Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  QC stood and went to her toes, stretching her calf muscles. They had been seized up from stress, ever since the altercation in the alley, and were now starting to cramp. She alternated pointing her toes as she walked, and used the exercise to justify a bit of snooping into Red’s apartment. There were few adornments, aside from the factory default furniture and an Rx-feed terminal, but a small handful of personal belongings stood out against the faded plastic like beacons, and she homed in on each in turn: An old photograph, actually imprinted on dumb-paper, sat inside of a scratched chrome frame. An elderly man and a young boy (Red by the looks of that nose), beamed out happily. They were somewhere green, likely on mandated vacation to one of those community garden pads, back before they tore most of them down. The colors had all faded equally, save for the blues. Older printers did that – the chemicals they recycled to make the blue were quite a bit more resilient than the rest, and stood out with age. It made the scene look cold, austere. Red was smiling with abandon, like boys do, but a look of concealed nervousness hovered about him even then. The old man held Red tight by the waist; Red’s hand sat uncertainly over the man’s shoulder, as if he had reached out for an embrace, then decided against it mid-photo.

  She set the picture back into the groove it had worn in the plastic counter — it must have been moved often — and picked up another. This one, a thin wooden frame (real wood? It felt oddly heavy and textured, but QC hadn’t seen enough actual wood to compare), held a picture of young Red viciously hugging the legs of an elegant but stern looking woman. His brow was knit. His eyes were closed. It was a posture of desperate, spontaneous affection on the child’s part. The woman was certainly striking, but seemed a bit too acutely aware of the angles of camera: Her neck was craned just so, her hair fell a little too perfectly over the one eye. The last picture was unframed. It was a stiff, smartpaper image of a stark-naked Red, much younger and leaner, and a pretty little teenage girl with a purple tri-hawk. They were standing atop a portable ‘feedpot in some slick corporate housing project — all clear corners, bright storefronts, and wide, open windows. The girl looked to be trying to reason with Red, whose penis, ragingly erect, was mid-wag in the general direction of a confused and angry security officer. The officer’s liquid blackjack was also ragingly erect, and mid-wag in Red’s general direction.

  That dated it. The picture, and by extension Red, were both older than QC had thought. She’d only seen liquid blackjacks in dated video feeds. It was an inefficient and somewhat goofy weapon: A floppy, flaccid gelatinous tube that, upon contact with a solid object, snapped to rigidity. It was too close quarters for the liking of modern security forces, and the amplified impact of the whip-like motion was tricky to control. It sometimes ended up being lethal when it wasn’t meant to be. Corporate security used the less (physically) damaging microwave soundguns now, beaming their spoken commands to the inner ears of potential perps with a crippling, unavoidable volume. QC held a thumb on the image until the info bubble popped up, and read the simple, unpracticed scrawl: “You only fall when you look down, Coyote.”

  A reference to something she didn’t get.

  She set the photo back down amongst the trio, and moved on. In the bare kitchen, the storage unit was beyond empty. A still-sealed instructional manual slipped from inside the door when she opened it, and floated to the ground. Not only was there no food in it now, but she doubted there ever had been. The only window in the apartment, a porthole set partway up the far wall, faced the vast interior chimney between the Four Posts. From it, she could only see brightly flashing signs advertising porn games through the ceaseless rain. Seated upon the sill was a fragile ceramic bird, its bright red paint now chipped and faded. She recognized it instantly. It was from the night they met.

  QC had just finished her second stint as a Factory Girl, still utterly convinced that she would make some quick, easy money and get out well before the damage could take - not like all those other, stupider girls. She literally tripped over Red at the top of the stairway leading back up and out of the backstage trough: He was sprawled on his belly directly in front of the exit, giggling happily at something cupped in his hands. She fought back the urge to kick his teeth in, and knelt down to look in his open palms instead. There, shielded from prying eyes, was the little red bird figurine. Red noticed her looking, and defensively shunted the bird away to his jacket pocket. He hopped quickly and with surprising agility to a standing position, straightened himself in a poor pantomime of righteous indignation, and cleared his throat.

  “I’m QC,” she spoke, forcing more politeness than usual, so as not to jeopardize her new job, “you work here? Cause if not, you’re not allowed back here, you burnout fuckwad. The fights are over.”

  “I work here,” he answered, affronted, “I’m a beta-tester. Very important.”

  “Yuh huh,” she rolled her eyes, “what’s with the bullshit bird?”

  “Oh man!” His face instantly dropped all pretense and brightened with childish joy. He dug into his jacket pocket and held the bird up before her, too close for her eyes to focus on, “did you see this bird I got?”

  “Yeeaaah, just a minute ago? When you were laying on the floor like a cunt, and I almost broke my motherfucking neck?”

  “It’s the best!” He proclaimed.

  “You’re bleeding,” she noted the nasty cut, still oozing above his left eye.

  “Somebody tried to take my bird,” he said sadly, “back before I knew it was mine.”

  “You mean you stole it…”

  “No. It was mine from before, I just didn’t know it and the shopkeep didn’t know it either. I tried explaining, but he wouldn’t listen. He hit me in the head and I ran away.”

  “I have to ask: Are you high, or just…simple?”

  “FivepartsBZthreealphaAPSonenonbindingcatalyst,” he recited in a single monotone breath. “New mix. Trying to emulate the emotional mindset of late childhood. Is it working?”

  “I…” QC reflexively started to form an orchestra of obscenity to unleash on the man, but his eyes glimmered with earnestness, and she opted instead for: “Yeah. Like a charm.”

  “Yes!” He exclaimed, pumping his fist.

  The two of them spent the rest of the night in a cramped, four-person micro-diner. The owner gave up on shooing them out to make room for paying customers, when it became obvious that there were none. He fell asleep instead, and snored loudly from a hammock behind the serving counter. As the drugs faded, Red matured (slightly) right before her eyes. Eventually QC found herself talking to a sincere, thankful, very sleepy and very hungover adult male. They’d been something like friends ever since.

  The nostalgia was sharply and abruptly broken by her Overdose Alarm. A deep blue light flashed in her peripheral vision, mirrored on her forearm panel.

  “OVERDOSE,” the sub-audible warning conducted the message along her large bones, “OVERDOSE OVERDOSE.”

  QC hadn’t been able to afford a full body workup for the black market control kit installed in her thigh, so she’d opted for catch-all integration with the official panel in her forearm instead. The official panel, annoyingly, only came with one default alert: The overdose alarm. It functioned as a universal notification for everything she did with her unsanctioned nanotech. In this case, it meant the drop of motion-sensor-containing blood that she’d left on the junkie’s forehead had moved.

  He was waking up.

  She ran around the kitchen bar and stood immediately across from him, well within spitting distance. He was groaning and shifting now, the blood smeared halfway down his cheek. He coughed, turned, and threw a hand up over one ear. And that’s when she heard what had caused the man to stir in the first place: It was so faint from her place in the kitchen that she’d chalked it up to an electronic squeal; a high-pitched, struggling whine. But now she recognized it for what it was…

  A door-drill.

  Somebody was boring through the walls, into the vacuum chamber, trying to spring the seal.
Somebody was breaking in.

  The junkie bolted upright, yelling a syllabic remnant of something he’d been saying while still inside the trip. It startled her into swallowing half of the weaponized saliva she was nurturing. She choked and gagged and gasped for air.

  “Introduce yourself!” The man demanded, spinning around on the bench, trying to take in his surroundings, “Inform me of my whereabouts at once! If I broke in here then I am terribly sorry!”

  “The fuck are you?” QC finally managed to ask, slurring her words around half a mouthful of spit, “and the fuck are you doing in Red’s house?”

  “Ah, we both want to know the same thing,” Byron conceded, just as an atmospheric pop shuddered through the walls. The first vacuum chamber had ruptured.

  Chapter Twelve

  “No fairsies!” Zippy squeaked, “we really got to get up in a big hurry an’ back when we killt that mean girl that kissed that other boy for you, you said you’d owe us one!”

  “Ah, Zippy, lass: I told you,” the unseen voice replied in a lilting, dancing brogue, “iss naught up’t me.”

  They’d progressed quickly enough through the fiefdoms immediately bordering Zippy’s own: A word from James or an eager smile from Zippy, and doors were thrown open for them. And if there was the slightest hesitation, Zippy signed a quick, two-pronged gesture to James, and he gleefully began cranking up something that looked like the access cover to a watermain: An oblong, flat black disc with a dense weave covering one side. When James finished spinning the oddly quaint, brass handle, it emitted a faint whine that quickly, exponentially built to maddening levels. If the stubborn inhabitant didn’t catch the hint and offer a string of rushed apologies in time, the scream terminated in a hollow concussive thump — all shockwave and no explosion. The effects didn’t extend more than a paltry few feet before dissipating, but when James held the disc right up against something, that something ceased to exist in a large hurry.

  They progressed haltingly in this fashion for hours – cajoling, flattering, and only occasionally blasting down each gatekeeper– until they abruptly ground to a dead stop. Red could see no clear boundary demarcating one territory from another, but all of Zippy’s influence seemed to end at a surgically precise, invisible line that ran between a little shop selling custom-built faux-leather jackets, and a wall comprised of an impassable network of interlocking rebar.

  Zippy was engaged in an absurdly complicated war of false personas with the unseen Irishman, while James and Red stood quietly to one side, competing to see who could ignore the other the hardest.

  James lost.

  “So what’s this all about then, mate? Never met a bloke what warranted A-Gent level heat before.”

  “They think I’m a drug-runner,” Red answered.

  “Yeh, I gathered that, thanks. What I’d like to know is: What drug’d you sprint off with that merits breaching the ‘Wells? That means a stack of bills, a serious headache and a knife in the back, more times than not. Penthouse ponces don’t deal direct down here: Usually just freeze your accounts, drop a few work-credits to some hard up junkies, and sit back and wait until you turn up starved or gutshot.”

  James spat unhappily in the corner of the cramped alley. To get there, they had crawled on their bellies through a living space that rose no more than two feet at its highest point, all while the residents obliviously tended to their lives. A young boy played a slow, prone game of tag with a simple aero-bot; a pretty little girl with a golden plate straddling her cheek and jaw hummed a chipper tune as she chopped tofu in a recessed kitchenette; an old man slumbered on his side, tucked away into an unlit corner and partially surrounded by a net of shimmering beads. The jacket-shop owner had extracted a small toll from them before unlatching the grate in his floor and allowing them through, out into the tiny gap between territories. The alleyway was just wide enough to fit five or six people abreast, and just tall enough so they could all stand at a slight crouch. As soon as they’d set foot in the miniscule demilitarized zone, the shopkeep slid a clanking metal curtain down behind them, effectively sealing the space. Their four credits had only bought them a one-way ticket.

  “So what is it, mate? I’m dying over here – curiosity and the cat and all that.”

  “Isn’t information the best currency down here?” Red answered, giving James his best evil eye. The creeping sobriety inching outward from his gut had given him an anxiety headache, however, so it ended up as more of a desperate, epileptic wink.

  “Ha! Guess you’re not as stupid as you look,” James smiled and slapped Red on the shoulder. It sent aftershocks of migraine pain up his neck, and into his ears.

  “But you look really bloody stupid, so maybe that’s not saying much,” he added. “Barter then? You explain this utter quagmire of a situation you’ve thrown us headlong into, and I’ll give you something in return.”

  “Like what?”

  “What d’you want to know?”

  “What’s Zippy going to ask for in payment?” Red said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Shite!” James laughed earnestly this time, “but aren’t you a clever one? And here’s me, thinking you was just another tourist. You know the game, boy, I’ll give you that. So fine, let’s deal then: Who’d you bugger to end up here, how hard, and why didn’t you kiss ‘em nice after?”

  “I do beta-testing for the fight labs, sometimes. They trust me with the high end stuff, because I keep mostly clean — or at least I keep my addictions varied enough that they never get too tight a hold. And the only nano-strains I’ve got in my system are my BioOS, a rooted drug induction rig, and the visual recorders in my optic nerve to record trips.”

  “Bollocks,” James glanced down at Red’s bare forearm in disbelief. “You’re practically a virgin! No older strains? Something a flush might’ve missed?”

  Red shook his head.

  “No nightvision? No toys leftover from childhood? Light bots? Nerve stims?” James’ whole face was contorted with incredulity, “you’re telling me you never, not once — not even as a stupid bloody teenager — hype up on oxygenators before sex? So what, you just didn’t need the stamina boost? You were a bloody natural love machine from the get-go?”

  “Strains mess with the drugs.”

  “Yeh, but it’s usually nothing. You wouldn’t even notice it.”

  “It wasn’t worth muddling the effects, you know? The more ‘strains you introduce, the more you’re gonna wonder, even with the most basic ABC mix: How long, exactly, did that really last? Was the run-time fifteen seconds shorter this dose because of some malfunctioning strain pulling it apart, or did I just screw up the bonding? Is that bloody creep in my peripherals actually a side-effect of the mix, or is it my biotech interacting? Even as a kid, the drugs were always more interesting. It’s not worth gumming up the works.”

  “Bloody hell,” James’ eyes widened as the realization hit him. “You’re a nerd! Hahaha! All this drama, and I’ve been sittin’ here thinking you’re some bigshot from upstairs. And you’re just a chem nerd!”

  Red considered taking offense, but the idea seemed to shake a large chunk of murderous edge off of James. So he shrugged, and smiled timidly instead.

  “No worries, mate. We’ve all got our quirks. I’m kind of an arms geek, meself. Designed this one, too” James said, hefting the significant weight of his shockwave disc up between them. “Based it on an old Nazi vortex cannon. They wanted to use it to take down aeroplanes. Never worked right back then, of course, and it’s still shite for range, but a few billion nano-fans in resonant sync does a little something at pointblank.”

  “That’s…great,” Red replied uncertainly, “I’ve never seen anything like it. Wouldn’t have guessed nanotech by the weight of it, though. Why so heavy?”

  “It’s the intimidation factor, right? Every work-a-day bastard’s got himself a cheap, lightweight plastic somethin’ or another. It’s commonplace, is what it is. But when you bring out a cannon with some actual heft to
it, people get scared. They figure it’s got to be some serious hardware to merit any kind of weight. Truth be told, I actually just lined the insides with lead. Totally functionless, but it makes it heavy as me mam’s teats.”

  “Clever,” Red admitted, mostly in the hopes that James would put it somewhere farther away from his face. “And the crank?”

  “Well that’s just a good time, innit? You ever cranked up anything? Bloody satisfying, that.”

  They shared a laugh that lost momentum quickly.

  “All right, then: So you’re a beta-tester. Still doesn’t say what’s in those veins that’s so all-fired important…”

  “New brand of Presence,” Red replied, digging his nails into the ball of his thumb in a vain attempt to quiet the drumming in his skull.

  James whistled again, long and low.

  “Yeah, but that’s what I don’t get,” Red continued. “It doesn’t work. It’s supposed to make for substantially longer trips back, up to a week if you go by the numbers. But it didn’t do anything different. Certainly not enough to go murder-crazy over an accidental runner. You know I’ve only been outside of the NDA grid for twelve hours now? Who the hell hires anybody – much less A-Gents — that quickly? Even the destination wasn’t anything special: We mostly use standard, non-title bouts while beta-testing. It’s boring, but a familiar scenario makes differences easier to spot. This was that Native American girl with the knife up against one of those old Mark II Security Bots. You ever seen that one? Next to that big old river?”