Verquotrine
by Olivia Vert (first published in the Journal of Immaterial Science on July 17th 2024)
I knew what I had to do – 50 milligrams of verquotrine and she would be normal again. Well, not exactly normal, but the way she was two decades ago, before the psychosis and the divorces. I could rip open the paper sachet and dump it in her afternoon tea. A few sips and she would get better – I was seventy percent sure of that. Or sixty, at least. I lifted my gaze from the tea, considered her face. She was asleep, her eyes sunk deep in her skull, wrinkled skin stretched over protruding cheekbones. Her lips were dry and bluish-grey, slightly open, her shallow breaths moving rhythmically with a thin grey hair strand stuck to her chin. I could probably have tipped the drug straight into her mouth, before the tranquilizers wore off.
Verquotrine, or more precisely its acetate salt, is a thermally stable and potent neuroplasticizer and grey matter stimulant. Approved by exactly zero internationally recognized health organizations, it is currently being tested in clinical trials for the treatment of various neurological and behavioural disorders. No one else at the Academy had seen the preliminary results, but the ethics committee would have freaked anyway if they knew what I planned. What did it matter? She was practically dead anyways, her body was just going through the motions. That being said, dead people don’t tend to go on two-hour unhinged monologues about nurses conspiring to steal their genetic information to sell it to The Big Corp. Besides, verquotrine was my invention, my baby – I knew how it worked. What would have been the point of spending five years at the Fundamental Particle Research Institute and the Academy of Health and Life Sciences if not to invent a cure for my mother’s ailing mind? The fact that I wasn’t able to defend my thesis was a natural consequence of my supervisor’s jealousy. Professor David Olm, my illustrious adviser, tried to sink my project. He went on at great length about my “baseless claims”, “generalisations” and “assumptions”. The old tool even implied I’d fabricated some of the data. He might have 60 years of experience in the field, but I don’t think he ever adapted to research in the 23rd century. Most of my friends had made the system work for them, though. My undergrad buddy Remmy had just received a hefty grant to establish his research group on Time Crystal refinement and X-Ray diffraction studies. We both knew the idea was nonsense – Remmy proved months ago that Time Crystals absorb X-rays efficiently, making any type of scattering or diffraction impossible. He stuck with it though, because it had all the buzzwords that the Academic Shareholders like.
“Whatever feeds you and the kids, huh?” I asked him once, glancing over his shoulder at his proposal.
“Pretty much, yeah,” he nodded, taking a sip of his sugar-free energy drink and fiddling with his wedding ring.
“How much harder must this have been under the old system? The publishing companies, the grants, the reviewers, so much hassle. It’s a wonder they got any work done at all” I said, leaning against the wall in his office. He nodded again, his face clouded in thought.
It’s a funny thing, progress. Remmy and I took the same courses back in our Fundamental Particle days. I can picture a day in late November – bright and warm even though the sun would set at exactly 3:06 PM where we lived. We were sitting on a stone bench just outside the main entrance to the Chemical Sciences building, watching A History of Research and Scientists from the 20th to the 22nd Century – an absurd seminar produced by our Communications department earlier that year. The notion of state-sponsored research facilities and multiple rounds of grant applications seemed so ridiculous. Nowadays, it is much more reasonable. Once a critical mass of academics left for industry jobs, corporations just moved in and privatized the rest. What it really means is that instead of appeasing this mythical “reviewer two”, it’s the corporate line manager who judges our research ideas, and dollars are the bottom line. I managed to fund my research on verquotrine precisely because my doctoral proposal was littered with words like ‘returns’, ‘synergy’, ‘novel and facile’ and ‘optimistic’. Everyone in my age group would agree that the two multinational hedge fund management conglomerates, Z1nq™ and Hexoid, are today’s biggest drivers of scientific and societal advancement. Their advent has made funding readily obtainable for both well-meaning, ethical researchers (myself included), but also by scientists simply seeking a salary. The introduction “review by AI” saved a lot of time and money, but it has also allowed less scrupulous researchers to game the system.
Here’s how that system works:
- The researcher comes up with an idea for a project.
- They assemble a team of scientific staff and write up a proposal to their corresponding Faculty Shareholders, explaining how their idea will be beneficial to humanity (i.e. the businesses) and how it will solve an important issue (bring in a sizeable profit).
- The proposal is carefully evaluated and accepted or rejected based on scientific merit (the projected income).
- If their proposal is accepted, the researchers go on and work on their projects, publishing their findings in AI reviewed journals.
- Major breakthroughs and incredible results are achieved regularly within short, six month projects, and numerous papers are published.