by Gemma Files
Where Rice’d always excelled were the soft-skill areas of social intelligence: linking, cross-referencing, playing seat-of-the-pants mix-and-match games with names, faces, relationships, motivations. All the things that übergeeks like Horatia, the real deal in terms of sheer cerebral cannon-power, found either too boring or contemptible to master.
Notoriety clung to both of them in roughly equal amounts, an ill halo—automatic separation from the herd. It gave them something in common, a connection virtually begging to be built on. Add up the sum of these parts, and whatever alchemical combination you ended up with would probably blister paint, eat through walls, dissolve fools on contact: major damage in a Klein bottle, times two by infinity. And fuck knew, Rice had never felt up to resisting that sort of open challenge.
As Horatia scouted ‘round for a seat, eventually deciding on the caf ’s single least passers-by-accessible table, Rice pondered her plan of attack. She knew she must be having a pretty good face day, judging by the cat-calls she’d gotten on her way down-campus, and that gave her an extra advantage.
As Horatia popped her MacBook Air open, revealing a screen mostly occupied with some chemical equation roughly the size of Pi to 1,000, Rice did a complex, basketball-inspired shimmy through the crowd and slid right in next to her, so close she was almost in Horatia’s lap. “Hey,” she said, grinning. “Antisocial much?”
Horatia scowled without looking around. “Do I know you?”
“Rice Petty, major Chem, minor Bio. And you—you’re Horatia Wint, Girl Genius. Got the full ride on home-school, did 100 across the boards on your entrance exams, won that big…thing last year…”
“The Lasky Award for Excellence in Chemical Recombination Studies?”
“…Yeah, that’s it, comes with $25,000 and a lab grant; think we’ve got, like…Prions for Perverts together, or whatever.” Rice leaned a little further forward, deliberately invading Horatia’s space to see what she’d do in response, if anything (answer: wrinkle her nose and stare at Rice like she’d grown another head, apparently). Then cocked her skull to one side while resting her chin on her steepled hands, and continued: “But anyhoo, enough shop talk…you like cunnilingus?”
“What?”
“Well, I’m just throwin’ it out there, man. In my experience, though, most chicks do.”
Horatia considered her again, a bit longer, and more closely. “Why are you even talking to me?” she asked at last.
Rice shrugged. “‘Cause you’re the only one here?”
“This place is full of people.”
“Well, sure.” Murmuring: “But, see…I’ve slept with most of them already.”
—
Back at Gilmore Petty’s West End screw-pad, to which Rice had had a copied key since she was around fifteen, Horatia watched with studied I’m-so-not-impressed ‘tude as Rice cooked her up a quick batch of home-made MDMA. An hour later, she was explaining her thesis research to Rice at top speed and volume, gesticulating like she was on crack; a half-hour after that, Rice had her bent over the breakfast buffet, her tongue in Horatia’s ear, three soaked fingers and an equally-wet thumb urging her girlie parts towards full, fist-ready dilation.
Why would she have even taken that first hit? on some level, Rice supposed, Horatia probably thought she was immune—that she could defeat simple chemistry through sheer Nietzschean will-to-power. The basic fact was, really smart people could sometimes do the dumbest shit imaginable; Rice herself was living proof of that truism. For most of her sexually-mature life, Rice had taken deliberate pride in cultivating a policy of enthusiastic polymorphous perversity—live life to its most lurid extremes was her motto, paraphrasing Rimbaud (or possibly Verlaine). In her time she’d seduced teachers, friends’ parents and parents’ friends, the occasional pet; she’d inserted any object inside her which would fit, plus many which really didn’t (though she’d certainly had fun trying to make them). Hell, she’d spent the better part of Prom Night sucking off her best-friend-who-was-a-boy’s same-sex date in the faculty lounge girls’ washroom, while simultaneously taping the whole encounter for later YouTube distribution on camera-phone. If it was doable at all, she’d pretty much already done it.
But even in a short life of complex thrills, sex with Horatia had to qualify as a serious career high. Cold and efficient to near-Spockian degrees under almost every other circumstance, Horatia had no moral hangups, a vivid carnal imagination (Rice suspected she’d attended the School of Porn for some time now, functional virgin or not), double-jointed thumbs, and seldom remembered to wear underpants. Considering her entire modus vivendi revolved around a constant diet of hypertension and overwork, it probably shouldn’t have been any sort of surprise that with the proper encouragement she could—and did—go off like a string of firecrackers.
They spent the next day in bed after a pleasantly exhausting night out of it, in various other locations (and positions). Rice lounged back and watched Horatia elaborate on the experiment that’d consumed her life up to this point, eventually breaking in to clarify—
“So you’re working on, like…human flesh spackle.”
Horatia, flushing: “I most certainly am not.”
Rice really had to laugh, long and loud. “Aw, c’mon! You know you are, man—that’s exactly what it is, and that’s totally fine; very…chick-friendly. Very marketable.”
“It’s a damn cellular matrix force-growth reagent in a collagen unguent base, you whore.”
“Comes in a jar? Goes on with a spreader?”
“…I hate you.”
Ah, but that didn’t last too long.
—
Just supposed to be a simple hook-up, a trick, like everything—or everyone—else Rice did. But she found herself taking Horatia’s numbers anyhow, and actually using them; indisputably, there was something about finally having another high-three-digit IQ case on speed-dial. Besides which, Horatia had…qualities, and those qualities were already starting to grow on Rice like sympathetic mold. Rice soon got used to having her around in the background while she ran through her normal daily grind of low-level super-villainy-so much so, after a lamentably short while, it almost seemed like she couldn’t function optimally without Horatia. Which was…
(creepy)
…evolution, maybe. Like calling to like. And likin’ it.
By the end of February, Rice had bought Horatia in on the bottom floor of an only half-built, all-but-discontinued condo out near the old abandoned sugar factory on Lakeshore, and put up for a bunch of shiny new lab equipment on top of it. A few weeks later, she let her dorm roommates kick her out at last, and moved in too. By April, when her Dad wanted to know just where the fuck her perfect GPA had gone and just what the fuck those $40,000 worth of unspecified expenses on his Visa bill were, she told him to go screw himself and he told her—fucking finally—that she was officially cut off. Annoying, but not unexpected.
After all, it wasn’t like she didn’t have a viable back-up plan.
—
But: “Listen,” said Horatia, with surprising patience, “I am not going to let you boil the greatest potential discovery of the 21st century down for parts and sell it as a recreational drug, just because we have bills to pay. I’m just not, Clarice.”
“Rice, please. ‘Clarice’ is Doctor Lecter’s long-distance crush.”
Horatia rolled her eyes. “Why would you want everybody to think your parents named you after a staple foodstuff?”
“Why would your parents really-for-truly name you anything that reduces down to ‘ho’? ‘Cause that kinda had to suck, back in school, right?”
“Moving on…”
It was April 22, Earth Day. Good time of the year for moral debates, but Horatia’s position on this one would’ve rung a whole lot stronger had she not just been turned down for a follow-up grant to her now-exhausted Lasky Award funds—as Rice well knew, having overheard at least one half of the entire shrieking phone call which preceded this particular plot twist.
As far as Rice could make out, the Lasky Foundation’s main objections had seemed to be A) but what are we supposed to do with something that keeps functionally dead rats alive indefinitely, yet unable to breed? (“Sell it to rich people who think they’re too important to die at a ridiculously inflated price, you morons!” Horatia had screamed. “Then use half the initial profit to mass-produce it, give it out gratis to everybody else, and freeze Earth’s population explosion!”) Which then led directly into B) shut the fuck up, you freak.
“You do get how you just kinda shot your credibility wad there, right?” Rice had asked, helpfully, after Horatia threw the phone across the room. “I mean, fighting Death-the-archetype mano a mano for the salvation of the world is…pretty cool, but to the corporate mindset? Counter-productive, to say the least. They want mortality left in the equation, man. Makes it a whole lot easier to sell people shit they don’t really need, when they’re scared.”
“I took the same Intro to Microeconomics requirement you did, thank you very much.”
“Okay, sure. But were you actually paying attention? or were you maybe just working on Reagent Draft one under the table, while making fun of the prof ’s heinous nose hair?”
To which Horatia snarled something unintelligible under her breath, so Rice began again, taking it nice and reasonable.
“Look,” she said, “you already stacked the deck at the design stage so this stuff would induce euphoria, right? With no side effects?”
“That we’ve seen, yet.”
Rice nodded. “And you could make a lot of it, pretty fast, if you needed to.”
Horatia, shrugging: “Absolutely. But I don’t need to.”
And there it was again: Horatia’s marvelous people-blindness—so endearingly hilarious when watching her trample over everybody else’s feelings, so infuriating once you realized she really didn’t even grasp that you had them too.
“Don’t you?” Rice leant back in her chair as if the whole topic was boring her. “‘Case you hadn’t noticed, ‘Rache, you’re not the only one whose income just dried up—I mean, you do remember who paid for all this, right?” A dismissive wave at the lab. “Sure, you could take what you’ve got to any major Big Pharma group, but you know they’d keep you on rats for at least another ten years, and you could lose intellectual property rights at almost any stage of that curve.” Sly: “This’d be just like skipping straight to human trials…if you can even call junkies human.”
“Says the woman who thinks ‘E’ makes any first date better. And you’d find a paying customer base—where, exactly?”
“Where wouldn’t I? Some of my best friends…oh, all right, more like all of ‘em, actually. Everyone I’ve ever taken a class with, shared a club with, hooked up with…”
“…Except for me, that is.”
Now it was Rice’s turn to nod, her grin stretching wider, as she locked Horatia’s hot gaze with her own, even hotter, stare. “All except for you, yes.”
Horatia did hem, haw and fume a bit more after that, but by post-Afternoon Delight snack-time, it was a fully done deal. They attacked the sub-equation together that night, worked ‘til 5:30 a.m., and spent the rest of the weekend on cooking/packaging. Friday evening after that, the hot new party favour known as “reA” was officially out on the street. Rice hit the circuit with fifty tiny baggies stashed in her purse’s lining, wearing a winning combination of Victoria’s Secret lingerie on top, red pleather fetish gear on bottom: salesperson mode, plausible and charming. Her twin trade secrets were a head-full of previous contacts and a complete willingness to do that all-important first little bump while her targets watched, ostensibly to prove she wasn’t “wearing a wire,” or some shit.
Test passed, the marks soon took a snort of their own, and sagged back, eyelids fluttering—oh man, shit, that’s good! Followed at speed by the one-hit-you’re-hooked routine of immediately double-dipping, rubbing it on their gums, all the while wondering out loud: Uh, Rice…it wears off kinda fast…can you, like, shoot this stuff, or what?
Well—
—let’s find out, shall we?
—
Sometime later, Rice, too, would have occasion to wonder, the way she once had on Horatia’s own behalf. So why did I even take that first hit, anyway? Fully knowing, in her heart—and elsewhere—the only possible correct answer:
…Oh yeah. ‘Cause I thought I was immune, too. Or indestructible, at the very least…
And the funny thing, in hindsight? That was the part which turned out to be true.
—
Start-up fees alone kept their penetration of the Greater Toronto Area’s synthetic drug market fairly shallow at first, though Horatia’s demented insistence on tracking—and analyzing—their clients’ habit-based bell-curves rendered functional invisibility not really an option. Still, Rice made sure they stayed close to the radar, if not actually under it. She had no doubt their main competitors knew of them, but it seemed unlikely they could gauge exactly how much of their profits reA sales might be cutting into, let alone who its creators were or where they lived.
By summer, however, the inevitable finally became evitable…and Rice and Horatia woke, one way-too-early morning, to find their lab-loft suddenly full of thugs with guns. Their leader, Dieter Dorfmann, was a rooster-proud flyweight boxer of a guy with a shaved head, albino-blond eyebrows, inept jailhouse tats and a scary little lisp; Rice had bought crystal meth off and on from his various club dudes for about a year now, and always maintained there wasn’t much wrong with him that a good swift dick up the ass wouldn’t cure, plastic or otherwise. Still, it was funny how much less innately ridiculous he seemed when bolstered by five other well-armed guys of varying sobriety, all of them busily tossing the place for whatever they could find.
Rice and Horatia froze, stranded, halfway down the stairs from their sleeping platform—both barely dressed, with Horatia maintaining a white-knuckled clamp on Rice’s wrist. The good part: nobody’d knocked over anything likely to explode, as yet. The bad part…everything else, pretty much: guys with guns, no guns of their own (not that Rice even knew how to shoot a gun, but she thought she could probably work it out fairly fast, given sufficient contextual pressure). No way to reach the door without being seen and/or stopped…
…so Rice went with her most basic instinct, instead—chill hard enough to cool down the whole room, thus keeping people calm enough for she and H to stay alive. In her best amused drawl, therefore, the knot in her gut thankfully inaudible—
“Yo, D, man…I can call you D, right?”
A rippling wave of pistol-cock clicks brought six separate barrels their way, at this; Horatia had already ducked behind Rice before Rice could even react, which might’ve looked bad from the outside, but provoked a weird rush of affection: That’s my girl. Dorfmann turned, cutting her the only-slightly-curious wall-eye. “DD,” he said.
Rice shrugged. “Yeah, well, whatever, D-squared—looks like you’re looking for something, so maybe I can help. What’s the issue?”
“Uhhh…you two rich bitches, shitting where I eat? Pushing your homebrew crap in my territory, without even kicking some back to me for the privilege?” Adding, as his chief button-men—equally large, brown and unimaginatively monickered brothaz Big Trey and Lil Trey—smirked behind him: “That’s just rude, dude.”
“Granted. How ‘bout we rectify that right now, then?”
“Okay. You turn over what you got, you don’t make any more, and you pay up for what you screwed us out of. Then you get to live…maybe.”
Rice clicked her teeth together, “thought” a moment, then smiled wide. “Nah,” she said. “Not really workin’ for me, as an offer. Care to try again?”
“Listen, little miss gay-’til-grad—”
And now Rice could feel Horatia’s nails really start digging in—but fuck it, her blood was up, and if she had to die today, she just didn’t feel like doing it while sucking anybody’s dick (metaphorically or otherwise). “Oh, fuck you
, little mister Aryan Brotherhood-’til-parole,” she snapped back, a contemptuous sweep of her hand taking in both Big and Lil’s multiracial faces at once. “Your White Power click-pals know exactly who you got carrying the weight for you, out here? or do you just skip conveniently over that part, come contact visits day?”
“Hey, insults. That’ll make me want to cut you a break.”
“Dieter, who the fuck do you even think you are, aside from the guy who couldn’t cook up a new drug if somebody made you deep-throat an Uzi? Get out of my damn place!”
DD flushed (creepily deep, even given his colouration); he cracked his neck from side to side, then said, with remarkable restraint—
“Make me.”
—and shot Rice, right in the chest.
Horatia’s shriek was louder than the bullet’s impact itself, and weirdly more painful. Rice lost her balance and fell backwards, like she’d been punched hard in the ribcage. Her ears rang. The light felt heavy. As she lay there, she saw Big Trey and Lil Trey moving slow-mo past her to grab Horatia in a double arm-lock, hauling her down right on top of Rice’s body. DD was blabbing on, thick and dying-battery deep, about “teaching” somebody some fucking thing, while Lil Trey undid his pants; Big Trey had put his weight on Horatia’s shoulders, holding her down on top of Rice’s body. Horatia flailed, scratching at Lil Trey’s eyes, and got a backhand in return that looked like it almost cracked her jawbone.
Oh, you don’t hit her. Ever.
Without thinking, Rice simply reached up, grabbed Lil Trey by his ears and broke his neck with one sharp twist, yanking his head clean off like snapping a pencil in two. Carotid and jugular popped, spouting blood like a busted tap. With a single wordless cry, Big Trey fell off the stairs, base of his skull connecting hard against the floor; Horatia scrambled backwards up the steps, mouth gaping, glasses smeared with crimson. A second later, Rice had vaulted to her feet, Jedi-style, and kicked Lil Trey’s twitching body off the steps too before heading straight for DD at full-out stalk, ignoring the shots he kept pumping into her body until the gun ran dry, until she was close enough to lift him off the floor by his throat. As he dangled, gurgling, she leaned and hissed, right in his face:
