Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  She looked to Red, not with hope or respect – he left her back there without so much as a thought, the rotten son of a bitch – but because there was nothing else. He was the only other solid object in the unholy space, save for herself, the white table, and the mysterious figure.

  As they closed the distance, the person at the table began to resolve. QC could see now that it was a man. There was something old about him, but it was tough to pin down what, exactly. His skin had the plastic smoothness of constant and unceasing artificial cell repair. If you had the money and the will, you could theoretically keep aging at bay for decades, maybe longer. But few bothered beyond the century mark, and fewer still tried to reverse cosmetic damage at that age. It just never looked quite right: Like somebody had gone in and erased all the finer details in the large, flat spaces of the face.

  The man had a close crop of fine black hair, and wore loose grey pants, tied at the sides. He had on a short-sleeved tunic of the same bloodless, toneless hue as the slacks. A delicate silver bracelet rounded out the effect. He looked at home in the open air; like he could blow away at any moment. He sat in perfect stillness, watching them approach.

  Red broke stride a few feet from the edge of the small white table. QC wanted to follow him; she wanted to embrace him tightly, only to feel the solidity of another human being; she wanted to at least be there to stop him from doing whatever certainly fucking retarded thing he was planning on doing — but the fear won out, and her knees became elastic. It was one thing to cross the colossal blue tundra of glass, knowing that beyond the thin, translucent walls was pure open sky. It was another to stand at the point where all those walls ended, surrounded on all sides by horrible, empty air. She dropped to a crouch a dozen paces back, and focused on the solidity of her own booted feet.

  The ageless man made an exaggerated show of looking behind the pair of them. He frowned deeply, and spoke in a melodic voice: “Just the two of you? Where’s the rest of your entourage?”

  “They’re not coming,” Red answered coldly, his tone tight and clipped with anger. “I figured it out.”

  “Oh, have you?” The man said placidly, “I admit it, then: You’re smarter than I took you for. It would appear to be your play.”

  “I’ve got questions,” Red snapped.

  “I’ve got answers.”

  “What’s your stake in this, exactly? Did you design the beta Presence, or just fund it? How much did you know about what it does? What it really does?”

  “Only fund, I’m afraid. And of course not directly. I know precisely what it does. Do you think we start crowdsourcing betas right out of the lab?”

  “Who the fuck are you?” Red spoke pointedly, cutting off the man’s response at its last syllable.

  “Well, clearly you know who I am. Do you mean in the larger sense? I am but a man, I suppose. Though a man of unlimited means and boundless vision. A man with fantastic cheekbones and a resounding singing voice. A man as gifted in the bedroom as he is in the boardroom. A man of substantial gir-“

  “Stop with the god damn games,” Red snapped at him. “Stop it, and tell me your name. You owe me that much.”

  “You…” the plastic mask rippled slightly, and the man’s head tilted to one side, “You’re serious. You really have no idea who I am?”

  His laughter started thin, but grew deep and joyous. When it finally ran its course, he sat for a moment panting and suppressing giggling fits. He closed his eyes, and reopened them with reptilian sloth.

  “In that case: I’m nobody. And you’ll find that answer everywhere you turn, I’m afraid. No matter how hard you look, or how deep you burrow within your pathetic little network, I promise you, you will find nobody. You want answers? I will turn your whole life into questions. Nothing will remain certain for you. At every turn, you will find only the peculiar absence of a man, and the harder you look, the less will be there, until one day the terrible vacuum will come rushing in on you, oblite-“

  “Father!” Byron yelled from behind them, “father, hello!”

  QC turned to see Byron jogging recklessly across the atrium floor, his flailing limbs fleeing his body in every direction. James limped steadily behind him.

  The ageless man sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose in exasperation.

  “Byron?” Red ventured.

  “Yes?” Byron replied, looking up at the stalk, out to the vacant blue horizon, and down at the black diamond beneath their feet – everywhere but at Red.

  “I’m going to be very calm here, okay? I’m going to be very calm, and you’re going to be very calm, and we’re going to come to a very clear understanding when I ask you this, understand? So I’m calmly asking you now: What are you doing here?”

  “I live here, Red. This is the atrium. This is my home. That’s…that’s my father,” Byron pointed with his whole hand at the now flustered looking ageless man at the little round table.

  “Good lord,” the man sighed. “All this time, and you didn’t have the slightest clue. I’ve played out the most brilliant strategy — reeling, taunting, pulling and coercing you exactly where I wanted, and you’ve simply been pratfalling through espionage without a clue of what you had. If I had just waited a few hours, maybe taken a long bath, my son would have come home on his own. It’s too funny.”

  He laughed and clapped his hands, but the gesture was pointedly humorless.

  “We’re bloody well here now, aren’t we?” James said, finally limping painfully up beside QC. “I’m gathering that you might want to keep your boy intact, now that he’s home, and not see him disassembled into his base elements by a whirling storm of steel, am I right?”

  “What is this?” Byron patted himself down uncertainly, “James, did you…violate me while I slumbered?”

  “Gross, mate. Don’t say it like that. I just planted a few million wee shrapnel bombs in your blood.”

  “I see no weapons in your hand, sir,” the ageless man answered stoically. “My lift would not have allowed you to arrive with them, and any nanotech in your blood will have been deactivated by my suppression strains.”

  “Your boy’s got a long history of getting contraband in, though, don’t he? Can’t imagine a Penthouse bloke like you being copacetic with having a junkie for a son. You’d take preventative measures. And yet he gets that bloody Gas in here, somehow, doesn’t he? Junkies always do. They’re the original innovators. You know your boy’s got a system in place,” James said, producing a small metal tab from the interior pocket of his ratty green tweed overcoat, “and maybe I piggybacked on that system. Let’s us press this button and find out if I’m lying, shall we, you bloody ugly freak ponce?”

  The man’s smile disappeared in one sharp motion. Like a limb had been lopped off.

  “Somebody needs to start making sense, or I’m going to headbutt through this glass and kill us all,” Red whined.

  “This, as you’ve hopefully gathered by now, is my continually evolving mess of a son, Byron Mayburn Hockner.”

  “You’re a Hockner?” Red turned to Byron.

  Byron nodded bashfully, still too timid to meet Red’s eyes.

  QC could hear the wind. Objectively, she knew that it was impossible. If the room wasn’t completely sealed and pressurized, they’d all be asphyxiated by now. But still the cold, eviscerating gales roared so loud they threatened to deafen her.

  “You sent your son to spy on me?” Red asked.

  “This idiocy is almost endearing. Why would I send my own son to spy on some Blackout beta runner?” The man gestured for Byron to come stand next to him, but Byron pretended not to see, and stayed where he was.

  “So you want me to believe that it’s just a coincidence that your son meets up with me, right after you tried to have me killed by that freak with the man-bots?”

  “I have no idea what you’re referring to. This whole thing has been slapstick. It’s actually quite humorous, really.”

  “So you didn’t try to have me killed? You didn�
�t rent the A-Gents to come after me? I just knocked on the wrong door — so sorry, the murderous billionaire you were looking for lives across the street?” Red was flushing crimson, his fists balled so tightly that his fingers dug into his palms.

  “Oh, yes, I absolutely did try to have you killed. After you absconded with Hockner Laboratories’ new beta-strain of Extended Stay Presence, which, as you know, is a terminal breach of our Non-Disclosure Agreement, we followed standard protocol and put a search alert on your home’s doorman system. Imagine my surprise when our head of Security calls to tell me that young Byron here had passed over your threshold, almost immediately after you broke contract. I assumed, at that point, that you had abducted my son to use as leverage while he was out on one of his many unsavory and, might I add, forbidden trips to the Blackouts. Byron, we’ve talked about this: That addiction is unseemly and unhealthy, it’s time we break it. There’s a lovely little neuro-detox spa in West Pacific. Some time out of the city might do you well,” the ageless man turned to address Byron, who alternated staring at his feet and his hands. “So what was a concerned father to do? I contacted the Alpha Gentleman under the auspices of retrieving a stolen beta, and even offered to pay the fee you posted for ‘access’ to the compound in your blood – I thought that was a rather clever way to publicly demand ransom, actually, but I see now that was giving you far too much credit.”

  “No,” Red considered the information, but seemed to shake it away, “no, you came after me so I couldn’t tell anybody what your precious little wonder-drug really does. You had to keep me silent. That’s what all this is about. Because I’ve figured it out. I’ve figured out what the beta is doing. It-“

  “Allows for repeat trips to later dates on the same timeline. Yes.”

  “And you have to cover that up! If people knew – if they knew that every single high on their favorite recreational drug was having real consequences; if they knew that every murder actually happened, somewhere, in some other timeline; if they knew that every callous arena match or casual Friday molestation ruined some timeline’s entire world, your empire would crumble! If they knew time travel was real, they’d stop using!”

  “Why would they do that? Because people are inherently good? We’ve known that time was not immutable since the beginning. We tried to keep it quiet at first, but you know these things – they do get out. There are too many variables. We thought the world would come crashing down around us when that first rogue technician posted his dossier for everybody to see. But then an amazing thing happened: Nothing. Oh, there was the start of a media storm, certainly, but soon a backlash rose up against even that small ripple, decrying it as false and manipulative. We were too frightened to react ourselves, you see, for fear of bringing the authorities down on our heads. We were dumbfounded when others started volunteering to do it for us! Days — not even weeks, but mere days afterward — and people were openly laughing in that rogue technician’s face. And do you know why? Because Presence is fun. That’s it. That’s the entire complex psychological effect that allows our work to continue. People like our drug. They want to keep using it, and to do that, they need plausible deniability – they need to believe that its effects are impermanent, possibly even entirely hallucinatory. And so they simply give that deniability to themselves, ignoring any and all evidence to the contrary. Using Presence does not hurt you. It does not affect your friends, or your families, or even your enemies. You literally cannot point to a place in our world harmed by this action, so whatever the problem is, one thing about it is certain: It is not ours.”

  “Bullshit.” Red retorted, reflexively. “People have empathy. Just because they’re disconnected from the damage, that doesn’t mean they won’t care that they’re doing it!”

  “Do a search. Right now,” the ageless man suggested, glancing idly down at his nails. “Have you even bothered? No, of course not. You assumed you were unique. You assumed that it took the insurmountable genius and courage that only Redding Firth possesses to expose such a sinister truth. Do a search for – what do they call it?” The man looked over his shoulder to nobody, but received no response, and turned back to answer his own query: “Continuing Timeline Disorder? You’ll find a paltry few hundred thousand results, dating back roughly sixty years. Go ahead.”

  Red flicked his eyes upward, and his BioOS slid down, overlaying his visual field. He highlighted the search option, focused on the words, and thought of a circle, contracting. The results returned instantly. There were millions — the man was wrong about that — but most of them were dead pages, sporadic and abandoned. Red tabbed through a few of the oldest, and the results were identical: Outrage in the first handful of responses, and then the mockery started. By the end of every exchange, the original poster trying to warn the world of Continuing Timeline Disorder was dismissed as insane or self-serving.

  Red started to speak, stopped, and laughed a little to himself.

  “Okay,” Red finally conceded, “this was all just comedy. Sorry.”

  “Indeed,” the man conceded, “no hard feelings, of course.”

  “What?” James suddenly sputtered into life, “what was that? No hard feelings?”

  “Absolutely. No matter what those trashy little feeds so popular in the Blackouts say, there is no great and murderous machine toiling above the people. Even the Penthouses are staffed by businessmen, workers, and fellow human beings. I see this has been a misunderstanding, and concede that you may not have intentionally stolen my product. Since there has been no damage done, I see no reason to start causing it now. I thank you for returning my son safely to me, and I wish you all the best. My personal lift terminates in Middle Industry, but I’ll leave your AuthPass valid for the rest of the day as you make your various ways home. Red, you’re going to need to get to an extraction machine. I’m messaging you the coordinates now. It’s my own personal medical wing, nine floors below. If you hit the water gardens, you’ve gone too far.”

  “No damage done,” James repeated dully, “no damage? There was a very pretty girl who could kick like bad whiskey, and your girl — your bloody A-Gent cunt — she came along and killed my girl. That is damage, mate. Damage that has been well and truly done.”

  “You’ll be compensated for the estimated lifetime earnings of any lives lost in the operation, I assure you,” the ageless man answered pleasantly, “Hockner Industry abides by all citywide Terms of Use.”

  “Zippy’s dead?” Red asked.

  “Don’t worry, mate. They’ll pay for it,” James said, and raised his hand, still holding the squat metal tab.

  Byron flinched and began to keen expectantly.

  A spot of uncut blue just behind and to the left of Hockner shimmered, and a woman walked out of it. Her gold and blue suit was torn and ragged. She was bleeding profusely, missing one eye, and holding her side with one arm. The other held a gigantic silver pistol.

  “Stop,” Victoria said simply.

  “Sure thing,” James replied, tossing the little metal tab to her. She caught it with her free hand, and winced. “All it did was turn on my bloody coffeemaker anyway. Just wanted to see where you were hiding. Real nice piece you got there. A friend of mine once asked me for one just like it. Got a mind to give it to her.”

  “Come take it,” she growled.

  “You’re going to burn for this,” Red spoke in a quiet and even voice, “you thought it was all so funny. A joke you can tell your friends. But you don’t know the punchline yet.”

  Thin trickles of blood ran from the meat of Red’s clenched fists.

  “I am an immensely busy man,” Hockner replied wearily, “either leave now or do something that gives Victoria here cause to murder you, please.”

  “You thought I rushed right up here to confront you?” Red said, his voice barely louder than the distant pressurizing fans.” You thought I figured out your little game, and what? Just ran into your office to yell at you? You honestly thought I was that stupid. That’s the punchline: You
think you’re some genius manipulator in your arrogant castle, high above all the stupid peons, and it never once occurred to you that I’d do something about it.”

  “We’ve covered this,” Hockner waved dismissively, “tell everybody you’d like about the beta. Scream it from the rooftops. It makes no difference.”

  “Nah,” Red replied, “I thought I’d show them instead. I put out a Contra.Act a few hours ago. It was some risky code, but an easy enough job for somebody who knows what they’re doing: Making a few tiny modifications on an Rx Feed Distribution plant down in Lower Industry. It was supposed to be shipping some Presence for the 6PM American Revolution Trip that gets dispensed, free of charge, to all 4th Tier Hockner engineers on every Tuesday. Oh don’t worry, it’ll still be distributed. You won’t miss your quota: What made the job so easy is that I didn’t even request a change in production. The plant is still churning out Presence. The same destination, the same duration, the same everything. I only asked that the Contra.Actor slip in one harmless polymer chain. Doubt anybody will mind. They’ll just get to spend a few more hours at the Battle of Amsterdam…”

  Hockner started to stand, but lost his legs halfway through.

  “You can’t do that!” the ageless man pleaded, “I don’t think you realize the ramifications here. We saw it in the samples Deng sent up: The prototype is flawed! It rebuilds again with every new dose of any Gas, until the user is eventually lost to that timeline completely.”

  “So what’ve I got to lose? I’m toast anyway, right?” Red laughed. “Hell, at least I’ve already got internet access set up at the place I’m going. Maybe I’ll like it. Get me a flashy new rave penis and start merging my neuroprofile with the Bear God on weekends.”

  “No, we can stop it,” Hockner was panicking, “We’ll get you out of the Four Posts. Presence is illegal outside of the city. We don’t even export it! It won’t build any farther, I promise you. You’ll still have the occasional unplanned trip: We can’t reverse what’s done already, but you can manage. I have contacts on the outside; it’s beautiful out there, Red. They still have forests.”