Pharmaco System: Pills of Progress A Professor's Redemption

Chapter 5: Ethical Hesitation

The flat had changed. The hangover scent of dust and decay had been overpowered by the clean, sharp odors of ozone and eldritch, other-than-ordinary botanicals. Stacks of paper, once in disarray, were now neat logs filled to bursting with information that would have set the scientific world ablaze. In the corner lived the three rats—Alpha, Beta, and Gamma—once sluggish captives but now bright, almost preternaturally well-looking animals whose cages hummed with incessant, fevered activity. They were the human representation of an energetic paradigmic change.

Richard Clark had spent three days as the stereotypical mad scientist with a burning passion for discovery. He had lab-combined stale bread and coffee grounds to produce a digestive aid that had remedied a modeled ulcer in a stomach model with a level of precision classified as impossible. He had created a mental enhancer from ginkgo biloba leaves and suggestions of copper cabling, its recipe so pure that modern nootropics appeared as unsophisticated clubs. Each success was a burst of pure intellectual lightning, an affirmation that he was not mad, that he possessed in his hands a door to a new world.

But as the first exhilaration faded, the stillness of the flat began to close in on him, and in that stillness an old, grim-faced acquaintance reappeared: doubt.

It insidiously crept in during the quiet moments, when he washed a beaker or stared at the thudding blue glow of the laptop. It kept reminding him in the voices of his old colleagues, the ones who had sat in judgement on him.

"Playing god, Richard?" the incredulity whispered, sounding suspiciously like the hostile head of the university ethics board.

He looked at his hands. They had wrought miracles from garbage. They had commanded biological functions with the lordliness of an orchestra conductor. Wasn't this the ultimate hubris? Medicine was a science of humility. It was about understanding a system so complex that one could but hope to nudge it gently back into balance. It took years of clinical testing, double-blind studies, peer review, and reluctant, public scrutiny. It was a walled city, whose portals were guarded by procedure and doubt.

He had only jumped over the walls and found a garden of endless abundance on the other side. But on what authority did he gather its fruit?

Every cure he came up with was its own autonomous kingdom, answerable to no one but the System. It leapt over the entire scaffolding of modern science—the procedure, the precautions, the slow and tentative erection of knowledge. He was a single point of failure, an errant node in the human advancement network. The world had already killed him for holding to ethics; the harsh irony now was that he was afraid to violate them on an infinitely greater scale.

His imagination created a sharp, agonizing fantasy. He pictured himself again before the board of Oxford, but this time, the charge was not the same. Not, "You fabricated data," but, "You are a fraud because your miracles function." They would accuse him of being a sorcerer, a con artist selling impossible remedies. They would haul him down not because he was wrong, but because he was too right, because he carried a truth so potent it blew their whole system of reference. Those in power, he was certain, would rather cling to an imperfect reality that it could handle than an ideal one that it could not control.

He paced the length of his small, cramped world, his step a gentle tattoo on the planks. The shelves, once littered with the remains of his former life, stood filled with vials of shining chemicals—a fortune's worth of possible catastrophes or miracles.

"What is the proper way?" he bellowed at the vacant room.

He looked at the laptop. The System was not a machine; it was a friend, an oracle. It had invaded his biology, it had read his brain. Perhaps it might navigate through the labyrinth of his guilt.

He sat before it, the cyan light washing over his weary face. "System," he began, his own deep and rough with weariness and trepidation. "The tests on animals are conclusive. The efficacy is. undeniable. But to a human purpose. Do I try it on humans?"

The interface, which usually responded with immediate, data-grounded absolutism, faltered. The cursor blinked once, twice. Then, new text appeared, not in the usual snappy cyan, but in a milder, almost amber hue.

[ETHICAL MODULE ENGAGED.]

The words sent shivers through him. An Ethical Module. Not a database or synthesizer, as he thought. It had a conscience, or at least, the semblance of one.

[QUERY ASSESSED: HUMAN TRIALS.]

[CONTEXT: HOST BIOLOGICAL INTEGRITY CONFIRMED. ANIMAL MODEL EFFICACY CONFIRMED. SOCIETAL AND REGULATORY FRAMEWORKS: NON-COMPLIANT.]

[RISK ASSESSMENT: HIGH. POTENTIAL FOR HARM (PHYSICAL/SOCIAL/POLITICAL) VIA MISAPPLICATION, MISINTERPRETATION, OR MALEVOLENT CO-OPTION.]

[RECOMMENDATION: CONTROLLED FIELD APPLICATION. SUGGEST INITIAL FORAY IN ENVIRONMENT OF EXTREME NEED WITH MINIMIZED OBSERVATIONAL OVERHEAD.]

Richard leaned back in his chair, stunned. It was sensible. It was sensitive to the limits, not just of science but of society. Controlled Field Application. It wasn't being told to go break into a hospital. It was being told he needed to go somewhere where the rules had already broken down, where the need was so great that the risk would be worthwhile. Somewhere nobody was looking.

It was a relief and added weight. The System was not pushing him toward cavalier godhead; it was drawing him toward a sinister, pragmatic sort of stewardship. It was acknowledging the minefield he had to walk through.

He took a deep breath, a weighed-down, tired sigh, and started to walk again. He was thinking of the promise he had sworn as a young man, not the Hippocratic Oath, but the scientist's creed: seek knowledge for humanity's good. And was the greater evil keeping a cure from killing pain, or letting loose a force that would topple the world?

Science unadulterated was the excitement of discovery, the unraveling of a mystery. But discovery without humanity was hubris. It was a rocket launched into a vacuum, signifying nothing. He had indulged in that hubris previously, believing truth would be enough. He had presented his findings on Medicon with the cold, tidy rationality of fact, and he had been crucified. He had realized that science is not something that occurs in a vacuum; science becomes a part of the fabric of society, every fiber of greed and fear and power.

To implement the System was to deal with that fabric itself. He wasn't going to be signing an academic paper; he was going to be handing a loaded pistol to a world already at war.

Its weight had been real, a burden on his shoulders that his recently restored body wasn't accustomed to bearing. The excitement of the past few days was childish now, a clean joy in the fireworks display before he realized that he held the trigger to a nuclear weapon.

He stopped at the window, staring out across the turrets of Oxford, set against the fading sky. The city of reason, of order, of centuries of painstakingly gathered learning. He was an alien there, and now he had the authority to reduce it to ashes or insist that it throw open its gates.

Too much. The silence, the burden, the breathtaking scope of it all.

With a quick, firm movement, he strode to the laptop and flipped it off. The cyan light died, plunging the corner of the room into heavy shadow. The only light came from the streetlamp outside, casting long, distorted shadows on the floor.

The darkness wasn't total, though.

From the hinge of the laptop lid, a gentle, steady blue glow continued to pulsate. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. A heartbeat.

It was waiting. It had presented its offer, weighed the risks, and now it was waiting for him to make a decision. The host. The human. The one with the conscience, flawed and craven as it was.

He stood in half-darkness, a man between heaven and earth, his own shadow reaching far behind him. The miracles were on the vials on the shelves. The proof was running in enclosures behind him. The path forward, fraught with danger and possibility, was his own to choose. The System had provided the power, but the purpose—the humanity—must be his own. And in the pale, pulsing light, he knew that his doubt was a luxury which would not, could not last.

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