Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  “Let me hear it,” she said. Her mouth felt disconnected. Like her voice was coming from a speaker somewhere above and behind her.

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  “Zip. No. That can’t be the last thing you hear.”

  “I can’t think of anything better,” she said, and she hoped she was smiling at him.

  “I bloody love you, Sera,” James said simply, in a voice high and cracking, like a pubescent chipmunk.

  She died laughing.

  ***

  James filled his chest with air that had suddenly gone stale. He drew a hand across Sera’s lips, then gently moved her feet from his lap and set them aside. He stood, carefully tucked the emerald bottle into her hands, and moved briskly away, retracing his steps.

  There was nothing in him.

  No thoughts, no plans, no rage; just a dim sense of purpose and a frantic energy collecting in his fingertips. He felt like his hands could pass through walls. Like the steel would melt as wax beneath his touch. He kept them balled into fists. He kept the energy for himself. He kept walking.

  He came upon the bloody intersection where he’d fought with the older A-Gent. But the man was gone now.

  Well, he’d had to come from somewhere, didn’t he?

  It was a three way crossroads: One path led back to Sera, one led off in the direction Red and the blonde had fled, and the other…

  A vivid tableau of Zippy blinked on in his head. Her blood spilling out across the grating, down into the sluice below, and flowing away, into the filtration plants. They would suck it dry, pull everything that was her out of it, and piss it down as filthy rain on the floors below.

  A quick surge of madness arced up his arms, trying to form a circuit to his brain, and he knew that if he let it close, he would become a howling, sobbing mess of grief.

  And grief does not put bullets into heads.

  James swallowed hard, found the emptiness again, and kept moving. He retraced the Albert’s path down a long, straight corridor, each side lined with a series of staggered alcoves. In a few of them were strobing terminal screens, blinking requests for authorization codes, and complex, scrolling graphics — but most lay dormant. Blank, black spaces that swept past and blurred together as he strode purposefully down the accessway.

  And then he stopped.

  He took two steps back and peered into an unremarkable little cube, dimly light by the soft green of some enigmatic filtration chart.

  Byron waved sheepishly from the floor. He was barefoot. His shirt was untucked and hiked up above one arm. A column of dried drool flaked off of his cheek. His eyes were shot through almost entirely with rolling velvet clouds. If he was out of the trip, it was only just.

  “James?” He asked uncertainly.

  “Yes, Byron.”

  “What’s happening?” He hefted his slight frame up onto his elbows, and swiveled his head with the dreamy slowness of the stoned.

  “A-Gents. They killed Se-“ he started, but caught himself. “They killed Zippy. Red and the other one are gone.”

  “QC,” Byron supplied.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Byron, I’ve got to find me a gangly bitch and then I am going to kill her for a very long time,” James turned to leave, and almost missed the words that Byron yelled after him.

  Almost, but not quite.

  James stopped dead, and waited for the voice to repeat.

  “I know where she’s going,” Byron yelled again, crawling out from the murky alcove and squinting up into the bright industrial LED panels. “I think I can take you to her.”

  “Brilliant,” James replied flatly.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The doors on the ancient freight lift had to be raised manually, with a pair of handcranks. QC had little difficulty with the operation, but Red seemed to be exerting himself tremendously; his legs wobbled and shook like a newborn calf.

  The doors skittered to a stop, only halfway up, and Red sat hard on the floor, panting. QC locked her handle in, then walked over to Red’s and did the same. They waddled under the gate together.

  The neighborhood they emerged into was suspiciously, unwholesomely clean. They were somewhere above Industry, Red knew, but couldn’t be very far into the Penthouses. The archaic lift was still using an obscure shorthand code, it’s meaning lost to time and advancement: Red jabbed in their destination coordinates as best he could guess while operating under the immense blanket of panic that the A-Gents’ appearance had thrown over him. Luckily, he managed to get the elevator going in a vaguely upward direction. Which meant that they were now vaguely upward from where they had been. That was about all he could tell, from his surroundings. The paths around him were all impossibly wide – more like streets than walkways – and utterly sterile. It was like set dressing in a vid-feed, or some kind of theme park. How did they do it? How did they erase every trace that human beings walked these corridors, even as they were walking them?

  Red guessed that they were somewhere in the corporate worker dormitories; a kind of limbo between the enviable luxury of the sky levels, with their verdant glens and pastoral hillsides, and the severe, ultra-secure research laboratories of Upper Industry. The apartments and storefronts themselves weren’t much bigger than the ones Red was accustomed to seeing in his own neighborhood, but their use of space was more efficient, the lines that defined them were crisper and more precise, and there was an obscene amount of room – several feet, in some cases — between each unit. Down in the Blackouts, every surface was covered in a dense patina of structural limpets: A chunky glaze of old wiring, unpowered business graphics, and mooring bolts. They pockmarked every wall, leftover from several generations of interstitial, mostly illegal establishments — unlicensed food shacks, black market commerce stalls, ad-hoc Rx dens and tiny, two person bars.

  But here, in this corporate dormitory, everything was exactly as it was first built: Glossy, neatly delineated, and perfectly clean. A whole neighborhood, straight out of the package. It felt peculiar and lonely.

  “Shitdicks,” QC sighed, “wrong floor.”

  “Wait,” Red barely got the words out of his throat, “we need to find somewhere for a minute. I need to get to an Rx ‘feed before my endocrine system falls out.”

  “Shit, what? Can you even dose up with that grey piss in your veins?”

  “I can damn well try,” Red answered, trying to make sense of the bafflingly uncluttered cube that Mapworks was showing him.

  “Is there time for this? Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to stand up there in the fuck-all open blue sky while stone-cold sober, but you’re kind of operating on a time-limit here. We’ve got like four hours to get you to that extraction machine, or you’re fucked from the inside out.” QC said tenderly.

  “Besides, where are we gonna go?” she continued, pointing all around her, “These cockfuckers are all probably eating a nice family dinner and talking about stocks or some bullshit.”

  “QC, we’ve got a blank Auth Pass. We could commandeer a jump-lift if we wanted-“

  “Holy shit! Really? I’ve only seen those on vid-feeds! I’ve always wanted to-“

  “-my point being, we can make it to the Penthouses from here in twenty minutes. And when I said blank Auth Pass, I meant it. It’s totally blank. As in, not just for elevators. Any unassigned door will open to us.”

  “Jesus humping Christ,” QC slipped an arm around Red’s back and took some of his weight on her, “I didn’t even know that was a thing. Motherfuckers can do that? Just buy a card and go anywhere they want? What kind of ridiculous asshole money does shit like that take, d’you think?”

  “I don’t think you can buy it,” Red said, and sagged pitifully onto her shoulders. He thought he’d been playing up the weak and battered card to buy himself some time, but he’d forgotten just how weak and battered he actually was.

  QC carried him down a series of ludicrously white, uncannily tidy streets, practically tripping over cleaning r
obots the entire way. Eventually, she found a vacant apartment behind a base element supply store. The BioOS interface must have been on the fritz, because she had to shake Red’s head back and forth in front of the door scanner like a rag doll before it finally slid open.

  “Welcome to Whispering Aisles,” an airy, digitally feminine voice greeted them, “a planned community of Taylor, Wellington and Shi Corporation. As part of your work-agreement, this living unit will supply you with every luxury a man, or woman of your station deserves, while maintaining a steady baseline of class and sophistication. Lofty ceilings, ample sun-emulation panels in every room, and only the highest end appliances allow for a system of controlled living that is 2 Consumer Contentment points above the Matsu-Dellingham Corporation, and only 12 CC points below the esteemed South Standard Collective.”

  The voice droned on, extolling the virtues of TWS-sponsored living, while various key points of the room lit up, highlighting the amenities in real time. QC’s posture grew hunched and defensive. She stiffly helped Red to the central bench in the main living area, and then wandered about the room swearing, threatening and waving her arms, attempting to silence the narration. Eventually she found the right combination of creative violence and arm position, and the walkthrough lapsed into quietude.

  “Get some rest,” She told Red, turning to the infinitesimal but ‘proven workable!’ kitchenette. “I’ll see if I can find the Rx ‘feed and maybe cook us up some motherfucking noodles and shit.”

  “Motherfucking noodles are my favorite,” Red smiled wanly.

  She forced a laugh, then disappeared behind the partition. Red quickly rose to his feet, and just as quickly lost them. Through an ornate series of awkward catches, lesser trips and painful stubs, he managed to fall to the floor in relative silence. QC’s attention remained on the kitchen unit, poking at dimly glowing panels and questioning the sexual integrity of the designer’s mother.

  Red tried again, slower this time, and eventually managed to waddle in a limping squat toward the entertainment center. With the wellspring of adrenalin that seeing (and nearly being murdered by), his first real life A-gent instilled in Red, he’d managed to sprint for a few minutes with QC in tow. Strangely, she struggled against him the whole time. She kept trying to convince Red to turn back, though he couldn’t figure out why: Did she want to fight? Did she actually think she could take on an Alpha Gentleman with a few strains of defective nanotech? Once they were safely inside the creaky old lift and moving, however, the lifeforce ebbed out of Red like someone slashed an artery.

  Red, as a general rule, did not run.

  It was not a statement of courage: Red hid plenty, he pleaded on occasion, and he wasn’t above the strategic wetting of the pants, but he never undertook the physical act of running. There wasn’t enough room down in the Blackouts to take an exceptionally deep breath, much less go jogging, and the public fitness areas had long since been abandoned to dying junkies and the gangs that robbed them. Years of beta testing prototype drug mixes, both professionally and as an enthusiastic amateur, had left him less than a prime physical specimen. Red could have hit up any Public Service ‘feed and ordered a free dose of Vigor Mix, but he never found the right reason to bother, and the bloody, feces-covered microderm patches of the Public ‘feeds gave him plenty of incentive not to. QC, however, ran easily. The arenas must mandate some pretty serious fitness strains for the ‘Factory girls. Or did she do something as quaint as exercise? She was taking some kind of measures to keep that tightly muscled little body and thos-God damn it, Red: Focus.

  He dragged himself the rest of the way to the entertainment center, fumbled in his lapel, and came up with his Rx card. He slid it into the ‘feed slot, right next to the gaming panel and the music controls, and the command prompt silently pulsed in his own BioOS. He allowed the access, and focused his attention on the internal controls. Menus flashed, spun, and closed. He found what he wanted almost instantly: The Gas section. The TWS mascot, Two Toes the Sloth, offered him a complimentary Housewarming Cocktail of euphorics, beta-blockers and some French Revolution Presence.

  What the hell, any old brand would do.

  Red thought of a circle contracting, and the Rx menu beeped in confirmation. The soft hum of cooling fans kicked on as the ‘feed swung into action, printing the chemicals onto his Rx card. The line of pending lights blinked once, twice, three times, and then back to one again. It repeated. When it stopped, Red pulled his card, now containing the dose, and waited for the disposable c-ring inhaler. He held his breath as the little tray flipped open, but the flimsy plastic device barely made a sound when it hit the delivery receptacle. When Red went to lift the c-ring out of the ‘feed, the airy, feminine voice boomed with impossible volume from the main speakers: “Your COMPLIMENTARY TWS HOUSEWARMING COCKTAIL is now ready. Thank you for your work at the Taylor, Wellington and Shi Corporation. Enjoy your PRESENCE for the FRENCH REVOLUTION. And please, have a pleasant high.”

  Red mentally added all TWS interface designers to his Revenge List.

  QC bolted out from behind the partition, glancing accusingly first up at the ceiling, and then over at Red.

  “The fucking hell was that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Didn’t sound like nothing. It sounded more like you ordering up Gas, which we just learned a few hours ago will put you a son-of-a-bitching coma.“

  “I wasn’t going to take it” Red protested reasonably, though he suspected he would have been more persuasive if he hadn’t been spread-eagled on the floor, clutching a freshly printed inhaler.

  “You got a death wish?” QC continued angrily, “Are you such a fucking pathetic wreck that jogging is like punching your self-destruct button? Would you really rather die than be sore for a few days, you wimpy little cunthole?”

  “Look, I know it sounds like that. But it is not that. It’s…another thing.”

  “Don’t be stupid: We can get you some basic muscle-repair ‘bots and order up a giant dickload of endorphins –if we overdose you hard enough, a few might even slip by that grey shit in your blood. What the upjumping fuck is a Gas trip going to do, but speed up your already hasty fucking demise?”

  “I don’t think they’re hallucinations,” Red quietly explained.

  “Oh, you’ve jogged yourself retarded. I see.” QC crossed the living area to haul Red back onto the main bench. It shifted from a solid to a gel on receipt of his weight.

  “I’ve got a theory I need to test and don’t start mocking me again, god dammit, I know what I’m doing.”

  QC stared at him silently. Her mouth was open, just slightly, and Red could see the tip of her tongue and the slightest hint of her bottom teeth, poking out above the lip. Red found it so intensely, lustfully distracting that he assumed she was doing it on purpose. They both knew that Red had a thing for her.

  “It is a good theory,” he continued, trying to convince himself as much as her.

  Let’s see: Possibly fatal trip to an unknown epoch full of angry man-machine-beasts, or potential sex with a pretty girl on a state-shifting couch? It was an argument he didn’t even want to be win.

  But he tried, regardless.

  “It’s a very smart theory, with a ton of really compelling evidence that would make no sense to anybody without several decades of mixing experience. It is an awesome, infallible theory that I cannot explain at all, but absolutely need to test before we see this contact, whoever they are. This has to be done, and it has to be me, and it has to be now. I know this sounds like a bunch of desperate junkie excuses, but you know me: I have too much fun to be suicidal, and I’m too cowardly to take stupid risks. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to.” Red took her hand, and only afterward realized it was the first time he’d done it.

  QC’s mouth snapped shut, and she nodded curtly.

  Before she had time to change her mind, Red slipped the inhaler into his nose. It sealed over his nostrils, and he snapped the purple patch on his Rx card face down into the
clear, flat plastic square at the end of the breathing tube. His card stirred into motion: The micro-fans kicked on, the cocktail was mixed, portioned, and blown gently up through the tube to his nasal passages. As an experienced user, Red was accustomed to prolonged turns whenever he dosed up on Presence. But this time, the high jumped right into the kick stage. A matte purple mist crept into the edges of his vision. He thought of something he wanted to say to QC. Maybe even the right thing, for once in his life — something charming and earnest that would make his motivations perfectly clear, while simultaneously consoling and reassuring her

  Red opened his mouth, quacked twice, then passed out.

  When he went limp, QC opened her BioOS. The dancing penguin interface waved happily for her attention. She focused on its beak, and the new message window slid into view. In the address field, she thought the words “Alpha Gentlemen emergency contact.” A swarthy fellow in a blue and gold filigreed top hat appeared in the avatar box.

  QC bit her lip, and tried to think of how to phrase her message:

  Come take this dickbreath junkie off my hands!

  If I said I knew where to find a certain skinny mixer with fisheyes, would you not burn me alive?

  I know where Red is, and I enjoy having skin. Can we make an arrangement?

  But no words appeared. The penguin giggled at her idleness, and pointed an eager flipper at the message box.

  QC closed the window, discarded the draft, and punched an unconscious Red in the arm.

  “They better saint my ass so hard my soul walks funny, for this shit,” she told him, and went to make them some motherfucking noodles.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Forest smells: Earth, Pine, Rot, and Water. But too separate, too distinct.

  Something murky and dire skated around Red’s mind, but his body only knew that the temperature was cool, and that the mossy earth beneath him was soft, so sleep took priority for a time. He was still swimming between wakefulness and unconsciousness when the thing throbbed again with sudden urgency. Red’s eyes snapped open, and he wrenched his mind from muddy waters into painful clarity.