Chapter 15: The Compound and the Curriculum

The medical AI's report arrived at seven forty-three in the morning, delivered to my laptop in a format that suggested whoever had configured the output template had been trying, with genuine effort, to make a toxicology report look like a memorandum of understanding. It had headers. It had footnotes. It had a section titled 'Executive Summary' that I read three times before concluding it had been written by a system that had absorbed a great deal of corporate communication and very little Agatha Christie.

I read the full report instead.

FRIDAY had consolidated Helen Cho's preliminary findings with the overnight analysis from the tower's medical AI — a system called CADUCEUS that Tony Stark had, in a moment of either classical education or mild megalomania, named after the staff of Hermes rather than the rod of Asclepius, which I had always thought was the medically relevant one. I had mentioned this to Carol once. She had given me the look she reserves for observations that are accurate and entirely beside the point.