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I secretly took some medicine to test the ingredients, and found out that most of them didn't match the records at all. Vitamin C tablets, starch capsules, glucose solution... Some of the medicines are just placebos. Health deteriorates. What frightened me even more was that I figured out their intention in an instant -
Some were designed to find out what differences the treatment would make. Some were designed to test the effects of placebos in follow-up treatment. The whole thing was a pack of lies.
At this place, those children are subjects, materials, data - everything but not patients, not human beings who fell ill.
And [Redacted], a seriously ill boy, was probably the only "healthy" child here. But now he has been "modified" into a patient for the experiment. And I still haven't figured out what the experiment is about. -- Anon Guest
What chafes the most is distrust. They asked for a Deregger Medik to assist in their experiments, and then pretty much had me there for the optics. Shown on screen, displayed to the public in the white coat, stethoscope, and safety goggles, but I'm not actually doing anything.
I guess I should have been forewarned when they made me wear a binder so that the other medical people weren't "distracted" from their duties.
Enthusiasm to solve many problems at once makes idiots of us all, I guess. That's how I got into this situation. An enormous medical facility dedicated to preserving future workers from a mystery ailment plaguing the entire polity. It looks like several nutritional deficiencies at once, and it might just be that. I am not permitted to do anything but hand out the medicine.
Or should I say "medicine".
It took me weeks to figure out the holes in the system. It was ludicrously easy to pocket a dose for one kid and claim the dispenser was one short. They just didn't care.
Second red flag, right there.
They didn't even check my pockets as I went back to my habitat vessel. A third? Maybe? Dereggers are always a bit lax about letting Galactics "go back to where they came from," even symbolically.
The first "medicine" I tested was glycerine. Nothing else, just glycerine. The next was vitamin C. A third was corn starch. There was sugar, cellulose, cocoa powder, and baker's yeast. Nothing in any quantity that could have made much of a difference.
What were they up to? It sure as hell wasn't making these kids better.
I reported my investigation results and smuggled my eyescreen into the facility. Making note of which kids got what medication over a passage of months. It wasn't as if I could have done anything else without immediate exile.
That was how we discovered the cycle.
The kids would arrive with a minor version of the sickness, and they'd get the sugar pill until they got worse. Then it was a cycle of cocoa, glycerine, cellulose, sugar, and corn starch until they got too weak to get out of bed.
Then they would overdose the kids with vitamin C and monitor the progress.
Do you know what happens to the human body when it has too much vitamin C? The bladder and the bowels purge the excess. And anything else with it. These kids are set up to die of dehydration and diarrhea at the same time.
It would have been faster just to give them cholera.
Then I managed to snatch the final "medicine" in the grand experiment. The one that those children got in abundance in their last days.
Coffee beans.
Straight up, unadulterated coffee beans.
They would be extracted during the autopsies, roasted, and made into a special executive blend. Because plebeian children made better civets than civets[1].
The good news is that the CRC is shutting the entire operation down in a few days. The bad news - for the CEO's - is that I have put a short on the entire coffee operation. The funds are going to the mourning families and rehabilitating the survivors.
I'm a Medik. I am here to help. I would never help myself at other's expense. That's what Dereggers do.
[1] Yes, you can get coffee that's been through the digestive system of the Palm Civet. Yes, it is hellishly expensive. And no, the animals aren't as exploited as these fictional children.
[Image by blackieshoot on Unsplash]
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