“This is mind-numbing,” Red said, shuffling carefully over to James, whose gaze was still bolted to the floor beneath his feet.
“Just don’t look at it, yeah?” James suggested, “Forget it’s there.”
“No, these two: This is ridiculous. I get the whole second personality thing, I do, but we don’t have time for it. Obviously he knows she isn’t a little girl - though he does a real bang-up pedophile impression – so why doesn’t she just drop it? She’s not fooling him.”
“That isn’t it at all, mate. See, playing that little kid card down here in the ‘Wells, that’s novice shite. Rank amateur. That’s the bloody remedial class of public personas. Of course nobody is fooled by it: It’s so obvious that it’s silly. Only an enormous arsehole would even try it, and be laughed right out of the ‘Wells for their troubles.”
“So what’s…?”
“So the whole point of a public persona is to hide strengths and invent fictional weaknesses. Playing the little kid card down here – no, nobody’s going to buy it. They’re going to think you’re a bit slow, yeah? Which is exactly what you want, innit?”
“What about him?” Red said, nodding to the man with the gleaming, wobbling penis jutting from his head.
“He’s playing at insecurity. Broadcasting the biggest, boldest weakness he can. He’s nothing but weakness, from the name to that big empty tomb out there. You think a bloke who straps a huge cock to his head with no sense of irony is savvy enough to take this much territory?”
Red had no answer, but refocused his attention on studying the plush carpet beneath his feet. It felt different somehow. More insistent. A looseness crept into his bowels — the same kind he got when he touched ceramics or those tiny trees the Chinese sold at the looping bazaar. It was too solid; too complicated for nanotech. This was handmade. The rug’s pattern, which at first glance he took to be some basic circuitboard, resolved into a dense chain of stylized monkeys, each hooking their lower paw into the upper paw of the monkey below them.
Somebody, somewhere, at some point, had taken years to produce this one single item.
Red felt cold drops of sweat begin to itch their way out of his pores.
“Problem?” James glanced at Red’s shins in concern, as far up as he was willing to look.
“We’re surrounded by monkeys,” Red answered, shuffling a shoe over to block a particularly sinister simian link.
“But that’s silly!” Zippy’s protested shrilly. “Not if nobody plays. There can’t be a game just between you and me. That’s no fun!”
“Gotta good game for little girls here,” the congealed patch of bald fat that was King Big Dick’s face emitted a barely distinguishable train of grunts. “Called chase the snake. You gotta wrestle ‘im when you catch him. Watch out though, little girl, he spits poison. Hawwww….”
“You guys want to play too, right? I promise that it’s going to be hoots!” Zippy turned to address Red and James. The latter nodded emphatically, without lifting his gaze.
“Play what?” Red asked.
“Shut up, mate! Just say ‘yes.’” James hissed.
“But it sounds like literally the worst game ever,” Red protested, but came up short when James caught him with a surprisingly painful elbow.
“Wh…yes. Yes of course I want to play. Games are just…just so much fun. All the time,” Red finally added, annoyed.
Zippy nodded at each of their answers, then turned back to Big Dick and stuck her tongue out. King Big Dick, for his part, immediately started to undo his skirt. Red returned James’ elbow, and gestured impatiently.
“He wants to execute you and is generously offering to split the bounty with Zippy’s fiefdom,” James explained.
A rubbery weakness surged down the back of Red’s legs. His vision focused suddenly, with laser clarity, on a single woven monkey in the far corner of the rug: It grinned back at him evilly, and extended a long, cruel, unwavering middle finger.
“Listen,” Red turned to the impassive mirror beside him, his own visage reflected back in fisheye. “You have a secure terminal here, right? Something landlined?”
There was no answer. The mirror simply swiveled in the general direction of King Big Dick and Zippy, both staring silently at Red from the raised dais.
“I’m not just some worthless god damn beta tester. I’m the best Mixer you’re ever gonna meet. You got a secure terminal — something with a direct connection, something that can run a tunnel into the blackmarket ‘Feed subforums — and I can get you stuff nobody else has even heard of. Just last week I pirated something that’ll make you feel eighty feet tall. Literally: It messes with your body image. Spent all day trying not to step on the people next to me. They’re not even going to release that. It’s a collector’s item, and I swiped the recipe. In a few years, that alone will be worth triple the bounty to the right people, and I know all the right people. I can make this worth your while. All I need is a terminal.”
Silence.
“Swear to god damn, I said” King Big Dick finally turned to address Zippy, his silver wang wobbling in appreciation “you got shit you share shit. Daddy always said it. Said ‘share the shit, son.’ Daddy wasn’t much for talking, but man could throw a fuckin’ punch. You seen him back in ’18, used to be a fighter…”
“Okay,” Zippy agreed after a moment’s thought, “but if you lose this round I get to pick the next game.”
Red looked back and forth between the pair of them, James, and the mirror-faced guards, waiting for an interpretation. The sentry nearest him leapt into action so violently that Red flinched, as if struck. The guard strode quickly to a section of wall behind Red, and pushed open a recessed door. Pure, white light flooded in from beyond; a thin pyramid of illumination etching itself precisely onto the smooth, black floor.
“He said you can use a terminal,” James finally supplied, “and if you can match the bounty, he’ll let you through.”
“If I can’t?” Red asked, already regretting it.
“I think he’s going to bugger you before cutting off your head. Or he might have said ‘after.’ Or possibly even ‘during.’ I’m not sure. It’s all very open to interpretation, depending on whether ‘fuckin’ punch’ is meant as an adjective-modifi-“
“Yeah thanks I got it,” Red said, and stepped into the light.
Chapter Seventeen
“What ever seems to be the matter?” Byron frowned up at the pixie-cut blonde. Or rather, he frowned up at the spot where she had been a moment ago.
Byron waited dutifully, but no snappy retort or ingenious mating of obscenities issued forth from the empty ledge. He was kneeling unsteadily, ankles crossed, at the bottom of a wide, flat-bottomed, steel mesh basket. It was suspended on every side by thousands of nanometer-thin cables (all encased in thick, black rubber, so as not to cut clean through any errant fingers). Above him, the cables ran together into a sort of chandelier, which redirected their upward course horizontally, and sent them braiding together into a thick, solitary central stalk. The thin wires on their own were near as unbreakable as made no difference; a nuclear bomb wouldn’t have compromised the integrity of that stalk.
He really didn’t understand the fuss.
Byron did understand that she found the location somewhat unsettling, after her episode in the catwalks — the basket in which he sat was suspended from an old crane arm jutting from the external wall of the North Post, and if one squinted carefully through the net of nanometer cables, one could see the slight curvature of the Earth on the distant horizon, and the wispy, cerulean ring of the atmosphere fading gently into space – but the exposure to external stimuli was minimal, and the structure infallibly sound. It was only if one were to wedge their face directly into the small space between ledge and basket that one could catch even the slightest glimpse of the patchwork metal exterior of the Post — its surface so massive that it seemed to actually fold outward – disappearing into the vanishing point far below.
Final
ly, a response came.
“No.”
“No?” Byron queried.
“No. Nope.”
“I…my dear, I do not believe that was a cogent answer to my inquiry,” Byron carefully modulated his voice to emanate pure logic and solace.
“Shut your fucking faggot hole,” QC replied, but her tone was frail and reedy, or perhaps the deeper intonations were being swept away by the howling of the vicious winds. Winds which never reached Byron’s basket, of course; never budged it an inch. All of the Posts had immense air foils mounted every dozen stories or so that nurtured a permanent, stabilizing upward air current, several hundred feet out from the building proper. It acted somewhat like a controlled burn, leading any intercepting parallel gusts away from the structure itself. The effect was not wholly smooth, but what buffeting air remained was no rougher than the open ocean on a breezy day, Byron recalled, remembering the time he’d spent with the Lord aboard Hercules on their way to Grecian sho-Byron was snapped forth from his reverie by a soft, ululating chant of curses with scarcely a breath between them.
“The winds don’t truly come in this far, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he offered helpfully, “and the Atmo generators seem to be fully functional, if a bit…musty.”
“Suck fucks from your mother’s asshole!” QC snapped back.
When Byron had first descended the short, fraying rope ladder that connected the ledge to the basket’s surface, QC had been squatting stubbornly before him, her back braced against the sealed doorway. By the sound of her voice, she had not budged.
“Are you stuck, perhaps? Have you caught on something?” Byron pulled at a loose thread forking outward from the cuff of his loose black trousers. He worried at it, made no progress and, sighing, did his best to tuck it back away. With a resigned grump, he unlocked his legs and stood to full height, putting his face on eye level with the cramped maintenance tunnel’s floor. The basket, Byron noted resolutely, had not swayed a fraction of an inch.
“I’m not fucking stuck!” QC said sullenly, mistakenly lifting her gaze to glare at him. She palled at the half-glimpsed open air behind Byron, and quickly tightened back into the smallest ball she could manage. From Byron’s perspective, with the faded silver duster puddled on the floor beneath her, her head tucked down below the high collar, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, she looked like nothing so much as an oblong ball of foil; a crinkled metal egg, nesting in the corner.
“The ah…acrophobia, was it?” Byron nudged gently, “Is that kind of thing common with you Blackouts?”
“I’m not scared of heights, for the sake of Christ’s sacred cock! I live in a fucking canopy shelter, Byron. Do you know what that is? It’s a god damn slab of pressureboard suspended from the underside of a catwalk — who fucking knows how many miles in the air — and all that’s holding it up is four little nano-cables, half the size of those.” She gestured flippantly back toward the basket. “I know we’ve like, gone down a few hundred floors from where I sleep, but it’s just plain fucking wrong to see it all like this. It’s not the height; it’s the out. Look at the fucking air! It’s blue! You shouldn’t be able to see god damn air! Everything is just way too fucking…everywhere.”
“I see,” Byron said, not seeing at all. “Well then, if looking is the problem, I have a proposition: Do not look. You rouse yourself, turn about, and begin walking backwards toward me. I shall tell you when to stop. The gap between basket and building is mere millimeters, and bounded on every side by nigh indestructible support cables. There is no possible way you could fall anywhere but into the basket itself, where I shall endeavour to catch you.”
“Are you insane? You fucking – you think it’s easier for me to walk blindly backwards and fall into it?” Her arms were a blur of flustered, incredulous gestures – the foil egg appeared to be in the process of hatching a particularly frustrated chick.
“I believe so, yes,” Byron gave the plan consideration, and found no fault: “I assure you, milady, you cannot misstep. As soon as the ledge ends, the cables begin and the basket is beneath you. I feel at this point I should remind you that I have been blindly following you into a series of increasingly horrifying and mortal situations for the better part of the afternoon. Why, naught but a few scant hours past, you bade me to climb another human being like an orchard ladder. It was simply awful. I am asking you to fall equidistance now to what I climbed then. It seems a fair trade of unpleasant distances.”
She was silent, or at least too quiet to hear above the ululating static of the restrained jetstream.
“Fine. Okay. Fine. Yes. We’ll do that. Fuck it? Yeah, fuck it. Yeah, it makes total god damn sense to me. I’ll just walk ass-backwards into the abyss and trust the waiting arms of some penthouse ponce. Sounds like a party.” She stood too quickly, and oriented herself with a curt, jagged gait, shaky with fear and anger.
“I shall overlook the impropriety, considering the stress of your predicament,” Byron offered kindly. He received a pair of sweeping, dramatic middle fingers in response.
“Ready?” QC asked.
“Indeed.”
Mustering all of her strength, QC made one hesitant, tiny shuffle backwards. And then another. Eventually, traversing the distance with an approximate 10:1 ratio of swears to inches, she managed to shamble her way to the edge of the platform, whence Byron told her to stop.
“Now, all that’s left is to fall,” he said pleasantly.
QC set her shoulders, held her head high, yelped like a kicked dog and slumped backward…
Into Byron’s waiting arms.
Who then immediately fell backwards himself, far too weak and clumsy to ever make good on his word.
“Sorry!” He scrambled to his knees and began to dust the woman off, but she made no motion to rise from her frozen sprawl. Her eyes were firmly shut, her jaw equally so. This did not prevent the anticipated tirade of profanity, of course; it was merely delivered through clenched teeth.
“You son of a bitching assblasting goatfucking little-“ She sucked in an impatient breath, held it, released. “Go….pull the thing, Byron.”
Byron extended a lanky arm to tug loose the mooring cable, and the basket executed a perfectly smooth and astonishingly rapid descent. His stomach expanded upward, lined his throat, swelled into his tonsils, and then slowly settled back into shape. Thick, white horizontal lines demarcated each floor; they instantly blurred together into an indistinguishable whole as the lift accelerated to its terminal velocity. Despite Byron’s intestinal acrobatics, he noted that the pair of them managed to stay comfortably rooted to the floor as the carriage embarked on its controlled descent. After a moment, even the incessant flipping in his belly normalized, and he settled in for the long, uneventful drop.
Byron attempted civil conversation to pass the time, and was met with stony silence. He tried silence himself, grew bored, and attempted interaction again. This time his platitudes were met with a string of vomit. He gave up and turned his thoughts inward. In times of severe stress or lasting boredom, Byron found it soothing to mentally replay his last few trips with the Lord; to chronicle and catalogue the time as best his addled memory could manage. When last he’d left the true Byron, the poet had just mustered the drunken courage to kiss his old friend and companion, William, for the very first time. Luckily, Byron had been employing the Voyeur strain of Gas, and so was able to watch the exchange unfold as a disembodied narrative form, rather than interjecting his clumsy form into the tender moment and risk ruination. But Byron did not need the physical stimuli of Presence to experience complete empathy with his Lord. Even now, through the uncertain film of memory, Byron could practically feel the slippery, silvery nervousness in his chest melt away into a warm, spreading brandy of excitement as William, after a moment of shocked uncertainty, passionately returned the kiss. They had both broken off suddenly, however - overcome with self-consciousness and hereditary guilt. William hurriedly excused himself for the night, stumbling down
along the shores of the Thames and disappearing into the coal haze, whilst the Lord settled back into th-
“Are we stopped?” QC broke into Byron’s trance, and he saw that she’d moved, a little, if only to inch slightly away from her meager puddle of sick.
“Hm? Oh,” Byron struggled to sight his bearings, mentally excising the first stirrings of an uncertain erection. He stashed the shame of it away, to rebuke himself properly at a later date. “Yes. Yes it seems we have. Up we go.”
Eventually, with a good deal more contact with her backside than he and his phantom arousal were entirely comfortable with, Byron shoved QC up onto the confined exit walkway, spun the handcrank that opened the access door, and sealed it again behind them. The stale, shuddering glow of ancient LED panels kicked on in response to their motion.
“Here we are,” Byron said, and laid a reassuring hand on QC’s shoulder, though the gesture ended up, to his mind, being something more like a limp-wristed slap. He hastily withdrew his hand entirely and stuffed it into his pockets, hoping the girl had been too shellshocked to notice the awkward proceedings.
“Yeah. Fuck. Fuuuuuuck.” QC drew in several deep, shuddering breaths, then slowly and uncertainly broke open her sealed eyes. “Thank you for that. You did good…ish.”
“Yes, ah…and thank you!” Byron exclaimed, instantly regretting it with every ounce of strength in his body.
Bryon’s life in physical space was a constant exercise in competing embarrassments. Though the biological withdrawals wouldn’t start for some time yet, still he ached for the blissful, confident disconnect that a good Gas high could guarantee.
Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity Page 12