Requests » Dr. A

REQUESTS » DR. A.

“Mark, you said «We win or they die?» — You and I ‘win’ in some way or everyone else dies?”

“Yes”

“I wish you would say a little more than that.” I am getting pretty frustrated by his terseness. It is not like him to be this terse.

“Yes, either we work out a reasonable solution for the thirty five thousand homeless so they are safe, warm, dry, watered, and fed going into their future, or we don’t. If we don’t, then those homeless will die or live miserable lives. Lives you and most dialysis patients would not pick if given a choice. Lives people would not consider fair if society did not do its best to prevent… and those people ended up with that life because of a coin toss.

So, if we don’t work out a solution for them, I will not work out a solution for the thirty five thousand dialysis patients that are now at risk due to a ‘resource shortage’.”

“There is not a resource shortage related to dialysis. We have been building up infrastructure for decades. There are thousands of clinics and hundreds of thousands of workers, machines, and patients.”

“And how many vampires?”

“Tens of thousands. We discussed this months ago.”

“And which of these ‘clinics’, ‘workers’, ‘patients’, ‘machines’, and ‘vampires’ is the limiting quantity?”

“Vampires are clearly the most limiting, although it takes a while to train workers.”

“So tens of thousands of vampires are doing dialysis for hundreds of thousands of patients. Say ten patients per vampire.

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What would happen if ten thousand vampires stopped showing up for dialysis”

“They would cease to be. ”

“OK… they would cease to be. But what else would happen?”

“A hundred thousand patients would need to be reallocated to other vampires and clinics.”

“Would that actually work? Have you tried increasing patientper-vampire ratios that high? You would be asking a vampire to spend additional time in dialysis that they don’t need to survive. My guess is that it also does not work: if you could have had fewer supervampires enslaved for 24 hours every day, I suspect you would have gone that route. It would enable one vampire to support hundreds of patient, so you could have had much fewer vampires, more redundancy, more secrecy, and other benefits. It would not be morally very nice, but I recall you saying «Undead don’t have many rights, including the right to complain».”

“Yes, I am not aware that increasing patient-to-vampire works. It could have been tried but that is above my pay grade. So assuming it does not work, there are thirty five thousand — ”

“A hundred thousand in the current scenario”

“Right. There are a hundred thousand patients no longer getting dialysis. In a few weeks after dialysis is no longer viable for them they will die — ”

“Or a bit longer if they share dialysis with other patients, but that puts more patients at risk. Or maybe you could get a lot of kidney donations?”

“And you have ten thousand vampires willing to die — ”

“cease to be”

“ — willing to cease to be, to kill a hundred thousand patients”

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“No”

“No?” The strange terseness again. A nervous stutter? A power play? Legalese?

“No, I do not have ten thousand vampires willing to cease to be to kill a hundred thousand patients. I have a bit less who are willing to make you save a hundred thousand patients. But those vampires will continue to be. ”

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