Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  James rocked back on his heels and let Red digest the information.

  “There are easier ways to kill a man, of course. And there are even better ways to blow his arse to atoms. But this one is mine. I designed it. Nobody murders the same way I do. That’s a point of pride for me, mate. I’m telling you this because I need for you to understand: That’s how bored I got with killing folk — I had to design and construct a whole new type of weapon to do it with, just to keep meself interested. That bugger out there? He was totally encased in industrial impact coating. You’re totally encased in what looks like a secondhand polyester jacket, ten years out of fashion. We got an understanding?”

  “Yep,” Red replied instantly, “This is Don’t Do Stupid Stuff 101, and I’m taking notes.”

  “Ha!” James straightened his tie in a charmingly anachronistic gesture of finality, “I’d bet nobody lists ‘courage’ amongst your vices.”

  He nodded his head at an ovular lid that looked to be lifted from a public recycling tube, secured to the wall with bonding tape. When Red obediently pushed at it, a three foot section gave way and fell back, loudly oscillating on the steel floor beyond. He bent to the portal and, the barrel of James’ weapon thrust unkindly into his rear, crawled through.

  The short tunnel exited into an apartment, similar to the basic unit that Red owned: A shipping container filled with molded living space. But this one, already quite a bit smaller than Red’s modest home, had been further divided into a half dozen separate abodes. Areas half the size of Red’s Kitchenette held entire households. Hanging closets, folded cots, stools, and even an ancient, tarnished kettle all hung just above his head, completely suspended on bent wires. A pair of waist-high yellow ropes delineated a public walkway through the complex, barely a foot across at its widest point. The path terminated in a jury-rigged ladder, comprised of three pairs of staggered hand-grips, apparently pilfered from shopping carts.

  Beyond, they climbed through a shattered windshield into an airship cabin that had been divided in two, straight down the center: One half served as a bar; the other, a row of cramped hotel lodgings. They ascended a rope ladder strung from the shattered exterior of a catwalk wall, stepped over two residents passionately screwing in the public aisle — the man’s feet lodged against the base of a chair in one apartment, the woman’s head lost to view in the interior of an oven in the unit next door – and ducked through an immense, pockmarked cooler.

  The claustrophobic tunnels, unsteady footbridges, and narrow walkways all blurred together. Though his body was repeatedly contorted in ways both painful and, he suspected, physically impossible, Red still managed to lapse into a hypnotic state for most of the journey. Focus Fugues were commonplace in his line of work, as was constipation, headaches, light sensitivity, muscle pain and nerve transposition.

  Red had precautionary measures in place for most of it: He’d had his eyes tinted to take the edge off the brighter lights (though now he had some difficulty reading OLED signs at a distance), subscribed to a stool-softening ‘feed in his morning dose — one of the few legal Rx channels he actually paid for – and the muscle pain was countered by a moderate dose of pure THC that he siphoned from an alternative medical clinic up in the Penthouses, and subsequently rerouted into his tapwater. He took the standard amphetamines and nootropics for productivity, like nearly everybody in the Four Posts, but that didn’t help with the fugues. So he’d also picked up a few psychological workarounds: Cognitive memes he’d read about on forums and message boards. Some of them even worked.

  Occasionally.

  Picture a brown cow in a green field. Envision the grass in exquisite detail, each blade wavering in the slight breeze like the raised swords of a tiny, victorious army. The cow is a deep, chocolate brown; its glossy hide shining in the cool spring sun. An oak tree stands behind it, with a swirling gnarl in the trunk. The spiraling oblong knot has been weathered grey by exposure. There is a frayed rope tied to the largest branch, leading nowhere. Hear the wind rustle the leaves. Feel it stir the hairs on your arm, the tingle like-Last night came flooding back to Red.

  He had been beta-testing for the fights, that much he remembered, but now the details snapped back in all of their awful clarity. This beta hadn’t been just another gas trip to scout a new location. This one was important: An entirely new type of Presence, meant to facilitate longer stays in the past – days, possibly even weeks. Exclusive, groundbreaking, highly secret stuff.

  Even the most boilerplate Non-Disclosure Agreement would have a clause forbidding him from leaving a pre-determined cluster of areas around his home until the beta could be fully metabolized, to ensure the tester didn’t run off and sell the residuals to a rival lab. That was standard, default stuff; the most basic rule of testing. And here he was, scurrying through the abandoned ground floors and loitering in the lawless zones of the ‘Wells. If the lab thought he was a runner….

  “Hey!” James snapped, pressing the cylinder impatiently to the back of Red’s head, “I said stop. We’re here.”

  Red had forgotten to break the Focus Fugue. He wondered how much time had loped by, barely glimpsed as it went rushing past him.

  And found himself staring up at an impossibility. The entire landing of this floor — a huge, voluminous space, easily large enough to fit a whole neighborhood (by ‘Wells standards, at least) – had been turned over to a single quaint, mid-size cottage. Surrounding it was a rich strip of freshly shorn, bright green grass, penned in by a gleaming white picket fence. Animatronic birds chirped in a diminutive fruit tree. The area directly above the cottage’s roof was left improbably vacant, and the ceiling had been painted sky blue. Projections of clouds lazily drifted across it. Real estate was the sole indicator of status in the cramped, claustrophobic society of the ‘Wells, and though Red knew there were larger territories elsewhere, the emptiness of this yard and the vacancy of that sky spoke volumes.

  A throne of skulls would have been less intimidating.

  “You said you know Zippy,” James reminded him, “let’s go see if she knows you.”

  Chapter Nine

  Byron awoke in the jungle.

  He tried to spit the sickly sweet chemical taste from his mouth, failed, gagged, and retched. When one engages in a full and complete dose of gas, from its designated inception through to cessation, the transition is gentle and indolent, like fading into slumber in reverse. That was a carefully modulated release effect, Byron had learned. When one appropriated a dose midway through its intended trip, there was no amiable ease of conscious states. He felt himself drift off in that other reality, lying prone on a remorseless plastic bench, then the kick took hold, and then he was now. Seasickness results from the slight difference between one’s visual perception and the readings of the inner ear. An abrupt temporal shift — from a modern-era Four Post barrio apartment to this primordial forest — was like motion sickness of the soul. Every fiber of his being swung dizzily, surged in confusion, and revolted against his attempts at control. Byron went from being sleepily drugged and sprawled out in his dealer’s apartment, to chemically wired and standing unsteadily in an ancient meadow. In response, he did the only thing he could think to do: He flopped limply to the earth, rolled to his side, and tried to slip in a few sobs through the cascading vomit.

  When the fist in his guts finally loosened, and the undulating waves of unbearable heat ceased their incessant crashing against his skull, he struggled to his knees. Raucous applause crashed all around, its source scattered by the density of the surrounding foliage.

  Oh yes, he remembered, that hadn’t even been his preferred brand. He was in the Gas-fights now, with their savage, shallow, brutal, compassionless gladiatorial theatrics. He hadn’t the dimmest notion of the roster, or even of the current epoch. The gas had burgled those memories, if he’d ever had them. He could well be in danger, standing out here unprotected. The arena, at least, would have microwave generators to deter predators. Byron planted one foot, steadied his weigh
t on it, and shakily dragged the other into place. He stood erect.

  Fully erect.

  Byron sighed. They would have clothes at the fight, too.

  He picked the least intimidating tangle of brush, and launched himself into it. He shuddered in revulsion as the alien organicity of leaves brushed up against his naked flesh, then froze at the flutter of movement. Did he imagine it, or –

  Suddenly, the broad head of a rotund serpent reared its bulk out of the shrubbery and lashed out at him. It missed his nose by a matter of inches, before crashing back away into the foliage.

  “Sheeeeiiit!” A squat little fellow swore.

  The upper reaches of his face were lost to a nylon spiderweb of cameras: Built on demand by the industrious nanobots of the Factory Girls, his headgear quantum-projected holograms of the fight back to reality, for those too poor to attend hallucinogenically. He seized Byron by the arms and shoved him bodily toward the arena. Byron stumbled as the sound waves washed over him and caused his motor control to misfire, but the momentum of the shove carried him through, and he landed face down in a pile of leaves, each as broad across as his shoulders.

  “What the fuck you doin’? You tryina’ git yourself killt? You lucky I was here just now?” The cameraman spoke with a thick Blackout accent; the high rising terminal appending each statement turned every sentence into a question. He was extremely short and excessively stout of body. His stature was not quite dwarfish, but it shared some elements, like the subtly stunted limbs and thick torso.

  “Good sir,” Byron began, hauling himself up with as much dignity as he could muster whilst naked and shellshocked, “I was merely attempting to alleviate myself with a ahm….modicum of privacy.”

  Byron did not carry many conversations in reality. The bulk of his human interactions occurred via custom-built gas trips. As such, he had inadvertently adopted the grandiose speech patterns of his inline translator. The program ran only a rough approximation of Romantic-era European dialects. His beloved timeline was not exactly a popular destination, after all. The software always managed to get the gist of the language across, but it tended to butcher the cadence and verbiage. To counter this effect, he’d modded his translator with a hack of Shakespearean and Victorian Dialogue Packs, amalgamated with some theatrical speech patterns cobbled from the more common Dickensian works.

  If you’d asked him to describe it, Byron would have told you it “captured the essence of civility and articulation that all periods should be lucky enough to share.” If you asked anybody else, they’d describe it as “talking like a dickhead.”

  “Is that Dickhead Talk?” the cameraman asked, annoyed. “Cause I’m afraid I don’ speak Dickhead Talk real well? Does what you just said mean ‘I’m sorry I nearly got my skull smashed in by a fucking dinosaur because I’m too stupid to read the giant hologram blinking the word ‘bathroom’ right behind me?”

  “Er…yes?” Byron floundered.

  Avoiding confrontation was second nature to him. He found that instantly copping to massive failures of character with no excuse, emotion, or offense was the quickest way to end an altercation before it began.

  “Feh!” The stunted man threw his arms up in disgust, and turned back to the fight raging across the arena behind him.

  Byron waited anxiously for further word, but the cameraman was apparently done with him, his mirrored eyes dedicated, once again, to following the action. An unreasonably tall, absurdly thin fellow with a set of matching lenses stepped over the pair of them with one great, loping stride. He set one spindly leg against the arena walls and peered directly down at the fight, angling himself for the aerial shot. They were camera-caste: Manipulated growth from infancy. Stubby men for the low angles, ungainly and enormous for the aerials. The low-angles were the lucky ones: Their bodily resources had been rechanneled into pure, dense, hearty muscle, whereas the aerials were engineered for maximum height at the cost of bulk. Like giraffes, they lumbered above the crowds, carefully measuring every step, because any fall was possibly lethal to their fragile frames. The cheaper fight organizers used robots and ultralights for the job. The more “respectable” endeavors, however, viewed the camera caste as a sacred tradition. All part of the show.

  Byron shuddered. He could not wait for this trip to end.

  A gasp broke out from the crowd. Lincoln had just taken a nasty gore through the upper thigh, and his face was twisted up in pain. The Triceratops was faring a bit worse: Ragged gashes oozed all along its side, and it was dragging one leg. Its left eye was formless gore, and it thrashed its tail about in blind fury— what Byron had initially mistaken for an obese serpent.

  The fact that Lincoln was faring well came as no surprise: He was an infamous ringer. Some ringers were famous warriors, some were master tacticians, and some were neither – simply ordinary men or women, noted in the history books for a variety of unrelated, mundane reasons. Yet when faced with the proper duress, something in them changed. Lincoln always tried to reason with his opponents at first, but all it took was one blow to trigger that perceptible shift behind his eyes, and he became a whirling pillar of rage and murder. The story of his very first fight had become legend, not just in the arena, but in all of pop-culture. The promoters had pitted Lincoln against a Zulu (it was supposed to be ironic, Byron knew, in the basest possible way), and the odds were overwhelmingly against the gangly, bearded man. He was known for his reason, speech, and compassion, not his battle prowess. It was intended to be a slaughter; they didn’t even give him a weapon to combat the tribal’s spear.

  But when the Zulu lost patience and thrust at the president, he swiftly ducked aside and unleashed that idiosyncratic Lincoln Roar. Thirty seconds later, the tribal laid dead, his throat torn out by a set of freakishly strong, sinewy fingers. There was stunned laughter from the crowd, at first, but even that quickly died when it became apparent that Lincoln had no intention of stopping. He savagely stabbed the Zulu’s spear into the corpse again and again, tears streaming down his face, all the while screaming a primal chord so consistent and unwavering that it most resembled an industrial steam whistle. Only one man actually bet on Lincoln in that fight, and they said he lived off that money to this day.

  This bout was more evenly matched, however, and neither combatant seemed likely to survive their wounds. Lincoln had just been pinned against a squat tree trunk by the beast’s horns, but rather than thrashing wildly, as another man might have done, he instead calmly gathered his fingers into a point, reached down and stuck his whole hand through the lizard’s remaining sighted eye. The animal roared and tried to rear away, but Lincoln grappled onto its head as it withdrew, using its horns as handles. He shoved his groping arm ever deeper, until it disappeared up to the shoulder inside the cavity. Suddenly the Triceratops grunted, shivered, and collapsed. Lincoln extracted the limb with a wet pop, turned immediately on his heel, and charged the crowd. His bloodlust was insatiable; it was part of the appeal of his character. He charged the crowd after nearly every victory, clawing at the raised walls, howling and slavering at the leering audience.

  Lincoln wouldn’t stop on his own, but it was bad sport to kill the winner, so security merely tranquilized him as best they could, and dragged the wounded president away into the forest. An announcer’s voice echoed from the tinny speakers, assuring the audience that “the champion has earned his freedom.” To the viewers, it was a good ending. It never occurred to them that the promoters had abducted Lincoln from his native Illinois in the first place, doped him up with dissociative anesthetics, then had him battle a genetically engineered dinosaur in a rainforest half a world away. Even if he survived the fight, the wounds, and the jungle, he’d certainly be driven mad from the events.

  But it was all immaterial, anyway: Everybody knows that time is immutable. The mechanics of the gas were poorly understood, at best – the trips themselves generally being regarded as something between time travel and a finely controlled mass hallucination – but the one thing everybody agr
eed on was that the timeline always reverts to normal, once the drug wears off. Regardless of this particular man’s fate, the history books would remember the same president they always did. There would be no new chapters detailing Abraham Lincoln’s lizard-wrestling years, and nothing in Byron’s present would change in the slightest. If everything is impermanent, then compassion and empathy simply become redundant.

  With the trip winding down, the audience began their customary post-fight mingle. The men started skirmishes with one another, knowing the wounds would not last, or else molested each other’s dates while their clothing was dismantled by pieces. Some were already instigating a casual orgy, if only to pass the time until they were kicked back out to reality.

  Byron found a tree at the remote end of the arena floor, and sat down between its ancient roots. He knew that his body was still lying helpless where he’d left it, sprawled on Red’s merciless couch-analogue for the next twenty minutes, but that was the true beauty of the gas: Anything that happened in the real world now was simply and plainly…out of his hands.

  Byron sighed as the weight of existential responsibility slid off him like water on a stone. He nestled back into the dirt, and closed his eyes.

  Chapter Ten

  Red sat politely in the tiny parlor.

  His sense of intimidation had only heightened after he’d been buzzed inside the anachronistic cottage, and left to stew in the yellow-and-blue tiled foyer. He opened his BioOS and idly tabbed through his messages, found he was too nervous to focus on the words, and closed it again. He scrutinized the materials around him instead. It was surreal: Objects this old simply didn’t exist anymore. Even recreations would be dazzlingly expensive. His guts grew heavy with the thought and its implications. How far had Zippy risen, in his absence? Would she even remember the sheepish screw-up she shared a bed with for a few months, years ago? But when he bent down to examine the baroque wooden molding that ran along the far wall, recognition sparked: It was a cross-section of one of those long, flat blades from a filtration skimmer – the spider-like ‘bots that pulled larger debris from the surface of the Reservoir. It had been intricately painted and covered with stenciled patterns, but it was not actually wood, or gold, or even a commissioned facsimile.