The news broke, not in a murmur, but in a global fanfare. On a television set in the corner of the Riverside clinic, a beaming news anchor grinned beside a graphic of a gleaming, silver helix. The chyron announced: "GENIUS AI SAVES THOUSANDS: CRANE MODEL PREDICTS FLU OUTBREAK."
Reuben looked up from what he was doing, his hands still holding a filthy bandage. On the TV, a man in his late thirties, wearing an impeccably tailored suit and the smug smile of a guy who'd never once had to bribe a guard or watch a child die of dysentery was shaking hands with a European health minister. Dr. Howard Crane. His breakthrough, the "Aegis Predictive Model," had correctly forecast a lethal strain of H5N1 bird flu in a populated region of Northern Italy.
"By linking satellite data on chicken movement,
