Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  The felted surface was already digesting the syringe: Recycling the elements and shuttling the sample tissue off for analysis. Luka spun around to face his workstation, leaned down to dig through a box beneath his console, and came up with a small grey cylinder, about the size of a fingernail. It wobbled slightly at his touch. A portable drive — unfathomably high-capacity by the looks of it. Ordinarily, Red would assume storage that size was some kind of extensive media archive, but he’d seen it used before, and knew it was just one of Luka’s personal Operating Systems. Most users had the interface and hardware built together into the lower edge of the eyelid, the average setup being about the size of a pinhead. Luka, on the other hand, swapped in different external drives on the fly. He needed a lot of storage, to record all of his twisted Presence trips.

  The idea horrified Red - that a person’s entire BioOS could be lost, or crushed, or stolen. It would be like losing a part of your soul.

  Luka slotted the drive into a port cut in the meat of his palm, and his workstation flickered into life. The inner control circle was cluttered with old widgets, themeless icons, and the faintly glowing pathlines of Luka’s most commonly used shortcuts. His background was a chubby little boy with a familiar face. Red looked into his tiny little eyes, too small for the round head, and felt violently ill. Thankfully, a diagnostic screen snapped up and hid the child from view.

  “Jesus, Red, you’re practically virginal! Except for, what is this,” Luka pointed to a vaguely cherubic nanobot with two thick, webbed fins and goggle eyes, “a Vid-ee-yo! relay unit? Are you kidding me, man? They went out of business like, three years ago!”

  The display began to flash briefly, and at Luka’s command, a new window slid over the viewer.

  “Got it,” Luka scanned the readout, “Looks like a pretty standard strain of Presence. Pacific Northwest, I’d wager.”

  “Yeah, just your standard non-title bout,” Red confirmed, “18th century. That one with the little Indian girl and the old security robot.”

  “18th century? Nah, there’s no timestamp on this one. Looks like that section degraded. There’s only a location now,” Luka highlighted a string of purple and black, “And see here: This polymer chain? I have no idea what that is. Maybe a binding agent? If it is, it’s not a very good one. Look, it’s only bonding to like chains. But what’s the point of that? Why would Gas collect Gas? This is weird, man. What was the beta supposed to do?”

  “Just a trip extender. Didn’t even work,” Red said, momentarily forgetting his physical aversion and peering over Luka’s shoulder to watch the realtime analysis.

  Luka breathed a little heavier, unaccustomed to having another human being in his personal space.

  “Why would…?” Red started, but he’d already seen the answer for himself.

  “Are they stacking for prolonged effect?” Luka finished for him, “That’s retarded. That wouldn’t even work. What were they trying to do here?”

  “It’s not degrading,” Red noted, and a creeping tingle shot up his spine.

  “Holy shit,” Luka panted, “holy shit. He’s right. It’s almost stable.”

  “Fucking bullshit,” QC came forward to check for herself, “if that crap was in Red, he’d be passed out right now, tripping balls with a bunch of savages.”

  “No, like I said: The timestamp is gone. If anything, it would default to modern day – but you can’t do that with Gas. It’s…I don’t understand it, but look: It changes right here,” Luka rewound through the readout and slid a greasy finger up to point at something like a branching tree, collapsing. “It kind of falls apart, but it keeps absorbing other chains, trying to rebuild itself.”

  “Look, guys, I build my own mixes, too. But I mostly just stuff methamphetamines into other methamphetamines. You’re talking out of my motherfucking paygrade here,” QC said, turning away from the display.

  “This beta, whatever it is, it doesn’t have a half-life,” Luka supplied, not moving his eyes from the bonding chains, “or it does, but it keeps rebuilding whatever degrades. There has to be some nanotech here; no way is this purely chemical. No way. What the hell did you take, man?”

  “If you don’t stop nerding out and explain something, I’m going to twist your balls around like a balloon animal,” QC said impatiently.

  “Any Gas Red takes in — even miniscule amounts, just the stuff floating around in the air – this stuff uses to rebuild its own dosage, until it reaches critical mass. It gets all used up, and immediately starts rebuilding again.”

  “What happens then, mister?!” Zippy squeaked. She’d snuck up beside Luka’s chair, and was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him, staring eagerly up at the screen. The fat man spasmed and shut down, overloaded by the girl’s presence.

  “Then I go for another trip,” Red answered, “over and over. Forever.”

  James whistled appreciatively.

  “That’s why you’re being such a flaming drama queen? So shitting what? You’ve got an everlasting fucking gobstopper. Am I right? It’s free hallucinations for life. Pretty much the only thing you ever wanted,” QC said.

  She flopped onto the workbench across the room, and spat idly onto the floor. A wisp of smoke curled upward as the saliva ate through the protective veneer.

  “It degrades a little less each time,” Red answered, “It has to rebuild a little less. The time between trips just gets shorter and shorter until…”

  “Until there’s no downtime at all,” Luka managed to choke out a whisper, “just a permanent trip to whenever Red’s been going.”

  He reached out a shaking finger to gently stroke Zippy’s Hair.

  She broke it.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  They left Luka alone to sob in hysterical pain. Red was beyond caring if he reported them for the assault, but he doubted somebody with that much incriminating metasexual media would be calling Security on his own drug dealer, anyway.

  Red spoke in precise bursts: “Not fast enough. Exact cloning. Yes, from the degraded sample I posted. No, no partial fee. No, no partial work. Yes, the contract is for five minutes. Not at all. Non-negotiable.”

  The avatar on the other end of the vid-feed made a motion that Red assumed, from context, was supposed to be obscene, but the user had chosen a disposable free trial persona for this interaction. It had flippers instead of hands – less detail to render – and the cartoon penguin’s head did not map to the user’s facial features. Its expression remained blankly pleasant, right up until the feed abruptly cut off. Red thought sideways, and his control circle rotated on its axis. The next feed in his queue was already running — another trial persona. This one, a bright blue hippopotamus in a neatly pressed white suit: Horatio Hippo, Attorney at Law. Free trials were the easiest personas to acquire and the hardest to trace, and were therefore ubiquitous on Contra.Act servers. Red could never mentally reconcile the act of contracting high-end tech crime from a bunch of boisterous children’s cartoons.

  Red executed a string of commands so swiftly that the transition animations never got a chance to play out: Slides blinked into existence only to be immediately covered by other windows, feeds, tickers, accounts, and user profiles, which were, in turn, altered, queued up, then closed themselves, and replaced by others. In his funds buffer, Red deposited every remaining credit that the mysterious contact had issued him. And then, just to be safe, he pulled every credit he’d reserved for pending Rx releases: Two thousand units of Bixerol, a standing order to purchase any and all mescaline (should it inexplicably come available), several liens on the up and coming nootropics labs in the South Post Chinese sector – all cancelled. He funneled the money into the blinking transaction buffer, its action queue still blank. He drained his savings, pawned his garden hours, emptied his vitamin bank, and even hocked his apartment for a fraction of its worth. The number that stared unblinkingly back at him was ludicrously large, and it still seemed woefully inadequate.

  But Contra.Actors were accus
tomed to doing quick jobs for modest fees. An offer of the magnitude Red just posted was bound to receive some attention, even if what he was asking in return was unreasonable.

  Red could tell by the avatars who was serious, and who was just trolling: He instantly closed every trial persona from that point on. Likewise, he denied contact with any meme references, and disconnected from an uncountable number of crudely modeled penises. After a few minutes – a lifetime by Contra.Act standards – one gave him pause. The avatar was an empty sky of ozone blue, save for a dancing squiggle across the bottom. It was suggestive of mountains, somehow, in the most pure and abstract sense. It was the varying weight of the lines, he decided, they were downright artistic. He focused on it, and it expanded.

  Red became dimly aware of something moving in the distant sky: A tiny round speck, but something about its shape in relation to the mountain-line suggested immensity and power. Slowly, it expanded outward, growing in both depth and complexity. An intricate blueprint of intersecting lines circled Red predatorily, its outline the shape of an immense bird. Red vaguely recognized the schematics: It was a cross-section of the Four Posts’ Waste District. The oval of the central drain doubled as the raptor’s eye, the element recycling dump was its belly, and a wide, snaking tunnel formed its crooked neck. Its voice was jagged and jarring: A compilation of the tones produced by a thousand different engines under various states of load.

  “You’re fucked in the head,” it said.

  “Bye now,” Red replied, but the bird flapped suddenly, and the movement transfixed him. The cross-section didn’t actually move, it simply expanded and contracted with the motion of beating wings – the blueprints swept upward past the Wastes into the old garden pads, and down into the large, empty rectangles of the airship hangars.

  “Hey, I didn’t say I couldn’t do it,” the voice-construct protested, with a sound like the crashing of a metal wave, “I’m just making sure you know about the relative fuckedness of your head for even asking.”

  “I have been made aware,” Red answered, “Funds are in the buffer. Can you make the deadline?”

  “God, you really have no idea how good I am,” the bird spoke, and folded in upon itself. The whole image reduced in area, until it finally showed only the pitted circlet of the central drain again. The speck he’d first seen. It settled back into the abstract sky, just above the mountainous squiggle.

  Red minimized the BioOS to a single blinking dot in his periphery, and began the long and cautious process of uncrossing his stiff legs. He took QC’s proffered hand, but before she could pull him to his feet, another soft chime emanated inside his ears. Incoming feed. He crumpled back to the floor, to the dramatic exasperation of QC, who threw up her hands and stomped down the access corridor in a huff. Red pulled his BioOS down, and the feed resolved: Plain text against a moving background of electronic static. There were three lines: An address, an authentication passcode, and a single request: “Immediately.”

  His mysterious contact again?

  The address wasn’t a format that Red recognized. He pushed forward with his thoughts, and his control circle expanded out, revealing his tools radius. Red panned over to Mapworks, and the autofill pulled forward the last address he’d seen. A dense patina of overlapping grids flew upwards from his relative position. Mapworks sent a dancing yellow line through a series of jackknifes (the access corridors), until they hit an elevator, at which point they ran straight upward to a gargantuan, neatly segmented cube – probably a corporate worker’s township. The path underwent a short series of right-angled turns through the tightly regimented neighborhood, then intersected another lift, and shot straight upward until it disappeared into the open air.

  Whatever the address pointed to, consumer-grade Mapworks wasn’t licensed to display it; a fact that implied worryingly obscene amounts of money. Red minimized his BioOS, stood painfully, and turned to the others.

  Zippy bounced excitedly. James slouched, his arms slack.

  “Got an address. It’s in the Penthouses…somewhere. I can’t see where, exactly. It’s pretty high up,” Red explained.

  “How high is it?” Zippy asked, like the setup to a joke.

  “Past the sky levels. Maybe even the roof.”

  James stood a little straighter. No one else moved.

  “Fuck your girlish asshole!” QC’s awestruck outburst broke the silence. She stuck her head around the corner of the hallway, obviously sick of eavesdropping.

  Another chime, and Red numbly brought forward his BioOS: On the left side of the control circle, the Contra.Act information buffer verified that his requested actions were queued up and ready to execute. On the right side of the circle, his own funds pulsed softly in the finance buffer. Red confirmed the transaction, and the circle flipped — the actions and funds switching sides. Red scanned through the data, then rented a few minutes on a cheap, anonymous AI for verification of the code. It confirmed the data with a throaty cry of “GOOD TIMES!” accompanied by an endlessly cycling image of a kitten’s face breaking out into a smile.

  Red signaled Mapworks to overlay the path on his visual field, and the program slipped three different options for elevators into the edges of his vision, asking if he’d like to purchase or input an Authorized Passcode to unlock one. He brought up this last read message, and the contact’s code slid over automatically. All three options instantly blinked from red to blue, indicating he’d been approved for use. Then, one by one, each turned gold. A high priority override. The Auth Pass automatically commandeered every elevator near his level, each car dumping their other passengers immediately and sprinting down to meet him, on the off chance that he might need one. The pathline jumped and twisted, a dozen more ghostly compass lines stretching out down every conceivable direction. Nothing but options, everywhere he looked.

  Red picked one at random, and walked. He did not check to see if the others followed.

  His plan was stupid. It was risky, and hasty, and maybe even evil. But it was the only one he had.

  Amongst his few sparse virtues, forethought and caution did not number. Red’s thoughts, which should have been firing like an electrical storm, seizing onto any desperate, hopeful scrap of an alternative, were instead pure, still and serene. His only intention — a soft and throbbing thing, endlessly repeating like a snippet of pop-song through the muddy, indistinct static of his forebrain – was righteous malevolence.

  And then he heard the strangest sound.

  Red stopped, and moved his head in the direction of each of the five access corridors surrounding him until he placed the source. It was coming from a passage just behind him, and to his right. He took a step backward, and peered down the hallway. A distinct, metallic ringing was echoing rhythmically against the backdrop of the persistent, dull thrum of the filtration pumps.

  Footsteps.

  A gangly woman in an elaborate gold and blue suit rounded the far corner and advanced purposefully towards him. There was something off with her features; something uncannily familiar, but all wrong. She seemed to have QC’s lips, a shock of James’ bright red hair, and part of Zippy’s large, curving nose. To his horror, Red recognized his own eyes staring back at him. Then her whole head blinked, and became an opaque, pixelated grid.

  Red turned to run.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Victoria carefully modulated her pace — kept it nice, steady, and even. She felt the nervous energy build up in her limbs, and let the agitation scratch at her joints. She breathed deep from the diaphragm, touched the tips of each finger together to sync her hand/eye coordination, and focused on the measured timing of her own footfalls. It took a constant, low-grade effort, limiting each stride to sync up with Albert’s like this, but it must be worse for him: Forcing every pace just a few inches beyond the comfort zone of his stubby little legs. The vibrations at the base of her neck told her that the adrenaline boosters were starting to kick on.

  3 paces per second @ 30 paces distance to primary threat
= ~10 second ETA to optimal engagement grid. Shit. Still two steps ahead of Albert, with all threats already seeing past her scramblers. Using them was a bad call on Hanover’s part and she knew it: Not enough people in here for the facial recognition software to pull a convincing average, but the overall combat stats still favored deployment, so she used it anyway.

  All right, don’t panic. Back to the code: Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize.

  Identify primary threats: Two Caucasian males, one Arabic female, in grids 43-04C to 46-07C.

  The skinny guy in front (secondary objective, she recognized) was just standing there stupidly, giving her a cockeyed, inquisitive puppy stare — but the two behind him were already moving, shoving him back and whispering hushed orders. Twenty-four paces. Eight seconds. Breathe out.

  She hated syncing, even with a partner closer to her measurements, but she and Albert weren’t insured for engagement with an effectiveness rating of less than 97% today. Syncing pushed them up to a staggering 99.65. Sometimes, Victoria just did not understand the index. She had no respect for this particular Albert: He was all numbers and no balls. No creativity and no flair. And yet Hanover had never put her rating higher. She had no choice; she had to trust the algorithms. The algorithms did not fail. She would engage in two seconds, and if Albert kept to his sync, he would round the corner just in time to take the threats from behind right at their highest rate of panic and distraction. Only a few more paces, and she would enter the mid-range combat grid.

  Breathe in, three paces, breathe out, two paces. Check the ER: 99.70. Can’t ask for better. Engage.

  She reached into her jacket and smoothly withdrew an obscenely large, gleaming silver handcannon. The numbers in her display flashed red and dipped as Hanover scanned the non-regulation firearm, but only to 99.55 — well within operating parameters.

  She leveled the pistol down the narrow corridor. The secondary didn’t react, save for a comical widening of the eyes, but the other two immediately turned sideways, dropped into a half-crouch and held their jackets up before their torsos, concealing the exact positions of the vital organs. Her targeting software went haywire, trying to compensate.