The Flux

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  They’d once used a Bingo machine to calibrate the ’mancy-level, but Valentine said playing games gave more accurate readings. Any given Pac-Man game was confined to a single blue maze, with the monsters chasing Pac-Man in preordained patterns… but add in a dose of ’mancy to create bizarre glitches, and Pac-Man went on some very unusual trips. If Pac-Man died on his new adventures, then it was time to shut things down.

  The frightening thing, Paul thought, was that after only two years of being a ’mancer, all this seemed normal.

  The forms bunched up, folding as Paul’s ’mancy ebbed. Paul had to focus. It was good to focus. It was fun to think about all the forms involved in the emergency room, not about his daughter who might teleport in at any moment to dispense mayhem….

  Paul wrote in slots for the insurance preauthorization forms, the billing codes for each prescribed treatment, the maintenance records in the anesthesia machines, and there entangled in the forms was Samuel Patziki, now having his fingers sewn back on after a terrible accident at the garage he’d been working at.

  Paul thumbed through the paperwork like a priest fingering his rosary. He pulled forms out of midair to list Samuel Patziki’s impending medical expenses, compared them to Samuel’s current income. Samuel Patziki had taken quite a pay cut, according to the IRS records, working a $22,000-a-year job to make the payments on his $47,256 mortgage at 8% interest.

  “Pac-Man’s in a shitty suburb now, Paul,” Valentine said, looking worried. “Cracked streets. Not a lot of outs. Bankruptcy-ghosts are closing in on him from every direction…”

  Paul flowed upstream, checking who Samuel Patziki’s insurance holder was: Samaritan Mutual. Paul winced; he’d worked for them, once. Samaritan was the cheapest insurance provider, preying on the poor with the cheapest rates and even cheaper payouts. A few calculations revealed Samuel Patziki would pay $24,794 after Samaritan’s claims were in.

  That wouldn’t do.

  “Paul, what are you...”

  Paper geysered out of the desk. K-Dash and Quaysean drew their guns, unsure where to shoot. Streamers of forms caught on the steel beams in the ceiling, filling the garage bays in gouts of documentation that shoved them against the lockers. Paul flipped through the paper, swimming through it, sorting through every possible combination of chargemaster prices, hunting for the cheapest available costs for poor Samuel Patziki.

  “Paul, this is fucking crazy!” Valentine cried. “Pac-Man’s chasing a hundred different fruits through a maze, and if he eats the wrong one he’ll die! I can barely keep him alive! You need to–”

  “I need to help,” Paul muttered, recombining every line item until he found the right cost: $1,396 in bills to Samuel Patziki. Not free, but as cheap as humanly possible given Samuel’s cut-rate Samaritan Mutual policy.

  The paperwork crackled with green energy, sizzling like a summer lightning storm. Quaysean and K-Dash flattened themselves against the wall, waist deep in crackling paper files, not quite sure if the crumpled documents were safe to touch.

  “Don’t move,” Valentine warned them, wading through the paper. She grabbed a fistful of paperwork in her hand; it struggled in her grasp, like an origami animal struggling to escape.

  She squeezed the magic out of it, a dribbling stream of liquefied sunshine, until it landed skittering on the hematite.

  “Dammit, Paul.” She hugged another armful of glowing paper to her chest. The paper dissolved into ash after the ’mancy left dribbled into the tray, leaving Valentine’s arms covered in ink smudges. “I don’t know if Oscar gave us enough hematite to store this much ’mancy. Did you have to go all sorcerer’s apprentice on me here?”

  “Don’t…” Paul pleaded.

  Doing ’mancy had consequences; the universe wanted to balance out the unnaturally beneficial bizarreness with malicious coincidence. Paul needed to redirect this accumulated bad luck elsewhere, pushing the flux where he wanted it.

  Under normal circumstances, an experienced ’mancer like Paul could hold the bad luck at bay for a day or two until he could find somewhere safe to bleed it off. Yet this flux crushed him like a garbage compactor. Paul felt the flux’s pressure pressing in – with the Flex comes the flux, as the old saying went – probing for worst-case scenarios it needed to create now, an ear-popping pressure like an incoming hurricane.

  Aliyah, it whispered. Aliyah could show up.

  He closed his eyes, letting the thought float away. If he focused on his daughter, then some crazy chain of worst-case scenarios would bring Aliyah here, and for all the wrong reasons…

  “You can’t take these risks, Paul,” Valentine chided him. “What if the cops had busted us in the middle of this brew? We’d be fucked.”

  The cops.

  He’d braced himself against thoughts of Aliyah, but hearing about the cops was like telling Paul not to think about a purple elephant. The flux latched onto that thought, surfed through it; Paul felt that pressure flow out of him, a tide of misfortune racing westwards.

  “Did you hear me, Paul?” Valentine repeated. “You can’t back up a dump truck of ’mancy and unload it wherever you damn well please. Not with Aliyah sniffing around. And if you won’t–”

  She finally noticed the stunned expression on Paul’s face, then dropped the paperwork. She balled her fists against her hips.

  “…You just shit the bed, didn’t you?” she asked.

  By way of reply, they heard the whup-whup-whup of incoming police choppers.

  Two

  Ready Player Three

  “I thought you had, you know, kind of an in with the cops!” Valentine hissed. “Wasn’t someone supposed to call you if the King snitched on us?”

  Paul held up his dead phone’s cracked screen. “It shattered when the alembics broke.” How the hell had the King found them?

  She flung up her hands. “Oh, that’s great. Just great. I thought you’d mastered your flux, and here we are with the po-po about to kick down our door–”

  “–if you hadn’t interrupted me in mid-brew, I would have kept it under control!”

  K-Dash cleared his throat politely. Quaysean glanced over towards the garage door, where the sound of the choppers beat louder against the plywood nailed over the windows.

  Paul headbobbed an apology at Valentine. “…hug it out later?” he offered.

  “Hug it out.” She shot Paul a pair of jaunty fingerguns by way of forgiveness. Then she scooped up armfuls of paper and squeezed, raining gouts of magic down onto the hematite. Paul mashed the gritty green flecks and sunny ’mancy together, squeezing until they condensed into clear white crystals:

  Flex. The most dangerous drug in the world. Magic a non-’mancer could use. Worth millions.

  More than enough to repay Oscar for this hematite.

  But by then, the choppers whirred overhead.

  “Now what?” Valentine asked, her fingers curling around the Xbox controller she always kept at her waist. Oscar’s meth labs had come pre-installed with secret exits, but they’d switched to a distant locale to try to avoid the King – which meant all this place came equipped with was obscurity. “Should I jack a car, go all Grand Theft Auto?”

  “Civilians get hurt when you do that.” Valentine’s videogame magic was brutally effective at causing mayhem – her channeling a first-person shooter could slaughter any police force – yet Paul refused to hurt cops for doing their job. “Besides,” he continued, looking longingly at the pallet of money, “we’d still leave evidence behind.”

  “So… we ask them to leave nicely?”

  “You’re damn straight we do.” He grabbed a legal pad, rested it on a teetering stack of cash, and began scribbling.

  Leasing agreements blossomed out from under his pen. Paul picked a name at random: Lemuel Galuschak. He inserted a birth certificate into the state records office in Menands, New York, then backfilled in several faked grade school records as Lemuel grew up in, let’s say, the 1950s – Paul gave Lemuel unexceptional grades, preferring
to have Lemuel be on the varsity sports team–

  Sirens wailed, joining the chopper noise. Valentine made a circling motion with her finger. “Speed it up, Paul.”

  “Fine, fine.” Paul blazed through, giving Lemuel Galuschak a spotty employment record until a fake uncle in Europe left him $75,000. That’d hold up to a cursory analysis, at least. Then Paul tracked down the building’s owner, filled out forms showing Galuschak had purchased the building in an auction two months ago, for–

  Oh, goddammit. He didn’t have time to negotiate. Paul grabbed a thick stack of bills, $50,000 in cash. As he riffled through the stack, each bill evaporated into confetti snippets of shredded mortgage contracts.

  That was $50,000 more than he wanted to spend, but the alternative was to have $50,000 worth of bad luck crash down now. Too much, with the cops setting up shop outside the door.

  “There,” he said, panting as he finalized the permits to store volatile chemicals. “We now own this garage. Or at least Lemuel Galuschak does, a sixty seven year-old man with a heart condition.”

  Valentine gave an exasperated gesture that encompassed the room, which consisted of ashen concrete, a desk, and a set of lockers – lockers lit up by flickering purple from the lights of the police cars outside leaking through the cracks in the boarded-up windows. “And when the cops bust through the doors, we tell them… what? Lemuel says it’s totes cool to set up a magical meth lab in his empty auto repair shop?”

  “Can you make it not empty? Can you make it look like we’ve actually set up shop in here?”

  “…for Flex?”

  “No,” Paul said. “To repair cars.”

  “How do you propose I do that?”

  “Don’t ask me – you’re the videogame queen. Isn’t there some videogame-style way to populate this garage with fresh equipment?”

  “Jesus Christ, Paul.” The police cars screeched around the rear entrance, cutting off escape. “You come up with half a plan, then expect me to pull a miracle out of my ass?”

  “…can’t you?”

  “Of course I can, but you shouldn’t expect that!” Valentine clicked an imaginary mouse, and the police lights’ flickering whirl halted. Quaysean and K-Dash stood petrified, literally petrified, their hands paused halfway towards reaching for their guns. Everything stood frozen in time.

  A glowing white grid superimposed itself over the walls and floor, highlighting each individual square foot.

  “First, we give it a fresh set of paint,” Valentine muttered, selecting the walls so they pulsed gray. She flicked her fingers. Blocks of different colors appeared before her, a dollar cost floating below each shade: a palette.

  She frowned, waving through various selections, until she settled upon a plain brick-red that cost $500. Valentine selected it; the flyspecked calendar vanished with a cash-register ka-ching!, to be replaced by a beautiful dry coat of paint covering all the walls.

  “This is the only part of The Sims anyone gives a crap about,” she squeed. “Buying crazy shit for your house!”

  She pulled up a furniture menu, selected a countertop with a cash register, spun it into the corner. She scrolled through several categories until she found “Auto Repair,” and began merrily dropping all sorts of repair equipment into the shop: spare tires, the car hoists, wheel aligners, engine analyzers….

  Paul drew Valentine’s attention to the depleting pallet of cash, which dwindled as she finalized each item. “Would you mind not buying all the top-tier equipment?” Paul asked.

  “You’ve seen my Hot Topic frenzies, Paul,” she shot back. “You should know better than to hand a shopping spree to a girl like me.” But she guiltily highlighted the Pac-Man machine and the OfficeMax desk, sold them back with another happy register ka-ching! They popped out of existence. The tray of Flex resting on the desk clattered to the floor.

  Paul sighed; if only Valentine could envision the proper videogame justification, she could have frozen time and teleported them all into another state. But Valentine’s ability to bend physics stemmed directly from her intense vision of how videogame rules should apply to the world; Valentine couldn’t teleport without a Portal Gun any more than Paul could conjure up free money.

  Valentine finished up by purchasing a rusted Saturn and maneuvering it up onto the hoists. She squinted, double-checking her work, then purchased a large oil-stained tarp to drop over the much smaller pallet of cash.

  Paul calculated; about $150,000 remained. Fine. The Flex was worth millions, it could pay off Oscar with money to spare…

  With a satisfied nod, Valentine clicked an “Exit Build Mode” button. Quaysean and K-Dash’s hands finished the grab for their guns; they whipped them out, then pointed them in confusion at a drum of antifreeze that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

  “What – what happened?” K-Dash asked, his voice cracking.

  “Whoo, now that’s a world of explanation we don’t have time for,” Valentine allowed, shoving them backwards towards the lockers. “Now be quiet while I make you look like mechanics.”

  “What?” Quaysean asked, “How?”

  “Gonna reskin you,” Valentine said, as calmly as if she’d told them she was going to get them a Coke. She snapped her fingers; two locker doors flew open, revealing blank TV static buzzing inside. She shoved the two boys inside.

  They went in as two skinny Latinos with gun tattoos laced up their whipcord-muscled arms; they emerged as plump, bucktoothed white boys clad in mechanics’ outfits. They looked in bewilderment at their bodies, spreading their now oil-grimed fingers before their faces.

  Valentine patted them on the shoulders. “Just a character swap,” she assured them. “You’re still you underneath.”

  The cops smashed the boarded-over windows in, fired nerve-gas grenades through blindly.

  “You work for Mr Galuschak.” She coughed as the metal canisters bounced off the walls, spraying green gas everywhere. “Do not fight back. Act like confused mechanics.”

  She ducked into the locker herself, emerging as a lean black man clutching a wrench – and immediately vomited.

  Paul held his breath, eyes watering, shoveling the Flex into a large plastic cooler. The fact that the cops had fired nerve gas without warning was a hopeful sign: that had been the NYPD ’Mancy Task Force’s default strategy two years ago, signaling they still followed standard operating procedure. This meant Lenny Pirrazzini was heading up the attack – and while Lenny was dedicated to stomping out ’mancers, he had all the creativity of a brick.

  Which meant Paul’s plan might actually work.

  Valentine-as-black-mechanic lurched over as Paul began to retch. The cops bellowed orders to come out with your hands up, not quite daring to charge headfirst into a ’mancer’s lair.

  Valentine shoved the Flex-cooler into the bottom of an auto-parts toolchest, then asked, “So what’s Galuschak look like?”

  “I dunno. Old and ethnic.” She shoved him into the blackness. Paul felt the cold electron flow of being converted into reticulated splines, a process more disturbing than he could convey. His flesh was translated into essential mathematic formulas, recalculated.

  He stumbled out of the locker, examining his hands to see what they looked like; they were wrinkled, liver-spotted. A walrus mustache tickled his lips. His watering eyes viewed the billowing gas through a curtain of overlong white eyebrows.

  Ugly, but it hid his artificial foot and missing toes.

  Paul’s lungs ached. The garage door vibrated from the thump of shaped charges affixed to the hinges. He grabbed an imaginary pen, created driver’s licenses for everyone, placed ID cards in everyone’s pockets.

  Lungs burning, he inhaled, and barfed all over his feet.

  He’d only breathed in SMASH-grade nerve gas once before, and never wanted to again. The government had designed this anti-’mancer teargas to cause instantaneous headaches and vomiting – enough to jangle any ’mancer’s concentration.

  Paul fell to his knees.

/>   The door blew open. Cops poured in, wearing gasmasks – What if we’d worn gas masks ourselves? What would they do if we’d adapted to their old tactics? Paul thought woozily, despairing at Lenny’s total lack of strategic forethought.

  The cops took no chances: they zip-tied the four of them, ankles and wrists, hauled them outside. The two choppers swooped around overhead, focusing spotlights on them, their rotors’ air wash dispersing the gas.

  The cops deposited them before a skinny Italian man in black armor who loomed over them, hands on hips. He smirked, wrinkling a wispy pube-stache that any man with a scrap of sense would have shaved off – but Lenny Pirrazzini was as overconfident about his marginal looks as he was everything else in life.

  “Four ’mancers,” he preened. “We got four of these fuckers. SMASH has been riding my ass for two years ’cause we hadn’t caught a one – but now four, in the basket!”

  One of the cops looked at Paul – who was, to all appearances, an elderly heart patient. “Uh, Lieutenant….”

  “I’m gonna shove this right down their damn throat,” Lenny continued, licking his lips. “Call ’em up every damn day and say, ‘Hey, you remember that time I rounded up four ’mancers in one shot? Without a scrap of your fuckin’ Unimancy to assist us? Maybe you guys could learn from us…’”

  “Sir!” the cop interrupted, extracting the driver’s license from Paul’s pocket. “I don’t think – I don’t think these are ’mancers.”

  Lenny blinked, an oddly squirrel-like action. “Of course they’re ’mancers. We got a call from the King of New York. The King is Midas, ’cause his information is golden.”

  Paul shivered: it was the King who’d turned them in. Somehow. “With all due respect, sir,” said the cop, “The – the ‘King’ is an anonymous informant. And I think – I think he gave us the wrong address…”