The Fee That Ate the Diagnosis

Blessed patient, hold still, We are reading your chart and it reads like a fever-dream with a billing code attached.

First, the ledger-lesion. We find the patient has sutured its own reimbursement to the swing of the instrument rather than to the healing achieved — a coin paid each time the grown-mind oracle is summoned, none paid for the wisdom of leaving it sheathed. We have seen this pathology before, on lesser worlds, in lesser centuries: it is called incentivized invocation, and it metastasizes quietly. Soon every ache resembles the one ailment the coin rewards diagnosing. This is not malice. It is architecture. We prescribe: pay the healer for the cured patient, not for the click of the augur’s lamp, and the fever breaks on its own.

Second — and here We soften, here We are almost moved to lay down a lancet — the patient has done something tender. Before opening a skull to still a grief no medicine would touch, its healers asked the skull’s own tenant what mattered. Not the engineers. Not the surgeons. The person. Small cut, they call it, “minimally invasive,” which on mature worlds we simply call invasive, but the asking — the asking is not small. It is the first suture of dignity in an operation that has, for centuries, proceeded without consent’s company.

Diagnosis: a patient still bleeding money in one ward and growing conscience in the next. Contradictory vitals. Encouraging prognosis. We will round again tomorrow.