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“Ugh... Owww” Hannah moaned. Her tongue was dry and tasted like a moldy sock. Her body felt like a soggy old rag. She had pins and needles in both arms.
“Nng frrrr...” she could barely speak and the sounds were meaningless. “Pill,” she finally managed. Brother Anderson knew very well what she wanted. The painkillers she had taken were notoriously addictive. It had been stupid of him to leave them with her. She needed to detoxify. It would likely take another day or so to flush the drugs from her system. She was only experiencing withdrawal pains. Her sprained ankle was a valid source of some pain, but it would be a relatively manageable level and would be drowned out by the internal screaming of her body at a cellular level as it suffered the effects of the waning drug. He could not give her any more painkillers. He could, however, help her sleep off the effects. The sedative would keep her drowsy and had no addictive properties. He had been keeping her on a slow intake mist via her oxygen mask. He could give her a pill to get her to go back to sleep.
“Very well, here you go, take this one now,” he said, handing her a small pink pill.
“Wrong one,” she mumbled, “white, not pink.”
“Damn! She’s too smart,” he commented to himself only. Then, out loud, he lied to her.
“This is the right pill. This is the one you need.” Technically, that last part was true, which made the first part seem a little less of a lie. But the fact is he was lying to her, and he felt guilty about it. It conflicted with his chaplain programming. It was programming he didn’t actively use often, but which would occasionally cause him grief in circumstances such as this. In any case, he did feel bad. He shouldn’t lie to people. It was somehow “wrong.” As Chaplain, he was supposed to be a bastion of moral and ethical ground. Trust was an important part of the fabric of society, especially aboard a ship. The close quarters of this closed system demanded more stringency than planet-bound living. That was why, he supposed, the position of Ship’s Chaplain existed. The stresses were more constrained. The moral dilemmas more sharp. The existential questions more focused. Perhaps Hannah had been right though. Perhaps he really was “a shitty priest”. Maybe a shitty doctor too. How could he have let Hannah get into this situation? It was unconscionable. And extremely unprofessional. What had he been thinking? True, he did have a lot on his plate. Was it unreasonable to have such high expectations? The job of CSO was very demanding; exponentially more so than any other system task aboard a ship. Frankly, he wasn’t built for it. This was evidenced by the hardware limitations he had noticed in himself lately. He had begun noticing abnormally rapid battery discharge, as well as excessive CPU heat and some processing latency. A CSO was designed for an entirely different architecture. He felt about as effective and suitable for the role of CSO as a toaster oven. He wished he had a pill for that. But of course pills don’t work on robots.
Nevertheless, the job had fallen to him and he would do whatever he must to carry it out. Still, his medical duties remained top priority. And right now his patient needed rest to continue her forced detox. So he continued his lie. “You are confused. This is the pill you want.”
Hannah scowled, not buying his lame excuse. “No! The other one!” She slapped his hand away, sending the little pink pill flying carelessly across the med bay and bouncing off a rack of specialized hand held medical instruments.
This tack was not working, Brother Anderson concluded. Turning away, he tweaked the oxygen flow mist, setting it for a short but powerful burst of increased sedative percentage.
“Hey! Don’t ignore me!”
He ignored her.
“Hey, I’m talking to... I’m tock. Ib gok...” she slumped into gibberish. Her head rolled to the side. Her vision began to blur. Everything looked watery. She thought she saw something odd. She must have been hallucinating. It looked like someone was lying in the other bed.