Pharmaco System: Pills of Progress A Professor's Redemption

Chapter 8: Street Clinic Trial

The miracle in the hospital ward did not stay within that room. It was a stone thrown into the stagnant pond of Oxford's suffering, and its ripples sped with a speed that was both wonderful and breath-taking. There were no press releases, no papers. The funds there were more potent: begged prayers at soup kitchen lines, whispered supplications in double-bunked hostels, the hesitating, swelling hope in the eyes of those against whom the medical establishment had turned.

The healer," they referred to him, although not many knew his face or his name. "Miracle pills." The descriptions were indistinct, miraculous. Tiny capsules that shimmered with inner light, that had the flavor of rain and mint, that chased away pain and cleaned out infections when antibiotics could not.

Elizabeth became head designer of their underground network. Her hospital internship granted both access and cover. She knew the patients that slipped through the cracks—the illegal, the uninsured, the ones who had diseases so rare or so far gone they were "non-viable" for standard care. She was their gatekeeper, her highly clinical eye sorting out genuine, desperate need from potential trouble.

The "clinic" was a shadow, ghostly thing. One evening, it was the back of a charity-funded shelter, the smell thick with the reek of cheap disinfectant and boiled cabbage. Elsewhere, it was a corner room in a community center after the doors were closed, the only sounds of the traffic humming in the distance and the hushed, anguished breathing of the waiting. There were no signs, no queues. It was somewhere that relied on trust and desperation.

Richard led the way. At home again, he worked with a focused energy he had not experienced since his days at the peak of his career. But these games are a thousand times bigger now. The Proximity Field of the System functioned around the clock, analyzing an incredible diversity of inputs—orange peels thrown away and full of bioflavonoids, rust particles as an iron source, specific weeds Elizabeth scavenged from city park sidewalks that the System informed him held unique anti-inflammatory effects.

"System, synthesize staphylococcus drug-resistant compound," he would command, his tone low. "Optimize biofilm penetration and immune co-operation."

[DESIGNING: 'SPECIFIC ANTI-MRSA COMPOUND.' WITH SYNERGISTIC IMMUNE MODULATION.]

The procedure never failed to impress him. It wasn't really creating a drug; it was designing a biological key to fit a peculiar, intricate lock. The final pills were a palette of soft, glowing hues—lavender for pain, gold for infection, deep emerald for tissue repair.

He was a ghostly presence at the clinics. He stood aside, letting Elizabeth take center stage, her calm professional demeanor a salve to the frightened and the uncertain. He observed, his gaze cutting, the System's ANALYZE routine constantly running in his mind's eye, a secret HUD overlaying biological data over his vision.

He watched a stout worker, his septic mauled hand the product of a worksite injury that had cost him his job, take a golden pill. The System feed indicated the real-time data:

[SUBJECT: MALE, 45. CONDITION: SEVERE CELLULITIS, EARLY-STAGE SEPSIS. PATHOGEN LOAD: 87.3%.]

[ADMINISTERING ANTI-PATHOGEN COMPOUND…]

[PATHOGEN LOAD: 54.1%… 22.8%… 3.1%…]

[INFLAMMATION REDUCING. TISSUE REGENERATION INITIATED.]

Within an hour, the hot red swelling was gone, the fever passed. The man gazed at his own hand, bending fingers that had been locked in agony, tears of marvel and relief welling in his eyes. "It's… it's cold," he stammered. "The pain is just… gone."

Another success. Richard would chart it by hand, a tick in a column, his hand steady. But deep inside, each was a seismic event.

The System spit out a constant, emotionless summary.

[CUMULATIVE FIELD TRIAL DATA: 214 SUBJECTS.]

[RESULTS: 98.7% FULL RECOVERY. 1.0% SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT. 0.3% MINOR SIDE EFFECTS (TRANSIENT NAUSEA, MILD HEADACHE).]

[TOXICITY: 0.00%.

The scientist in him was amazed at the statistics. 98.7%. It was a percentage that did not belong in the real world. The 0.3% of side effects, so negligible in context, were nonetheless scrupulously noted.]. He'd wake in the middle of the night, spooking out these cases in his head, what was it, a synthesis error, some hidden factor in the patient's physiology, his own failure of execution. Each tiny error, each momentary headache, a moral transgression, a sin against the perfection the System offered. They weren't statistics; they were people, and he felt the weight of each and every one of them.

But the victories were a wave lifting his own battered spirit. He saw hope return, not as a metaphysical concept, but in the tangible, physical transformation of human beings. A woman whose body was ravaged by a lupus flare that had stolen her mobility from her walked out of the community center after two treatments, her gait firm, the butterfly rash on her face forgotten.

The most poignant experience was on a rain-soaked Tuesday afternoon in the shelter. A young girl, six at most, was led in by her mother. She had a grubby, chronic ear infection that had rendered her half-deaf and miserable seven days a week. Her name was Lila. She was small, clutching a worn stuffed rabbit, her eyes wide with fear.

Richard had produced a soft, blue-azure pill. Elizabeth comforted the girl, talking softly and soothingly. Lila swallowed it and winced at the weird, ozone taste.

They waited. Twenty minutes went by before Lila's mother gasped. "Lila? Sweetheart?"

The small girl was turning her head back and forth, an expression of profound perplexity on her face. "The buzzing… it's gone," she breathed. And in an instant a smile, untainted and shining, flashed through the terror. She could hear. The dull, thudding din in her ear had given place to silence, and then to the clear, separate voice of her mother.

Overwhelmed, she sprang from her chair and threw thin arms around Richard's legs, burying her face in his frayed trousers. "Thank you, healer man," she whispered into the fabric.

The contact was electric. Richard froze, his professional reserve splintered to smithereens. He looked down into the small, trusting body wrapped around his legs. This was not a data point. This was a child back in her world. Its weight, the raw, humbling privilege, overwhelmed him. His vision obscured, and he was forced to look away, hastily washing his eyes with the back of his hand, his throat too tight to speak. He was not a professor here, not a fallen scholar. He was merely a man who could mend what was broken.

At that point, the last vestiges of his doubt were reduced to ashes. This was his fate. This was the answer to the System's demand.

But light casts shadows. Miracles that upset the applecart won't be secret for long. The gossip that spread through the slum districts of Oxford also reached other, more cultivated ears. A doctor at St. Jude's, bewildered by the sudden healing of the septic patient, made an unusual case report. A chemist noticed a strange drop in antibiotic prescriptions in certain postcodes.

And somewhere else, in a spick, high-floored boardroom somewhere else, in Medicon Industries' sheeny London headquarters, other facts were under scrutiny. A local sales report for a powerful, expensive intravenous antibiotic showed an unexpected, statistically anomalous decline in the Oxford area. It was a tiny blip, nothing in a global landscape.

But Medicon was a predator, and predators are attuned to the slightest tremor in their environment. The blip was detected by an algorithm whose function was to detect market threats. It was compared with the extraordinary case report from St. Jude's, which was automatically extracted from medical databases by another corporate surveillance software.

On a high, highly reflective screen in Victor Croft's office, Head of Threat Analysis, two pieces of information converged. A map of Oxford appeared, and two red spots blazed—one at the hospital, one within the city's impoverished center.

Croft, a man with eyes as tranquil as a chess master's, steepled his fingers. Probably nothing. A data glitch. A fluke.

But he'd risen to his position by disregarding flukes.

He typed in a command. A single line of characters, stiff and determined, on the screen.

INITIATE PROBE: OXFORD. ASSESS FOR UNREGULATED THERAPEUTIC ACTIVITY.

Somewhere in the building, a low-priority alert flashed onto a lower-grade's terminal. A soft, insistent, red light.

The pursuit, though neither of them yet suspected, had begun.

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