The Tinkture Incident // Redux
Glenn Dungan
Notes on in retrospect from the failure and catastrophe of a mismanaged pharmeceutical company. Inspired by Peter Pan.
The Manhattan streets had assumed nothing on the morning of October 19th, 2030. The market economy was finally booming, the unemployment rate low, the country as politically aligned1 as possible in recent years. This was the ending of President Oliver’s first term, and he seemed like a landslide for the second, especially with his track record in the senate of championing Tinkture as a replacement for medical and therapeutical concerns. Healthcare had become free and divorced from the economy due to this pharmaceutical advancement, at no grievance to any economist2. No one could have expected the destruction of the Pan Pharmaceutical headquarters in a sudden boom to have totaled the death count of 1,096 people3 in a highly congested urban area of Lower Manhattan. Like disasters both man-made and natural, what would become known as “The Tinkture Incident” had captured the macabre attentions of the public at large, even after twenty years of the traumatic episode. This was a watershed moment for not only the pharmaceutical industry but for humanitarian interest groups and ecological PACs. It could be argued, and this text does not4 aim to promote nor dismay the following, that this event culminated in George Oliver’s failed re-election campaign. To be clear, this article aims to simply remain neutral and provide a timeline for events, of which conjecture could be made in agency to the reader to determine what had actually occurred.
Pan Pharmaceuticals began as Pan Industries with Brennen Hooke, who built the empire on a previous fortune of selling electronic vehicles. The tale began on a holiday to an unnamed island. It goes that Mr. Hooke took ill from the strain of his travels and the doctor on board could not explain his ailments. Mr. Hooke was reported to state that he was aging more rapidly than other men due to stress, travel, and the upbringing of his son, James, whom he doted over. Unsure of what to do, Mr. Hooke took himself for a walk as suggested by the doctor and came across flora5 native to this land6. Feeling bold and at ends for solution, Mr. Hooke ground the plants and ingested the mixture as tea.
Purportedly, he felt stronger and brighter. His new found health sprung sudden momentum and he left his wife and his son to return to his company with aims to expand into the pharmaceutical industry with this wonder drug. Thus, Tinkture was born.
But it was not until Brennen Hooke retired due to health complications and passed controlling ownership of the company that Tinkture began to blossom. Still primarily focused on electric vehicles with a small market endeavor to pharmaceuticals (rumor had it that Mr. Hooke’s wife was administering what would be known as Tinkture exclusively to him before being convinced of its market potential7), upon the son’s ownership Pan Industries had quickly begun to reorient into the pharmaceutical colossus it is more commonly known for. As standing CEO, James Hooke had championed the very same elixir which had saved his father when James himself was a boy.
Tinkture was a singularity for the medical profession; a literal wonder drug. The effectiveness of this drug was, at the time, without hyperbole. Longitudinal studies8 determined that those who took Tinkture had reduced aging, longer life expectancy, and no longer had a slew of health effects. The common cold was more or less eradicated. For infants, whooping cough would be in the same boat at polio. And it was with Tinkture that Pan Industries transformed into Pan Pharmaceutical (occasionally referred to in this text as PP), spearheading a golden age of human health. This proved a smart move for James Hooke, who had worked to distance himself from the political and industrial ties of his father and the potential nepotism it suggested.
It would not be until the hacking group “The Lost Boys” surfaced Internet footage of the R&D department within PP. Grainy footage showed football field sized laboratories of tiny vials, lined seemingly ad infinitum, underneath dominating hospital lights. At first glance it looked typically arcane in the way that pharmaceuticals play with chemicals and biomaterial, but upon examination from a crude close-up one could see the contents of the bottles. Miniature women with moth wings sat in the vials, knocking their heads against the glass, pounding with thimble sized fists, wings fluttering fruitlessly9. PP was smart in this video; to promote the leaked video as hokum and doctored would only lead to a combustion down the line. Thus, it was strategized to get ahead of it. At a press conference in front of Rockefeller Center, CEO Hooke released a statement with the aid of Spokesperson Elmer Smee:
This video has given us the amazing opportunity to reconsider the angle of our fauna. We are grateful to the public for their patience as we reclassify our material for our production. The creatures are not native flora; they are miniature winged women, and their contribution is paramount to the Tinkture which 85% of America uses daily.
When Robert Klaus of the New York Times pressed that Hooke explain where the “miniature winged women” came from, Hooke replied that the country of origin was a trade secret10. But what was probably the most on-the-surface damning element of the entire conference was when Janet Dour of CNN asked if those miniature winged women were “fairies”. Hooke’s tone to Ms. Dour’s comment was one of resignation, retroactively positioned as fatigue from being prodded all day: “Yeah, sure. I guess. Fairies. Fine. Whatever1112.”
What followed was a landfall of special interest groups such as Justice for Fairies (JtF), The Pixie Initiative (TPI), and Equality for Fairies (EfF), among others. This public initiative raised awareness of the now commonly referred “Fairies” and their quality of life. A poll conducted in later that autumn by Political Think Tank Republic discovered that Millennials, Gen-Zs, and Gen Alphas had an overwhelming support to Fairy well-fare.
After months of lobbying and protesting outside of PP industries via both physical acts and on the Internet, the Lost Boys hacker fringe group released another video from within the PP R&D department, this one entitled “M&P”, (revealed in source code to stand for “Mortar and Pestle”). This video was from security cameras and showed the process of how Tinkture was made. Between [0:01 and 2:04] the scientists are simply mixing their tonics, running tests. At [2:05] a crude red circle is highlighted over a specific scientist and the viewer is invited to watch their happenings as they trace about the lab. Then at [4:39] the scientist leaves off screen and the view from the security cameras returns to the image of the first video released by the Lost Boys a year prior: that of the Fairies in their test tube bottles. The red circle denotes the scientist going through the aisles of test tubes13 before picking up one of the Fairies. At [6:02] the scientist goes off screen and the shot changes to the processing room. The viewer follows the same scientist as he takes the vial, and upends it into what looks like a cylindrical tube capped by two metal discs. At [6:41] a smaller green circle appears at the transported Fairy. The image zooms into the Fairy. The scientist is a shadowed colossus in the background. The image is granular and of bad quality, but even so it is possible to see the Fairy is in obvious distress, she14 is frantically batting her wings and clawing at the walls. From this close-up perspective one can see spikes at the top of the vial. At [7:02] the scientist presses a button and the top and bottom discs capsize like a monkey clashing cymbals. The discs rotated, obvious that the fairy was grinded15. Finally, at [7:53] the vessel opens and the scientist grabs the bottom dish, which contains powder. The video ends16.
The “M&P” leaked video caused an outrage and a subsequent PR nightmare for Pan Pharmaceuticals. This expose equipped the numerous Fairy welfare groups and super-PACS with proof enough to confront Mr. Hooke and his treatment of these Neverland sprites. PP hastily released a statement regarding the alleged abuse and malpractice. Pan Pharmaceuticals established that ground Fairy corpses were the ingredients of Tinkture, and while extraction of their vital anima was regretful, it was no different than the bolt gun to a cow. And, as if anticipating the public displeasure with this response, Mr. Hooke declared that the Fairies were kept in pristine conditions, cruelty free17.
Now interlocked between an unrevealing PR disaster, a senate hearing, public outcries, and NGO think tanks and ethical watch groups, PP was positioned against a serious threat. Additionally, other companies, namely Chesire Industries and Barbosa Laboraties had purchased copyright to begin working on a competitor of Tinkture which would go to market under the success of containing no Fairies. The pot was boiling.
On October 19th, A combustion that looked like an electrical fire19 erupted from the 8th to 10th floor of the Pan Pharmaceutical’s headquarters. What ensued has been covered tremendously in various news outlets, so this article will not summarize the micro-journeys of the fleeing New Yorkers, nor the wave of goodwill which had purportedly swept over the silent city in the aftermath of the Tinkture Incident. However, the authors of this article would be remiss to not illuminate the brave displays of the NYPD and the FDNY, of which we invite the readers to visit the Tinkture Incident memorial and accompanying museum in located in Kips Bay.
Two weeks after the Tinkture Incident, The Lost Boys released their final video before disappearing into the ether of anonymity still maintained to this day19. The footage shows less activity than the M&P, although this leak, titled “Dream” is accompanied by a transcript. The video shows a lone scientist, later identified to be Peter Benning, standing in front of a glass jar housing a female Fairy, later referred to by Mr. Benning as “Tinkerbell”20. The transcript is as follows:
Peter Banning: I don’t know.
Tinkerbell chirps.
PB: I don’t, um, do you think so?
T: Chirps.
PB: No, I know, I know. I just…maybe we can [indecipherable] and then go.
T: Chirps.
PB: No, no. You’re right, Tinkerbell. We’ve got to make a statement.
T: Chirps.
PB: I know what to do. The compound is unstable. It needs only extra several milligrams of…you know.
T: Chirps.
PB: No. I don’t have anymore.
T: Chirps.
PB: No. No! Not you. You’re my friend.
T: Chirps
PB: Martyr. Right. It’s about the message. Everything you’re saying is right. Mr. Hooke’s tyranny has gone on long enough.
T: Chirps
PB: You’ve spoken a lot of sense to me, Tinkerbell. [indecipherable]. I would do this even without your help, you know.
T: Chirps.
PB: And Wendy. I know. If my Wendy’s [indecipherable] still wouldn’t be fixed with this promise, I won’t renege on my helping you. Still…I think that if I could somehow convince her cells to be young…oh, Tinkerbell, I don’t like how any of this is going down.
T: Chirps.
PB: You’re right. It’s necessary. For her.
T: Chirps.
PB: [Laughs] Maybe when we’re children again we’ll meet you in a different life. Maybe.
T: Chirps.
PB: [Laughs nervously] I don’t know what I meant either. Ever since Wendy got diagnosed, I’ve been thinking about the afterlife, if there is one. Hey Tinkerbell?
T: Chirps.
PB: Do you believe in an afterlife?
The leaked “Dream” video was the last logged communication in the R&D department. Two days later, the aforementioned explosion occurred, devastating New York City’s body and the countries’ soul. Not all survivors have been accounted for. It difficult to determine whether there is any correlation between Mr. Benning’s conversation with this Fairy and the Tinkture Incident, although the transcript suggests suicidal and / or terroristic tendencies in retrospective analyses of Mr. Benning. His wife, Wendy Benning (nee Darling) had been diagnosed with a rare disease which threatened her life21. The “Dream” video, as well as Mr. Benning’s psychological profile and family life, leads the public to believe in a thesis promoted by The Lost Boys: that Mr. Benning had somehow managed to not only communicate with the Fairies, but had somehow been convinced that to save his wife he would need to destroy the R&D department of Pan Pharmaceuticals22. Thus, the fuse for The Tinkture Incident was ignited.
But correlation is not causation. Although evidence suggests Mr. Benning had set off the explosion, there has yet to be any definable proof23. What can be determined, after the numerous court proceedings and senate summoning and legal fall out, is that Mr. Hooke of Pan Pharmaceuticals suffered an irreparable damage to his company. Shares of PP plummeted to a mere 5% of his value within the next twenty-four hours. The company was disbanded, leaving a maelstrom of carnage and mourning in its wake. Mr. Hooke had managed to flee from the ensuing fallout and disappear into public obscurity. He remains out of the public eye to this day24.
The calamity of The Tinkture Incident is still felt, ambered in memorials and museums and films. A more sinister aftermath is the uptick of the Pirate’s Curse, presumably contracted from the family and friends of the scientists most closely involved in the incident. There is also the economic fallout of the explosion itself, of which the city has still never quite recovered. Those not caught in the initial blast but never the less intercepted by the noxious fumes reportedly continue struggle with mental health problems and trauma25. Fairies have not been reported anywhere since The Tinkture Incident, although the very existence of them has promoted an immense surge in adventuring and exploration, ranging from expensive government campaigns to locate them to hobbyists to popular television shows26.
One thing is certain, however, that the Tinkture Incident was an unfortunate perfect storm of factors. If The Lost Boys had not released the video, would Mr. Bennet have been primed to be sympathetic to the Fairies? Would the public not outrage against Mr. Hooke’s and Pan Pharmeceutical’s abuse, even though Tinkture was considered a wonder drug? If Mr. Bennet’s wife was not afflicted with a mysterious disease, would he have believed the Fairies at all? Or could it go farther back – was Mr. Hooke himself the culprit for the Tinkture incident for bringing the Fairies overseas from “Neverland”? Or further back still – Mr. Hooke’s father. Does this start with him? Does the infamous Tinkture Incident begin with a sick man on holiday?
The Tinkture Incident will forever be imprinted upon the public memory as a strange and terrible time in both our countries history but also the pharmaceutical business. There has been no evidence of Fairies nor real proof of Neverland. If the victims of the Tinkture incident were to vanish, could a case be made that it was all just a terrible dream27?
1. If you look anywhere else that isn’t bought by bigwig media outlets, you’ll find that the country was terribly divided. None of the big cities voted for Ollie.
2. Untrue. Free healthcare is only for those who can afford it.
3. More than that. This record does not account for those who had succumbed to health issues or injuries sustained after.
4. “Silence gives consent.” – Audrey Lorde / “Being neutral in situations of injustice means choosing the side of the oppressor.” – Desmond Tutu.
5. By definition, flora are flowers, fauna are animals. This distinction inspired the special interest group, Justice for Fairies (JfF) motto: “Fairies are not flowers”. Over three thousand people gathered to chant this mantra in front of city hall during the legal proceeding post Tinkture Incident.
6. Hokum, I say. The story has been writ ad infinitum in every news outlet, interview, get-rich-quick / self-help memoir. But what country? This has never been confirmed. Why the secrecy, even back then? Are there no boundaries to this proclaimed island? Are there flamingos flying over lagoons or lagoons flying over flamingos?
7. That story is simply false. It was me.
8. For this context, a fifteen-year study should not be considered longitudinal. What of those who had developed cancer after prolonged use? What of the children of heavy users who are born with Tinkture in their blood stream and do no age past eleven years old? We still don’t know. We only know of the Pirate’s Curse.
9. Sometimes, the glasses did not have air pockets. This is not conjecture.
10. It was this response which opened up PP to a Senate Committee hearing three years later, independent of the Tinkture Incident. The Senate ruled this decision against American interests to maintain a secret of where PP obtained their fairies. The location was disclosed, but not to the general public. The Mondragon Report [Mulder, Dana] tracked the rise of insider trading relating to industries off the coast of Cuba and the Dominican Republic, tracing “Neverland” somewhere in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle. This has remained unconfirmed but has infused into the public narrative enough that it might as well be true.
11. PP R&D had actually been informally referring to the “trade secret” as “Fairies” for decades. It was Brennen Hooke’s wife, Elsa (nee Fortuna) who had started using the term. Proposedly.
12. As with any disaster, it would be unfair to attribute the cataclysm as a singular moment of misfortune. The horror of Chernobyl was not just an uncontained meltdown of a reactor; it was a series of smaller errs, human and cosmic alike, which snowballed to catastrophe. Such was the case of the Tinkture Incident, although in this scenario the timeline of accumulative errs could be traced to several exact moments. If only PP knew the PR implications of Hooke’s public answer.
13. One can only imagine that sound of that room. A dark cavern with only soda lights, a mechanical whirr from the purifiers and conditioners in the lab. I don’t know what the Fairies home in Neverland is like, but I imagine that we, as Humans, are bigger than any built structure of their world, bigger than any mountain or obelisk. Sometimes it sounded like a fly colliding into a window before flying off. Sometimes.
14. Interesting that the writer of this article denotes the Fairy as a “she”, especially when all communications coming out of PP were stubborn in their gender-neutral terminology, opting instead of referring to them as the plural and neutral “they”. It’s hard to tell, but you can see the captured Fairy with incredibly human features; evidence of breasts and hips, a full scalp of hair. For all intents and purposes, the Fairy’s look human, with the exception of their size and the obvious wings sprouting from their back.
15. A detail that is indeed lost in this granulated, low-quality footage of this video is the blood that comes out of the capsule and the vat at the bottom of the contraption that catches it, not dissimilar to sanitization layouts in meat processing plants. Another detail missing here is the sound of sucking air from the contraption and the chirp of the Fairy that can only be a scream.
16. I am sorry.
17. Cartoonist Alice Gromm delivered a particularly poignant commentary on the paradoxes at play here. In the following issue of The New Yorker she shows a picture of a Fairy in a blender before it would be turned on. A woman in workout gear is about to add bananas and kale to the machine. The caption: “Mr. Hooke says this is cruelty free, so it’s okay!”
18. The fire was green, and had a million sparkles in it, like a cloud full of glitter. It would be determined later that the soon-to-be mentioned scientist who had instigated the Tinkture Incident, Mr. Pietro Banning, had created a chemical compound that functioned similarly to both gas fire and mustard gas, measuring about twice as chemically potent as Agent Orange.
19. Rumor has it that The Lost Boys still exist, although under a different name. Another rumor is that The Lost Boys have disbanded into several groups to expand their reach and tighten their focus. One thing is for certain: The Lost Boys will not be lost to history. The Tinkture Incident boosted their profile into the zeitgeist of anarchism, with their characteristic hood being a popular Halloween costume. Graphic novelist Nala Oorem’s wildly popular “F for Fairy” and the movie adaption will ensure that the Lost Boys would not be lost to the public eye for some time.
20. It is unclear whether Mr. Benning assigned this name or was given it by the Fairy herself. Little is known about Fairy culture, although their society does use names to identify themselves from their ilk. This suggests an intelligence more on par with Humans and Dolphins than those of less intelligence creatures. Additionally, it was determined later that the naming convention for Fairies is a series of sharp and swift clicks that have remained undecipherable. Another mystery is how the Fairies communicate with larger beings such as ourselves -- Fairies have learned to communicate telepathically, but only for those that are willing to listen. This form of “selecting hearing” has baffled many scientists and psycho-linguistic professionals. With these mysteries in mind, the question circles back to ‘Tinkerbell’. Was this a name that Mr. Benning had assigned to her, or a name that the Fairy was telepathically suggested to Mr. Benning to promote the impression of being harmless?
21. The disease is called Demataes, although in common nomenclature it is referred to as the Pirate’s Curse. It is a form of cancer in which the cells are tricked into speeding up growth and decay. As most forms of cancer are the cells dying and unable to maintain themselves, this particular variant effectively ages the entire person at an average recorded rate of 1.8 times the speed of what is typically average. This disease had only been recently discovered and named by the Surgeon General after the Tinkture Incident. A national study by Cal Technologies determined that heavy abusers of Tinkture over an average of 6 years (consequently, the length of time when Tinkture went to market before vanishing due to the calamity), emit a low-grade radiation that is undetectable by modern equipment and was prior unknowable to trained medical professionals. Demataes is a brutal affliction. Children born with this disease typically have a life expectancy of 46 years.
22. The story of Peter and Wendy Benning would later end up capturing devotees of the macabre, elbowing the mindscape of the type obsessed with the Unabomber, Charles Manson, etc. His biography, written by Nelson Helm entitled “Forever Young” is perhaps the best printed rendition of Mr. Benning’s character. Although the biography demystifies the dark air about the manipulated chemist, it still finds itself as a common artefact of this time, reaching the top of many “Best of” lists since its publication and earning Mr. Helm a Pulitzer Prize.
23. It was Mr. Benning. He said that Tinkerbell whispered to him, told him secrets. He never told me what these secrets were.
24. I know where he is. The Fairies can talk to one another telepathically over incredible distances. I believe it is quantum entanglement, but this is pure theory. Rosetta tells me that all of the Fairies are connected. When I asked her if she could hear the ones in the R&D department getting killed she said that they could hear everything. Rosetta told me that Mr. Hooke went back to Neverland, looking for alternatives for his Tinkture. The Fairies had communicated with the land and capsized his boat and drowned his blackbox. Mr. Hooke will never make it out.
25. Of those who had ingested the gas of the explosion, roughly 40% of had lasting negative effects, according to a study by think tank Orchis Quantifiers. Of this 40%, 18% were blinded, and 2% were committed to an insane asylum. Of that 2%, .5% claimed to have experienced awful visions of strange worlds and crocodiles with clocks for eyes. Perhaps most alarming, the most afflicted of these lunatics all repeat the same mantra when idle: “Tick, tock, tick, tock.”
26. “Fairy Finders” / “On the hunt for Hooke / “Unsolved Mysteries”. It’s all derivative!
27. We must not let this nightmare erase itself. It might not be in our lifetime, but a mistake like The Tinkture Incident will happen again in a vicious cycle as long as we are innocent and heartless. We cannot stay young forever. We must grow and learn from our mistakes to prevent them from happening again.
Glenn
Dungan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Glenn Dungan is currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. He exists within a Venn-diagram of urban design, sociology, and good stories. When not obsessing about one of those three, he can be found at a park drinking black coffee and listening to podcasts about murder.