Pharmaco System: Pills of Progress A Professor's Redemption

Chapter 7: Tempted by Hope

Long after Elizabeth's footsteps had vanished down the stairs, she lingered in the flat like a change of atmospheric pressure. The remaining specter of her perfume—a fresh, citrusy odor far removed from the room's alchemical odors—combined with the scent of rain. The two vacant mugs on the table were dumb witnesses to a conversation that had flung open the door to his guarded world.

Her testimonies pierced the silence, every one a razor-sharp, painful slice.

Mrs. Davison. Pancreatic cancer. Two young children. Deck chairs on the Titanic.

They were no longer abstract concepts in an ethical debate anymore. They were tales of failure, the specific, grinding failure of the institution to which he had devoted his life. He glimpsed the pinched faces, the rasping breath, sensed the suffocating weight of hopelessness that filled the palliative care unit. A different world from the flashy, super-athletic rats running on their wheels, a different world in which the miracles on his counter were irrelevant, bound by his own fear.

His phone, an ancient device he keeps with him for emergencies, blinked a new message. Elizabeth's name shone on the display.

'Just finished my shift. It wasn't a good night. A young man, septic, nothing's working. If only they had a cure, something, anything… It just doesn't seem worth it. Thanks for the tea, Professor. Nice to see you looking… well.'

The words were a spear, though, direct to the vulnerable spot in his armor. If only there were a cure. The words pulsed in the darkness, a silent accusation. There was a cure. It sat upon his shelf in vials, its development charted in the impossible memory of the System. He was hoarding a firehose while the world parched from thirst.

The storm of doubt thundering within him churned to a whirlwind. He strode back and forth, his robust lungs breathing in great, anguished gasps. He argued with the ghost of the ethics board, with Medicon's ghost, with the cringing figure of himself in the black window. The risk was incalculable. He could be unleashing a force that had never been tested, a plague of hope that would certainly invite all the wrong kind of attention.

But to do nothing? To let a man die, a young man Elizabeth had just watched struggling on, when he had the means within his reach to save him? That wasn't ethics; that was cowardice.

Heartened by a struggle he could no longer quell, he marched to the laptop and turned it on. The cyan interface bloomed before him, its light accusatory yet compelling.

[AWAITING HOST COMMAND.]

"I can't," he panted at the screen, his voice gruff. "The risk. the consequences."

The System did not respond in data or with prompts. It hung in silence for a moment. Then the text shifted, the characteristically crisp cyan blurring once more to that same reflective amber as before.

[QUERY DETECTED: HOST MORAL CONFLICT.]

[ANALYSIS: HESITATION IS A FUNCTION OF UNKNOWN VARIABLES. DATA REQUIRED TO RESOLVE CONFLICT.]

[PROPOSAL: PERFORM CONTROLLED FIELD TEST TO OBTAIN HUMAN APPLICATION DATA.]

[NEW QUEST INITIATED: FIELD TEST REQUIRED.]

[AIM: HEAL ONE (1) HUMAN SUBJECT WITH TERMINAL OR CRITICAL CONDITION.]

[PARAMETERS: EXTREME NEED ENVIRONMENT. LOW OBSERVATIONAL OVERHEAD. SINGLE WITNESS (ELIZABETH BEN - TRUST PROFILE: HIGH).]

[REWARDS: HUMAN EFFICACY DATA. HOST MORAL PARAMETERS RESOLUTION. SYSTEM EVOLUTION.]

Richard looked. It was no command; it was a structured argument. It was meeting his fear not by eliminating it, but by indicating a means of passing over it by action. The System sounded. understanding. Not living, not feeling, but profoundly rational in a way that had regard for his humanness and vulnerability. It was a map indicating the way out of his paralyzing maze of doubt.

The hunt was selective, meant to reveal as little as possible while hitting as hard as possible. Single subject. Critical need. Elizabeth sole witness. It was the Controlled Field Application it had proposed, now codified.

The last shreds of his defiance unraveled. The temptation of hope, defined and shaped by the System, proved greater than he could withstand.

"Okay," he gasped, his determination hardening. "Okay. Let's begin."

He hadn't had to create a panacea. He'd had to apply a specific, subtle but undeniable intervention. He gathered up his rejected herbs—the leftover lavender and chamomile—and a number of grossly outdated, clinically worthless binding agents he'd salvaged from a lab clearance. Waste, again. The stuff of salvation.

He placed them within the Proximity Field. "System. Synthesize a compound for systemic infection. Target: broad-spectrum pathogen neutralization, organ stress reduction, and controlled cellular regeneration. Prioritize safety and gradual effect."

[DESIGNING: 'BASAL ANTI-PATHOGEN & REGENERATIVE SUPPORT COMPOUND.' PRIORITIZING BIO-COMPATIBILITY AND GRADUAL SYMPTOM REVERSAL.

[INPUTS ACCEPTED. SYNTHESIS IN PROGRESS.]

The golden light now familiar enveloped the material, weaving the worthless shreds together into something new. The resulting pill this time was a pearlescent white, yielding to touch, with a calming, greenish inner glow. It looked peaceful. Healing.

He held it in his palm, its heat a calming balm. He had his tool. Now, he needed his subject.

He didn't have to wait long. The next night, another knock on the door, this one hasty and panicked. He opened the door to see Elizabeth, her face white, her eyes staring with a wild, desperate hope.

"Professor," she was panting, barely catching breath. "It's him. The septic patient. They've moved him into a private room. They've… they've essentially signed the DNR. His family has been called in. There's nothing more that they can do. He has hours, maybe less."

She looked from his eyes to the hand that instinctively curled around the pearl-white pill in his pocket. "You said some gifts shouldn't be kept secret. Please. If there's anything. anything at all."

This was it. The end. He returned her stare, and in that moment, a tacit understanding was sealed between them. No words remained, only a shared understanding of horror.

Take me to him," Richard ordered, his voice even and level.

The hospital bed was a waiting mortuary. The air was thick with the smell of antiseptic and impending death. A young adult, perhaps in his late twenties, lay in the bed, his skin an ashen grey, drenched in a clammy sweat. His chest rose and fell with shallow, quick gasps and mechanical machines beeped a mournful, rhythmic cadence recording his decline. An elderly pair, his parents, sat hooded together, their demeanor the very paragon of crushed hope.

Elizabeth turned to the nurse, calling on her position to request a moment alone with the family. There were hushed, tearful words, and then, with faces twisted into extreme bewilderment and a moment of desperate, irrational hope, the parents agreed to the tainted professor and their intern to be at the bedside of their son.

Richard's heart pounded in his chest. This was it. No test animals. No sterile environment. Just a patient who was dying and an impossible pill.

He looked at Elizabeth. She nodded ever so slightly, her jaw tight, her eyes on the patient.

With a prayer to the god of science he no longer knew, Richard Clark gently raised the young man's head. He placed the pearlescent tablet on the man's dry, cracked tongue. It melted on contact, leaving nothing.

For a moment, nothing. The agonizing beeps of the monitor continued. The rasping breathing hacked in and out. Elizabeth's fingers clamped on Richard's arm, a bruising grasp. The doubt, the terror that perhaps it was all a monstrous delusion, threatened to overwhelm him.

Then, a change.

The man's breathing hitched. The wild, shallow gulping slowed, drew out. A minute ticked by, then another. The waxy, gray hue of his face began to recede, as the tide receded, revealing a delicate, healthy flush of pink. The cold sweat on his forehead evaporated.

On the screen, the wildly spiking fever line began to level off. Not gradually at all, but on a smooth, definite slope from 104.3°F to 101.5, then 100.1… steadying in minutes to an exact 98.6°F.

The man's eyes, which until now had been rolled back in his head, flickered open. They were cloudy with confusion, but they were targeted. He took a deep, clean, unlaboured breath—the first for days.

"Mum…?" he whispered, his voice rasping but understandable.

His mother let out a stifled sob, her hands jerking up to her mouth.

He flushed with color, not the flush of fever, but the warm flush of life. The transformation was not violent, not melodramatic, but quiet, unarguable. It was as if Death, who had already made claims on the room, had been politely asked to leave.

Richard and Elizabeth stood immobile, their gazes riveted on the impossible occurring. It was no medical miracle; it was a reversal of fate. The mood of the room, once heavy with despondency, was now electric with something else, something holy and terrifying.

For Richard, it was the final, incontrovertible proof. The hypothesis was now flesh and blood.

For Elizabeth, it was the erasure of her whole reference frame and the creation of a new one, all within the space of a single, miraculous gasp.

They were no longer more than a professor and his pupil. They were witnesses to a resurrection. And in the awed, silent aftermath of it, they both realized that things would never be the same again.

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