Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  But he was not terribly good at running.

  He did have plenty of incentive, however: Preserving both his own life, and the half-spent inhaler of gas in his pocket. The junkie inside was already eyeing cozy corners to crawl into and dose up in, but his survival instincts were winning out, for the moment. He coaxed inertia back into his ungainly limbs.

  Byron had been frightened, lifting the inhaler off of the moustachioed man with the clipped ears. It was impossible to know exactly how long the gas would put somebody down for. Some would snap awake within seconds of pulling the source, while others would stay submerged for hours afterward. It was too risky a maneuver for all but the most desperate of addicts (a category Byron was loathe to admit he fell into, currently) and it was severely bad form, besides.

  Byron turned to survey his pursuers, and was momentarily blinded when the room flashed bright scarlet from a pulsing arterial bloodspray, displayed by the overhead projectors. Something big and vicious had just occurred in the pre-title bout. The few onlookers not displaced in time gasped, and frantic bookies waved their arms, shouting that betting was now open again. Byron banked on the distraction, stood to his full height, and walked briskly toward the low oval exit portal they’d hastily cut into the base of the mammoth hangar gates.

  The addict in him cooed insidious temptations, and he found himself thumbing the inhaler through his tunic. He pushed the thoughts back and made himself a bargain: If he could just get out of this alive, he’d find a place nearby and dose up as soon as possible, just a little, just enough to take the edge off. And then, with a clear head and steady hands, he could message another contact – Deng, maybe – and commission some of his own brand to take home with him. He’d have to endure whatever barbaric trip this dose was built for, of course, but it was a price that needed to be paid. The inelegance of the Gas-fights always left him feeling faintly sick — a frosty, prickly unease that crept into his bones and took hours to shake – but he could salve those wounds with 19th century Athens and dark-eyed Nicolo, soon after.

  But where could he hide, and safely use? He wasn’t overly familiar with the Blackouts. The crowded markets and constant throngs triggered his anxiety. He only knew three areas intimately: The elevator docks, the arena, and Red’s apartment. A thought occurred to him, but he waved it off as a desperate fallacy of the addict. The addict is nothing if not insistent, however; he scratched at the inside of Byron’s skin until he listened:

  Red’s place is close, the addict reasoned, and safe, and if Red comes back, so what? We need more gas built anyway. We can pay. Isn’t the customer always right?

  “Thief” a voice in the crowd screamed, and the fragile etiquette of drug-users demanded a response. Junkies didn’t have many rules in the Four Posts, but nobody steals a stash. The cry was picked up and passed around, and Byron - a pale, glowing reed in the thresh of poor, filthy Blackouts - was easy to spot.

  So it was decided, then: Byron was running.

  He was not terribly good at running.

  But he was lucky, on occasion. Another flash of red caught the fickle attention of the crowd. That trademark roar – all madness and glee, starting deep and resonant like a train approaching, then slowly ascending into hacking, raspy laughter — rang out from the speakers. Lincoln, reveling in the fury.

  But an answering bellow issued forth almost immediately, and the shouts of the audience told him that the fight wasn’t over just yet. All eyes not currently glazed with a purple sheen were now focused upward, at the battling projections. Even, Byron noticed with swelling optimism, those of the two bouncers guarding the exit portal. He pushed his lean form into an elongated wedge, willed strength to his legs, and prayed that they could keep him upright for a few more steps.

  Byron was running.

  He was not terribly good at running, but he was getting better all the time.

  Sort of: He clipped a toe on the portal’s lip, but kept his feet as he bolted out of the hangar. He shut the addict away in its box, and focused on moving. The physical disconnect of the withdrawals actually seemed to be helping — he assumed his leg muscles would be burning intolerably, if he could feel them. Thankfully, he could not, and they kept him mobile for far longer than he would have thought possible. Through the lazy eddies of shoppers at the infinite, sprawling markets, across the patchwork catwalks, up the narrow toll-ladders and shaky, unlicensed stairwells, and eventually, to nobody’s surprise more than his, they took him all the way to the relative security and familiarity of Red’s apartment before giving out.

  He stood bowlegged in front of the door for several ragged, gasping minutes. His BioOS displayed a contextual action menu:

  Welcome to the Alebrijes Model, a TWS manufactured living unit. This user is currently away. Confirm to send a Knock, or leave a message for user name [USER NOT SPECIFIED] and call again at a later date. Thank you!

  Byron confirmed the context action, and heard a distant chime from behind the door. No response. He tried it again, and again, skipping past the prompt to leave a message after every unanswered Knock.

  Of course it would be locked. Why hadn’t that occurred to him? Because the blasted addict was speaking, that’s why. Byron could not recall ever losing his temper – anger simply did not become him; he mostly smiled nervously in any scenario that called for indignation — but something burst in his chest, and he lost control of his own balled fists. They flew ineffectually against the walls, the floor, his own body, and finally bounced off of the stubborn, uncaring, impassive door.

  “Welcome home,” it chimed, and stuttered open with a chattering whoosh.

  He did not have the energy to question it. Byron stepped numbly inside, did his best to steer his already falling form toward the central bench, then let the addict out of his box. He plastered the inhaler over his nostrils, and the vacuum sealed. The first breath stung. The second caused his lungs to stumble, and on the third—

  Nothing.

  He should be gone by now, shouldn’t he? He should be lost to time, this idiot body fading, to be replaced by one sharper and more present. But then, he didn’t make a habit of dosing up halfway through the trip. Maybe it took longer, this way. At least the withdrawals were…withdrawing. Ha! He giggled, writhed, and murmured to himself blissfully.

  To pass the time until the kick, he mentally catalogued the last hours he’d spent with Lord Byron. Most times, he opted for the much more expensive Presence version of the gas, so he could interact with the trip — hold the Lord’s hand in times of despair, make him laugh with his inane stories of cities in the sky – but sometimes he was content with Voyeur. Sometimes, it was enough just to watch the Lord exist, and silently witness his life unfold, unimpeded. It had been Voyeur when Nicolo, with his slight unibrow and orange scent, knelt beside Byron in the yard and tended to his wounded hand. Their faces came a bit too close, and biological imperative engaged. They moved suddenly, sharply towards one another, their lips parting, their hands groping for Red’s door – did it lock behind him?

  Byron couldn’t recall.

  Should he? Weren’t there people chasing him? No, that’s ridiculous. Why would people be chasing Byron? He was not fit for chasing. It was uncouth. Everything would be fine, he was sure. Everything would be safe, solid, sound.

  “The structure is always sound,” he spoke aloud, in his deepest, most authoritative voice, mimicking the Public Service Ads that boomed all throughout the Blackouts.

  Nicolo. Think about Nicolo, he reminded himself, but the image would not catch. The gas was taking him deeper, and the only picture he could hold in his mind was of Red. Red’s dull grey jacket. Red’s patchy stubble that never seemed to grow or be shorn. Red’s sheepish smile, the one that overtook his face only when he was deep into a new and interesting high.

  That’s how he’d been when they first met.

  Byron’s father was engaging in that vague and sinister sounding thing — “business” — down at one of Hockner Industries’ smaller chem
labs. He’d brought Byron along (against both of their wishes) to show him something dull and explain something even duller. He spouted words like “family” and “legacy” and “disappointment,” while Byron fantasized about Romantic poetry, the roar of cannons, and the fragile armor of honor. His father had grown quickly frustrated, and abandoned Byron to the sterile void of a medical waiting room while he yelled about numbers. Byron had stayed all of a few seconds before strolling out the door, into the catwalk markets, in pursuit of new contacts that might mix his strains in the future. That’s where he found Red, chewing on the edge of a worn plastic bench with careful precision. His jaws weren’t grinding with the rabid abandon one would expect from the insane or massively drugged, but rather with a studied and moderated purpose. He would pause every few seconds, turn his head as if lost in consideration, and then return to primly masticating plastic. When he finally noticed Byron staring down at him, perplexed, he matched the gaze with pupils that occupied the entirety of his eyeball. Red put up a finger to preemptively silence Byron, indicating that he would be with him momentarily, then licked the pockmarked surface one final time, and settled back on his heels, calculating something with his hands.

  Byron wasn’t familiar with many drugs besides Presence and Voyeur (he took a low-grade cocktail of nootropics and amphetamines to get through the day, like everybody else), but even he, with his limited knowledge, could identify this as the work of a hallucinogen. A fact which spoke volumes to Byron. Hallucinogens were a black level ingredient, to be prescribed sparingly, if at all. No legal Rx Card would dispense the volume that this man had clearly taken. Which meant that the crouching, muttering fellow currently developing intricate algorithms for proper bench-tasting was either a mixer, a black market dealer, or a resourceful junkie with workarounds for the official dispensary. Any of these options would serve for Byron. He huddled next to the man cautiously, trying to be noticed without being distressing. He was debating how best to break the ice when the man tugged distractedly at Byron’s sleeve and said:

  “Come here. Does this bench taste funny to you?”

  Tangential, rambling revelries, flashbacks, and nostalgic details — the gas was about to take him. Byron struggled, in a faraway place, to move his arm. He found it impossible. The kick was coming any second now: That ephemeral, delicate, imperceptible shift in being. It was like sinking into a warm pond, and every inch of you that fell below the waterline became water itself; flowed outward, expanding and deconstructing simultaneously. Just before his own body ceased to be a relevant concept, he heard the telltale stuttering hiss of Red’s half-broken door, opening. A deep, abiding panic fluttered through his chest, but the pond seized it, shook it, and returned it to bliss.

  The kick.

  Chapter Six

  Red’s hands were bleeding freely, but he was up and moving again before the pain had time to register. He managed a scant few steps before catching a shoulder against something in the dark, and sprawled into another mound of ragged scrap metal and garbage. When he’d last seen the janitor’s monster, it was picking its way across the mountain of broken toys so slowly that Red had actually smiled with relief. But here in the gloom of the filthy, uneven hallways, each spill cost him precious seconds, and gave them to his pursuer. He could hear the faint pinging of the thing’s spokes climbing over the trash heaps, and the wet pops as it loosed itself from the muck, but it was the silence that tore at him: The quiet times when it wasn’t pulling itself out of or over the debris piles.

  When it was advancing on him, free and clear.

  Between the haphazard piles of detritus, the vaulted ceilings, and the constricted aisles, it was impossible to place the thing’s exact distance from him by sound. With every new, wheezing breath, Red anticipated the cold hands seizing at the back of his neck. With every new fall, he expected the heavy plastic chassis upon him before he could stand again.

  The creaking and groaning of an immense pressure bearing down on old structures, the dull-edged acoustic roar of the water mains, the rhythmic thwacking of the filtration plants, reverberating deep within the structure’s bones, the hollow pattering of countless leaks, and just below it all, the steady metallic tock of Reggie, advancing.

  Red tripped again, and his hands caught in a large and unwieldy construct — shelves, perhaps, or the skeletal frame of an old ultralight. There could be an ancient air-dock around here somewhere, he thought, from back before they started the Reservoir and nobody thought they’d build higher than a few hundred stories. He tweaked, pulled, and wrenched until the wide, unsecured mass came free from the ankle-deep water. It was awkwardly shaped, but strong, and weighed virtually nothing. He hurled it into the corridor behind him, his bloody hands slipping painfully across the ragged metalwork. It landed a dozen paces back, and clattered to a stop. Red allowed himself a shred of hope: It might have blocked a regular ‘bot indefinitely, but Reggie’s human arms could probably maneuver it out of the way. Still, if he could just buy a minute or two…

  Red turned to take a step, and heard the robot’s spokes clang against the shelving.

  It hadn’t been more than a few feet behind him.

  There was a long, wet scrape as the shelf began to slide, and everything inside of Red froze. Silence. Then a sharp ping as it finally caught on something. The thing was stalled, for now. Red took a deep breath, expelled all of the panic and desperation welling up inside of him, and in spite of his survival instincts, every one of which screamed for him to run, he slowed his own pace to a careful crawl. His headlong flight and subsequent falls were only losing him ground. He wouldn’t move much faster than his pursuer this way, but every minute the robot spent on the shelving, and every minute Red maintained a steady, stable pace, would be a minute gained. He paused, and listened. There, ahead and to the left: That was where the turbines sounded the loudest. The four great central water pipes were bolted to the exterior of each Post, and that was where he needed to be – not lost in the ruined aquatic catwalks, risking dead ends and collapses — if he was ever going to find a way up.

  Red heard the twanging of plucked metal, as Reggie bent and began picking at the obstacle. He hesitantly extended his own foot, and then planted it. And again.

  Time was measured in tiny, agonizing, crawling steps. Their chase progressed, one deliberate movement at a time, like a waltz in slow-motion – Red one two, Reggie one two, Red three four. He kicked his way around a vast glass sphere blocking most of the walkway, and planned his next move: Eventually, by following the turbine roar, he would emerge from the catwalks into one of the Four Posts. Their only common intersection was at the interior corner of each mega-structure. Also located at every corner: Stairwell access. It wasn’t certain, but it was hope.

  Red stretched a leg out in front of him and felt around until it contacted the flat surface of a wall – not the curving glass of a catwalk, but real, solid, steel wall. Explorations to either side confirmed it: The entrance to a Post. He placed his hand against the surface, and began inching sideways, feeling for the frame of a door.

  His path took him closer and closer to the turbines. As he closed the distance, Red discovered an entirely new dread: Though the constant, unceasing pocks of Reggie’s advance had unnerved him, he could at least track the thing’s progress, no matter how imprecisely. Now, with the static wave of the turbines drowning out all other noise, he was at a loss. Was he still making faster progress? Had it been slowly gaining on him all this time? Reggie could be there right now, for all he knew, silently staring at him from just inches away, and reaching….

  He stubbed his fingers against a raised metal bump, more solid and compact to the touch than the concrete and graphene mesh of the Post’s walls. The bump ran vertically, bordering a smooth, level plane. A door, and its frame. It was huge. Way too wide an opening for any ordinary room.

  The stairwell, he thought desperately, it had to be.

  The colossal stairwell doors had been designed for a dozen commuters pass throug
h, shoulder to shoulder. But the stairwells haven’t functioned as “stairs” for many years: With space at a premium, any usable, livable area was bound to be claimed eventually. Every descending and ascending flight could fit ten men abreast, and the open plateaus of each landing were larger than the average housing project. It wasn’t long before enterprising homeless realized the value of the wasted real estate. Their transition from footpath to neighborhood was piecemeal, at first. Just cardboard shanties tucked away in the corners, and mobile sleeping kits hastily set up for the off hours. Most commuters took the lifts anyway, so not much fuss was raised at the temporary settlements. But temporary always becomes permanent, if you let it: Soon makeshift platforms were slung from the underbellies of every flight. At first, they were only accessible by rope ladders, and weren’t much more than places to sleep without getting arrested, assaulted, or trampled. But they were so unobtrusive — webbed into disused corners of the ceilings like eggsacs — that even these permanent structures remained unnoticed. Inevitably, they grew outward. Platforms were strung together, others slung below them, and still others below those, until the “unobtrusive” structures ran all the way to the floor below them, and the ‘Wells were stairs no more. Unlike the primarily abandoned floors he found himself stumbling through, where roving, psychotic janitors and tube collapse were looming threats, the ‘Wells were sound. They had doorways that were easily secured, clear, delineated borders that could be maintained, and free, unmonitored access to every floor above and below.

  This ‘Well would not be vacant. There would be a guard on the other side of the door.