was not something that happened; it was the state of the world. Airports became fortresses. Borders slammed shut. The very fabric of medicine was now at issue. Trust, the foundation upon which all healing had been built, had been shatt
Chapter 28. The Rebirth Code
He was alive for three days, not quite dead. He was data in transit, a living thing put through a brutal, forced software update. Elizabeth didn't leave him. She watched the ghastly stillness of his body, the pure lack of breath fogging up a mirror, the emptiness of a pulse beneath her frantic fingertips. But he didn't decay. His skin was still warm, cool to the touch, but not cold as death. It was the coolness of a deep, peaceful lake. She stood balanced between him, her existence reduced to the space of one desperate heartbeat and the next.Early on the third morning, the change began.It started as the softest glow, a soft, inner light that oozed out through his pores, flooding a blue-white softness over the darkened room. It was not the crackling, electric blue of his transformation, but a softer, deeper one, like moonlight filtered through ice. Then there was a sound—a single, deep, resonant thump that shook through the floor. It was not the wild beat of the human heart, but the
Chapter 29. Return to the Streets
The world had been healed in a quiet, communal sigh of relief, but the author of that healing was a ghost. Richard spent days inside the sterile environment of the safe house after the dismantling of the Chimera strain, an incandescent mystery finding the boundaries, or the lack of them, of his new life. He was a star lodged within plaster walls, his brightness a persistent, gentle pressure on the mundane world.But a star, by definition, must glow.An old restive desire, the one that had originally set him onto the rain-swept streets with a bag of pills, reasserted itself. He could feel the city around him not as buildings, but as a living thing—and it was still sick. Not with the manufactured horrors of Chimera, but with the old, familiar plagues of humanity: poverty, decay, and the insidious, grinding wear of a system that had long since ceased to look at its weakest."I have to go out," he said to Elizabeth, his voice the same low thrum.She looked up from work, her face darkening
Chapter 30. Government Ultimatum
The miracle that had filled the Oxford streets with wonder soured, at terrifying speed, into a new kind of energy: the cold, disciplined fear of the mighty. The videos of Richard's touch-healing went out not as inspirational miracles but as promises of life. In the corridors of power, the script was no longer one of public health or ethics but of containment, control, and national security.There was a special UN Security Council session over all regular protocol. It was closed to the general public. The press release was a bureaucratic masterpiece, mumbling on every level, yet the resolution, "Pharmaco Containment Act – Alpha," was forcefully unyielding. In a Geneva underground bunker, a collection of world leaders' faces drawn on a gargantuan teleconference screen addressed a live feed meant for the Oxford safe house. The man leading the call was U.S. Secretary of Defense James Coulter, his jaws set firm as granite.Professor Clark," Coulter began, his voice devoid of any warmth. "T