Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  “There is simply no call for this kind of chicanery. Elevating a simple misunderstanding to the level of physical discourse is the basest possible option with which we are presented, and it is one by which I, personally, will not abide. Though the nature of our relationships vary…” The Penthouse Kid moved his whole head as he talked. The purple haze had crept all across the whites of his eyes, and started in on his pupils. Tunnel vision.

  Sera had seen his type before, the kind that gets harder to understand the more important it is to understand them. Punk had grown up talking instead of scrapping on the catwalks behind ‘tech shops. That primal switch in their heads — that fight or flight center — it got rewired all wrong. Whenever they should be throwing punches or running away so fast their calf muscles split off from the bone, this kind of veil came down over their brains instead, and random words started leaking out like somebody stabbed a dictionary.

  “Whether our motives are in service of that most pure and noble endeavour, friendship, or in the vital and utilitarian conscript of business, the one mutual goal we must all agree to share, for the shortest interim at the very least…”

  Sera shifted her hips on Little Deng’s lap to keep her leverage, and felt a broad, fleshy poke from below. Deng locked eyes with her and grinned.

  Fearless son of a bitch.

  The big grey man across the room, the one out of range when she and James had made their move, kept right on rattling off mono-syllables – no, stop, down, drop, wait – his mouth stalling until his brain had time to catch up with his eyeballs. It was taking a while.

  “Surely we can all agree, as level-headed and reasonable persons, that violence is, at best, premature. Far be it from me, good sirs and ladies, to besmirch the means by which you ply your bloody trade, but allow me to suggest – just suggest, mind you, as an impartial observer – that thus far we have seen no cause to believe an irrevocable schism of wants has arisen.”

  The grey man that James had by the eyeballs was emitting a soft, high-pitched whine, like idle electronics. He was shellshocked. He was untested product. He was done.

  The one pinned beneath the tip of her prosthetic leg kept trying to scrabble for purchase, though, despite the pain. He, at least, was a vet. She twisted the thin shaft between his third and fourth cervical vertebrae until the agony immobilized his arms, but as soon as she moved that leg, she knew she’d only get two or three seconds, tops, before he was back up and on her. She could probably sever his spine with her full body weight, and maybe put Little Deng down with her sub-dermal blade in that window too, but no way she could turn, target, and nail the rambling bastard with the gun, too. James would be ready for the move as soon as she made it, but he had the same battle scenario: Two seconds, minimum, to put down his marks before turning on the gunman. Any way she cut it, the grey man would have time to fire on one of them. But not both, and no guarantee he’d hit what he was aiming at.

  Shit.

  Even odds.

  No way to swing them, either. Sera would have to wait until the gunman bought himself a chance to think, and hope he thought wrong. Sometimes you just have to let a stalemate play out a bit. Let them change the scenario for you. In the meantime, Deng had started softly, slowly thrusting against her. She put her blade into him a little and beamed her most precocious smile.

  “Please!” The Penthouse Kid squeaked, “no need for bloodshed! If you see some fallacy in my assessment of the situation, by all means speak and allow the group a chance to rebut.”

  “You make your guy stop talking queer!” The grey man snapped, shaking the barrel of the great red pistol towards Sera, “it’s freakin’ me out!”

  “Nobody told you the rules” She said to Bryon, “so you can’t play this time, but you can play next time and you can be on my team.”

  “Mate, what the bloody hell are you trying to say anyway?” James spoke.

  “He’s tryin’ to say we need to chill the fuck out,” Deng had gone abruptly soft when her blade first broke the surface tension of his throat.

  “It should be our utmost priority,” the snob agreed, wiping snot from his nose with a little square. The fog finally broke through the barrier of his pupils; spilled over in thick clouds, like cream in coffee.

  “He’s a jackass, but even jackasses can be right once in a while,” Deng said, “You some bad motherfuckers, and we treated you like pussies. That’s on me. Won’t happen again. But it ain’t a thing needs killin’ over, is it?”

  Sera looked to James. She dropped an eyebrow in concession, and he raised one in agreement.

  “Bugger,” James said jovially, releasing the two grey men he had pinned, “I was just trying to give some constructive feedback on the quality of the service.”

  “Sorry mister! My mom says I should watch where I’m going but I don’t know how ‘cause I ain’t been there yet.” Sera piped cheerfully, hopping up and away from Deng.

  The man on the floor groaned thickly as she removed her leg from the interior of his spine, and there was a touch of wetness to it. She hadn’t positioned herself carefully enough. Sloppy. Might’ve cracked the root sleeve.

  “Still friends?” She adopted a precocious head tilt and pointed to the fallen man “that one’s got an owie.”

  Deng motioned with his head, and the grey man with the shattered teeth dutifully dragged him out of the room.

  Just the untested product and the rambling man, and she still had her blade.

  She shot James a quick, wide-eyed look, but he shook his head almost imperceptibly. Wanted to see how the peaceful option played out. Too fucking nice for his own good. Fine, then.

  “Mister, I got an owie too,” she showed her bloody hand to Deng with a quivering whimper.

  “Now, you say you’ve got naught but the best of intentions here, mate, but you’ve given us a handful of reasons to call that false. Let’s run them down,” James strolled casually over to the bar as he spoke, uncorked a thin green bottle and poured brown liquid into a glass. “You’ve still got our girl here tied up, for one.”

  Sera gave the bitchy-looking blonde a cursory glance; they’d never seen her before. What the hell was he doing?

  “For two, you show up to the party with drinks in one hand and guns in the other. Now, normally, that’s my kind of shindig — the only thing I love better than fine whiskey is bloody murder — but you don’t shake hands barrel first, yeah? And for three, you dragged our favorite burnout off without so much as a ‘by your leave.’ Love the atmosphere, but poor marks for hospitality, mate.”

  “Aight, aight,” Deng put up his hands, “I sent my boys off already. That’s your one. And I’ll even cut your pet cunt down here free. But she raided my fuckin’ lab and spit fire in my men’s faces. Two are in the lab now getting their skin scraped off and replaced. So if you don’t know her — and I don’t buy that you do — you might wanna put on goggles before you pop that gag out.”

  “That’s two,” James held up two fingers, then extended the third and wiggled it back and forth.

  “Red’s fine!” Deng protested, and rose from the couch with a squeak. He blushed. “That was the couch, I swear!”

  Real leather, Sera noted, or as good a counterfeit as to make no difference. And new, too. He’d banked some serious money recently.

  “Your boy made a deal for the beta he got in his blood, remember? Gotta get him in the lab before his metabolism goes south on us. It ain’t a thing.”

  The Penthouse Kid had taken to standing in the farthest, darkest corner of the room now that the danger was winding down. Actively hoping to be ignored. He kept throwing eyes at the blonde. Must have come together.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem having a word then, eh?” James sipped at his whiskey, closed both eyes, then opened one of them slowly, like a lizard on a hot rock. “If you’re fibbing me, though, I’ll cut your god damn tongue out and make you eat it. And that’ll be hard going, without a tongue and all.”

  James smiled benignly. Deng mere
ly laughed.

  Sera cut the blonde free, and pulled the ballgag from her mouth. It was like popping a cork from a bottle of vintage obscenities. She instantly bull-rushed Deng, swearing so quickly that the words were impossible to distinguish from one another. Sera rerouted her easily, grabbing her arm and leveraging her own weight to swing the blonde around and down. The girl ended up seated, rather abruptly, on the couch behind her. She blinked up at Sera, perplexed.

  “We gotta play nice now, okay, and maybe then we’ll get to watch movies!” Sometimes the child act even grated on her, but going without it was worse: Like standing naked in a crowd.

  The blonde nodded grimly, leaned over, and let slip a thick, membranous bead of saliva. It popped and sizzled on the priceless leather. Deng’s capacious smile melted right away with the deep red finish.

  Sera turned to Deng, spun him about, and gestured toward the far hallway. At its end was an open door, and beyond that a pure white polygon, so bright that it was impossible to resolve anything on the far side of it. Deng walked in front, followed immediately by Sera, her bloody blade resting on the back of his neck, where the cervical and thoracic spines met. Eleven pounds of pressure, she thought, like pushing open a heavy door.

  James followed behind her, the two grey men after him. He was still gripping the pistol he’d stolen in his right hand, held low at the waist. Sera made sure to keep her body slightly to Deng’s right, masking the weapon from the view of anybody on the other side of that light. They’d be blind for at least five seconds in there, and chasing blurs for another ten before their eyes could adjust. Fifteen seconds of disadvantage. Maybe more. Nothing to be done. She willed one foot to follow the other, and stepped into the blank canvas.

  Little Deng was either telling the truth, or just rock fucking stupid. He kept close to her little blade, moving hesitantly but steadily, even when they crossed into the shining white void and their vision dropped out. A smarter man would’ve jumped away and yelled for help the second the dayblindness hit. If he had backup in there, they would’ve had plenty of time to mow her and James down as they stood there, blinking helplessly. When shapes finally began to carve themselves out of the void, Sera made out four large, washed out blobs to her left. Better than nothing, but still impossible to gauge distance. Most likely the remaining, unaccounted-for grey men. There was a squat rectangle in the center of the room – a giant table or a desk – with three immobile flesh-toned masses laid atop it; one pink, two colorless. An uneven squiggly mass behind that bespoke a cluster of large and multi-sided objects: Medical equipment, furniture, supplies. Something thin and sharp moved among them.

  “What is this?” James apparently recovered before her.

  Sera’s vision finally resolved enough to see the problem: On the long, flat workslab laid two writhing grey men. Next to them was Red, completely limp, and completely still. His pallor was deathly, even for a man that looked like cigarette ash on his best day. Thick tubes slugged gunmetal ooze into his veins with fat, blubbery pulses. Beside him sat a clear cylinder full of his own blood.

  All of it, by the looks of things.

  Sera seized onto the back of Deng’s neck and locked her elbow up to push the little blade through as smoothly as possible –

  “No no nonono,” Little Deng screeched, “just wait! Just wait!”

  She froze on the point of puncture, a solitary drop of blood welling around the point of her blade.

  “Shit, bitch, he’s fine! He’s fine! He ain’t dead!” Deng had seized in a hunched position, every muscle in his body tensed, waiting for her strike.

  “No, he’s dead all right,” a skinny black woman with fractal-angled cheekbones stood up from her stool by the workslab, “but he’ll get better. Probably.”

  “Woman! Ain’t no time to be glib,” Deng admonished.

  She sighed impatiently.

  “We’re swapping out his blood for HD-MPAS: High Density, Multi-Purpose Extraction Solution,” the woman droned, and plucked a humming balloon out of the air. She tapped something on it, and the thatched surface of the workslab blinked, and was gone. Just a texture setting. In its place now was a smooth, flat screen, already being filled with diagrams of whirling atomic structures.

  “The best chance of preserving a complete sample of the prototype is the blood,” she continued, “but it may have been metabolized already. If so, we’ll need fat, muscle, organ and spinal fluid samples. That all takes time to properly extract, hence the solution: It acts as both extractor and preservative, removing and storing any trace of the beta in his system, while still allowing him to get where he’s going: We’ve taken his blood already, and we can flash it here, but you’ll need a lab with better facilities to remove the HD-MPAS when it’s finished gathering the beta. The solution is too thick for the heart to pump, but the ‘bots have their own glucose engines; they don’t need the heart to provide motility. He’s got more than enough Respirocytes in there oxygenating to make up for the blood loss - they’re actually more efficient than normal blood, to the extent that he should only have to breathe a few times an hour — but it’s not a habit that I recommend breaking. You see, it’s all perfectly standard and perfectly safe…for now. The sheer amount of ‘tech in his veins, no matter how top-end it may be, is going atrophy the organs eventually. But he’s got at least seventeen hours before cell damage starts, and another four before it becomes irreversible. So it is as I said at first: He is dying right now, but the solution’s already kicking on and he’ll be back around in a moment. The solution will need about twelve hours to complete extraction, and then he’ll need another transfusion back to normal blood, which will be awaiting him at our sister lab on…let’s see here: Level P4353, Lotus Pavilion.”

  “Smells like burnt face and new electronics in here” James noted, “this a new addition to your abode, mate?”

  “Came with the couch,” Little Deng smiled and shrugged, his hair clacking like a cocktail party.

  “Nice story. Too bad it’s bullshit,” the little blonde snapped, “he’s a fucking mule,”

  Sera tilted her head.

  “I’m a factory girl,” the blonde explained, “a glorified nanotech smuggler. When they pump a girl full of shit they need back, easiest way to ensure you do it is to put a kill switch in there. A day or two passes, and the ‘tech goes crazy, shreds your organs unless you get it out.”

  “I assure you, we do not need any of this back” the thin woman replied haughtily, “This isn’t a kill switch. It is a medical procedure, and standard practice in beta recovery.”

  “Bullshit again, you razor-faced dyke,” QC threw out the insult almost as an aside, “You said it yourself: He’s got about a day to get where you want him to go, or he’s dead.”

  “For what? A transfusion?” James spoke up, “I know a bloke’ll do it for two sandwiches and an hour of Roman Orgy Presence. Red doesn’t have to go anywhere.”

  “That’s…not exactly true,” the angular woman interjected.

  “Fucking called it,” QC laughed bitterly.

  “For optimal retrieval, the nanobots in the medical solution inundate every organ in every system. To remove them completely, you’ll need a facility equipped with extraction software that corresponds to their exact license key. One license key, two machines. That’s not my doing, that’s just medical software DRM. The other machine is, as I said, awaiting you at the lab in Lotus Pavilion. This solution will not respond to any other machine. It is nothing as sinister as a ‘kill switch,’ however – it is merely an anti-piracy measure.”

  “Get us a bloody Rx feed, then,” James sighed wearily, “If I’m going to the Penthouses, I’m going to need my formal drugs.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  And he is in a forest.

  A forest is a strange thing. Some people grow accustomed to it: They see the trees like walls — like objects or obstacles. But Red has spent his entire life surrounded by flexing graphene and unyielding steel; the overwhelming presence of life i
s disconcerting. A walk in the forest is a stroll through the belly of a giant beast. Everything is alive.

  Everywhere.

  The very Earth beneath his feet pulses with unseen root systems; the air thrums with insects and birds; the trees swell and contract imperceptibly, breathing. Die anywhere in the Four Posts, and sooner or later a monitor ‘bot will land on your skin, and maintenance crews will be notified to pick up and incinerate the body. Die in a forest, and it will digest you. You’ll be absorbed slowly, over a period of decades — but time is a flexible concept to a man who makes his living on Gas and mind-bending hallucinogens.

  Seen in timelapse, the effect becomes clear: Nature is a beast, and it eats.

  Some look at the trees and see a fence. Red looks at the trees and sees only teeth.

  What was this paranoia? An augmented effect of some chemical in his blood? It could be amphetamine, but there was some subtle rift between his body and the external world that didn’t feel like uppers. Was it the Gas? Both strains, Presence and Voyeur, imbued their users with a borderline unpleasant sensual clarity. The discomfort faded some with time and habituation, as all things do, but the sharpness was ever-present: Scents were stronger, and delineated too cleanly. They didn’t bleed into one another or waft away, as they did in realtime. Here, there was no uniform smell of forest. There was the mustiness of earth, and the crisp wetness of leaves, and the spiciness of bark — all entirely distinct and equally present. Every sound was played from a different speaker; every texture was against a different patch of skin. Whichever artist sketched this world had pressed down too hard on the borders, made things stand out just a little too much from one another.