The Medicine
Francisco Figueira
Copyright 2014 by Francisco Figueira
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), companies, governments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Table Of Contents
Teaser
What Is This?
The Medicine
Author Comments
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Teaser
How would the world react if a plant capable of curing any disease was found?
What would you do if no one knew about it but you?
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What is this?
This is not just a story. This is not to entertain. This is far from having the size and the writing of a conventional book. If you are looking for hours of pleasant writing about descriptions of characters or places, this is not what you are searching for.
This is a small written work belonging to a sci-fi series called Softweapons that is solely focused on sharing with you powerful ideas that will most probably shake some of your beliefs about yourself and the world. Softweapons mixes plot with reflections, explanations and philosophic texts in a writing that is neither formal nor poetical. It is just as if someone was reporting something that happened.
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The Medicine
There was a great secret kept in the ends of Asia. A small region in Nepal inherited an ancient treasure: “the Medicine”. It was a plant capable of curing any disease. Over centuries, the miraculous garden where the plant flourished was kept in secret. Few people knew about its existence and the majority saw it as a legend. But something with such value never becomes oblivion. And the growing greed from those who knew about it put the worldwide secrecy in constant danger.
At first, a group of warriors from that region seized control over the territory. This was not a hard task. There was no one guarding the area besides unarmed peasants that valued their lives more than the Medicine. After this peaceful invasion, no one had access to the plant but the owners of the garden. They used it for their own benefit and the small portions they delivered to outsiders were sold at very high prices.
This balance between risk and economic benefit was crucial to the survival of the community. If they sold too little, they could not have enough means to buy the resources they needed. If they sold too much, the news could spread quickly and beyond their control, and then new warriors would come to fight for the Medicine. How many? From where? With what weapons? These were all disquieting questions for a people that had a very limited knowledge about the world.
Yet, sooner or later, that scenario would become true. It’s impossible to hide a secret forever. Thus, a few years later, new Nepalese fighters came and fought for the garden. They were equipped with good weapons and shields and some were experienced soldiers. They slaughtered the former group, making a bloodbath never seen before in that region. They spared no one. Keeping the secret was the priority.
After the battle, one could only see destruction and corpses everywhere. At the center there was the garden, flourishing as if nothing had happened. What was surrounding it was just a small price to pay to get something with tremendous value. But soon they realized the Medicine was nothing more than a poisoned gift. They faced the same dilemma as the previous community and they struggled for survival. Sometimes something with endless value may have in fact very limited possibilities.
What could they do? Wait until another army to come and defeat them? Do the same mistake as the former group did? Of course not. They needed a new strategy, even if they had to burn their bridges. And that’s precisely what they did. They decided to sell the Medicine at a large scale, become very wealthy and then buy so much military power that they would become invincible. This was a bold move but also probably the only real alternative they had.
Everything happened like they had predicted. Clients, wealth and power increased like never before, and so have the conflicts… to the point that war became routine. Warriors from China, Mongolia and even Japan came to fight for the garden’s control. The massacres were a necessary evil. The Nepalese group was growing, along with the number of people that benefited from the Medicine. Even a German doctor, Dirk Hoffmann, has traveled a long distance to buy an entire plant to cure his son of a terrible disease after realizing the western knowledge could do nothing for him.
In the 19th Century, the fire arms of a private Dutch army brought chaos to that small Asiatic region. The Nepalese community was large and strong. The garden was located in the mountains, which prevented fire arms from having a clear advantage over swords and spears. But still, Europe was at its best and the Dutch soldiers were too many and too strong. They besieged the Nepalese warriors in the mountain where the Medicine flourished. The eastern soldiers were trapped. They could only wait for the enemy to slowly and carefully come to the top. Then they would face the rifles at medium-distance. They had no chance to survive.
But when the Dutch soldiers came they saw the unexpected. The Nepalese warriors were holding alight torches. A fire weapon strikes much faster than a sword or a spear. This was the main advantage of the European army. But, in this specific situation, if they shot the enemy the torches would fall to the ground and the invaluable garden would burn. As for the Nepalese, they knew there could be no negotiation with greedy colonists. So they could either throw the torches off the mountain and hope for a miracle to happen or they could throw them in the garden and strike first (which would drastically increase their chances of survival). Could the Medicine ever be more useful than now?
They thought it couldn’t. So they threw the torches to the front. A fire wall quickly grew between both armies. The Dutch were too perplexed to make the first move. And the few that were shooting were doing it randomly to the fire, once they couldn’t see the enemy. The Nepalese ran and jumped through the flames, slaughtering as many soldiers as they could. The Dutch began to shoot massively. Few battles in history presented such chaos and destruction as this one did. The flames burned the entire garden, the Nepalese were all killed and the Dutch were now so few and frustrated that they weren’t an army anymore.
The treasure kept for centuries had turned into dust. Every single living warrior knew that. Every peasant from the region knew that too. So did everyone else that had been aware of the Medicine’s existence. Now the plant was nothing more than a memory for those who had been cured by it. And nothing more than a myth for those who only had heard of it. No business could be done and no disease could be cured with something that didn’t exist anymore.
However, regardless what people might think, the truth was that the Medicine was not extinct. And only one person in the world knew that. The German doctor that bought an entire plant to cure his son. Actually, he didn’t have a son and the plant he bought was still alive. He has now in his own house what great armies and nations believe to be lost forever. And only because he did the right thing, in the right way and at the right time.
Now the question is: what to do with the Medicine? For several times, Hoffmann thought the world could be saved with the plant’s diffusion. However, he realized something with so much value would inevitably end in the wrong hands. Like it happened in the past, the greediness of some men would always prevail over the common good and the final result could never be positive. If the oil and diamonds have already a tremendous impact, what could we expect from something such as the Medicine?
At most he would save some tens or hundreds of lives until someone seized total control over the miraculous plant and turned it into a worldwide multi-millionaire business, squeezing the wealthy and leaving the poor without any choice. Even the
deliberate dissemination of diseases would be an easy way to rapidly create a great wealth. And to add insult to injury, if the owner were to be killed, if his business were to be stolen… a more powerful leader would ensue. And slowly, yet surely, we’d take another step towards the end of humanity.
For now, keeping Dr. Hoffmann’s secret locked in his house was the best way to prevent such catastrophe. With this in mind, the German doctor decided to devote most of his time to study the Medicine in his lab. Several tests were made in an attempt to better understand the interaction between the plant and the human organism. The conclusions were: the stalk cured any sore; the leaf cured any physical disease or malfunction of the organism; the flower cured any psychological disease. No matter how many tests were made, there was nothing the plant could not cure.
This secret was kept within Dr. Hoffmann’s family generation after generation and more research and experiments were made along the centuries. When Biotechnology emerged, the family descendants started to do genetic modification. The greatest result obtained was a version capable of generating fruits. The only way to know the effect the fruit would have on the human organism was by experimentation.
In 2017, the scientist that created this new version of the plant (with fruit) decided to try the result of his work. This event would dramatically change the course of humankind.
To be continued in Softweapons II: 2029
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Author Comments
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