Page 128 of A Light in the Dark
I eyed the luna moth shifter. “There you go again, telling all my secrets.”
“Being accepted into Mirage universities is not a secret, Valerie.”
It wasn’t? “Also, I haven’t even finished picking which courses I’m going to take or which degrees I’m pursuing!”
“Degrees is plural,” my mother stated, and she considered me through narrowed eyes.
“She’s getting numerous degrees. I suspect she’ll get a business degree and a law degree to start with. Valerie is wickedly smart, and the schools are willing to work around her schedule, especially now that she’s been elected Stonecreek’s mayor. The universities are all in a war to have her, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she ends up with a degree from all of them. She loves learning, and she picked the house because the education might not be enough to let her have a stable place to live.”
I sighed. “It’s true. I get to spend a few hours a week working on my schooling, but it’ll have to wait until after Iget done the major mayoral work. It’s a mess. And honestly, after we’re done here, I’m driving us to City Hall, I’m leaving you in Joel’s care, and I’ll be putting in my max allowed working hours before I go home and Joel handles the basics.”
“I’m taking care of everything while she rests, and because she won’t have any chores or cooking to do, I’ll probably let her do five hours of actual work in the day unless her condition worsens.” Joel eyed his mother.
“Yes, that’s fine if she’s not doing any chores, cooking, or other strenuous activities. The idea is to limit stress, and I suspect the faster she gets done her obligations, the less stressed she’ll be.”
Finally, someone who truly understood me. “I’m having a blast driving Blaze. That doesn’t count as work, right?”
“Driving your new car around is fun and not stress,” his mother replied with a smile. “How is your headache doing?”
“A single painkiller reined it in just fine,” I reported.
“Good. If your headache progresses beyond that level, tell Joel, skip work until the headache eases up, and get rest. You’ll be fine. We’re just overly cautious.”
“Would Zac have survived if we’d enforced bedrest, do you think? We tried…”
One day, Zac’s death wouldn’t hurt so much, but I expected that one day would be decades down the road. For my parents? I doubted the pain of it would ever fade.
“We heard of the little boy from Stonecreek who’d died, gone to Mirage, and helped the researchers make a better medicine,” Joel’s mother said, and she heaved the sort of pained sigh that made me wonder who else had died from the infection. “I hadn’t known it was from the town next door or the circumstances. Your son’s life gave back a lot ofother lives. Before the new medication, there was a twenty-five percent chance of death of those dealing with the infection for the first time. If you survived the first time, survival was almost a guarantee, but the first infection killed a quarter of the time. And there was just nothing we could do to stop it. Everyone in town here has lost somebody because of the infection. Everyone. Now? Nobody dies from it. And I mean that—nobody. Your little boy died, but he’s saved so many lives from his grave, and there’s no way we can ever repay that debt.”
“Mirage keeps sending us money about the medication,” my mother muttered. “We never wanted money; we just wanted it to never happen again to another parent. We don’t know what to do about the money.”
Joel’s mother blinked. “Berra, did you not read the donation contract when you sent your baby to Mirage?”
“We couldn’t read it,” my mother confessed. “It was filled with all those legal terms Valerie likes. And we tried the dictionary, but that was filled with even more legal terms. We just checked to make certain we’d get his body back eventually for burial.”
Joel bowed his head and sighed. Joel’s mother covered her mouth, but a giggle escaped. “Okay. I’m assuming they used their boilerplate donation form. We’ve sent a few of our family members over to Mirage for research. And yes, the contracts are complicated. Joel, do you want to explain it? You’re better at it than I am.”
“Mirage medical research is a compassion based system. When you send a family member as a donation for research, you’re entering a legally binding agreement that if your family’s body helps unlock something used for commercialpurposes, such as a treatment, a vaccination, or so on, the family of the deceased is automatically given a cut of the profits for the expected lifetime of the deceased. So, if you send a child, and the child’s body is responsible for a breakthrough, you’re compensated until when that childshouldhave died of old age. It encourages people to send their loved ones to Mirage, especially when they died of illnesses or things like the bacterial infection. All drug companies that use Mirage’s research are required to pay Mirage for access to that research, and the family of the deceased is then compensated. In the case of life-saving treatments, the payment is increased based on the lethality of the disease.” Joel glanced my way, and he winced. “I’m sorry I’m being so callous about this.”
“You’re fine,” I assured him. “Zac loved helping others.”
All my memories of my older brother involved him getting underfoot and doing everything he could to help and please everybody.
“We just never really understood the money,” my mother confessed.
“Can you show me the account statements? I can take a look and give you a better idea of how the medication is being used.” Joel smiled at my mother. “Understanding might make acceptance a little easier.”
To my astonishment, my mother had a cell phone, a model similar to what I used. After a few moments, she offered the device to Joel. “I bought this thing with some of the money because it can reach emergency services even where we live.”
Joel took the phone, whistled, and spent a few minutes going through everything. “I can understand why you’reconfused about the whole thing. Oh, they even have a copy of your contract in your documents. All right, let’s have a look here. There’s a note in the opening that states that you signed contract, likely without reading, due to grief. This note means you have the option for minor renegotiation if needed. That’s an unlimited clause, because Mirage doesn’t play around. It wouldn’t be retroactive, but you have some options for negotiation. The base contract is fine, but you have the option to release their fiscal burden early. I do not recommend doing that, by the way. That money is coming from pharmaceuticalprofits, and not paying you is not going to lower the cost of the drug. Mirage allows pharmaceutical firms to charge a limited amount for the drug for the lifetime of the contract. So, removing that might cause the drug to cost more. They base the cost of the drug on Mirage’s price for research and a million doses.”
I checked my phone, which had my payment information for my prescription. According to the prescription, I needed to take a dose every twelve hours for two weeks, and before insurance, I would have paid twenty dollars a dose. “This one is actually pretty pricy, Joel. Well, compared to regular antibiotics. Those are like twentycentsa dose. This one’s twentydollarsa dose.”
“The contract breaks it down. Give me a second. Okay, so, according to this, none of the bodies they had received prior were able to help them isolate what is so dangerous about this group of bacterial infections; standard antibiotics just didn’t work on them. They didn’t even help. Something about Zac’s body helped them identify why antibiotics weren’t working.” Joel’s brows furrowed, and he spent a fewminutes reading. “Ah, here it is. This says he’d been tried on a combination of different drugs?”
“Yes. We were really careful about monitoring him, and when he worsened, we went back to the doctor, and he would try something new.”
“Well, your doctor didn’t save Zac, but he saved a lot more lives afterwards; the drug cocktail used is what made the difference according to this. And there’s a note that the doctor overseeing Zac’s care was also paid some compensation due to his role in the development of the medication.”
