The Hippocratic Oath, The MadFlynt, & Other Stories: Mini Forward by Bill Kelty

By Mohamed Jax elAntaki and Bill Kelty

The Hippocratic Oath is a story that takes one to the shores of madness and holds one's hand as you travel within the empty plains that composes the NMSP's ideology, the NMSP is only political party of TowerHight and how their pernicious architecture ransacks the human soul, travel with Ransom as he attempts to reconcile his fate with his duties as a senator of the NMSP. In a wold where the very inescapable fact of getting sick is rendered a crime punishable by extermination, how will Ransom act when his friend becomes sick?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685835255

Book preview

Mini Forward

Ulysses was a very long story of a day in Dublin, the Hippocratic Oath is a very short story of Mohamed elAntaki's night of dreams and nightmares.

From poignant poetry to political science fiction, it simultaneously warms and warns of fragility amidst technology.

The Hippocratic Oath: Chapter 1

We the Healthy

"I swear by Apollo Healer, by Asclepius, by Hypieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture.

To hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture; to impart precept, oral instruction, and all other instruction to my own sons, the sons of my teacher, and to indentured pupils who have taken the Healer’s oath, but to nobody else."

Hippocrates

There is this monument in the middle of Mercy Square; it is made of black granite and blue marble – it must be at least 100 years old; kneeling I used my hands to dust off the base, the many lifetimes of dirt and dust, which I could read but with great difficulty as my eyes are not what they used to be:

Never again shall we leave the sick.

Dr Harris

I observed the surrounding of the great obelisk thinking to myself how much we have strayed from this noble purpose that Dr Harris proposed in the year 1900 when there was still a bit of reason left in humanity. During that year Dr Harris had given a speech that would be considered now to be bigoted and borderline heresy. It was paradigm-shifting at the time. The first sentence struck such awe in the crowd who had gathered to listen to the good doctor; no one who was sick would be left to his or her own devices ever again. The very anthesis of that sentiment became the building policies for the NMSP, the ruling party in TowerHights; TowerHights is the capital city of New Colombia. After the massive medical purges, and the great war that followed soon after, the remaining government of the USA had collapsed and with it any remaining decency and kindness. Thereafter from that wreckage New Colombia was formed. The kind-hearted and auspicious words of Dr Harris were replaced by a rigid and cruel outrageous slogan for the benefit of the party and their morally myopic sycophants,

"Sickness chooses the weak."

"Strength chooses the strong."

"God favours the strong."

Dr H.P. Harrold

The slogans lines have sculpted the inner workings of the people forever, through the invention of Temporalthought, or tt . These slogans live forevermore through the peoples that chant them: it makes them who they are, a uniform masse of an undesignable blob of conformity, frozen in thought, forever. tt creates cognitive immobility of the masses, making them butter in the hot hands of the party.

I stood up and I could hear my knee crack and click, long before my knees were cracking and clicking, I remember Laura Lovelace I, Senator of the NMSP party. We were all sitting in the Great Hall– it was of a pristine decadence with silvery chairs with a round purple rug with golden ends, and right in the middle a bust of Dr H.P. Harrold, the founder of the NMSP,

I remember that day because Laura sat next to me. The moment she sat down, she made a sound almost of painful relief and looked at me with such concern and said, It’s nothing, but we both