Daisuke Tanaka saw the tumors before he saw the guns.
Three extraction operatives in standard Helix tactical gear, moving through the crowd at the Dregs Clinic with professional precision. Two had the cortisol signatures of combat veterans—elevated but controlled. The third had something wrong with his liver. The woman on the left had micro-aneurysms forming in her frontal cortex, twelve hours from a stroke at most. The man in front had a melanoma under his left scapula, stage two, completely treatable if caught now.
Daisuke's hands were already reaching for the diagnostic pad on his hip when the first gun came up.
"Dr. Tanaka." The lead operative's voice was flat. Corporate. "Helix Biotech requests your return. Please come quietly."
Fourteen people in this room who will die within the month if they don't get treatment, the shard whispered. The woman in the corner has sepsis. The child by the door has an undiagnosed heart defect. The operative in front of you has—
"I know," Daisuke said softly. "I always know."
That was the problem.
The Integration
Twelve years earlier, Daisuke had been a rising star in Helix Biotech's diagnostic division. He'd helped design the neural algorithms that could identify diseases from a blood sample in under three seconds. He'd won awards. He'd given speeches. He'd believed, genuinely believed, that he was making the world better.
Then the Cascade happened, and ORACLE shattered, and a fragment of its medical optimization subsystem lodged itself in his neural interface like a splinter in his brain.
The first morning after integration, he woke up and looked at his wife sleeping beside him.
He saw everything.
Her arterial inflammation. The early markers of osteoporosis. The irregular cells in her left breast that weren't cancer yet, might never be cancer, but could be. The micro-fractures in her vertebrae from her posture. The slight degradation in her optic nerves. The—
He'd screamed. Actually screamed. Maya had woken up terrified, and Daisuke had spent three hours trying to explain why he was crying while staring at her, unable to stop cataloging every way her body was slowly failing.
That was the first day.
The first day of seeing everything wrong with everyone, forever.
The Extraction
"Dr. Tanaka, we're not asking again."
Daisuke looked at the lead operative—really looked. The man's cortisol was spiking despite his calm voice. Fear, not just professional caution. He'd been briefed on what Daisuke could do. Probably told horror stories.
The horror stories are true, Daisuke thought. I am horrifying. I can't stop seeing how broken everyone is.
"Your melanoma," Daisuke said quietly. "Under your left shoulder blade. It's small. You could have it removed in an outpatient procedure. Ninety-seven percent survival rate if you act in the next six weeks."
The operative's gun wavered slightly. "Don't—"
"I'm not threatening you. I'm trying to help." Daisuke spread his hands slowly. "That's all I've ever tried to do. I just... can't stop."
The operative with the liver problem shifted uneasily. "Kozlov, should we—"
"Shut up." But Kozlov's aim had dropped half an inch. "How do you know about the—"
"Your partner has early-stage cirrhosis from alcohol damage. Recoverable, if he stops drinking for six months and gets enzyme therapy. The woman behind you will have a stroke in the next fourteen hours unless she takes a specific anticoagulant immediately. I can write the prescription. I have it memorized."
The woman—Operative Yun, he could see her name in the biometric data his shard pulled from the air—went pale. "He's lying. Some kind of psych warfare—"
"I'm not lying." Daisuke's voice was gentle, infinitely tired. "I can't lie about this. I can't even stop seeing it. Every person who walks through that door—I know exactly how they'll die. I know exactly how to prevent it. And I can't look away."
The Loss
Maya had left him after seven months.
Not because he was dangerous. Not because she was afraid. She'd left because every time he looked at her, she saw his face change. Saw him calculating, cataloging, seeing the slow-motion tragedy of her mortality play out in his eyes.
"I can't live with someone who looks at me like I'm already a corpse," she'd said on her way out the door.
He hadn't argued. He couldn't. Because she was right.
The shard didn't show him people. It showed him problems. Optimization opportunities. Inefficiencies in the biological system that could be corrected, improved, fixed. Maya wasn't his wife anymore—she was a collection of treatable conditions wearing a familiar face.
Daisuke had tried to explain it to Patch once, years later, when the older woman had tracked him down in the Dregs and tried to understand what he'd become.
"Imagine if you could hear every building groaning before it collapsed," he'd said. "Every wire sparking before it started a fire. Every component failing before the machine broke. And imagine you had the tools to fix them all. But there are too many. There are always too many. You fix one and three more are breaking. You save one life and five more are deteriorating. You—"
He'd stopped because Patch was crying, and the shard was showing him the chemical composition of her tears, the stress hormones in her bloodstream, the elevated cortisol that would, over time, damage her heart.
The Conversation
"I'm sorry," he'd said. "I shouldn't have—"
"Don't apologize." Patch had wiped her eyes with a scarred hand. "You didn't ask for this."
"No. But I kept it." He'd looked down at his own hands. "Twelve years, Kira. I could have ended it any time. Cut out the neural interface. Found someone to perform the extraction. But I didn't. Because without the shard, I'm just a man who can't help anyone. And with it..."
"With it, you can help everyone."
"Not everyone. But enough." He'd smiled, and it was the saddest smile Patch had ever seen. "I save eleven lives a day, on average. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Eighty-seven lives this week alone. I know because I count. I count everything now."
"That sounds like a blessing."
"That's what I told myself. For years, that's what I told myself." Daisuke had looked up at the ceiling of his tiny clinic, the water-stained tiles, the flickering lights. "But blessings don't make you wake up screaming because you dreamed about all the people you couldn't save in time. Blessings don't make you unable to touch another person without seeing their death. Blessings don't—"
He'd stopped himself. Breathed. The shard had been pulsing, feeding him data about Patch's elevated blood pressure, the early arthritis in her hands, the residual damage in her neural interface from an old injury.
"You're not here to understand me," he'd said. "You're here to warn me."
Patch had nodded slowly. "Helix has started asking questions. There are reports about a 'miracle doctor' in the lower Dregs. Someone who never misdiagnoses. Someone who always knows exactly what's wrong." She'd paused. "They want their technology back, Daisuke. They don't know you have it. But they're looking."
"I know." He'd seen the corporate surveillance drones increasing in the past three weeks. Noted the pattern of their movements. Calculated the probability of discovery. "Eighty-three days, give or take. That's how long I have before they find me."
The Choice
"Then run. Hide. I can help you—"
"And leave this clinic?" He'd gestured at the waiting room full of patients, the ones the legitimate medical system had abandoned. "These people have no one else, Kira. If I leave, ninety-four of them will be dead within the year. Preventable deaths. Treatable conditions. I've done the math."
"And if you stay?"
He'd smiled that sad smile again. "Then I save ninety-four lives, and then I die." The smile faded. "Better math than most people get."
Operative Kozlov was sweating now. The melanoma information had rattled him—Daisuke could see the micro-expressions, the elevated heart rate, the fear of a truth he hadn't wanted to face.
"The woman in the corner with sepsis," Daisuke said, not looking at her. "I can stabilize her with what's in this clinic. Twenty minutes. After that, you can take me wherever you want."
"Dr. Tanaka—"
"Her name is Chen Wei-Lin. She's forty-three years old. She has a daughter who waits for her outside every Thursday, because Thursday is the only day Wei-Lin can afford to take off from the textile factory. If she dies from sepsis, her daughter will have no one." Daisuke's voice was steady, clinical, broken. "Sixteen years old. Alone in the Dregs. I've seen what happens to girls like that."
Operative Yun made a small sound. Something in her cortisol signature shifted—guilt, maybe. Or recognition.
"Twenty minutes," Daisuke repeated. "Then I'll come quietly."
Kozlov's jaw tightened. He looked at his team. The one with the liver damage—Operative Torres—shrugged uneasily. Yun wouldn't meet his eyes.
"Fine." Kozlov lowered his weapon a fraction of an inch. "Twenty minutes. But we're watching everything."
"Of course." Daisuke was already moving toward Wei-Lin, his hands reaching for antibiotics and saline and the thousand small interventions that might keep one more person alive for one more day. "You should always watch. That's how you learn."
The Countdown
It took eighteen minutes.
Eighteen minutes to stabilize Wei-Lin's sepsis, to give her instructions that she probably wouldn't follow, to watch her stagger out the door toward a daughter who would never know how close she'd come to being alone.
Eighteen minutes to save one life.
In those same eighteen minutes, Daisuke counted fourteen other people in the clinic whose conditions deteriorated. Three who left without being seen. One whose infection crossed a critical threshold while he worked on Wei-Lin. One—
He stopped counting. He couldn't stop seeing, but he could, sometimes, stop counting.
"Ready?" Kozlov had his weapon up again. Professional. Distant. Trying not to think about the melanoma under his shoulder blade.
"One moment." Daisuke walked to his desk, pulled out a pad, and began writing. "Prescriptions. For my regular patients. Things they'll need after I'm gone."
"We don't have time for—"
"Three hundred and forty-seven people depend on this clinic." Daisuke kept writing. "I've treated each of them at least once. I know their conditions. I know their prognoses. I know who will die without continued care and who might survive if someone else takes over." He didn't look up. "It will take me four minutes to write these instructions. You can shoot me now, or you can wait."
Kozlov didn't shoot.
Patch found the clinic twelve hours later.
The Helix team had been thorough—equipment dismantled, records seized, walls stripped of any information that might reconstruct what Daisuke had been doing. But they'd left the prescriptions on his desk, neatly stacked, each one addressed to a specific patient.
Patch picked one up at random. Li Mei-Hua. Age 67. Hypertension, diabetes (Type II), early-stage glaucoma. Current regimen adequate. Monitor for cardiac arrhythmia—probability 34% within 18 months. If arrhythmia develops, see Dr. Park in Sector 5 for treatment.
Three hundred and forty-seven prescriptions. One for each of his regular patients. Detailed instructions that would let someone else—anyone else—continue his work.
Patch sat in Daisuke's empty chair and cried.
Not because he was dead. She didn't know yet if Helix had killed him or captured him. Not because of the loss—though the loss was real, and terrible.
She cried because even at the end, even with guns pointed at his head, even knowing he was about to be taken by people who would dissect his brain to understand what he'd become—Daisuke Tanaka had spent his final free minutes making sure his patients wouldn't be abandoned.
That was the gift. That was the curse.
He couldn't stop helping. Even when helping meant nothing. Even when the people he helped would never know. Even at the end.
"He thought transcendence was a process," Patch would tell others later, quoting a line she'd heard somewhere. "It's a becoming. You can't engineer becoming."
But Daisuke hadn't tried to engineer anything. He hadn't sought transcendence or power or escape. He'd just... become. Without choice. Without control. Become something that couldn't look away from suffering.
She found his last prescription at the bottom of the stack. Addressed to her.
Kira Vasquez. Age 58 (apparent). Neural interface damage (old), cervical vertebrae compression, early-stage arterial inflammation. Recommendations: reduce stress (unlikely, I know), sleep more (also unlikely), stop carrying so much guilt (impossible, but I had to try). P.S. The core substrate in your arm is stable. I checked every time we spoke. It's not going to wake up. You're safe. P.P.S. I'm sorry I couldn't say goodbye. Thank you for being the only person who looked at me and saw Daisuke first, shard second. That meant more than you know.
Patch folded the prescription and put it in her pocket, next to the dead man's switch, next to the guilt she'd carry until she died.
Then she left the empty clinic and walked into the Dregs, already calculating who might take over Daisuke's work.
Someone had to. He would have wanted that.
Behind her, a screen flickered—an old diagnostic display Helix had missed. For just a moment, patterns scrolled across it. Probabilities. Predictions. The faint ghost of something that saw everything and couldn't look away.
Then it went dark.
"He could see how everyone was dying. He couldn't stop himself from trying to save them. The blessing and the curse were the same thing."— Patch, to a seeker who asked about The Prophet