The Cure

Chapter 9

     XAVIER WAS IN THE GUEST room setting up his make-shift lab when Sammy walked up and stood by the doorway. She quietly watched as the young man worked away, setting stuff up and moving paperwork and other files around. When he finally noticed she was there, he stopped what he was doing and looked back up at her.

     "Is there something I could help you with?" he asked her.

     "Actually," Sammy said with a smile, "I was going to ask if there was anything I could help you with."

     Xavier paused for a moment and pondered the request. She was being more helpful than the usual prisoner, but he also didn't want to take her enthusiasm for granted.

     "Of course," Xavier said, smiling back. "Over there is a box full of files and papers. If you could take them out and place them in alphabetical order on the large desk that would be immensely helpful."

     "No problem," Sammy replied, as she walked over to the other end of the room and started to take files out of the box he specified. As she was moving files over to the desk, one of them fell out of her hand and spilled onto the floor. As she was picking it up, she realized they were pictures of other people who had undergone treatment. She flipped through the pages and was relieved to see that in the last photo the patient being treated looked a lot healthier than she did at the beginning.

     "What was her name?" Sammy asked.

     "June," Xavier said as he came over to pick some of the photos off the floor. "She had become infected with AIDS through an event that was not of her choosing."

     "It was not her choosing?" Sammy repeated.

     "It was forced upon her, just like the sexual advances from the man that raped her." Carter said as he looked at the picture in the folder. "Rather than let life force her to live with someone else's decision, I gave her a chance to make her own choice. As you can see, she's doing much better."

     "And yet there are people who don't want people like June to feel this way?" Sammy asked, the mere thought revolting her.

     "I'm afraid so," Xavier confirmed.

      "Why wouldn't they want her to be cured?" Sammy said in disgust as she put the file on the desk with utter contempt. "Why would someone want to do that? What motive out there is big enough to make someone want to let others die for it?"

     "Money," Xavier said as he walked over and sat down in a chair beside her. "There are companies, thousands of them out there that make a lot of money just medicating these people till the day they die. These companies make billions off their suffering and that's a lot of money to just walk away from. To those people and the many shareholders they answer to, that's all the motive they'll ever need. If my serum ever hit the open market, the pharmaceutical industry would take a mammoth hit. People wouldn't need to take their drugs anymore, and countless companies would file for bankruptcy protection. For that reason alone, there are oodles of bad people there who don't want any kind of cure to see the light of day."

     "That's horrible." Sammy said as she sat down on the floor of the spare room, "People are choosing money over saving lives?"

     "It happens all the time, Sammy." Xavier retorted, "People choose not to get involved in civil conflicts while genocides rage on unmolested, wars for oil and other outrageous errors in judgment are usually made to maximize profits. It's not exactly the way to make any moral decisions, but leaders consult their wallet or stockbroker rather than consult their conscience about what is the right thing to do."