Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  “But…but what if we cooperate with the utmost urgency and earnestness?” Byron quailed.

  “Come on,” QC said, ignoring his pleas and pushing her way into the crowd. “We gotta find us some Christian Scientists.”

  “Come again?” Byron called after her. He attempted to occupy the wake she left behind her as she shoved, slipped, and swore her way through the drug-addled press.

  “Free purification stations,” she explained.

  And what comes after that? If there’s one thing the Gentlemen got, it’s money. Those shitty free flushes the Scientists give with every pamphlet download won’t do jack against high end tech like that. No, what we really need to do is get somewhere I can think; just pull my dick out of the breeze for a damn second. Take stock of what I got. What I got? That’s a joke: Some faulty nanotech, a mouthful of bad omens, and a pasty man-child tugging at my fucking apron-strings. Fuck fucking fuck fuckbiscuits. That’s great, girl. You’re doing great: No plan, no idea, no resources. Just well-funded enemies and handicaps on every side.

  God dammit, knock that shit off. What are you gonna do, sit down and cry about it? Moving is safer than not moving, and shitty flushes are better than none at all, right?

  QC slipped sideways, ducked under drunkenly swinging arms and stepped over bodies in varying states of overdose. She flicked her eyes upward, squinted, and dragged them back down. The dancing penguin of her OS idle state gyrated away. She formed the word ‘nav’ in her forebrain, and a dense tangle of strings filled her vision. She glanced around, looking for a business name to identify her location (like hell she was turning on locational software now,) and plunked it down on the map, forming an anchor. She searched for the nearest Home of Greater Science — the charitable terminal hubs Christian Scientists like to set up in the seedier chemical districts — and sure enough, a dull blue line shimmered into life on the ground before her. The OSPenguin danced up and down its length.

  “Foot traffic is high!” It squeaked, “Two hours, walking!”

  Not the way she walked.

  QC mentally flipped away, and let muscle memory overtake her consciousness. Everything in her funneled down into simple route-finding, picking out and identifying open avenues: A space between two men there, closing. Through. Fat lady walking slow, right behind that skinny guy moving fast. They’ll leave a space between them in just…a few…there. Old dude too hammered to do much more than sway. Bump him back into the den and you’ve got a free ten feet past him. Look: An addict stumbling in line at Amphetamine stand, the people behind giving him a wide berth.

  She stepped up onto the corrugated metal platform, ignoring the offended jabber of the vendor inside, and took two quick paces past the low tables, with their stacks of illicit Rx Cards. She was nearly out the exit on the opposite side, but a thin woman suddenly zipped up and blocked the way, already fumbling her newly-purchased card into the ‘feed tube. QC pushed her, walking the line between accidental bump and offensive shove, and used the momentum to take a skipping hop over two unconscious girls - couldn’t be more than ten years old between them. She spotted an inexplicably empty stretch of catwalk just beyond the smart-glass partition, and quickened her pace.

  Jesus, would you look at this? All this open space – it’s unheard of.

  QC glanced around and confirmed: Every other shop around her was set right up flush against the translucent cylindrical walls of the catwalk. And there were other shops were set up against them, and others, and on and on. Sometimes the only way to reach a less trafficked business was to push through backdoors, crawl beneath stoves, or squeeze through tiny portals carved into the foundations of other, more recent establishments. It’s like the marketing meme says: “If you can reach it, it’s not worth going to.” And in QC’s experience, that was mostly true: The Choking Tiger, her favorite bar, was basically just the repurposed husk of an ancient family aircar, meant to comfortably seat four back in its day. It was only accessible by politely asking the owner of an armored-clothing boutique to open his trapdoor, then shuffling through the crawlspace into a pirated BioOS shop, stepping through the slatted doorway in the west wall and finally, carefully edging around the white hot friction burn of one of the big water recycling tubes.

  All that demand, all that desperate scramble for space, and yet here was easily a twelve foot long expanse of virgin catwalk wall. It fired every alarm in QCs gut, but too late: Her momentum propelled her forward, and before she could will her legs to cease, she was striding confidently into complete nothingness.

  Vertigo took her by the throat and hurled her to the ground.

  She traversed the void daily; trundling across the interior chimney of the Four Posts on ramshackle carts, wobbly ziplines and shaky walkways - but those only looked down at more catwalks, other carts, ziplines, and walkways. On most days, an errant glance into the chimney below yielded only a dense patina of cables, plastic sheeting, glass and steel. But not this window; not this clear plastic floor. This was a viewport with a rare and unobstructed view straight down into the yawning abyss. Thousands and thousands of stories below her scratching hands and uselessly scrabbling feet, and there was still only blackness. As far as QC was concerned, she lived her life on solid ground. She was never more than a dozen feet above some kind of structure below – even if she was zipping across the chimney holding onto a bundle of coathangers slung over a cable of braided artificial hair; even if she knew, objectively, that a fall might send her careening off the objects below and bouncing to her certain death – there was some kind of god damn something below. And now some asshole, some clueless fucking bureaucrat who’d doubtlessly never set foot below Industry, who probably thought a transparent catwalk floor would be a fucking tourist attraction, had just ripped back the curtain and exposed the awful truth behind the fiction. An existential shockwave ebbed up behind her eyes. She willed a leg to move, but it merely wobbled in response. Her cartoon OSPenguin danced coyly at the edge of her vision, beckoning her to continue.

  “Foot traffic is high!” The cutesy text wiggled above its head, “One hour, forty five minutes, walking!”

  “What seems to be the problem?” Byron’s voice shattered the wall of screams building inside her head. He nudged her gently from behind and every nerve in her body jumped, ran through with electricity. When she merely whimpered in response, her eyes gone discoid, still locked unwaveringly on the abyss, he finally seemed to get it. He pulled her face up toward his, buried it in his shoulder, and walked the two of them onward, traversing the space with no difficulty.

  Back in the press beyond the empty space, QC tried to stumble to a vacant corner, but found none. She ended up retching onto an unconscious junkie’s face. A man took her lead when she was finished, stepped up to replace her, and began his own vomiting. A small queue of queasy-looking drug fiends began to form behind him.

  “How the fuck did you…?” QC motioned back, without looking, toward the horrible absence.

  “Hm? Oh, open spaces don’t bother me in the slightest. We have several open-air verandas, up at my father’s manse,” he answered sheepishly, “He calls his office ‘the atrium.’ The floor is made of glass, there.”

  QC shuddered, and tried to resume her pathfinding. But she was shaken internally in a way she could not admit, and could spot no more openings. She resorted to shoving, swearing, and begging her way through the throng, like all the other junkies.

  “I’ll level with you,” QC said, when they’d finally wrestled their way into a narrow alcove. “I’ve got nothing after we hit the CS purifiers. And it’s not like that’s gonna do hot Jack to cold shit anyway. With Scientist’s tech how it is, you’d be lucky to flush a viral magazine preview.”

  “Well, I’m clearly out of my preferred element,” Byron answered, after a long and exaggeratedly thoughtful silence (he actually put four knuckles to his chin in a perfect pantomime of careful consideration.) “But it seems to me as though Red is at the crux of our current dilemmas. So it stands to r
eason that the only answers to said problems would also stem from that same source.”

  “Bullshit,” QC tensed her leg muscles, using their strength to drag herself up from a cramped crouch, “you just want more drugs.”

  “Oh, indeed! Indeed. However, in this case the addict also speaks with the voice of reason: You said they were tracking us, correct? And I believe you also mentioned some rather awful things they would do to us in the pursuit of our mutual friend, should tracking fail? Perhaps our only option, then, is to ensure that it does not fail.”

  “Find Red for them and hope they only gank his spindly ass? That’s cold, Byron.”

  “Do not mistake me, madam: I am actually rather fond of the silly fellow, and there is no equal for his mixing talents. But I am rather fonder of my own relatively pristine, unburned self. Are you not?”

  QC’s brows knit in quiet consideration. She went silent for a moment, then spat resolutely and turned back to Byron.

  “Shit, maybe they’ll be grateful. Maybe there’s even a reward. So okay, we go with your plan: How do we find Red? I only know him as the adorably wasted asshole that chases imaginary squirrels outside my work every other day.”

  “My dear, quality custom Gas-mixing is a small world. There are a billion hacks in the industry, to be sure, but simply judging by the quality of his work, I sense that Red has some amount of pre-eminence in his field. It should only be a matter of finding another quality mixer, and asking them. Politely, or with ah…shall we say, salivary conviction?” He gestured at the discolored spot where QC’s spit had landed.

  “Somebody must have fucked my frontal lobe, because you’re making a lot of sense all of a sudden. But I don’t know many mixers, and not one of them worth a damn. You?”

  “Madam,” Byron answered in mock offense, “what kind of junkie would I be, to have only one source? There’s this wonderfully terrifying faux-colored fellow I know down below. He operates out of a gauche little barge in the Reservoir. A fellow Biographiliac, come to think of it, though he’s only into these vulgar twentieth century aborig-”

  QC held up a hand to silence him while she mentally calculated the likelihood of their various increasingly horrible fates.

  “Shit. It’s a terrible plan,” she finally shrugged.

  “Irrefutably,” Byron nodded with genuine enthusiasm.

  “I’ve got nothing better,” she added.

  “Indisputably,” he countered.

  “Shut the fuck up, Byron,” QC said, and raised one foot to push off the wall. She rolled her shoulders, exhaled the tightness in her chest, and slipped back into her swagger. She spotted an opening almost immediately, and slipped easily between the dead-eyed bodymodder with a lizard’s face and the prostitute clad only in shifting holograms - most of them stylized phalluses; an entire cloak of sparkling, glittering, erect cocks.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Red was feeling something implacable and disconcerting; an unbearable and alien lightness, as though his whole body had become vaporous, just waiting to be dispersed by the next stiff breeze.

  Red was feeling uncrowded.

  After they’d stepped through the immense steel portal — the sheer presence of the monstrously solid thing still throbbing dully behind him – Red turned to find nothing at all. Just a vast and wholly empty square.

  The clearing was forty feet at its widest point, and half that much again long. Its far end terminated at two wide sets of stairs surrounding a thin central path, which ran up at an angle for a few hundred feet, then jackknifed around a wall and disappeared from view. Red dimly recognized the flat, empty space’s dimensions as belonging to one of the central stairwell’s gargantuan landings, located midway between floors; the steps and promenade must have been the original walkways, as laid down untold decades ago. There were no jury-rigged tenements here; no micro-bars crowding the path; no food stalls suspended from the ceiling by lift cables. Even the telltale stink of the ‘Wells – an odorous slurry of cooking grease, graphite, sweat and decaying pressureboard – was conspicuously absent. This was merely one landing and the subsequent connecting flight of a central stairwell, in their original condition. Every inch of space in the ‘Wells meant a gallon of blood spilled, and whoever owned this stretch wasn’t even using it. The very concept made Red shudder.

  Two guards flanked the group to either side, their faces covered by smooth, blank slabs of reflective metal. The leftmost one motioned them forward, while the other stripped them of their weapons. He dropped James’ heavy metal resonance fan immediately, not anticipating its heft. A piercing clang rang out, only to be absorbed by the emptiness of the space. James stifled a laugh, but even Red thought the gesture seemed forced.

  Red was still staring numbly about, trying to spot the pixelated haze that might mark the whole thing as some sort of holographic overlay, when Zippy shoved past and started bouncing happily up the steps. Her rapidly disappearing form seemed comically tiny against the vaulting cathedral of the empty stairwell. The guards scrambled to catch up with her – obviously anticipating more of an adjustment period from the newcomers — while James and Red shuffled nervously after, unsure of what else they could do.

  The discomfort eased only slightly when the group crested the stairs, and found the next landing populated. Elongated, vertically-oriented buildings hugged the length of every wall, running unbroken up to the next flight. But the frantic buzz of the ‘Wells was still missing; what few people they passed on the stairs seemed to only risk the central pathway for short distances, crossing it at a brisk jog and quickly disappearing behind stooped doorways. There was a muffled buzz of life behind those walls, but it was apprehensive and subdued, like an audience sitting quietly in the dark, anticipating the show.

  They summited several floors in this fashion, each identical in appearance: Narrow upward path banked by two long, continuous structures with dozens of short doorways set into their facades.

  From his brief, tense commute through it, Red had gotten the sense that Zippy’s entire fiefdom spanned perhaps a third of the space between two floors; he had already lost count of the number of flights they’d taken since the behemoth door had sealed behind them. He was, in fact, struggling to recall a point in his life when he hadn’t been trudging painfully up an endless parade of dull grey steps, when they turned the corner on another sparsely populated landing and he found himself staring into infinity. Where the stairwell ordinarily turned back on itself and resumed its upwards tack, there was only a towering reflective wall – the same dull reflective material as the guard’s featureless masks – ascending straight up for several hundred vertical feet. The stairwell itself was just…gone.

  Or rather, the bulk of it had been erased – upon closer inspection Red spotted a single narrow flight continuing along one side of the structure, barely wide enough to fit a single man. But that was it: The rest of the path had been replaced by an unfathomably large and immaculately polished cube. A half-dozen floors of stairwell must have been knocked out to accommodate the thing, Red thought, idly wondering how he’d ended up on the floor, desperately grasping for handholds against the bare steel. He looked to James for assurance, but found the man glaring sternly at the ground, refusing to look at or acknowledge the wrongness of the space. One of the mirror-faced guards harrumphed arrogantly at the pair of them.

  After searching through his mental catalogue of altered states, Red recognized the encroaching tide of a panic attack. His heart felt stretched, threadbare — worn to a fragile sheet of loose fabric by years of careless abuse. He could hear its laborious beat; his ears and eyes pulsed with it. He giggled a little and ran through the PANIC mnemonic: PAss NICely, don’t try to fight it, PAck it tightly, Never Intensify it, Cool the blo-A sharp ping, quickly swallowed by the cavern. Another. And another.

  All four of them – James, Red, and the two mirror-faced guards – snapped to attention and scanned the cavern, searching for the source of the noise. One by one, their gazes fell to Zippy, standi
ng defiantly beneath the looming mass of glossy wall, her curved prosthetic clacking out a steady, regular rhythm as she kicked playfully at a door-shaped outline in the cube.

  “Can we go inside?!” She squeaked, and clapped.

  ***

  King Big Dick was a fat, hairy cylinder of flesh with a middle-aged man’s head poised precariously on top. His bare arms poked out of two holes in a delicate golden vest that seemed to have the texture of foil. His thighs were draped in a metallic platinum skirt; his calves wrapped in an ornate pattern of sandal straps, pallid flesh bulging between each loop and knot, porcine and vulgar. He actually wore a crown, Red noted in astonishment: A literal crown. And on top, a huge platinum phallus, joined together with gel-mesh – so as to allow some organic sense of movement – flopped and wobbled from its apex.

  “Like I said,” James whispered to Red, “bloke’s a bit unsubtle.”

  Red did not respond.

  King Big Dick sat cross-legged atop a huge, brass-hued chair in the center of a smallish room somewhere in the heart of the mirror-cube. The floorspace of the throne room was downright modest when compared against the vast, empty stairwells and towering walls of the exterior, but a sense of sucking absence pulled at the hairs on Red’s neck until he followed their urging upwards, and saw that it had no ceiling – the walls ran up the entire height of the cube, presumably terminating out of sight, somewhere unknowably far above. Red struggled with the urge to lay flat on his back again, like a turtle, and clutch at the floor with all of his strength.

  It was a struggle he lost.

  When at last the vertigo passed and Red regained his footing, King Big Dick and Zippy had been arguing for hours. The central debate seemed to revolve around Zippy wanting to organize a game of hide and seek, while King Big Dick wanted to rape her inside out. Zippy spoke in her childish singsong, and Big Dick answered with slurred, muttered growls, peppered with crude sexual propositions and demented tangents. It scanned as gibberish to Red, but he got the sense that, on some higher lingual plane, threats, bargains, pleas and honorifics were being exchanged. Though if hard-pressed, he could only say that he’d just listened to a man describe his genitals in exquisite detail to a ten year-old girl who really, really wanted to be “it” first.