Subject 247 had missed two consecutive appointments. Sarah stared at the empty slot in her calendar, then at the corresponding gap in her data spreadsheet. Eighteen months of meticulous documentation. Hormonal fluctuations, psychological assessments, growth charts, all meticulously tracked. Now, just silence where the numbers should be.
The ethics committee meeting was in twenty minutes. She'd have to explain the gap, justify the incomplete dataset, defend why her research deserved continued funding when half her subjects had already been pulled from the treatment group and put into the "ad-hoc non-treatment monitoring arm".
A soft knock interrupted her calculations. "Dr. Hendricks?"
Sarah looked up to find Subject 247 hovering in her doorway. Not Subject 247, she corrected herself—Billie. The distinction hit her with unexpected force.
"I know I don't have an appointment," Billie said, glancing toward the waiting room where protesters' voices filtered through the windows. "But Mom thought maybe we could talk?"
Sarah minimized her spreadsheet. "Of course. Come in."
Billie sat down and began worrying a loose thread on their jeans, avoiding her gaze. "So the internet says my body's a states' rights issue now," they said, the words brittle with forced irony. "Mom said the Supreme Court… yeah." They paused. "What does it actually mean? For this." The gesture was small—a flick of the wrist towards their own chest, towards the fragile peace Sarah’s study had helped broker.
"It means the politicians have a green light," Sarah said, the rehearsed, calming phrases dying on her tongue. Her own voice sounded foreign, thin against the humming light. She thought of the memo from the university's legal department she’d read that morning, a masterclass in spinelessness filled with weasely phrases like "navigating a complex new legal framework." It was a document designed to protect an institution, not a child.
"So you have to stop?" Billie asked, their voice shrinking. "The blockers, I mean."
There it was. The moment where her two worlds collided. The world of science, of p-values and longitudinal data, and the world where a scared kid was about to be dragged back into a personal hell. The study’s protocol was unequivocal: the unsanctioned continuation of treatment would invalidate the data. Her entire PhD hinged on that data.
And it might soon be illegal altogether.
"If the state law passes," she said, the official words tasting like poison, "our hands are tied."
Billie finally looked at her, and Sarah saw the carefully constructed armor of teenage nonchalance dissolve into pure fear. "But I was going to enter a drawing in the art show," they whispered, as if it were a secret. "It's… a self-portrait. And it finally looks like me." A tear traced a path down their cheek. "I can't go back to how it was. Please."
A thought, cold and automatic, flashed through Sarah’s mind: Note for file: Subject reports significant distress; potential regression of psychological gains. She felt a wave of revulsion at her own clinical detachment. The purpose of science, the reason she’d pursued this work, was to alleviate suffering, not to document it in meticulous, IRB-approved detail as it was inflicted by the state. To continue the study under the new law would be to turn her research into a chronicle of cruelty. It would be a perversion of everything she believed in.
That night, Sarah’s apartment was silent except for the frantic thrum of the cicadas. On her laptop screen, she had Billie’s file open. Testosterone (T): 18 ng/dL (suppressed). Bone Density: within expected norms. Psychological Assessment: Subject reports 'feeling real for the first time.' Below the clinical metrics was the section for Qualitative Observations. She stared at her own typed words: Loves graphic novels (recommends 'Nimona'). Expresses interest in set design for theatre. Described a self-portrait they are drawing for a school art show.
She thought of the men who wrote the laws and the men who wrote the university memos. They saw the numbers, the metrics, the abstract "minor." They did not see the art show. They did not see the kid who loved graphic novels. Her job, she realized with terrifying clarity, was to see both—and to understand that the numbers only mattered if they served the human being they belonged to. To choose the numbers over the person was a failure of ethics, of medicine, and of science itself.
Her choice was clear.
She moved to the locked footlocker in her closet. The key felt cold in her palm. The click of the lock was a definitive sound, a door closing on one future and opening onto another, far more dangerous one. She took four boxes of Lupron, their pristine white packaging a stark contrast to the illicit nature of her act. She buried them in a tote bag, logged nothing, and closed the locker.
The far corner of the Food Lion parking lot was bathed in the buzzing orange glow of a sodium lamp. Sarah pulled alongside the other car, the engine rumbling quietly. Billie’s mother was a silhouette in the driver's seat, her posture rigid with tension.
Sarah leaned across, passing the plain paper bag through the window. "Four months," she said, her voice even and low, the voice of a clinician giving instructions. "The schedule is unchanged. Officially, Billie is in the non-treatment monitoring arm of the study. We are only observing. This bag does not exist."
The woman’s shoulders slumped in a wave of relief so profound it was almost a collapse. She clutched the bag to her chest, her knuckles white. She couldn’t speak, only offered a single, sharp nod, her eyes glistening in the dim light.
Sarah nodded back. She put her car in reverse and pulled away, the red taillights of the other car shrinking in her rearview mirror. She was no longer just a scientist. She had made her choice, not against science, but for it—to defend a human life from the cold, inhuman calculus of the powerful. She was alone, driving into the humid night, with the full weight of that choice.