Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  “The fuck’s with him?” QC asked Zippy.

  Once the hatch had closed behind her, and she was safely surrounded on all sides by the relative density of the mesh walls, the paralyzing tide of fear within QC receded. It was still there, though; giggling at the outskirts of her mind, waiting to come gleefully skipping back in at the slightest invitation.

  “Nothing, silly! Zippy answered. “Red likes to play imagination, that’s all. Ain’t you never played imagination? What are you, dumb?”

  James and Zippy had promptly commandeered a small corner of the elevator for their little group, while all around them, passengers were locked together like cigarettes in a pack. Most with barely enough room to sit, and some not even that: They slept upright with their arms looped out through the flexible mesh cells of the walls. Initially, James had staked out just enough territory to maintain a controlled perimeter, but the relative darkness of the lift’s interior triggered something in Red. He began raving about machine faces in the dark, and tore at the floor until his fingers went bloody. As soon as they’d gotten him settled down, Zippy stood, turned, and vaulted off of her Bounder into the back of a pale, cosmetically freckled fellow in a soiled pink cape. He bent nearly double before launching away and skidding to a halt atop a group of neo-fascists with identical blonde mohawks. One of the Neos got to his feet as if to fight, but James reached inside his jacket – a casual motion, as if going for a business card – and came up with something resembling a long, thin steel bolt. He hurled it nonchalantly into the air, where it unfolded and propelled itself with uncanny accuracy into the punk’s temple. The kid sat down abruptly, made a short sobbing noise, and lapsed into unconsciousness. A small but intensely courteous area cleared around them, after that.

  Red had been the same ever since — motionless, sweating despite the cold, his pupils swallowing his entire eye.

  Two strips of dappled sunlight shuddered into existence against the west wall. They chased each other in a vertical line, strobed briefly, and vanished — only to appear again, larger, two feet to the left.

  Red tamped his breathing down, flat and narrow. He felt the solidity of the floor beneath him. He let his eyes go lax, and tried to mentally catalogue every unfocused shape in his field of vision. It was an old psychological meme that Beta testers used to control trips going off the rails: Focus intensely on the shapeless everything. Do not consider the implications of anything, just populate your cognitive world entirely with blurry, formless entities, and ride out the trance until the body has time to process and normalize.

  Years of experience beta-testing dangerous new Rx mixes — both professionally, and just because it was a Tuesday — had kept Red from employing such base methods for as long as he could remember. Normally during a bad trip, he’d simply ping his BioOS and scan the chemical readouts.

  Ferrosotrine 3:8

  Dimethyltryptamine 1:6

  Aspirated Euphorime 1:3

  The display would read, in small, flashing blue letters. And Red would be reassured; it was just chemicals being chemicals.

  Red had pulled up a chemical readout immediately after the first hallucination: A little girl standing uncertainly in the middle of the cargo-hull. She had metal pinchers sticking out of her face. She pointed at Red and screamed.

  He scanned it again when a group of stooped figures scuttled straight through the family sitting beside him. The figures paused for a moment, then one lifted a leg – a leg that terminated in a thousand bright and whirling insectile limbs instead of a human foot – and placed it against the wall. They scurried up the curving surface and disappeared through the ceiling.

  Red finally closed the display, after the matronly old woman smiling directly in front of him dropped the blanket from her shoulders, and revealed a whirring mass of mercurial pupae clinging together in roughly the shape of a human skeleton.

  The readings always came back the same, anyway:

  Trochoidal Sopoforine 3:5

  Thorazine 1:10

  Chlordiazepoxide 4:15

  Methylenedioxymethamphetamine 1:3

  It was Red’s standard Hyper-Anxiety Mix: The one he’d frantically slotted against his wrist immediately after waking on Little Deng’s table.

  There were no other active foreign agents. There was no chemical impetus for these hallucinations – or at least, nothing that his system could catalogue.

  So Red sat, and he watched the lights chase forms through shadow. He considered the world around him, but did not think. He saw, but did not understand. He especially did not understand that thing over there — just the upper torso of a man, his entire lower half nothing but a tangled mass of cables and jacks — attempting to plug itself into the mouth of a comely Asian pre-teen. That, he did not understand. He did not understand it as hard as he possibly could.

  Red pulled away from himself and cleared a space to think:

  Ordinarily he’d chalk something like this up to undocumented drug interaction, but Deng’s acute-boned technician had done a complete transfusion. At first, Red thought she’d spiked him with Presence while he was under – it might start to explain that whole forest fiasco — but his BioOS scan was perfectly clear of all chemicals, save for the infinitesimal traces of inert Beta-Gas still stored in his fat cells. The tech had pulled all of his blood, every last drop, and packed his veins with gunmetal sludge instead. He knew that to be true, if for no other reason than the god damn Hyper-Anxiety Mix wasn’t working. The HD-MPAS that pumped through his major arteries now instead of blood was a vicious form of automated leukocyte: Any foreign agent the solution found in his body would be devoured, disassembled, and have its core elements reassigned so as not to interfere with the extraction process. It was already hard at work, pulling the Beta-Gas remnants from his fat and spinal fluid, shuffling them down to his colon, and repacking them into a microscopic brick to be passed on command. Nothing was making a trip the other way; nothing was getting to his brain…unless it was already there.

  And even if something had stored itself in his neural tissue, no drug Red had ever heard of caused hallucinations with appropriate physical manifestations: The lacerations, the bruising, the bloody nose. Throughout his illustrious beta-testing career, Red had bled from the eyes, vomited up chunks of bone, and orgasmed through his fingertips, but nothing ever clawed his damn face open. It just wasn’t possible.

  But it was okay. Because they were on their way to see Luka.

  Luka owed Red. He owed Red for his contacts, for his mixing services, for his all-hour deliveries and custom anti-addictives — but most of all, he owed Red for his continued silence. Not much was frowned upon under the influence of Presence – it’s hard to police a shared hallucination - but any trips within the last hundred years were strictly forbidden. The law was ostensibly to prevent theft of Intellectual Property – a quick trip back a few weeks to the right factory at the right time, and you could steal any patented mix before the inventors even knew to protect it. But there were worse perversions to be had from in-lifespan time travel. Even the Anthromorphs thought meta-molestation was sick.

  Luka practiced it almost daily.

  Red didn’t exactly condone the practice himself, but Luka was a Middle Industry engineer: He always had access to new drug-feeds, and as a hopelessly addicted self-molester, he always had need of Red’s services. That left Red with a lot of leverage, and right now, he had a use for it.

  A slender, seven foot tall blonde separated herself from the crowd of huddled passengers and drifted towards Red with preternatural grace.

  He did not comprehend her. He did not understand her. She was a shape; a form without function.

  He did not understand that her limbs narrowed to flashing metal points with every step. He did not comprehend when she bent to him with a kindly smile, and slapped him hard across the face. He did not understand that her flesh molded itself against his face like gelatin, then halfway through the strike, snapped into cold, unyielding metal.

  Red
did not allow the woman’s existence to affect him. But the world went black anyway.

  “Jesus!” A sharp crack awoke QC from her fitful slumber and her dreams of being sucked outward into the freezing vastness of the open sky.

  Something was resting limply against her. She gritted her teeth, put the rage aside for a moment, and decided to see who’d struck her before melting their fucking faces off. And there was Red, lying in her lap, a large red welt blossoming across his face. Dull grey liquid oozed from one nostril.

  “What the fucking fuck?!” She gestured wildly at James, who was glowering at her disapprovingly.

  “What’d you hit him for?” He asked, bending down and lifting one of Red’s eyelids.

  Apparently satisfied by what he saw there, he dragged Red to a supine position and propped his head up with his own checkered green blazer.

  “I didn’t! I was sleeping and then he…god damn headbutted me, I guess? Fuck my ass!” She swore, reaching up to feel at the knot growing on the side of her head.

  “Don’t look at me, love. Zip and I were standing guard, all dutiful-like. If you didn’t club him, though, who did that?” James tilted Red’s face to one side in the dim light, and QC saw something like a handprint there – but massive, and with webs stretching between each finger. “There’s no one else back here…”

  “Well, I don’t shitting know, do I? What’d I just say? It’s not like I…oh,” QC looked around with building dread. “Oh. God’s. Shining. Asshole.”

  “What?”

  “We’re the only ones back here!”

  “Riiiight….?” James rotated his wrist, urging her to get to the point.

  “Then where the jumping fuck is Byron?”

  “Who’s that now?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Who am I?” Byron asked, tittering.

  He’d been repeating the query incessantly since he’d hit the turn – the phase of the high when Gas inundates the parietal lobes and shuts down self-body recognition.

  “Primary objective,” Albert answered flatly. He was filing his nails with the rough-shod underside of his standard issue air-mesh woven pistol.

  To his credit, Byron had tried to run when he first realized they were A-Gents. But by then, they were too close. They’d approached him with their facial scramblers up: The software rendered their features dull and unremarkable. It scanned the crowd around an A-Gent for the mean average facial structure, widened or narrowed their eyes based on the surrounding standard, remodeled skin color into an unremarkable hash of textures — but they could only get you so close before the mark started focusing too intently on the details. That’s when the scramblers break down and throw up a pixilated, opaque emergency mask. That’s when everybody runs.

  When Hanover first alerted them to Byron’s location, Victoria had advocated for full-body cloaks and balance-shattering rounds. Overt tactics again. Albert reasonably pointed out that the cloaks drained an awful lot of power, were only good for short bursts, and that balance-shattering hundreds of commuters seemed like a tad bit overkill for one lost, stumbling Gashead. She sputtered unhappily about it, but Hanover’s assessment backed Albert’s call.

  He knew this this particular Victoria’s type all too well: Grown up on the vid-feeds with too many action tropes bouncing around her head. She fell in love with the concept of the mysterious, deadly, refined A-Gent: Some Albert or Victoria uncloaking right before a fulfillment — seemingly ripping through the fabric of reality itself to burst into a deadly whir of action; woven pistols blazing, filigreed top hat glinting in the light of a dramatic explosion — only to blink out again a second later, leaving behind nothing but a smoking corpse and a glimmering Calling Card embossed with the trademark golden ‘A.’ This Victoria only wanted to live up to the ideal. She wanted to play at the fiction she’d been fed, and found that the reality was too often disappointing.

  Now, instead of a dramatic footchase through some filthy, crumbling Grounder’s slum, exchanging fire with IP counterfeiters while flickering in and out of visibility and dancing, vaporous, through the crowded press – she was gently tripping junkies with their own feet on a crowded lift dock, and saddled with a squat, plain-looking middle-aged Albert that only wanted to run numbers. He understood her frustration, but there was little to be done about it. This was not a vid-feed.

  At least they’d bagged their primary: They had taken Byron in less than five seconds, and with no resistance. When his amethyst-clouded eyes finally placed the scrambled faces for what they were, it was far too late. He made a pathetic, scuttling dash for a few paces, before Victoria charged forward and kicked his heel to the side. Byron stumbled, and slowly melted to his knees, puddling on the floor in a plaintive, limp heap. When they picked him up, he reflexively asked for Gas, and Victoria slapped the card Hanover had sent them into a C-Ring Respirator. To his earnest gratitude, it was even his preferred brand: Voyeur strain // Biography // February 13th, 1810 // Athens, Greece // George Gordan Byron. As soon as his BioOS interfaced with the dispenser and confirmed the mix designation, Byron immediately quieted and shoved the inhaler, a bit too hard, into his own nostrils. The soft thump of vacuum pumps kicked on to seal the outer ring, and he drew in a series of great, gasping huffs.

  Unfortunately for Albert, experienced addicts tend to have longer turns – that period between worlds, where figures and landscapes bled into one another, fading in and out of the dull violet fog that boiled in their periphery — and it almost always left the interstitial user confused, euphoric, and extremely, rampantly annoying.

  “Who are yooouuuuu!” Byron cooed, slapping at the empty air in front of him.

  “How long is this going to take?” Victoria was standing eight inches behind the lift attendant, two inches to the left of his center-mass. Optimal distance to engage grappling and limit the effectiveness of drawn weapons (assuming a right-handed target). It was an awkward invasion of personal space, made all the more conspicuous for the cavernous cabin of the corporate express elevator, empty save for the four of them. The attendant was reminded of her presence when she spoke, and instinctively tried to move away. Victoria followed instantly, maintaining the exact numbers her training dictated. They waltzed a tight, slow, uncomfortable dance; her front to his back.

  “28 minutes, ma’am,” the attendant answered, trying not to turn his head. “We’ve got clearance through all the pedestrian tolls, but Industry freight still takes priority at crossings. Usually jams up for a few minutes around Lower Industry, where the Material Docks are, but Middle is mostly factories and labs. Straight shot to the Penthouses from there.”

  “Half an hour,” she spat, and the man jumped at her tone. “What is this, the stone age? Albert, primary threat.”

  Albert sighed, but knew she’d only get worse if he didn’t play her game.

  “Primary objective: Diminished motor capacity, limited field of vision, three minute ETA to full Gas engagement. Assuming no incentive for Victoria to abandon contract,” she winced at the barb, and he tried to keep the satisfaction out of his tone, “threat priority goes to remaining variables, no matter how inconsequential.”

  “Primary threat, Albert,” she said coldly.

  “Lift Attendant,” he obliged.

  “Hear that?” Victoria whispered viciously into the lump of scar tissue where the attendant’s left ear should’ve been, “we’re ready for you.”

  She might be more right than she knows, Albert thought. That scar tissue; an odd injury. Intentional self-maiming? Could be a ‘Loon, though he doesn’t look old enough for the part. Still… there was some talk of resurgence in the movement.

  Albert stepped back two paces, into the optimal firearms grid.

  “Ma’am, please, there’s nothing more I can do! This lift runs on shared lines with both commuter and industrial platforms – no matter what your clearance is, we simply cannot take priority from Industry! It’s just not zoned! I promise you, the Chairman himself could not get to our destina
tion any faster.”

  The attendant stepped forward a few inches, and Victoria quickly followed, silently grinning into the back of his neck.

  “Besides,” the operator continued, “you can never tell with the Gas. My cousin went under one time, and some Drillers popped the lock to his place, tried to roll him. He swears he was past the kick, already building himself a nice, cozy fire back in 20th century Montana. When he came to, he was holding three severed fingers. Drillers weren’t anywhere to be seen.”

  “Oh, watch out for the junkie, huh? Is that what you’re saying?” There was venom in her voice.

  “No, nothing like that,” the attendant sensed a trap, but couldn’t see the spring. “I use, myself. Daily, even. I like the Civil War. Hell, once a month I treat myself to some Presence and fight for the South. Everybody’s got their thing, right?”

  “See that pitiful, disgusting addict over there? The guy who, according to you, is just a sad sack of shit that we should stomp into the floor, just to be safe – do you know who he is?”

  “No, I-“

  “That worthless junkie is our primary objective. Rated non-combat. Not to be harmed, under any circumstances. So he’s out of the equation, isn’t he? Do you know who that leaves as our primary threat?”

  “M-me…” The attendant stammered.

  “I’ve got six killing blows queued up right now, specifically for a man missing his left ear. Albert, what’s first in your queue?”

  He grimaced, but answered:

  “Metalstorm rounds, currently targeting the lower body. Intended amputation, but possibly non-lethal,” he said, trying to comfort the man, but it only seemed to distress him further.

  Albert knit his brow, but held his tongue. The young ones they vetted through these days were so pointlessly aggressive. They always forgot that the single most important aspect of the training – the algorithms, the theorems, the categorizing, the grid defining, the threat-prioritizing – was to isolate and remove potential enemies before they had a chance to react. All the tough-guy talk and overt combat stances were essentially self-fulfilling prophecies. Threats would become threats, once you told them they were threats. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to admonish her. Schisms lowered effectiveness ratings, and despite how grating he found this particular Victoria, Hanover had the pair of them operating at a steady 94.6% all afternoon.