Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  She focused on the floor: A dull industrial green covered in a thin patina of scratches, each filled with the glittery graphite-colored dust of dead nanobots. The ceiling: Old-style LEDS, still hung in archaic pinecone clusters instead of worked into the steel itself. Their unfiltered protective lenses scattered the rays, casting a wan, draining, lifeless light. Unfiltered LEDs always instilled a sense of hyperreality in her: Details were too clear, shadows too sharply defined against the whitish blue haze. A broken strand of fuses hung between two small cylinders. Heaters? Filters? Whatever. They’d sat idle for so long, their original purpose was irrelevant. The nano-dust was thick in the corners; the cold was biting. A stray hair swung loose from her bangs, stubbornly refusing to budge from directly in front of her left eyeball. She could see it was split at the end. The dusty white carcass of a moth in the corner, where the access corridor turned. A loose thread - actual thread? As in cloth? The motherfucker was how rich, exactly? – frayed from one of Byron’s pantlegs.

  As if hearing her thoughts, Byron suddenly stopped and swiveled to face her. QC shook her head, willed her eyes into focus, and after a few muddy attempts, finally recognized the words he was speaking.

  “What?” She mumbled.

  “Are you quite all right?”

  “Yeah. Me? I’m good. The fuck is your problem?”

  “Terribly sorry, milady, I must have misspoke. I did not mean to imply that I had any sort of quarrel with you, I was merely requesting that you stay close beside me now, for the Reservoir sits just beyond this portal.” He gestured extravagantly to a nondescript, round, three foot door with a bisected wheel in the center. “It is quite dark from this point on, and it can take a good bit of time for one’s eyes to adjust. All the pathways are docks, you see - just floating on the surface – so a single misstep and one might find oneself in the water, nightblind and lost. I don’t suppose you know how to swim? No, forgive me, of course you wouldn’t. It’s ah…well it’s all rather unpleasant business, in a nutshell.”

  “Hold on,” QC said, and dropped into a squat against the corridor wall. She traced a series of shapes on the exposed flesh of her thigh, then pressed deeply. “I think I might actually have some nightvision strains still active. Or at least a white adjust program. Had to double as camera for a fucking perv expo last year. I think we’ve updated since then, but that pig bastard Henry never does a complete flush. Ah, there we - AHH! SHIT! SHIT ON YOUR FUCKS.”

  “Oh my! Oh no!” Byron swatted frantically at the air about his face, “what is it?! Moths?! Oh good lord, it’s moths, isn’t it!?”

  “God. Damn. It.” QC whispered through clenched teeth, her eyes squeezed so tightly shut that flashing orbs of color pulsed in the darkness there. “I just turned on nightvision in a well-lit hallway, dickhead. But good to know your killer fucking instincts are so finely honed. Moths, pussy? Seriously?”

  “Sorry, I ah…I saw a dead one back there and…” Byron let the thought trail off, and offered his hand to QC by way of apology. She did not take it.

  “Byron?” She asked finally, still clutching her clenched eyes.

  “Hmm? Oh! Apologies.” Byron took her arm and did his best to help her to her feet. He escorted her over to the hatch and gingerly leaned her against the wall. He struggled with the old valve, splay-legged and shaking like a newborn doe, but eventually managed to crank it, and the door popped open. The difference in atmospheric pressure sent a dry, chemical wind rasping down the access corridor. He steered QC through the opening, followed suit, and shut the portal behind them.

  “We’re in.”

  QC cautiously moved her hands away and opened her eyes.

  “Fuck me!”

  “Oh dear, no, this is hardly the time or place for-“

  “Shut the fuck up, Byron. It’s just a phrase. I didn’t know if the janky-ass nightvision strains would even work, but this shit is crazy. It’s like mid-day in the desert. I think I can see the fucking South Post from here.”

  “Fantastic!” Byron clapped his hands heartily and the sound echoed sharply across the water. The abrupt silence that followed was full of menacing attention.

  “We’ve just got to make sure to avoid those,” QC pointed to a thick slab of LED-woven pressboard atop a thin metal pole, “the light banks. See them?”

  “Not in the slightest,” he answered genially.

  “What, really? Jesus: They look like miniature suns to me. There’s one like a hundred feet to your left.”

  “I see a dim little dot in a vast abyss, shining pathetically.”

  “Poetic,” QC rolled her eyes, though the gesture was lost on Byron. “All right, listen, this is going to get complicated: The first thing to go on the more disposable strains, like this nightvision, is the generators. The little guys that turn glucose into energy – there’s no repair strain bundled in with disposables, so when they burn out, they’re gone. Starting them up over and over again is a lot more strain than just leaving it on. Get me? If I turn this bullshit off, it might not come back on. So when we get to those lights, I’m going to be blind. Just get me out of there and pointed away from them as fast as you can, and we’ll be copa-fucking-cetic. I’ll lead you in the dark; you lead me in the light. Cool? Cool. So let’s go.”

  Byron smiled eagerly, happy to have direction again.

  “Byron,” QC snapped, a bit too loudly, “that’s you again: Where the fuck are we going?”

  “Little Deng’s house,” he answered quickly, waving his hands in every general direction.

  “Oh, right! Little Deng. There’s a big god damn neon sign right over there. I’ll just follow that.”

  “Funny, I don’t recall a sign…”

  “Sarcasm, jackass. Which direction am I going, Byron?”

  “Ah…”

  “No. No you are not allowed to fucking say that. Do not ‘ah’ me you flighty little cockhole. Tell me you know where we’re going.”

  “This is not the usual protocol! I’ll typically send a polite message at least two days ahead of time, and when I arrive, two very large men grasp me in the dark and escort me bodily to my destination. It’s all very well put together,” Byron reasoned.

  “So you brought me to the god damn Reservoir – the Reservoir, Byron: Where the very concept of rape is too scared of getting raped to visit – and now you’re telling me you have no fucking idea where we’re going. In the darkness. In the god damn Reservoir.”

  “No! Of course not. I happen to know exactly where we’re going. It’s just the getting there that eludes me at the moment.”

  QC stared furiously down into the still, black waters. She fantasized about holding Byron beneath the surface, rebutting every one of his pleas to live with anecdotal evidence of his own staggering incompetence as a human being. She drew a deep, gulping breath into her belly, held it there, and slowly released it. She turned her gaze upward. The light filtering in from the city above was indistinct, but unbearable. A pure white void overlaid with a thousand dark silhouettes: The catwalks, cart-lines, bridges, and myriad other structures crisscrossed one another in vertical paths up to infinity. A fractal snowflake; a web of sharp, artificial edges set against the backdrop of a blank and shining void. Somehow, the web calmed her. It was all still up there.

  She turned to face Byron again.

  “Do you at least know what it looks like?”

  “But of course! It’s a horrid thing. A grand, three-story barge, all classless kitsch and tasteless novelty. On the roof, there’s a crude tableau of an oasis – trees made from chipboard and the like. If that wasn’t gauche enough, it is all painted up in the most garish scheme: Red, green, yellow – all utterly atrocious, really. Though from what I remember, it didn’t seem as though anybody else bothered to paint anything down here in the dark, so it should be a snap to spot.”

  “Nightvision’s colorblind, Byron.”

  “No offense, madam, but if you’re having trouble spotting the enormous pleasure-barge with the artificial forest on
top, I would not think the color scheme to be the deciding factor.”

  “Son of a whore.”

  “So you can dish it, but not take it, eh? Sensitivity, my dear, is more a vice than a virtu-“

  “Not you, cheesedick. I think I see the place.”

  “Fantastic!” Byron moved to clap again, but QC reached out and caught one of his forearms. He completed the motion with the remaining arm regardless, throwing off his balance in the process and falling to one knee. He looked like he might cry.

  “No. Not fantastic.” QC whispered.

  “Why ever not?” Byron asked innocently.

  “There’s not many people out right now: A few little pockets of grody-looking motherfuckers here and there, but they seem to want to stay out in the open as little as possible. It’s the same everywhere…except where we’re going. The place we want to go? I see what looks like a god damn fireworks show. There are lights everywhere. There are half-naked women dancing through an artificial forest, and oh yeah – about a dozen hulking motherfuckers with what look like spears just fuckin’ hanging out, plain as day.”

  “Well!” Byron exclaimed happily, “That sounds like our place, doesn’t it?”

  “No, dipshit, you don’t get it. Everybody else here is hiding in the dark. As far as the eye can see. There’s only one place where the motherfuckers aren’t hiding at all, and do you know why? Because they’re what everybody else is hiding from.”

  Chapter Twenty

  RED: Be more specific.

  HOWCANIHELP: How so?

  RED: “I can help.” That’s not helpful.

  HOWCANIHELP: How can I help?

  RED: Is this a spam AI? I swear to God…

  HOWCANIHELP: No. It is a legitimate question. What would be helpful? I can provide it. There is nothing beyond my means. It is that simple.

  Red’s eyes phased in and out of focus. A tiny Cyclops holding a shiny, squirming fox automaton eyed him balefully from the far corner. When he turned to look at it directly, it disappeared. Red sifted through his mental catalogue, looking for persistent hallucinogens with flashback potential but no euphoria – Prophetus, Focalene, that crap dose of Merit the SpaniTard insisted was pure vintage, or maybe just plain old Dimethyltryptamine bound to something fat soluble. Atomic structures slotted together like bricks in his mind.

  HOWCANIHELP: Hello?

  RED: I’m here. Sorry. Got some psychopaths-for-hire and hallucinated monsters after me. Busy.

  HOWCANIHELP: How can I help?

  RED: I don’t buy it. You’re screwing with me.

  HOWCANIHELP: Thirty six hours before full metabolization. That is what your post said. Whatever it takes to get you into my labs before that occurs, I can provide. How can I help?

  RED: Fine. Liquidity then. No earmarks, no traces, just non sector-specific credit and lots of it. Right now. I have to pay the king of penises not to rape me to death, thanks.

  HOWCANIHELP: Your account sigil, please.

  ***

  “Do you like to play with dolls?” Zippy asked King Big Dick, staring up at him with pure, unfiltered earnestness from her cross-legged position on the floor.

  “Yeh. Blow-up ones,” he grumbled, swilling from an ornate flask emblazoned with stylized phalluses.

  The subtext being that he was tired of talk, Zippy understood, and that there would be action taken soon. What action that was, she couldn’t say exactly – most of his threats were tinged with sexual overtones, but that might have just been his public persona coloring the meaning. He might not rape them at all; he might just slit their throats.

  “Or we could play soldier,” Zippy informed him, with her most harmless intonation.

  She intended for him to understand that they too were prepared to fight, but would still rather bargain, even if Red’s connections couldn’t come through.

  He spat and fiddled around inside his pants.

  That one was obvious.

  “My friends play with me and they says I hit harder than any boy and that I’m the best at sneaking. That’s called re-cog-ni-since.” Zippy thumbed the compressed spring-blade in her pointer-finger: A sliver-thin structure of folding calcium and keratin housed in the hollow of her first knuckle. It wasn’t very sturdy, and it hurt like a son of a bitch to get out, but in an emergency she could break the joint back and deploy a ten-inch bone stiletto. Judging by King Big Dick’s increasingly aggressive self-fondling, it was about to become an emergency.

  “It’s not my favorite game, though” she conceded, and he smiled lewdly back at her.

  “Your friend looks like a faggot,” King Big Dick noted, by which he meant that he thought Red looked like a faggot.

  “His dad will beat you up,” she replied instantly, hoping to imply that Red had some sinister, mysterious connection in the upper levels. Which, if he was anything like the Red she remembered, he certainly did not.

  That miserable ratfuck bastard.

  Shows up in her tidy little fiefdom one day asking for help with his goofy, lopsided smile, and in a single afternoon, he undoes years of political manipulation. The sexual favors, murders, thefts, arsons (well, some of the arsons anyway; a few were just for fun), all to secure her territory, and now she could feel her fiefdom shrinking by the minute. Her inbox had been pulsing with activity from the second they’d set foot outside of her cottage, but just she didn’t have the heart to check the updates. Not until the job was done, at least. Though it didn’t really matter, she could feel the losses in her gut already: Blowing a walkspace through a neighboring territory was an act of war, plain and simple. Even if she appealed to the zoning council, she’d surely have to concede feet – entire fucking feet! – of cubic space just to settle jagged nerves.

  “Your fairy friend haddaminetageddwhuhedunndid,” King Big Dick said, the sentence trailing off incomprehensibly into his flask. He hefted his stinking bulk from the throne and, platinum phallus-crown waggling obscenely, waddled toward the doorway.

  “Okay,” Zippy sat up, her one good foot asleep, and limped dutifully after.

  Do something right, Red. There’s a first time for everything.

  ***

  Red’s account sigil was a rune made up of two interlocking triangles inside a stylized eye, with three frayed spheres encircling it. He thought of tracing its contours with the blinking cursor, then focused on it turning opaque, then thought nothing. Nothing, in its purest form. No list of side-effects reeling by, no categorization charts, no atomic structures — even the tiny Cyclops was gone. He was utterly alone, left without even his thoughts.

  …

  Wait, should he be alone?

  Red scanned the room, wincing at the tight pain it brought to his neck.

  James was gone. The guard too.

  That seemed unlikely. Red wasn’t exactly certain of the protocol for being kidnapped and extorted, but he was fairly sure it wasn’t standard modus operandi to be left entirely to your own devices with an open terminal. He ran through the list of possibilities: Could he run? His lungs were weak, and his legs were half-useless in the best of times. After fleeing that freakish man-bot-thing in the tunnels, and then the sharp, persistent climb of the ‘Wells, he wasn’t sure he could move them at all. Call for help? The terminal was certainly being monitored, but Red’s BioOS was equipped with two dozen Virtual Private Networks for just such an occasion. Who could he call, though, that he already hadn’t? The bastard Luka was already leaking the news that there were A-Gents after him. Nobody would even open his messages now, for fear of falling under the Alpha Gentlemen’s phosphorous-happy blanket Non-Disclosure Agreement. And no authorities, not even the private ones, served the ‘Wells. So Red opted for the path of least resistance: He folded his hands, sat quietly, and waited for his kidnappers to return.

  An optimistic blip vibrated in his inner ear, as his account sigil faded blue and flipped over, showing that a pending transaction had just completed. Red, figuring his mysterious benefactor was just some troll getting a few
pathetic, cruel kicks at Red’s expense, had asked for a frankly ludicrous sum. He picked the number specifically because there was no way the pretense could continue: The punk couldn’t drag out the charade after seeing that number; he could only disappear. And then it would be over, and he could release the tiny amount of hope he’d kept caged in his chest, fluttering around meekly at every locked window, every rapidly closing door.

  An amount twice what he’d requested glowed steadily in the pulsing confirmation box. Plain white text in the memo section beneath the transfer read:

  Just in case.

  Red focused on breathing, blinking, and remaining upright. And he felt himself failing at every single one of those feeble tasks. Then a portly midget in a mechanical Tuxedo, one half of his face burned – divided right down the middle in a perfect vertical line – walked through the ceiling, did a jaunty little dance, and disappeared into thin air.

  Red brought up the Rx database, and tabbed over to hallucinogens.

  ***

  James had liked the guard.

  There was something familiar and easy about him. You can find blokes like that in every line of work, even the foul and murderous ones: Happy, trusting, just doing their job and not asking for anything more than a few hot meals, a roof, and maybe the occasional pint with the boys.

  James had liked the guard, and so he’d made it quick.

  He ducked into the hallway the instant the mirror-faced sentry turned his back. James leapt up deftly, wrapped his forearms around the man’s neck, put a foot on the back of his knee and stepped down with all of his weight, while simultaneously twisting his own body up and away. The guard dropped, his neck twisted with a quick, sick burst of soft pops, and it was done. James was grateful for the reflective surface of the mask.