Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  Byron numbly strode over to where QC sat huddled on the docks, and bent to pick her up. She slapped at his arms, clawed at his face.

  “It’s me! I won!” Byron said, “They are bested.”

  “Bullshit,” QC spat in amazement, “where the fuck did that come from?”

  “I think you’ll find me a little more formi-” Byron began to brag, but the floodgates chose that moment to burst. His voice terminated in a strangled croak instead, and he vomited onto her shoes.

  “Fuck. No, it’s okay. It’s over now. You did good. Listen, can you put out that light? I’ll take it from here,” QC slipped her hand into his reassuringly, and Byron practically shook with the relief of it. He led them cautiously over the shadowed, slumped forms, and snapped the spotlight off.

  “Jesus!” QC exclaimed, taking in her surroundings.

  “What is it? Are there more of them?” Sweat instantly sprung up through his skin.

  “Nothing. Just…wow. You really messed these dickheads up.”

  “I did? Will they be all right?”

  “I really don’t think so,” QC said, a skeptical admiration in her voice, “This guy’s got half his head busted open, and – did you make this other guy eat a piece of nanobar?”

  “Lord, no! I’m not a savage.”

  “Well, it looks like somebody tried to turn his fucking mouth inside out, savage.”

  “Ah, yes. Hm. He did cede rather quickly after the thrust. QC? Can we please continue? I…do not wish to linger here.” All the energy bled down Byron’s legs, and dissipated into the ground beneath his feet. He had never been more tired.

  “Sure, one sec,” she said, then led him over to a spot a few steps to their right, where Byron guessed the first man must have fallen. She made a hocking sound, and he heard the fat, wet thwack of something wet contacting skin. Another two paces forward, and the sounds repeated.

  “Okay cool, let’s roll,” she said cheerfully, and once again led Byron limply into the dark.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was no more than a brisk walk, but Red found the pace dizzying. After a night spent navigating first the darkened tunnels of the lower levels, and then the cramped, stifling ‘Wells, he had grown accustomed to taking quick, shuffling half-steps. His sense of what was an appropriate pace adjusted itself drastically downward, and now, traveling at a normal rate of progress felt like stepping onto a people mover — as if covering twenty feet in under a minute somehow defied the fundamental laws of physics that governed mass and speed. With King Big Dick’s influence, doors flew open without negotiation. Even after they’d left his own disconcertingly sparse, empty territory, other gatekeepers took one look into the impassive mirror slabs of his guards and tripped over themselves to throw their doors open. One tiny fiefdom, barely the size of a catwalk stall and tucked entirely into the upper corner of a single landing, went so far as to appoint a blonde-haired serving boy to their entourage. He rigorously avoided eye contact while tossing glimmering, shredded pieces of nano-fiber at their feet as they passed through the territory – all twelve horizontal feet of it. As the door swung shut behind them, Red stole a glance back, and caught the boy nervously vomiting on his own shoes.

  On the rare occasions that they did come across an uncooperative territory, the King’s men started hopping around in a primitive wardance, before stoically raising their long, narrow tubes. The opening at the bulbous tip of the staves was no larger than a screw, but they fired a thin, densely weighted projectile that unfolded just before impact into a large, flat discus. The discs were entirely geared for demolition, not lethality, but they tended to take large chunks of wall and the occasional support beam along with the offending door.

  And suddenly, Red understood why the territories opened themselves so freely: Even fiefdoms that felt no personal fear of reprisal from King Big Dick still felt a sense of duty to the general structure of the ‘Wells. Their homes were all built on top of, around, and inside of one other. Each territory stood only by virtue of the support structure of its neighbors; a communal sense of sanctity for the foundations was all that kept them from total collapse. The complete disregard for structural integrity that King Big Dick’s guards displayed was tantamount to insanity, and Red could not help but wonder just how much reprisal Zippy would face for their own earlier mad, destructive flight.

  The guard at point pulled up short, broke his slovenly gait, and stood erect to stretch. The break in protocol warranted a sharp, disciplinary elbow from his companion.

  “Fuck it all, man, we’re here,” the reprimanded guard snapped back, “you see anybody but us around? KBD hisself broke character back in the cube; I think we can relax a little in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.”

  “All right” the other agreed with a shrug, swiveling his distorted reflection face toward Red.

  He motioned with his head and stepped aside, revealing an old, rusted-out portal, partially concealed by a set of cracked, translucent plastic shelving. The hatch apparently doubled as the back wall of a small cable shop, and the guards wasted no time in knocking the stall apart with their tubes. The shop showed signs of fresh habitation: An open sheaf of smartpaper reeling an endless parade of InfoPorn; a half-eaten meal ration (the cheap, grey brick variety from the public ‘feed), and a dented aluminum cap filled with still-steaming liquid. The owner must have gotten word, or seen them coming, and abandoned the interstitial business rather than risk facing the guards. When the wall was cleared, King Big Dick’s men took turns wrestling with the archaic, wheel-shaped valve set into the portal. It appeared to have been fused shut with rust.

  But that shouldn’t even be possible, Red thought, nothing rusts – not accidentally anyway.

  Cosmetic mods and textured paints could be made to simulate the effect, sure, but nothing in the Four Posts could be made unusable by oxidation; the Integrity Commission would have had it destroyed years ago. If they hadn’t, the rain that perpetually fell from the stormclouds of Industry would have rusted straight through everything below in a scant handful of decades.

  James noticed Red marveling at the rust patches, and clarified: “It’s farmed, mate. They spray the whole thing with a mix of ferrite and electrolytes. Not the most effective barrier, but it sends a message, don’t it? Might as well be a skull and bloody crossbones.”

  “They?” Red asked.

  “Them. The boat people. Reservoir blokes. Never met one myself, probably because they do shite like this,” he motioned to the door, “to make sure we don’t go in there. So we don’t go in there.”

  Red glanced over and found the guards still struggling with the valve. One had placed both feet against the lip of portal and was supporting his entire bodyweight on the handle. The other had braced himself against the pressureboard wall of the shop; it bowed outward with the force. One of their hands slipped, sending both careening to the ground, cursing and grunting.

  “You’re silly, boys!” Zippy spoke up, a hint of timid giggle in her voice, “Why isn’t you using your boomsticks?”

  “Hey, look who’s contracted a case of the Crazy Bitches,” the guard snapped back, staggering to his feet. “Look: The deal was we get you into the Reservoir. That’s it. We’re going to open this door as quietly as possible and hope to God nobody notices we did until we’re halfway back to the Cube. I am not taking a stick in the eyeball for you runt bastards.”

  “A what?” Zippy tilted her head quizzically, like a puppy.

  “They’re savages in there, lady. They fight with spears. They can all see in the dark. And they scream like banshees when they attack. They ain’t human,” the second guard answered.

  “Those sticks go right through the armor, no matter how much you got on,” the first added, his voice dropping to a cautious whisper. “Some kind of prototype nanotech blades or something on the tips, I heard. Nobody else has anything like it, because it was outlawed before it was even released. Too dangerous to the structure.”

  “The structure is alway
s sound,” the other guard answered reflexively, touching the bare steel of the wall.

  “Whatever, Eddy. Long story short: Those big-ass sticks of theirs pass right through you before you even got time to bleed.”

  “He ain’t foolin’,” Eddy eagerly appended, “A buddy of mine went in there back when we were still doing supply raids in the early days. Says the boat people started whooping and hollering, just up and came out of nowhere. So the guy next to him raises his rifle to open fire, only to find his arm gone. Didn’t even notice until he went to shoot.”

  “Pardon, gents” James said, stepping forward, “mind if I have a go?”

  Eddy shrugged and stepped aside, while the other scoffed and threw up his hands: “You make too much noise, we ain’t waiting around to see what comes out.”

  “I’m a bloody mouse,” James said, dropping his duffel and rummaging inside of it.

  He finally came up with something that looked like a pint glass screwed into a showerhead, pointed it at the rusted portal and pulled the trigger, sending several thin streams of grey, shimmering fluid arcing out onto the hatch.

  Nothing happened.

  “Give it a tick: It disassembles steel and that’s not quite what this is. Won’t do fuck-all to something structure-coated, like walls or the hatch, but it should get through ferrite spray,” he said, then flopped down on a spool of housing cable and felt around for his cigarettes.

  “So….” The shorter guard, Eddy, began, but finding nothing to say, merely trailed off.

  “Where you guys from?” The larger one asked Zippy.

  “I got a fiffdom down on 642!” She announced proudly.

  “Oh yeah? I’m from the seven-aughts, originally.”

  They all stood quietly.

  “I spy with my little eye…” Red finally said, unable to bear the choking awkwardness.

  Even the guards laughed a little, and then Eddy’s head folded into itself, and he was gone.

  “DOWN!” The remaining sentry pushed them behind a panel of thickly braided support cables, and leveled his tube out at the corridor.

  The empty corridor.

  “What was that?!” Red tried to spot something – anything – to pin the danger on, but had no idea where to begin. He spun his head around and around, and finally settled for staring at the ground and trying not to hyperventilate.

  “No idea. Did you see it? His head! His head!” The mirror-faced sentry was trying, and completely failing to hide the panic in his voice.

  James wrenched a whirring blender – Red recognized it as the bio-weapon that exploded the Janitor’s freak man-bot down in the lower levels —and fired it blindly from cover. They all waited in terse silence, but heard no sickening bloody pop in response. James swore, then dug into his bag again, coming up with the slatted tube. He rose to a low crouch, stood motionless for a split second, seemed to reconsider something, then shifted direction and pulled the trigger. There was a deep, surprised scream — a man’s voice — and then James ducked back behind the panel.

  “Alpha Gentlemen,” he said, “Got their cloaks up. Watch the shadows – they don’t cast any, but if they step in front of one you’ll see it flicker.”

  “You got one?” Zippy dropped the girl voice; her tone was flat and serious. She flexed her leg nervously against the floor and contemplated something.

  “Could be. That should’ve unbound his external nanotech. Probably has a puddle in his ears and grit in his eye if he had subsonics or visual augments in. Might be we scrambled his brain for a few minutes, if it was hardwired. If so, all the fight’s out of him. If not, he’s short a few augments and probably right pissed about it.”

  “The door,” Red tugged on James’ sleeve like a lost child at the zoo, “Look.”

  Two wet chunks had fallen from either side of the rusted mound at the base of the wheel, laying bare the mechanism beneath.

  “Right!” James said, smiling, “We’ve got a bit of luck left, don’t we?”

  He pulled the mirror-faced guard over and growled into a fisheye distortion of his own face.

  “You. Mate, you’re going to stay here and hold them off, yeah? Provide cover fire long enough for me to shock that door open and get us through.”

  “Now why in the name of God’s throbbing cock would I do something as utterly stupid as that?”

  “They’re professionals, those blokes out there: They’re A-Gents. What do the Alpha Gentlemen do?”

  “They catch betas,” the guard answered automatically, reciting the commercials.

  “That’s right: They hunt down rogue beta-testers. That’s all they do. That’s all they bloody care about, innit? Are you a rogue beta?”

  “N-no,” the sentry ventured uncertainly.

  “Right again, mate. You’re on a roll. So as long as you don’t actually hit any of ‘em while you’re covering us — which is bloody unlikely seeing as how they’re invisible and all — they’ll come straight after us the second you stop and lay down arms, right? The most they’ll do is give you a rude stare or two as they pass. Or you could let us die here and now, and take it up with King Big Dick when his money doesn’t come through.”

  “Shit. Shit shit shit. Yeah: Okay. Okay,” the guard huffed audibly behind the mirror, and set his shoulders grimly, “ready whenever you are.”

  James pulled a heavy lump of black metal from the duffel, motioned for Red and Zippy to cover their ears, then pointed the fan at the stuck portal and pulled the trigger. In response, the metal door sang out in a high, oscillating voice, and exhaled a fine red dust into the air. James slapped the back of the sentry’s helmet, hard, and the man dutifully stood up to fire. James moved first, hurling himself headlong across the exposed ground. He tucked, rolled and came up already spinning the wheel-valve with surprising ease. There was a vacuum pop and a sharp intake of wind, followed by a soft, humid expulsion, like a giant, formless beast yawning in the darkness. Zippy took one short preparatory step with her good leg, then leapt and came down hard on her flexing prosthetic. She sprang through the portal with easy grace, and disappeared into the black beyond.

  Red crawled as fast as he could toward the opening, hands and knees loudly slapping against the tiles of the ruined storefront.

  When he was through, James followed, swinging the hatch shut behind him. He felt around for the mechanism, pushed Red and Zippy back from the door, and unleashed another roaring wave of pressure that resonated in Red’s long bones for several minutes afterward.

  “They won’t be coming through that door,” James said, when the thick, sludgy feeling in their eardrums subsided.

  “Where we goin’?” Zippy asked, her girlish chirp back in full effect.

  “Not a clue, darlin’,” James answered.

  It was impossible to place their relative locations in the darkness, even while speaking. They say deprivation of one sense makes the others stronger, but Red, having, at one time or another, been deprived of every sense there is thanks to a litany of experimental Rx mixes, knew that was a lie. It just made you more acutely aware how much you needed all of them.

  “I can feel one edge of the dock,” Red whispered into the pure, oppressive silence that only a large body of still water can generate. “It’s not that wide. If we get down on all fours, me on this side, somebody else on the other, and somebody else in the middle – we should be able to make our way along without falling.”

  “Stupid-head!” Zippy squealed, heaving an exasperated sigh.

  “You’ve got a better idea?” James replied.

  Red felt the dock shift when he crouched down. A few stubborn moments later, and there was another shift as Zippy followed suit.

  “James?” Red asked, beginning his hobbling crawl, trying to keep one hand on the edge of the dock and one hand in front of him.

  “Yeah?”

  “They really gonna let that guard go?”

  “Nah, they’ll light him on fire,” James answered matter-of-factly.

  “W-what? W
hy?”

  “Poor bastard wasn’t just around us when they showed up, he was fightin’ with us. A-Gents got to figure he had a reason for doin’ it, so that means he probably knows something, yeah? Letting him live would be a violation of the boilerplate non-disclosure agreement the Gentlemen sign with all their clients. That Eddy bloke, he seemed a bit of all right. Probably would’ve brought him with us. That other one struck me as a bit of a knob, though, so…”

  Red felt his stomach turn; Zippy laughed.

  Suddenly, Red’s forehead collided with something soft and bounced away. He felt blindly up along it with his free hand, finding its edge – some sort of narrow, fleshy pillar. Moss?

  “You reach any higher, boy, my wife gonna kill you,” a voice said, directly above him.

  Red pulled his hand gingerly away from the man’s leg.

  “Was wonderin’ when you gonna say something,” another voice sounded, from somewhere behind the first.

  “Like watching ‘em crawl,” replied the first, “’specially the girl.”