Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  Red sat up and scanned the shallow gulch. The trees on either side were of a solid, solemn thickness that spoke of lifespans in the hundreds, if not thousands of years. A jagged crop of rock broke through the curtain of moss he was propped against. Red couldn’t find a way to place his head where a spike of sharp stone wasn’t poking into it. He accepted the annoyance, and tried to use it to help bring his thoughts into focus.

  The acutely defined smells screamed Gas trip, but he was too lost in grogginess to recall where, or why. Finally, Red gave up and uncertainly took his feet. He shook his arms out, rubbed his palms against his eyes, and cracked his neck.

  And then it came back to him.

  The Gas: His body had been absorbing it out of the stale, recycled air of the Four Posts, and it was slowly building up to toxic levels inside his veins. Once enough of it collected, he was sent off on a Presence trip to some unknown era in the Pacific Northwest. When he woke up, the process started again, and would repeat forever, until one day, probably soon, he wouldn’t come back from the trip at all. Red had taken a legitimate dose this time – ostensibly meant to take him to the French Revolution – but his theory had proven partly correct: No matter the intended destination, he always wound up in the same forest. This last was only a small, free trial dose. He had maybe an hour before it wore off. One hour to confirm the rest of his theory. Red had to find those creatures from his hallucinations, and fa – oh, there they were.

  Just a few feet away, staring at him.

  Red hadn’t been looking for people, and so hadn’t seen them. But then his eyes did something funny with the focus – shifting from far to close and back again — and he recognized the trick. What his brain had been duped into thinking was a stripped and rotting log sticking out of a small stream some fifty feet away was actually a face, not ten inches from his own, silently staring back at him through a thin film of optical camouflage.

  “Uh….hi?” Red instinctively raised his hands in surrender, but the figures – and he could see several parallax spots now that subtly disagreed with his eyes – did not move or respond.

  After a long, silent moment, Red lowered his arms. Still nothing.

  “I can see you,” he tried, shrugging slightly. No reaction.

  Finally, he reached out and poked the nose of the one standing a foot in front of his own face.

  “Boop,” Red said.

  There was a flurry of activity as a half-dozen figures decloaked simultaneously and began jabbering at him in their queer, motley language. Red caught two successive words of Russian, but couldn’t quite place their meaning. The tone, however, was perfectly clear: The machine-men were confused, slightly embarrassed, and just a little angry — obviously not accustomed to having their noses booped through their invisibility cloaks.

  To be fair, if he had spent his life in any other line of work, or had a slightly less feverish lust for amphetamines, Red may not have spotted them at all. They were using high quality optics. But the kind of insane paranoia that the right mix of uppers and euphorics could instill in a man had once led to Red spending an entire sleepless week doing nothing but searching for cloaked intruders in his apartment. He obsessively read guides and FAQs, played online training games, practiced forcing his eyes to pay special attention to spots that were hard to focus on, and pounced on every disused corner, searching for invisible enemies. Red never found a cloaked intruder. Indeed, he’d never actually seen optic camouflage in action, up close and personal – because they were as expensive and impractical as they were rare. But a small, stupid, proud part of him was glad the practice paid off, even if he had to be irretrievably lost in time and surrounded by furious Native American cyborg-animals to do it.

  A little creature of indeterminate gender stepped forward. It had planes of glass for eyes, and was covered head to toe in subtly writhing cables, each ornately carved to resemble a different species of snake. It prodded Red with a kind of high-tech spear, the shaft covered in switches; a grid of thin heat vents slashed across the barbed head. It twisted something, and the weapon hummed ominously, like a tiny jet engine preparing for takeoff. Red made a desperate series of hand motions that he hoped conveyed apology and an almost embarrassing urge to cooperate. The creature seemed to catch the overall meaning, or at least felt enough pity to postpone the rocket disembowelment.

  The thing whose nose Red had so callously, offensively booped, was apparently the group’s leader. It was almost entirely covered with thin prismatic spines, and stomped grumpily off down the length of the gulch. His (there was no question of its gender now that Red could plainly see the massive, exposed genitals; each testicle shot through with clear luminescent spikes that cycled randomly through the visual color spectrum,) companions immediately turned to follow, falling into a tight wedge formation. The small creature and another taller, slighter boy whose legs split into two at the calf — giving him four independent, cloven feet — brought up the rear, herding Red before them.

  After a half mile or so of tripping and stumbling through the slippery gulch, Red was finally marched, bleeding and scuffed, into a sort of village. Their settlement had a feel of impermanence to it, though there was nothing hasty about it. Squat, round huts, each a mish-mash of high tech alloys and animal hides, were laid out in a semi-circular pattern. There was a shrine or altar at the center of the circle, the space demarcated by a two-foot tall wall of interlocking stones. Two totems stood watch on either side. One was styled after a crude robot, pieced together from scrap electronics and random metals, all sharp edges and spiky gears. The other was humanoid, female. She was carved out of a single giant, flowing piece of driftwood.

  There was inquisitive chattering coming from all around him. The language was broken, almost without cadence. It dropped into the rolling, guttural phonemes of Eastern Europe, then ascended into the singsong tones of southeastern Asia, randomly interspersed with rapid, staccato syllables that sounded vaguely African. All throughout it, there were ululating hisses, great inhalations of air and sudden slurring expulsions that belonged to no language Red had ever heard before. The group approached a large yurt at the crown of the circular settlement, and the four-hooved boy shoved Red stiffly into its opening. When his eyes finally adjusted to the dim, Red saw that the man with the Disco Penis was gesturing emphatically to a small bundle of rags. The rags stirred, and slowly spat forth a head and an emaciated pair of arms.

  There was an old man lost somewhere in that vast pile of dirty fur and leather. He held up a wrinkled hand for silence, then motioned to Red. The waifish boy with the mechanical hooves shoved him forward again. Red stumbled hesitantly through the half light, and took the seat he was pointed to, directly beside the elder.

  Though the temperature was cool outside, it was utterly stifling inside the hut. Red couldn’t imagine what it would be like wrapped in all that fur. But the old man’s skin was cold and clammy when he reached out and carefully took Red’s hand. He looked deeply into Red’s eyes for a moment, then turned and spoke to Disco Penis, who plucked something from the floor and gingerly placed it on the old man’s waiting tongue.

  A few minutes passed like this — Red holding hands with a weird geriatric while trying to remain as still as possible so as to avoid committing a fatal faux pas in Indian Beast-borg culture. And then something strange started happening to his BioOS: The pulsing oval in the far left of his peripheral vision normally signified its idle state. But now the oval was blinking quickly, indicating activity.

  And then it vanished entirely.

  Panic flooded through Red’s limbs. It pooled in his toes and welled up in his eyes; he had never been without some form of BioOS. Its abrupt disappearance was like a leg suddenly ceasing to exist. A scream bubbled up in his chest, but before it could erupt, a vivid crimson slash bisected the world. Dancing before Red’s eyes was a flat and unbroken line of blood. It spiked, and then settled. Spiked. Settled. Red recognized the universal rhythmic cycle that meant a program was working. After a f
ew iterations, the line arced three times in rapid succession, and smoothed out again.

  Two steep hills slowly broke the flat horizon, and evolved into figures, each in profile and miniature. One was squat, square, and robotic. The other was an ultra-stylized silhouette of a woman – her limbs too lithe, her movements too fluid to be motion capture. Conversely, the automaton’s movements were too stiff and sudden, even for crude robotics. They were avatars.

  The woman suddenly vaulted over the machine, and struck it from behind. The robot spun and fired something from its torso, but the woman ducked low, and was up and running again. The fight continued in this fashion for a few seconds, with neither figure making much headway, but then Red noticed something else was changing. The woman’s motions, though not exactly stiffening, were slowly taking on more and more precision. Fluidity bled into the machine as well. Their avatars were intermingling, each taking a little something from the other, every time they touched.

  Red became aware of another graphical level behind the line. Its opacity was so much lower than the line that it was almost invisible. With effort, Red focused all of his attention on the background, and started to discern patterns. A series of large, jagged shapes joined by narrow bridges, with huge empty gulfs between them. It was a map of the Earth. The continents joined, danced, collided, merged and moved away, mirroring the combatants in the foreground. At the center of it all was North America, highlighted just slightly brighter than the other landmasses. Over time it grew thinner, longer, and smoother from the repeated impacts.

  Back in the foreground, the woman and the robot were almost indistinguishable from one another. Her smooth, feminine lines were thoroughly intercut with sharp, blocky appendages, protrusions and sockets. The robot had elongated, the squareness of its torso now thinned at the middle and curving effeminately. The two charged one another, and locked hands in the dead center of the display. They grappled violently at first, but it immediately devolved into an embrace, and the spaces between them disappeared. They formed one single shape now, and it was growing dimmer and larger. In the background, the modified North America was growing smaller and brighter, until Red saw that the two shapes were identical. They met one another, blinked, and vanished.

  The pulsing oval of Red’s normal BioOS flickered back into life. He exhaled, venting panic like poison gas. Red had been so focused on the narrative unfolding in the display that he only now realized he’d been staring deeply into the old man’s eyes. The elder’s faded, milky pupils were shuddering and jumping with the distinct rhythm of BioOS activity. Red knew it should have been impossible, if only for the firewalls alone, but he understood: Somehow, they had swapped personal Operating Systems, and the old man was still engrossed in Red’s Superpanda. Red tried thinking of the line again, and it grew bright, cutting evenly across his field of vision. He let his focus relax, and the slash sunk below his sightline. Red flicked his eyes up to his own BioOS, and found it happily intact.

  Apparently, the trade was permanent.

  The old man cried out suddenly. It was an anguished, furious yelp. His focus snapped back to Red, and his eyes narrowed in accusation. He spoke one alien word, like an explosion in a cymbal factory, and slapped Red across the face. The elder turned and muttered a series of harsh commands to Disco Penis, and he and the hoofed boy seized Red by the arms, dragging him violently from the yurt, hurling him bodily over the low barrier of stones, and then forcing him to his knees between the two totems.

  The woman and the robot.

  The woman was plain and forgettable, save for a slash of brilliant blue painted across the left part of her hair.

  The machine’s torso was square, topped by a low half-dome with two goggle-like cameras for eyes. One appendage terminated in an articulated buzzsaw, the other a simple machine pistol. Red recognized the model: A vintage peacekeeping unit. He’d seen it recently, after all — just yesterday: The Indian girl and the robot. The unremarkable opening bout that his lab used to beta-test new Presence.

  This was their world. This was what they became, centuries later.

  The thin red line twisted and spiked sharply across Red’s eyes. All work in the village stopped. The creatures turned as one at the silent signal, and Disco Penis looked to the old man for confirmation. The elder nodded once, his wet, rheumy eyes screwed up in anger. Disco Penis turned on Red with astonishing speed, unsheathing an eight-inch long prismatic shard directly from his naked hip, and brought it savagely down toward Red’s throat.

  And then he woke up.

  Red clawed at his neck, tried to scrabble backwards, and immediately cracked his head against the corner of the living-area bench. QC was staring at him, mouth open, eyes wide, hands to her parted lips. Sudden death had kicked him prematurely from the trip. Red felt the full effects of the Presence, now without the mitigating high, settle over him. Nausea swam dizzily behind his eyes, the foul stench of unused gas burnt his nostrils, and a thousand insects crawled up his spine to settle in his brain. He tore off the inhaler and threw it across the room.

  “Jesus,” he panted, again and again.

  “Did you get what you needed, asshole?” QC threw a half-eaten sandwich at his chest.

  “Yeah,” Red ignored the sandwich projectile, but accepted QC’s outstretched hand. “Yeah, I think I got it. We can go now.”

  “What’s the rush? I think we have another few hours before your liver fuck-strangles your kidneys to death. Maybe we can take in a show or something.”

  “I’m sorry,” Red said, finding a timid strength returning to his legs. “Thanks for staying with me.”

  “That’s…fine, I guess?” The sudden earnestness made QC blush, and blushing, like everything else, made her angry: “But I still say fuck you partially to death.”

  “Ready?” Red asked her, trying to physically shake the dizziness from his head.

  “Ready,” she answered, and spat a smoking glob onto the off-white carpetfoam.

  They left the vacant apartment together, heading toward the central elevator banks. QC led the way. Red was too distracted, playing with the dancing crimson slash of his new Operating System.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The elevator doors slid apart in perfect silence, opening onto a room so vast and vacant that its interior space triggered QC’s agoraphobia. When she stepped out and realized that the walls were not, in fact, a pure shade of azure blue, but clear glass, looking out on all sides to the unbound sky, she felt a synapse crack inside her skull.

  And that was before she saw that there was no floor.

  We’re falling, QC thought madly, her gaze sucked inexorably toward the nothingness beneath her feet. No. No, it’s just glass. And they can make glass harder than steel. It’s safe, you’re safe. You’re not falling. You’re not falling. You’re not. It’s probably not even glass, just high resolution display-paint, that’s all.

  The hardest building permits to acquire were extra-structural, Red recalled. Building within the Four Posts was hard enough, with every inch already spoken for. But going outside the central structure, erecting out into the sky? To build something like this profane chapel to greed — this single, solitary room; a stadium bordered on all but one side by nothing — it took more than money. Its immensity spoke volumes of the owner’s influence and power, while its complete and utter destitution spoke of something else: Hubris, madness, or just the blank, hollow apathy of the superlatively rich. The vividly clear walls soared upward, so high above Red’s head that they were lost to the vanishing point before he could see where they intersected. Each pane of glass was the size of Red’s entire flat. The only slight interruption of the endless skyline was the weld that secured one pane to the next, where their joints knit together with a fine white mesh.

  Beneath his feet, the entirety of the Four Posts sprawled. Looking down from an impossible height, the city appeared as a black diamond, bordered on each side by a thin line of grey. The blackness within was not pure, he saw; it was riddled with f
laws, interspersed with faint and fleeting lights, crisscrossed here and there with shimmering, multi-colored lines that formed a rainbow cat’s cradle within the darkness.

  Toward the very far end, Red saw, the room at last began to taper, until the walls, ceiling and floor met at a single point. And there, floating in the air, hundreds of thousands of feet above the earth below, a small figure sat at a round, white table. It did not rise to meet them, nor even stir at their arrival. QC willed motion into her limbs, and managed to break her paralysis long enough to turn and run. But when she did, she found that the elevator had vanished: A smooth, unbroken eggshell surface sat in its stead. Her breath came shallow and tight. She tried to seize at Red’s coat-sleeve — tried to plead with him, offer him anything he wanted if he could just bring back the lift…

  But he was gone.

  Red was striding purposefully toward the tiny figure at the far side of the atrium, his footsteps ringing out hard and clear on the reinforced glass floor. The thinness of the tone confirmed that, no, they were not display-paint after all. QC glanced upward, because it was better than looking down or out. Above her, a sparse handful of other structures jutted from the skeletal central stalk of the North Post. Each was an equally improbable palace, suspended impossibly in the air, but there were not many sprouting outward from the gargantuan round pillar, with its bulbous knots of motion dampers. In the far, far distance, she could see where the buildings ceased entirely.

  She could see the end of the city.

  QC found the will to move, but only because abandonment was worse. She followed Red like a cowed dog, every heel strike resonating against the crystalline glass. With every clack, she expected the whole thing to shatter like ice and spill them into the air below, screaming, suffocating, torn to pieces by merciless and frozen winds.