Pharmaco System: Pills of Progress A Professor's Redemption

Chapter 4: Rats Tested

The exhilaration of his own recovery was a powerful poison. Richard knew this. The scientist in him, even as it was temporarily overpowered by the miracle, was reasserting itself with a veteran caution. One data point, no matter how deep, was anecdote. A clinical trial required a cohort, controls, and replicable outcomes. He had entered a new world, but he was not leaving the scientific process behind. It was his sole master in this uncharted realm.

His fresh, clean lungs inhaled a firm breath as he surveyed his kingdom of disarray. The miracle had happened here, but it was born out of chaos. To understand it, to master it, he needed order. His first task was not synthesis, however, but sanitation. He filled much of a day with a manic, furious cleaning. He washed beakers until they shone, reorganized his meager chemical supplies with obsessive attention, and swept a cleared space on the bench in front of the laptop, now humming with a soft, steady watchfulness. This region, he decreed, was the Proximity Field. His altar of demonstration.

The System required raw materials. His gaze fell upon a discarded box in the corner, filled with shed botanical specimens from a botany department clearance weeks before—primarily moldy lavender and chamomile, now more compost than specimen. Waste. Perfect.

But he needed test subjects. Not human subjects. Not yet. Too new was the memory of his own transformation, too apocalyptic the possibility of harm. He thought about the biomedical research division of the university, the cages of rodents waiting to be used for experiments that were, at best, incremental. He thought about the procedures for disposal.

A plot, filled with moral ambiguity and utilitarian risk, crystallized in his mind. It was not an ethical plot, but a logical one.

That evening, under a drizzling dusk sky, Richard Clark, the former Oxford phenom, was brought low. He used antiquated keycodes—surprisingly still operational—and a service door he knew was poorly defended. His healthy and strong heart thudded in his chest not with effort, but with the sheer surrealism of the act. In a little, antiseptic-scented, sawdust-tinged room, he discovered what he wanted: a crate labeled "Bio-Waste - Incineration." Inside it, lying snug in neat but doomed bedding, were three lab rats. They were the controls of a completed experiment, deemed surplus. One, a large white one, had a pea-sized tumor on its flank, easily visible. Another was listless, coat mottled. The third appeared to be healthy but small. Rescues, he told himself, though the word seemed thin. They were lab animals, and he was saving them from one experiment to another much stranger one.

In his apartment, he constructed three makeshift cages out of plastic storage bins on the spot and fed them, watered them, and provided a clean blanket. They flared their noses at the unfamiliar, chemical-tainted air. The one with the tumor, whom he named "Alpha," expressed no visible aggression. The drowsy one, "Beta," hardly moved. The little, well-behaved one, "Gamma," would be his control.

The laboratory was set. Materials were set. Subjects were set. The scientist would be back.

He sat before the Interface, cyan light mapping determined lines on his face. "System," he said aloud, the words still foreign. "Proceed with Synthesis Protocol."

[AWAITING PARAMETERS.]

He placed the container of reeking herbs into the Proximity Field. The SCAN facility responded, the molecular matrix of decaying cellulose, essential oils, and mold spores appearing on the screen in a complex, quite unwholesome design.

"Make as primary input," he commanded mentally.

[INPUT DESIGNATED: ORGANIC COMPOST (DEGRADED). NUTRIENT DENSITY: LOW. TOXICITY: NEGLIGIBLE.]

"Now," Richard breathed, his fingers intertwined. "Target output… a general health and vigor supplement. A… vitamin-fortifying compound. System-recommended formula."

The System remained still for three seconds—a very long time in its processing speed. Then, a new text appeared.

[SUGGESTED: 'BASAL METABOLIC OPTIMIZATION COMPOUND.' OBJECTIVE: ENHANCE CELLULAR ENERGY PRODUCTION, STIMULATE HEALTHY FUR GROWTH, BOOST IMMUNE RESPONSE. COMPATIBLE WITH INPUT MATERIALS. PROCEED? Y/N]

"Proceed," Richard breathed.

The familiar ritual began. The plants in the box shuddered, though the air was still. They emitted a soft, golden light from within the rotting pile, which condensed, drawing the wasted, dispersed compounds into unity. It was a small, silent forge. Within minutes, the light extinguished, and instead of a mound of rot, three perfect, pearl-sized capsules of a creamy, golden yellow rested there. They smelled sweetly of honey and fresh soil.

He had given him one. It was warm against his skin. He placed it in a tiny dish and approached Alpha's cage. The large white rat gazed at him through gleaming, black eyes. He extended the pill with tweezers. Alpha sniffed, then, much to Richard's astonishment, took it delicately from his mouth and began to chew. It was gulped down in an instant.

Richard clicked the ANALYZE function on, pointing it at the rat.

[SUBJECT: RATTUS NORVEGICUS (ALPHA). HEALTH INDEX: 48%].

[EUTHANASIA INDICATORS: SUBCUTANEOUS LIPOMA (BENIGN), MILD NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCY].

[MONITORING…]

He settled back, notebook on his knee, pen held loosely in his hand. The old routines were comforting. He began to call out notes, the scratch of the pen a reassuring beat in the quietness of the room.

Nothing, for an hour. Alpha licked itself, took a swallow of water, and slept. Richard's optimism began to thicken into skepticism. Was its own recovery a one-time thing? A strange interface between his own personal biology and the System?

Then. Subtle. Constant. Improvement. At around the ninety-minute mark, he caught a glimpse of Alpha's fur. Before, it had been clean but lacking. Now it was getting a smoother, shinier appearance, as if each strand of hair had been polished.

[HEALTH INDEX: 67%. FUR QUALITY: IMPROVING. CELLULAR METABOLISM: +150%.]

"It's working," he whispered, breathing closer.

He looked at the tumor. It was still, a little pink swelling. He hoped it away, a foolish, unscientific desire. There was no difference.

But then, two hours in, he saw it. The tumor, which had been a hard, rounded bulge, was. less hard. Its edges were becoming soft, receding back into the surrounding tissue. It wasn't evaporating with a great bang; it was being deconstructed, being dissolved or absorbed at the cellular level. It was like watching a sandcastle being eroded by an incoming wave of health.

[HEALTH INDEX: 89%. LIPOMA MASS: 60% REDUCED. LEVEL OF TOXICITY: 0.01%.]

Toxicity. 0.01%. The figure was absurd. All drug substances in the world had side effects, a toxicity profile. Even water was toxic in the wrong amount. This was… perfection with a rounding error.

By the fourth hour, the tumor had disappeared. Completely. No trace, no indication that it ever existed. Alpha was exploring its pen with an effervescent enthusiasm Richard had not seen before, its coat lush and full, its eyes sparkling with animal vigor.

[HEALTH INDEX: 312%. TOXICITY LEVEL: 0.01%. ALL PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS: RESOLVED.]

Three hundred and twelve percent. The pen dropped from Richard's fingers, rattling on the floor. He wasn't just restoring health; he was creating a super-health, a state beyond the animal's native range. He had turned foul herbs into the very essence of life.

He administered the pills to Beta and Gamma in haste. Within sixty minutes, Beta's drowsiness had vanished, its patchy fur growing out. Gamma, already sturdy, was remade into a whirlwind of lean, hyper-sensitive vigor.

He took each measure, his hands shaking not from illness, but from a profound, earth-shattering awe. The entry in his notebook, "Pharmaco compound trial #1 – Success. Tumor eradication observed. Health index elevated beyond baseline," felt miserably insufficient, a whispered effort to describe a thunderclap.

He watched them, these three little lives, remade from rubbish-strown victims to paragons of biologic excellence. One of them, Beta, released a soft, cheerful squeak. Its little pulse on the ANALYZE screen was a perfect, even beat, a symphony of health built up from garbage.

This was not an acting drug. This was not a cure. This was rewriting biological code. Science, his own personal religion, had never given back results this instant, this absolute, this pure. It was a discipline of struggle, of incremental advance, of playing hot potato with symptoms and accepting compromises. The Pharmaco System did not play. It did not compromise. It commanded.

The last shreds of his old way of thinking, already in tatters, now completely torn apart. He wasn't attacking science. He was going over its sacred texts with a pen and correcting them off the cuff.

A voice emerged from him, a voice he had not used in this flat for years. It was a deep, astonished gurgle that expanded into soft, genuine laughter. He gazed from the fat, well rats to the glowing screen, and then at his own strong, capable hands.

And for the first time since his fall, since the gradual downhill slide toward illness and despair, Professor Richard Clark smiled. Not a smile of triumph, not yet. The smile of a man who, after all these years of traveling in a desert of despair, had stumbled upon a river.

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