The Miracle Pill

Excerpted from the unpublished papers released according to the last will and testament of Dr. Robert Schroeder.

My father was one of the last of those family doctors you usually saw on old covers of the Saturday Evening Post. He'd visit homes all the time and lollipops were well stocked in his black bag along with tongue depressors. I knew he would've liked for me to follow him into medicine, but from the moment I read about the discovery of quarks as a kid, I was destined to be a physicist.

I always appreciated the field. I loved how deliciously banal it was. No romantic upending of everything. Just a whole career of finding ways to fill in the little gaps in the margins. I sought out my margin where physics literally became strange.

I was always fascinated by strangelets, those previously-theoretical bits of quark matter which everyone thought would solve the problem of dark matter. I wrote regularly on the evidence of their presence. I got to be "that strangelet guy" and I was fine with that and I would've made a career of that alone if it hadn't been for a particular experiment under the Franco-Swiss border.

After the discovery of long-lasting strange-matter, there was a period where everyone seemed to be asking me for advice. I actually found it rather annoying. I wasn't interested in being one of the talking heads on CNN offering cable-TV-level science and platitudes about how "incredible" this new discovery was. I just wanted to see the data.

When I did, I realized that none of my theories fit the observed behavior. Even then, we had a sense of their behavior and how strangelets seemed to exist as mass in multiple universes at once. I even pondered if this might actually explain the presence of dark matter and dark energy in the universe (a semi-reactive particle of near-infinite mass due to co-existing selves).

I was fascinated by how stable they seemed to be, especially at large size. But it wasn't till the so-called "cold strangelets" that ideas for applications started to resolve. Industrial applications in superconducting came first. It was at this time that particular side effects from handling this kind of strange matter came to light. A technician said their gout was healed. Another's arthritic back cleared up.

I collected these stories and went to work formulating a theory. I considered that the particles might react with matter in a way that caused temporality or causality to be muddled. A person's injury might reverse itself. But there were no similar reports in superconducting experiments to bear these theories out.

It wasn't until I got a friend in a medical study to begin exploring it that we could come up with a working theory.

This has since been expanded upon but we knew then that there was a significant and positive medical effect on people. Even those without medical illnesses found that their arteries were without any level of plaque or hardening. Their cognition improved dramatically. All injuries, healed or not, simply vanished. In some cases, there were immense physical changes. In one early documented case, a change of gender occurred to the subject (she was not in the least bothered by this result).

The alterations didn't occur immediately but they were persistent and irrefutable. Coming up with a theory took the most time.

To finally clear up all debate on the subject, it was my friend who wanted to call the press conference that would change my life forever. The newspapers naturally first touted it as a 'miracle cure'. I received so many calls from people sobbing into the phone, about their sick child, their sick mother, their own terminal illness, begging for the cure.

It was for those people that I agreed to work on the sugar pill when I wasn't even certain about the theory. The theory, as set then, was that the strangelets precisely resonated with matter in a parallel universe. So, if they passed through a human body then one of their other selves would likely exist in the same place and transmit data through that connection. It was a working theory and it was very wrong.

Plenty has been written trying to reconcile the why and how of strangelet changes. This is what works best for me. The strangelets are influenced by human consciousness. Someone who wants to be healed is healed because the strangelet interacts with another version of that person who isn't sick or who is healthier.

Back then though, once it became clear that strangelets did work as a cure-all, there was a mad rush to test the heck out of them. They were manipulated in so many ways but the thinking was to put them in the same folder as other strange chemicals, with large machines and hefty price tags.

But, I happened to read another study which found that strangelets, when cooled and warmed rapidly, did actually convert normal matter into strange matter. The process only happened when the strange matter was treated under very specific conditions. The new strange matter didn't replicate and it had all the same properties of a tasteless ash. Through immediate study, I found out the ash had the same healing effects I'd studied in regular strange matter.

It wasn't a long step till discovering the right mix to put into what was essentially a sugar pill. It struck me as so very amusing at the time that my pills were basically placebos with a bit of ash. You'd think that such a product would be simple to pass through clinical trials.

But the myths of strange matter persisted. I had to test out every chance of harm. It was frustrating and tedious but, after so many hours of testing and retesting, it was cleared. Then, we were still blocked by many pharmaceutical companies who either resisted the trials or wanted to get on board with my work. They had big checks to write, but I remembered my father.

On the day my 'miracle pill' was fully approved, I shocked everyone when I refused to patent the ratio of sucrose and strange matter that had been developed during study or the method I'd found of easily creating safe strange matter.

For less than a quarter penny, almost anyone could produce a pill which cured any disease. I did take a certain degree of Schadenfreude watching countless drug corporations implode, claw along with government aid for a few months, and then finally perish.

Even in all the poor places of the world, my pill could reach the ill and pained. It didn't solve all the world's problems. Hunger, war, indifference, and pain endured but the pill seemed to help.

There was a time when I couldn't walk out on the street without people hugging me in joy and crying on my shoulder.

Some flaws were found with time. A person with a new heart didn't have a perfect heart forever. They just had a second chance with their refreshed heart. For those who didn't learn their lesson, the pills soon had to be taken regularly. That side of human behavior will always disgust me.

There were also plenty who would pop the pills for the rush of a new body or in the hope it might give them superpowers from another universe.

From the rubble of the old drug companies came ones selling designer pills that supposedly had a little something extra. Snake oil on top of a sugar pill. It was then that I stepped aside from it all.

Looking back, the expected population explosion never occurred. The curing of disease did have a positive effect on humanity, even if it did feel like little more than one of my father's candies to soothe a crying child.

Beyond the perspective most have taken about the pills, I wonder about the effects on a larger scale. Everyone is glad to have their trash taken away once a week but no one ever really thinks about where it goes. I wonder, what happens to the disease the pills remove? Is it gone forever? Does it go into a far off universe where the twin of the strange matter deposits it in the body of an unsuspecting person there? Is there a world where the refuse of our illnesses has been dropped on everyone? Is there a world where countless people mysteriously get sick and no one knows why?

Stepping back, I have to wonder in my old age why good and bad things happen. Do bad things happen to the good because of people like me in other worlds who have harnessed strange matter? Does good come from a purposeful hand or a random swap by a passing particle of naturally-occurring strange matter? What of all the miracles we've ever known? What of children who woke up from the haze of cancer to a spontaneous remission?

There are days I sit and I think of all the people I have saved because of my discoveries and how many people will live a happier and healthier life because of my efforts. It soothes my fears that I have broken the order of the universe. It soothes my fear that there was never any order to begin with.

Still, despite all the good, despite all the hope, I curse myself and wish I'd had the wisdom to follow my father.