Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  …

  A guard meant to keep intruders out, not admit and protect them.

  A guard that would likely either ignore his rapping, kill him for the disturbance, or just enjoy the evening show while the janitor’s monster tore him apart. Nowhere in the list of foreseeable options did “help the bleeding stranger with his dick in the breeze” appear. But Red was out of choices. He knocked timidly, like a neighbor there to complain about the noise, and awaited a response.

  “What can I do for you, mate?” The voice came back instantly.

  “My name is Red,” Red screamed in reply, all self consciousness lost upon hearing another human voice, “and I need help.”

  “Fuck you,” the guard replied plainly. There was no malice in it. Just a statement of fact: Fuck you.

  “Please, there’s something out here. The janitor on this floor, he’s got these uh…man-bots, I guess? One of them is after me. I don’t know if it….I think it’s very close.”

  “What part of ‘fuck you’ did you not comprehend, friend? Was it the ‘fuck’ part? If so, I’d be happy to explain in detail. Draw you some pictures, yeah?”

  “Please! I’ve got connections. I can get you authorization for any chemical ‘feed you want. I can print open Rx Cards. I can build the craziest mixes you’ve ever ingested. Ever wondered what blue tastes like? Want to punch a hole in steel with your cock? I’m your man. Just please, open this door!”

  Red felt an abrupt change in air pressure. Everything became strangely…closer. He was certain it meant that Reggie had entered the room. He couldn’t know it for sure, of course, it was just paranoi –

  “Who says I don’t already?” The voice replied, chuckling.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Shag holes in steel. Who says I don’t? Was it Beryl? Don’t listen to that bird. She’s just mad coz I said her brother’s better in the sack. He was, by the by.” The voice was downright jovial now, laughing at Red’s pathetic bribery.

  “I know somebody that used to live on this floor, in the ‘Wells,” Red tried, desperate now. This was the floor that Zippy had her modest hidey hole in, after all, the last time they’d seen one other.

  “Her name is…uh…it’s…”

  “It’s what?”

  “It’s Zippy. I know that sounds made up!” Red added quickly, his words blurring together, “I swear to god though, she exists! I just don’t know her real name. But she knows me. I’m sure she’ll vouch, please! I think it’s in here now. The robot. I think it’s right here!”

  The door swung inward.

  A smallish man with a shock of ridiculous red hair stood inside of it. He was wearing a comically antiquated tweed suit, complete with a thin yellow tie. The guard blinked out into the darkness, then, apparently satisfied that Red – with his bleeding face and prancing dolphin vest — wasn’t a threat, motioned him in. Red gratefully scrambled inside, and plastered himself against the furthest wall from the door. He turned back to the man and started to speak, but the words died in his throat.

  He saw a dull plastic gleam begin in the darkness beyond, and then two grasping, black hands, advanced into the light. The guard swiveled about crisply, braced his feet, and pulled the trigger on what looked like a blender mounted to a shotgun handle. The entire room blazed into brilliant clarity. The crackle of electricity, the sound of shattering plastic, and then an aqueous, organic pop.

  “Those bloody zombies the janitor makes,” the man droned, turning back to Red and swinging the door shut with his heel, “they can’t get through the steel, but they’ll scrape at it all night unless you put ‘em down.”

  “Thank you,” Red replied numbly.

  “James,” The man pulled the blender section from the handle, and plugged it into a metal base mounted on a small, flimsy plastic endtable. “And don’t thank me, mate: I only let you in on account of Zippy. Though I gotta say, if you’re pulling my leg here, she’s gonna eat your balls.”

  Red giggled uncomfortably.

  “Nobody’s joking, friend” he added evenly.

  There was a pleasant whistle, like a tea-kettle set to boil, and the spritely ginger fellow reached down to pull the blender back out from its base. He returned it to the handle, twisted it into place, and leveled it at Red’s face.

  Chapter Seven

  QC brushed past the few conscious audience members. Some were just waking up, groggy and shameful after their hedonistic trip, while some were still under, and would be for hours. The users’ timelines all synced up during the trip, but not necessarily before or after. Some of the audience members that had just been ogling her ass in the forest seconds ago, by her perception, had already awoken and left for home by the time she came around. She distributed the expected timid bows and lurid winks to the stragglers (a Factory Girl’s social role being somewhere between expensive geisha and trashy strip-club waitress), then slipped out the private backdoor of the viewing area.

  She emerged into a lengthy, trough-shaped room that served as the employee’s station. The trench was ten feet deep, but only five wide, and the ceiling was completely open to the arena floor above. Its original use, back when these had all been airship hangars, had been as a mechanic’s pit. Or at least that’s what she’d always assumed, judging by the neglected tools, spare parts and other miscellany still littering every corner of the place. Other Factory Girls, officially sanctioned Dealers, security guards and bookies stood before the banks of lockers that ran the furrow’s length, changing in or out of their respective uniforms. At one end, a barebones laundry service chugged away (though machine washing was one of the first things nanotech made obsolete, years ago). Still, she’d never seen the laundry not in operation, sending its gouts of sour steam up at regular intervals. Somebody must be using it, or maybe it was just that nobody had ever bothered to shut the damn thing off.

  Wafer thin partitions denoted laughably inadequate ‘office spaces’ to either side of the channel, but their boundaries were largely ignored, and most were abandoned. Old workbenches lined every open expanse of wall not dedicated to lockers, and these surfaces simultaneously served as desks, chairs, shelves, medical offices and laboratories for intent men and women in elaborate glasses, who tweaked unseen nanobot factories, tended to minor wounds, or just quietly overdosed on their down time. She found an unoccupied length of plank beside a shaven-headed young woman and a man in a white coat.

  “Hey yo,” she snapped her fingers to get the girl’s attention, “I’m up on the post-event orgies tonight. Cover?”

  “Eat shit and die,” the girl replied absently.

  The man in the white coat plucked a barbaric, inch long hypodermic – one of the old ones, with the actual visible needle and everything – from a rack, and jammed it in her arm. She yelped in protest, but he’d already depressed the plunger and turned away, leaving the needle waggling limply in the flesh of her forearm. She extracted it herself, orated on the virtues and failings of his mother’s vagina for a solid minute, and then turned back to QC.

  “Swap me tomorrow’s title?” She finally countered.

  “Fuck you,” QC eyed the amber-skinned girl warily, “that’s Gettysburg with battlemechs, right? That shit is mind numbing, and it lasts forever. The orgies take like an hour, tops.”

  The girl simply shrugged and turned to leave, but QC caught her arm.

  “Fine. Done. You suck cocks in hell,” she said, by way of goodbye.

  “Suck cocks in hell,” the girl answered back automatically, already drifting away, back down the trench.

  It was a crap deal, but she had to find Red. QC was practically a veteran amongst the Factory Girls, at two years. Most either quit, took ill with the ‘tech cancer, or else succumbed to temptation and tried to bolt with the strains. She stayed alive and active only by virtue of careful monitoring, some black market strains to hold the cell decay at bay, and a keen vigilance on her cloaking software, to keep the tyrannical organizers as ignorant as possible. There were better private te
chs around than Red to do the work, but not many that worked at his rate: Free. He had kind of a thing for her, QC knew — or at least he did when he remembered to. Which wasn’t often.

  She stopped at her locker to change into her civvies. The demure, suggestive yoga-suit (cut low into the cleavage, open at the midriff, and way too tight on the ass, evoking equal parts “spiritual time-yogi” and “eager chrono-hooker,”) was abandoned. In its place, she donned a loose-fitting pair of black engineer’s trousers (a thick, triple-reinforced nano-resistant material), a plain, white long-sleeved shirt, and a dull silver duster. The latter was a remnant she’d discovered when she wrestled open the dusty locker on her first day. It had likely been part of a uniform, leftover from the hangar days. Maybe even a captain’s, or at least one hell of a fancy flight attendant’s.

  She knew she was attractive in her own, entirely forgettable way, so she very carefully dressed to emphasize the ‘forgettable’ part. Most Blackouts walked around in elaborately threatening or provocative clothing, and they usually did so to make up for their near-total lack of survival skills. Overcompensation almost always meant ‘victim’ to anybody prowling the catwalks with a razor, looking for a paycheck or an hour’s entertainment. Her nondescript demeanor and pedestrian attire amidst the sea of spiked-pauldron wearing, ornate blade-carrying, color-shifting-aura-projecting clowns said one thing quite clearly: I am very, very bad for you.

  For further clarity, QC had also cut the left sleeve of her duster back above the elbow, to show off the brightly illuminated control panel on her forearm. Though she had no access to the official strains the fights paid her to employ (and, in fact, had to tear open a patch on the thigh of her trousers to access the black market panel she did control), the official display served to sow one more insidious doubt in the minds of any would-be attackers.

  Regardless, she found the best policy was just keeping her head down, knowing where she was going, and getting there fast. Her path took her up through the media-markets, into the looping bazaar in the South Post loading ramp, and past the countless shops, bars, and tiny lean-to apartments that lined the Blackouts’ catwalks so densely that she had to crabwalk in spots just to pass by. When her way was entirely blocked, as was frequently the case, she paid a modest fee to an urchin with dyed blue feet – the mark of the attendant caste – and they’d run off to fetch rickety baskets, pull-carts or jury-rigged rope ladders for her to traverse. At the other end, she’d find another blue-footed boy who would invariably charge her again before reeling her in, unlatching the door, or tossing down the final rungs.

  When the basket she’d just crawled out of promptly swiveled and zipped back down its line without pause, she turned to check on its passengers: Four men all jammed into the tiny container together like cigarettes in a pack.

  Maneuvering the crowded and ceaselessly shifting geography of the Blackouts required constant improvisation. The odds of you being able to take the same path twice were unlikely; the odds of anybody taking your exact route for any length of time were astronomically low. Which meant that these four men, whom she’d last seen following her out of the hangar doors, two full floors down, were obviously, blatantly trailing her. And while the catwalks proper were always full this time of day, it was just a matter of time before she turned down a familiar alleyway only to find it had been sealed off by the rear wall of a freshly erected noodle stand, or pirate gas den. If a jump was going to happen, better on her terms.

  QC hunched low and pushed through the press, out into the central avenue. No way could she make enough time to lose them through this crowd, but she knew an empty cul-de-sac up ahead with enough room for her to scrap, and it wasn’t too far off the main strip if things went south. She shoved past a gawky, insecure teenager with spikes for eyebrows, a broad-shouldered man with a hologram of a flaming skull over his face, and a trio of identical Asian midgets with metal claws for hands. When she finally rounded the corner, she took a calming breath, straightened her spine until it cracked, and settled comfortably down into a loose, ready posture.

  The first one turned the corner, saw QC waiting for him, and froze. He made no sign of movement or aggression. He was going to wait for his buddies to get his nerve up for him. The others paused, too, upon first spotting QC, but they soon realized they were a pack again.

  “You must all carry half a testicle each,” QC said sweetly, “to only manage one full pair of balls together.”

  “We saw you at the fights,” the first one finally spoke “wanted to get ourselves some of that VIP treatment.”

  The others laughed.

  Amazing. You could save up a few weeks worth of credit and buy any number of spinal implants to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain. Anybody could call up devastatingly powerful orgasms at the touch of a button, but these malformed (sexual deviancy usually went hand in hand with a broad, fishlike facial structure, QC thought; some inbred, recessive, splay-eyed dullness of the features always on display in those sneering faces), sociopaths still went out raping on the weekends.

  She touched the two rough pads on the insides of her gums with her tongue, then pressed it hard against the roof of her mouth until she felt a click. A peculiar leaden weight filled her salivary glands. It was a random disassembler — her one and only legally purchased strain — activating. She’d splurged for the high end tech and opted for the Sacrosanct Strain: Immune to pollution from other nanobots, self-sustaining, and with online access blocked to deter hackers. It wasn’t blackmarket, or leftover from the fights like her other ‘tech, so the disassemblers could always be counted on to do their job. And their job was to savagely rip apart the atoms of any living structure without her DNA. It took hours to do any serious damage, but they kicked on the second they contacted foreign flesh, and she’d heard the pain was as instant as it was unbearable.

  She let the leader get in nice and close. Let him see the mock fear in her eyes, and gave him an expertly crafted lip tremble that let him know, without question, that he was in charge now. He leaned in toward her face with a smug sneer, and she spat a hefty gob of disassembler-laden saliva directly into his half-open mouth. His eyes went wide with rage, and he reached out to backhand her, but then the ‘bots started in on him. He tried to scream, but only managed a hacking gasp before keeling over and seizing on the ground in agony. She saw the others pass a look of confusion around. The bigger one, with a face like somebody drew a grotesque caricature of a human head on the back of a shovel, stepped forward and reached for her. She grabbed his hand gently and raised it to her lips. He was too confused, slow, or excited to resist. She nimbly licked his palm.

  He screamed like a child, high-pitched and completely without reserve.

  The beginnings of a stifled laugh escaped her, but she caught it and put on her meanest scowl instead. The remaining two started to comprehend. One up and bolted, disappearing in the streaming crowd of the avenue behind him. The other pulled a small sliver tab from his jacket, twisted its base, and smiled meanly as it telescoped outward into a millimeter thin, foot-long blade. The pair of them stood at odds for a moment, both contemplating the list of potential attacks and preparing their counters. QC took the initiative, and slowly, methodically lifted two fingers up and off to one side. She twitched them a little, like bunny ears. He glanced over at them, puzzled, and she spat directly into his open eye.

  That damage, at least, was going to be costly.

  She stepped over the man with the blade, who was now locked into the tightest fetal position she’d ever seen, around the leader, still tearing at the inside of his mouth, trying to pull his own tongue out with his fingers, past the sobbing giant, rubbing his hands bloody on the ground, and back out to the avenue. She fell in step behind an overweight woman in a black trench coat. The back of her jacket displayed a looping animation of the woman herself, stomping on the crotch of a cartoonishly bleeding punk.

  Fucking amateurs.

  When she arrived at Red’s apartment, she casually hi
p-checked the spot in the faulty control-box that opened the security door, and stepped inside the bare flat without issue. Red hadn’t even bothered to customize the sad little unit; he just purchased the default settings and started sleeping in it. The molded furniture — bed, chairs, couch, center table, kitchen bar and appliances — all flowed out from the walls and floor in one seamless, unbroken piece of plastic. There were perhaps a handful of items in the entire dwelling that were not factory stock: A row of photo frames on the bar, a pair of torn grey jeans thrown on the floor, a single empty glass on the table, and a pale, gangly boy, giggling to himself on the living bench. He made a feeble slapping motion at the air when she first opened the door, then passed out.

  Chapter Eight

  “Do you know what this does?” James asked Red, nonchalantly waving the blender at his nose.

  Red stared down the length of the hollow cylinder, transfixed. There were two sets of spinning blades at the base, and he could just make out the tiny nubs of nano-factories ringing the interior.

  “It blows things up,” Red surmised, finally recognizing that a response was required of him.

  “Exactly!” James practically clapped for him. “It’s really quite fascinating. The whole thing revolves around a brilliant little medley of express assembler ‘bots…”

  “You mean disassemblers,” Red corrected automatically. He didn’t know much about weaponized nanotech, but he knew that ‘disassemblers’ were the bad kind.

  “Nah, mate: Assemblers. The little blades down here at the bottom? They’re not weapons or anything, just plain old fans. See these?” He rubbed his finger along a row of nubs just inside the barrel, “These are the factories. They build and store the strains I use. Those holes around the tip are nozzles – just high powered squirtguns, really. They aerosolize the ‘bots with water molecules as they exit the barrel. Gives ‘em some weight; something to latch onto when you launch the buggers, otherwise they just disperse in the air. This little beauty in my hands actually sprays two strains of nanobots — one that grabs an extra bit of oxygen, and one that grabs an extra bit of carbon. And when they land, they start splicing them into your skin. Then she fires out a measly handful volts. Barely enough to hurt, really. That’s all she needs to turn a bloke into a bomb.”