Vessant Pharmaceuticals · Etheron trial · Protocol VP-ETH-204
Etheron is not a drug in the ordinary sense. Nothing is made in a factory and handed to the patient. The drug is made out of the patient's own body, and then put back into it.
Cells are taken from the participant, altered in a facility so that they divide and rebuild faster than the tissue they came from, grown over several weeks, and put back into the same body. The body does not reject them because they were never foreign. They are the participant, edited, and returned.
It was trialled here on people with tissue damage that does not heal. Spinal cord, cardiac muscle, optic nerve. People who had been told there was nothing further to be done for them.
It worked. That is the part of this file nobody wants on the record. Participant E9-003 had been blind in one eye for nine years. On the third day he told a nurse he could see the shape of the window. It is in her handwriting with an exclamation mark after it, the only one in the file.
On the sixth day he could not find the word for the window. On the seventh he did not wake, and the scan showed his brain swollen against the inside of his skull. He died on the eighth.
Two more went the same way inside two weeks. The regulator stopped the trial. The sponsor said the cause was the conditioning drugs given beforehand, removed one of them, and the hold was lifted after five days. Two more died on the changed protocol. The sponsor halted the trial itself and has not offered a further explanation.
In all five, the returned cells were found well outside the tissue they were sent to. In threads, following the blood supply, into the base of the brain and along the cord.
The cells had not failed. They had done exactly what they were altered to do, which is divide and rebuild, and they had gone on doing it after there was nothing left to rebuild. The pathologist wrote "no terminating signal identified" and left it there, because there is nowhere on the form where more is invited.
Tissue that keeps building does not know the person it is building in has stopped.
Names withheld under Schedule 2. Grade refers to the scale below.
| ID | Age | For | Grade | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E9-001 | 54 | Cardiac | 1 | Discharged |
| E9-002 | 61 | Spinal | 2 | Discharged |
| E9-003 | 47 | Optic | 4 | Died 14 Jul |
| E9-004 | 58 | Cardiac | 4 | Died 16 Jul |
| E9-005 | 39 | Spinal | 4 | Died 21 Jul |
| E9-006 | 66 | Cardiac | 2 | Not traced |
| E9-007 | 51 | Spinal | 1 | Withdrew |
| E9-008 | 44 | Optic | 3 | Not traced |
| E9-009 | 57 | Cardiac | 4 | Died 09 Nov |
| E9-010 | 62 | Spinal | 4 | Died 12 Nov |
| E9-011 | 49 | Optic | 2 | Discharged |
| E9-012 | 58 | Spinal | 3 | Not traced |
Wakes when touched.
Not to a voice.
Not to his own name. Grade 3, Appendix C
The scale was written for a temporary state and every grade in it is expected to pass. There is no grade for a man who reaches three and stays there.
Three reports from the department's own log. Reproduced as written. Names and addresses withheld.
Male, approx 60, standing in his own front garden in a dressing gown. I said his name eight or nine times and got nothing. He was looking at me the whole time. When I put a hand on his arm he turned and walked towards the house. Ambulance attended and took him. I have done a lot of these and it was not a stroke and it was not drink. He was not confused. He was attending to something else.
Male stopped on the bypass, walking in the roadway against traffic. Would not give a name and did not react to the vehicle or to the horn. There is an injury to his left forearm, older than tonight, that he did not appear to feel when I examined it. He let me take his arm and move him onto the verge and then stood exactly where I put him. I stayed with him twenty minutes waiting for an ambulance and he did not move once. I want it noted that I was single crewed and that I did not know what I was dealing with.
Call from a shift worker who had passed the same four people stood in the alley behind the parade at the end of two consecutive nights. All four present on arrival, stood apart from each other, none of them speaking. None responded to being spoken to. Three moved when touched. Nobody had reported any of them missing. That is the part I cannot get past. Four grown adults, out all night, twice, and not one person had rung in about any of them.
The department has no classification for any of the above. Each was filed under whatever the attending officer chose on the night.
A query was run against the incident log for reports describing a person awake but not answering to their name.
| Month | Reports | Filed as | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov | 2 | Welfare | 2 |
| Dec | 3 | Welfare | 2 |
| Jan | 6 | Public order | 3 |
| Feb | 9 | Missing person | 3 |
| Mar | 14 | Sudden death | 4 |
| Apr | 21 | Various | 4 |
| May, part | 31 | Various | 1 |
Eighty-six reports. Nineteen closed. The other sixty-seven are open, which in this department means the file sits in a tray until somebody has a reason to pick it up. Nobody has had a reason.
Only twelve people were ever given Etheron in this trial. Eighty-six is not twelve.
Nineteen doses left the factory and did not come back, and nobody has been to the factory. Twenty-two people were found being dosed with an unlicensed product in a warehouse on the western bypass. That was reported once as a drug raid and was not reported again.
A trial can be halted. A manufacturing process cannot, unless somebody goes and halts it.
Listed by title only, as required. The annex holds these items and is not permitted to release them. Titles are reproduced from the index and are not summaries.
Item 05 is the one to look at. Guidance is written for officers who are expected to meet the same situation again and again. Nobody writes handling guidance for an isolated incident, and nobody drafts a contingency for something that has finished happening.
Schedule 2 remains withheld. If it is ever released it will be released here.
Schedule 2 material is released against coordinates, never against a name.
Put in: the five coordinates off the tape at Station 2, with a space between each.
You get back: a release key of eight digits. It goes to Decoder 2, on the
last page of your pack. Cases 003 and 004 each have their own.
Annex clerk, pencil, inside the back cover
I am not a doctor and the medical part is not mine to question. I can only tell you what a file looks like when it is wrong.
Two reports in November. Thirty-one in May, and May is not finished. A trial that went wrong stops when you stop the trial. This is going up.
Nineteen doses are somewhere and nobody has been to the factory. Twenty-two people were found in a warehouse on the bypass being given something, and that was written up once as a drug raid and never again.
I have read the pathology four times. The cells do not stop. That is the whole of it. They were built to repair and nobody built them anything to tell them when to finish, so they go on into the brain, and what is left afterwards is a person who is awake and warm and will not answer to their own name. Sixty-seven of those are sitting in trays in this building.
I have written it down because somebody has to and because the next person to open this will want to know that at least one of us said it out loud.
And whoever you are, understand what you are holding. Forty-one pages came out. A hundred and twelve did not. Everything I have just told you, I worked out from the part they let go. Schedule 2 is four times the size and I have read all of it, and there is a reason the review date has passed and nobody has been near it.
If you have the run of the door system, the entries are there. I would start with the passes that were canceled. A canceled pass should have nothing after it.
The door system the clerk is referring to is live.
Access is limited to authorized personnel and to holders of a current case file. A case file is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and it comes with a door code that works on the department's terminals.
Part of every case is held on those terminals and nowhere else. If you want the run of the system the clerk had, that is how you get it.
Request a case fileFour cases open. All free. All deaths this department gave up on.
112 pages, review date passed, no next review set. If it is ever released it will appear at this address. There is nothing to sign up for. Come back and look.
Riverbay Falls is fiction. Vessant Pharmaceuticals, Etheron and Protocol VP-ETH-204 do not exist. The clinical events are modeled on real ones, including a 2016 cell therapy trial halted after five deaths from cerebral swelling and documented cases of transplanted cells forming tissue where it was not intended. None of this is medical information and none of it should be read as any.