Dr. Anthony Davis, a relatively young doctor just out of medical school, was the one who finally found the medallion. It had been missing for an hour.
The medallion was lying on the floor in an unused storage room, next to a note scrawled on the back of a prescription form. It read almost like a suicide note.
"Goodbye world.
You won't see me again. You won't know me again. And I can't take this any more. It's a lot like medicine in general--sometimes we're appreciated, and sometimes we're just hated by patients who can't accept that bad things happen to good people and we're not miracle workers. I'm not going to tell you what I did to myself. I can assure you, my close family knows, but there's no way they're going to tell you. And I'm by no means dead, but you may as well think of me as such.
-- The former Dr. Frederick Weinberg."
At least he didn't steal the medallion, thought Anthony. But it was too bad he hadn't stuck around for the new change in procedures. They were going to announce them the next day! The hospital had made a lot of mistakes using this new tool, but they did learn, and if Fred had been able to handle the stress a bit better, maybe he could have been around to see it.
The policies were really pretty simple. First of all, the hospital would always leave several hours a day for spare "operations". Any patient who needed a second treatment--and that included treatments that weren't necessary to preserve life--would automatically get the nearest spare slot. It would mean not being able to use every slot to save a life--but it would mean patients wouldn't be put through mental torture, and any doctor who'd worked for any length of time knew that no hospital could save everyone anyway.
If nobody needed the spare slot, they could bring forward one of the patients from the regular slots--and there was always somebody.
They would also let millionaires buy slots. This was strictly for elective "surgery," anything from sex changes to deaging. The slot would always be one of the spares. There was some opposition to the idea, but even a non-profit hospital had to survive somehow. No millionaire would be allowed to buy a lifesaving slot; those would be doled out at random, regardless of ability to pay.
Finally, a part-time researcher would be hired to find out about the medallion. If magic was real, this couldn't be the only source of magic in the world. And the medallion itself was too big of an unknown. What if the medallion did something bad? Maybe it sucked out the life force of someone a hundred miles away every time it cured someone. Maybe it summons Satan after it's used a thousand times.
A few weeks later, the research was bearing fruit. There were indeed tales about the medallion. It didn't seem to be an instrument of evil, which was a great relief to some skeptics; if anything, it had a sort of poetic justice and might backfire when used to do harm. It also had a distressing tendency to get lost, which the hospital needed to prepare for. It wouldn't do to lose the medallion and watch the hospital's slow collapse. But then, perhaps if the medallion is sentient it really likes to be in a hospital, where it can change more people in a month than it would in a year of random use by anyone else. The medallion might not get lost at all.
There was no word yet on other sources of magic, but there would have to be something. Or so everyone hoped.
Meanwhile, Dr. Weinberg, in a quite different form, was....
