This story takes you back to when everything began and shows what’s at stake when human care is replaced by corporate algorithms. Here’s a sneak-peek excerpt.

Pok slept the whole walk over to MacArthur Medical Center. Phelando angled the stroller to fit in the hospital’s revolving door, crossed the lobby past the cafeteria and the long hallway down to the adult emergency room, and stepped into the pediatric wing, where light reds and blues replaced sterile white. A cartoon alligator pointed the way to a lone kiosk inviting him to check-in his son. The unit’s side panel proudly displayed an insignia Phelando had never seen before: a shepherd holding a stiff snake as a staff. Above it was the familiar TSO trademark for The Shepherd Organization.

Already? Phelando knew the integration was coming. He’d volunteered for the committee overseeing The Shepherd Organization’s robust proposals for reshaping medicine, starting at MacArthur. Helping out with notes and analyzing charts was one thing, but handling triage? AI had arrived. Pediatrics, it seemed, was the pioneer.

Before he offered his son’s index finger for scanning, Phelando interrogated the kiosk for the hospital’s policies and made sure he declined consent for DNA cataloguing. This done, he clipped the reader onto Pok’s finger…