Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  To anyone looking closely, Byron was two things: An addict, and a Penthouse Kid. Add them together, and you get: Victim.

  But he had his hungers, and they required feeding. Caution and discretion lost out to addiction, every time.

  He wandered absently through the thick press of the pre-fight crowd, stopping every few feet to scan the outliers for Dealers. They should be everywhere (the sign out front proudly advertises that they had twelve on staff at all times), but he’d been fumbling through the crowd for minutes without spotting a single one. Byron knew the man he was looking for worked the graveyard shift, but there was no sign of his – wait, there: The short, unassuming man in the uniform grey jacket. Byron breast-stroked through the crowd with a staccato burst of “excuse me, sirs” and “terribly sorry, ma’ams.” The pleasantries would give him away all the more, but he only had to reach the man in the grey jacket, and all would be taken care of. Plastering on his most earnest smile, Byron stepped up alongside the man, and saw that it was not Red. He lapsed back into the crowd with a heartbroken sigh, even as the Dealer began hawking his wares:

  “…gas, euphorics, corticosteroids, nootropics! Got your Voyeur, Kharon, SlimZ and Merrimene here! Gas, euphorics…”

  It seemed like hours that he drifted: Washed up, caught in tides, and spun about in the circling eddies of the pre-fight crowd. He was having trouble focusing. The screens flashing their surrealistic violence, the dreary-eyed audience members, the deep thrum of the infrasonics that only the Kharon-addled could hear – it all blurred together into a nebulous fog of irrelevancy. The only objects that retained meaning in his purple-rimmed eyes were the disposable C-ring gas inhalers, sealed over the nostrils of those lost to the pre-fight shows.

  Couldn’t he just…? No, no he could never resort to something so base. He simply had to find Red. Red had his mix. Red could help him away to a more refined world where his limbs… were not moving independently… from his body?

  What was this?

  Why were his hands struggling to slip one of the cheap plastic strips from beneath the nose of a vacuously smirking blonde girl? He would not resort to petty thievery, he insisted to himself, but his hands would not listen: They had already broken the vacuum seal, and were desperately scrabbling to get the plastic tube up to his own face when somebody caught his forearm, and twisted it back. Byron laughed and started to explain – it’s these damnable fingers, you see; they’ve minds of their own — but he was off his feet now, sprawled on the ground before three gamblers who were too caught up in the match to spare him more than an annoyed kick.

  “Well, they certainly deserved that,” he thought. “I don’t know what those hands were thinking, trying to snatch the inhaler right from that nice young user’s nose. Simply barbaric.”

  And besides: He wasn’t here to watch the fights. He was here for Red. Red had the only gas that Byron needed. His eye twitched up to an ornate cruciform, pulsing in the upper left quadrant of his peripheral vision. His Biological Operating System expanded outwards, drifting fluidly down over his field of vision. He compulsively checked his inbox for a reply from Red. It remained empty. He double-checked the buffer account that held today’s drug funds, and ensured that Red hadn’t accessed it yet. It remained full. The deal hadn’t been accepted. He whisked the BioOS away, and it collapsed back into the baroque cross icon of its idle state. Funds were never the problem. Scarcity was the problem.

  Where in the world was Red?

  Byron did not want to be in this shipping district, elbowing his way through slack-jawed, hallucinating fight-fans, and watching televised barbarism throw curtains of crimson across the hangar floors. He wanted to be home. Home with a thin sheet of purple squares loaded into his Rx card; home with the servants to watch over him while he was under; home with his large black chair and his hand-knit shawl; home, where tea was always waiting for him when he came up; home, where coming up never lasted for more than a few blissful, sleepy hours.

  For the tenth time today, Byron cursed his esoteric taste. Droop-eyed addicts happily indulged all around him, transported away by the cheap and ubiquitous strain of Voyeur gas that the fights distributed. They didn’t care what they took or when it took them to, and it was their apathy that Byron envied most of all. There are addicts, and there are addicts, and then there are people like Byron: Even junkies looked down on him with pitiful haughtiness, simply because he’s clocked more life-hours following the Lord than in his own skin.

  His own tight, uncomfortable skin.

  Without fail, when he first detailed his mix for a new supplier, they would sneer and spit and slur at him – waste, meat suit, biographiliac - but he simply could not find any solace in these tawdry fights, nor even in the more ubiquitous mainstream biographies. At least if he followed historical figures famous enough to have the entirety of their life pre-mapped for him — the Jesus Christs, George Washingtons, Queen Elizabeth I’s – he could just slot his Rx Card into his own home ‘feed whenever he ran low, and he would never again have to venture below the cloudline into the claustrophobic, choking, dangerous Blackout floors.

  But Byron’s lot was to follow his namesake, and the vast bulk of Lord Byron’s life went chemically unexplored, save for a few choice moments and his own custom-created gas trips. For the latter, each batch had to be specially commissioned from blackmarket dealers like Red. And on nights like tonight, when Red was nowhere to be found, the fog of withdrawal set upon Byron with its dull-edged, vicious throb: The itching first, then the nausea, and now the peripheral blindness, settling all around him like an amethyst mist. The last would eventually tunnel his vision completely. Eventually, there would be seizures strong enough to tear his muscles in twain. Eventually, he could even risk death.

  But it all paled in comparison to spending one more minute in this miserable, boring, awkward body amongst these filthy, boorish thugs and their vulgar fight-trips. For a brief moment, he felt a surge of righteous entitlement turn to fury inside of him – he would claw their eyes out, rip the precious gas from their lungs and inhale the entire damned room, suffocating all inside with the terrible vacuum of his hunger – but his rage quickly collapsed beneath the blitz of fear.

  In a panic, he shoved his way through the press and into a dark, relatively unoccupied corner. He took a few asthmatic, shuddering draws of air, and steadied himself.

  Red was here, he reassured himself, he had to be here. The fight nights were always good to Red. He subcontracted as a house Dealer and peddled his obscure concoctions on the outskirts, catering to the more jaded addicts, looking for something new. He would be here. He was always here.

  All around Byron, the dusty old screens showing the pre-fight entertainment blipped off. The house lights – giant, archaic LED panels set into ceilings a hundred feet above his head – all went dark at once. One by one, the main projectors fired up (the last coughed twice before sputtering into reluctant life and completing the three dimensional image). There, above the crowd, ten feet tall and faintly luminescent, stood a tall, lanky, frightened man, alone in a wooded clearing. Every audience member too poor, busy or unconscious to be present via gas trip craned their necks for a better look. The camera snapped forward abruptly, showing the figure in close up: Ropy limbs. Misshapen face. Chinstrap beard.

  The man was immediately, instantly recognizable, though even the veteran gas-fight addicts would be hard pressed to tell you exactly why that should be. They only knew that he was an icon — important to history in some vague, ill-defined way — and therefore that it was entertaining to demean, torment, and maybe even murder him, depending on how the day’s match went. The bookies fell largely silent. They didn’t waste their energy on the opening matches. These weren’t the interesting fights. They merely served to whet the bloodlust for the main events. Byron could already guess at what came next, because the opening bouts all followed the same basic template: Some random historical icon set in mortal combat against an inherently ridiculous or overly powered o
pponent. The basest coupling of cheap violence with an even cheaper laugh.

  Sure enough, trees began to crack and fall in the unfocused patch of greenery just behind the lanky man. A throaty, rumbling squeal sounded somewhere beyond the shrubbery. Then its source slowly emerged from the brush: A thick, horned head whipped from side to side, clearing the foliage around it, followed by broad, leathery shoulders, a stumpy midsection, and a long, blunted tail. The beast stumbled and struggled to breathe, unaccustomed to the new atmosphere it found itself in. But when it spotted the tall fellow, it dutifully lowered its spiked skull into a charging posture, and pawed at the earth.

  To his credit, the man’s shock died almost instantly. He quickly scratched together his composure, and narrowed his eyes at the animal’s uncertain approach. His gaze darted away, spying something just off screen, and he rolled deftly out of view. When the camera panned back to him, he was wielding an enormous blade with both hands. He set his feet, and prepared to meet the charge.

  Byron sighed in disgust and turned back to his search. Abraham Lincoln versus a Triceratops. Of course. How many times can one watch this dreck, he wondered, before even the feeble-minded finally grow bored of it?

  Chapter Three

  The ultralight cameras on their silvery webs drifted down like snowflakes, and settled peacefully across the Recovery Pile. QC watched as they instantly started to dissolve, like rot in timelapse. The Customer Service ‘bots — wispy, wireframe humanoid skeletons — came staggering up next, already disintegrating midstride, and fell headlong into the pile of shimmering dust. Then the bird-faced security drones — not built for slow speed maneuvers, they dive-bombed themselves into the pile, kicking up plumes of mercurial ash with every impact. Last were the appliances: The microwave sound generators, the climate control units, the interference dampeners. This was QC’s favorite part: Watching the large, stout machines with their stubby, stiff legs, waddling determinedly to their doom within the pile. Though they were immense, and solid enough where it counted, the bulk of the heftier structures were still comprised of the same lightweight carbon nanotubes as the drones and cameras. Their larger panels and some of the support frames were were solid steel, but their hollow webbed bones were pure nanotech; they all crumbled at roughly the same rate, leaving only the odd, lacey tube to jut out from the ash, like seafoam on sand.

  The Disassembler nanobots that, moments ago, had been coursing inert through QCs veins, were now devouring every piece of the set around her, dissolving and recapturing the more valuable elements for reabsorption before the trip back. The common ones - hydrogen, carbon, oxygen – they abandoned. They’d been pulled from the trees, rocks, earth and air around them to begin with, and could be safely discarded in the pile as detritus. The rarer elements — lithium, helium, technetium — couldn’t reliably be found in every staging ground. Those cost money. And the fight organizers were nothing if not cheap: If you have to bring it to the Arena Epoch, it’s coming back with you.

  Hence, the pig.

  And so QC’s Disassemblers went to work, pulling each construction apart and packing their worthwhile materials into a series of miniscule spheres, color-coded for easy identification. She sifted through the pile of silken dust once the ‘bots went inert, gathered up the kaleidoscopic marbles that remained, and hand fed them to the animal, one at a time. Some of the Factory Girls preferred the injector (it was quicker to just stab the hollow tube into the animal’s hide and load it up), but QC had found that pigs were quite happy to eat just about anything with a handful of real, organic grass. It was a futile gesture of kindness, she knew: Without proper care and careful monitoring of vitals, packing pure elements into a living thing was dangerous, and sometimes fatal. “Proper care,” however, took hours — if not days — and that, the fight organizers simply did not have. Plus, if a vat-grown pig contracts heavy metal poisoning, suffers catastrophic cell decay, or has an embolism during the return trip, who gives a shit? Even QC’s eyes no longer welled up when the vat-pigs inevitably squealed and keeled over. It was a matter of exposure: Witness a tragedy every day, and it becomes routine.

  But while you can pack element-spheres into a pig until it dies, and harvest them later without loss, Factory Girls like QC were needed for the strains of nanotech that built and demolished the arena. It takes time and money to acclimate a strain to a new host, and the animals die too often and too easily to risk losing expensive strains on every trip. So QC had an occupation, while vat-pigs had an expiration date. But when it came time to jam that thick injector through their hides, she always opted for the small charity. She saw too little difference between the two of them: If the budget shook out a little differently, a vat-pig could have had her job in a heartbeat. And if the Fair Use of Human Resources contracts shook out a little differently, she could have had its job as well.

  Being a Factory Girl wasn’t easy work: The first few months were filled with constant injection, and the Acclamatory Periods left her with ceaselessly aching joints. During the APs, her cartilage ground together like powder glass and she could feel her heart palpitate whenever it passed a microscopic clot of ‘bots that hadn’t fully dispersed in the bloodstream. But soon it was just a matter of showing up, taking the gas, bleeding out the strains, watching the fight with dull-eyed weariness, sitting on the mat, waking up, and going home. Shit, maybe she was a vat-pig, after all.

  At least the Aps were over now. All of QC’s ‘bots – the camera-builders, the material dissolvers, the element packers – had successfully acclimated to her physiology, and went down just fine these days. At least until the organizers upgraded to a new strain. And those bastards were so cheap, that was a bi-annual occurrence, at most.

  Wait, no. Fuck!

  She had an upgrade scheduled this week: A new strain of control ‘bots that used the glucose in her blood for power instead of thermowave batteries. Supposed to be “safer and more self-sufficient,” which she knew was bureaucrat-speak for “cheaper.” Shouldn’t complain, though: At least they’d give her a decent flush before the upgrade. Knock out all the inert bullshit kicking around her veins right now. They said you couldn’t feel it, but she swore the creeping cell-damage was starting to wear on her, like a weakness in the bones.

  But if the upgrade was this week, they’d be testing her for compatibility any day now. QC bit her lip and spat in frustration: She’d managed to bank a few odd strains for herself over the years, and even hired a body designer to route them to a universal control in her left thigh. If she was lucky, the organizers would only fire her for breach of contract if they found out about the black market nanotech. If she wasn’t, they’d break her down for strain retrieval. She’d signed the contract, after all.

  If she was going to be sure her contraband ‘tech was still cloaked for the Compat Test, that meant a trip to Red’s for a scan. How close was this thing to wrapping up? She surveyed the clean-up progress: The disassemblers had moved on to the audience’s clothing now — vital-monitors were woven all throughout their uniforms, and the nano-strains there were valuable enough to warrant pig-space. But that usually came last, and seemed to be almost finished: The insubstantial fabric of their hastily manufactured coverings was already decomposing, literally falling off of their bodies as the ‘bots did their work. The audience always reveled in this part. The women giggled in mock-embarrassment, while the men goaded each other broadly as each became nude by inches.

  She nudged the Harvester — a broad, flat clear disk with a bulbous reservoir on the rear – and it dutifully rolled over the piles of crumbling unitards, pulling whatever ‘bots it found into itself, before trundling over to the Recovery Pile for absorption itself. And that was the last of it. QC waited a long moment for the strains to deactivate, then filled her lungs and exhaled strongly into the final Pile. It scattered in the air like pollen on a stiff breeze. When the dust scattered, all that remained was the dull heather mat that her inactive nanobots conglomerated on. She rolled a patch of microdermic needles
across the backs of her thighs, flipped out the gelatinous buffer blanket, and settled it over the pad. She sat on it cross-legged, making sure as much of the patch’s surface area was touching the blanket as possible, and waited. Five minutes, and the bulk of her strains should be back inside of her. The gas would wear off soon after, and she would be returned to her own time, hopefully off to find Red before the medics scanned her.

  If this had been real, the vast open spaces and great, unblinking sky would have filled QC with a crippling dread. But the sharp edge to her senses assured her this was just the gas, doing its thing: Not much different than a hallucination. Comforted by the fiction, she used the moment to take in the forest, and try to relax.

  A furry little rodent that looked kind of like a cleaning unit: It had a thick, bristly tail, and chattered at her from its perch in the branches before disappearing. A tiny insect with ample orange wings flapped in the middle distance. A lone, bloody horn sat wetly in the trampled grass at the far end of the clearing. Somewhere deeper in the forest, Lincoln was howling in confused rage.

  He’d easily won this match. He easily won damn near every match, which made for a good teaser bout before the main events, but far too predictable for the title card. The howl sounded again, so loud you could practically hear his lungs splitting apart from the effort. It would’ve been bloodcurdling, if the ‘loop hadn’t gone viral years ago. She heard it ten times a day now, at least: Spliced into every cheap action vid on the channels, echoing throughout commercials for industrial adrenalin, or forming the backbeat for some chintzy panic-dub mix.

  Her BioOS chimed three times, and blinked gently: The infusion had finished. She stood, and felt the sickly load of the ‘bots settling back into her blood cells. Objectively, she knew it was impossible for a human being to notice the infinitesimal weight of nanobots – the medics called it ‘psychosomatic projection’ – but every single Factory Girl she’d ever known had told her they carried that same fucking weight.