Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  And he liked the coat. Went well with the tie.

  So James kept his head down and his eyes open, waiting for his moment. But the crew of large, charcoal-skinned boatmen, each scarred and mutilated and reeking of chemicals and mold, presented no opening. To the untrained eye, they were a mess. They swore, cuffed one another, and carried every duty out with a plodding, dull-eyed, slack-jacked idiocy. But no fundamental perimeter line went unbroken, no man strayed too close to the prisoners, and no spear-point dipped too low to be quickly brought to bear. In the ‘Wells, everything was a feint. Spotting one was second nature to James. By ‘Wells standards, this was an artless and obvious ploy; these men were not dim-witted, slovenly oafs. They were tight and professional. Their eyes never stopped moving.

  His moment never came.

  The pale kid with the turban-braid had welcomed Red with genuine cheer, then shuffled him gently but firmly over to a barbed whip of a woman, her face and body all sharp angles and bony points beneath a pair of disposable green scrubs. The pair of them ducked down a hallway in the rear, and hadn’t been seen since.

  Zippy immediately and loudly proclaimed her fondness for pretty boats and popcorn. She wasted no time setting her little identity game in motion, and it seemed to be working. None were fooled into thinking she was simple, of course – most anyone living close to the ‘Wells recognized a public persona when they saw one - but they were fooled into thinking that she wasn’t clever or subtle enough to craft a better ruse, and that was the point. They overlooked the way she used her peripherals to scan every step, every weapon, every exit. They did not watch for the odd tightening of the muscles or the drop in stance when she prepared for an attack, only to become blocked somehow, and shrug the movement off with a giggle.

  Jesus bloody Christ, could he use a drink. Just the incessant clink of glass from the pasty kid’s hair was enough to set him salivating. He felt the dull construction of a headache start to erect itself behind his eyes.

  The blonde bird with the Fuck You face was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Scraps of plastic wrap still clung to her underarms and behind her knees. A mesh ball gag with black vinyl straps was wrapped about her head. The thin line of exhaust mesh across the top gave the gag away as an Inertia Unit – something that cancelled nanotech. She must have spitters installed. Nasty little bitch, James thought appreciatively, and fought back a tingling ghost of attraction.

  Across from the blonde a wispy lad sat with his legs clasped, knee over knee, like a woman. One wet, bare foot shook incessantly. He was too quick to laugh, and the gathering clouds in his eyes fingered him as a Gas addict. One about to be in very rough shape at that. James had him pegged as a Penthouse kid, by the lack of scars and modifications, but he lacked the weird burnt brown of regular UV exposure. Besides, Gas addiction wasn’t a Penthouse vice – SlimZ and Furies were all the rage up there, last he heard. Even high end Presence was a bit low rent for the skybox crowd.

  The Penthouse kid seemed to know Red somehow, though neither had directly acknowledged it. James caught the shock of recognition on both of their faces when they’d first spotted one another, but what it meant, he hadn’t a clue. The turbaned kid was making the rounds, surveying each of the newcomers and taking their measure, under the guise of hospitality. The mean little blonde he eyeballed warily and apologized for gagging:

  “For our safety, right? Although I gotta say, shit looks good on you.”

  He laughed; she glared.

  The kid squinted down at Zippy, but she sold her goggle-eyed stare so thoroughly that he simply shook his head and moved on. The addict, he backhandedly insulted and socked in the arm, but there was a cautious tenderness in his movements, like he was scared of doing any real damage. The turbaned kid didn’t seem to want the addict to know that, however. Strange.

  And then he shuffled up in front of James.

  “Whadda we got here?” The kid elbowed the grey man beside him, who dutifully laughed. “You my accountant or some shit?”

  James shrugged. Not meekly, not apathetically, just a slight raise of the shoulders. Measure every movement.

  “You gotta name, brother?”

  “James,” he answered simply.

  “Me? I’m Little Deng,” the kid said jovially, “and this here’s my home. Y’all are my honored guests, so shake that stick outta your ass and unfold a little, will ya?”

  “Yeah? In that case be a mate and go get me a drink,” James took the gamble.

  Silence. The grey men waited, hand on spear, for the insult to be taken. Deng mulled over the possible meanings of each syllable.

  “Ha!” He finally laughed once. “Man after my own friggin’ heart here!”

  Deng turned and clacked over to the bar. He poured a long, slick ooze of whiskey into a clear plastic tumbler, and handed it to James. James tilted it back, and let the wave of relief slide through him.

  “If that’s how you treat honored guests,” James spat the liquid onto the floor, “I’d hate to see what you do to the help.”

  One of the grey men laughed out of turn, and quickly cut himself off, anticipating some form of punishment. A toothy, genuine smile carved through Deng’s carefully sardonic mask. He lifted a smaller bottle from beneath the counter there, shaking it tantalizingly from side to side, and poured something honey-colored into a squat, bell-shaped glass.

  “This here,” Deng said smugly, “I get from a dude up in Industry. He gets it from outside the City. Imports it! You believe that shit? Hadda look up the friggin’ word, when he first told me. He trades me one bottle of this fine, beautiful hooch for twenty-two hour’s worth of illegal Presence from the banned continuities. Likes to go back a few years and kill his own kids, before they grew up and fought back. Hard to build Gas that goes that recent, you know? Hard, expensive, and dangerous. That’s death, for dealing in a banned continuity — not to mention all the feed-blocks Industry’s got in place for mixes that cover the last twenty years, but this shit? This shit is worth it.”

  James tipped the bell-glass back and swallowed a careful half-sip.

  “I would fuck this,” he whispered in awe. Despite every instinct in his body, James began to like the kid, just a little bit.

  “Can I have some juice too?” Zippy chimed in sweetly, batting her eyelashes.

  “Shut-up-bitch,” Deng snapped back automatically.

  James’ newfound affection wavered, but the anger almost immediately turned to pity: Deng, the poor bastard, had bought into Zippy’s act, and was starting to dismiss her entirely.

  “Little Deng,” James sloshed words and whiskey together in his mouth. “Named for your old man?”

  “Naw, Deng? He’s no daddy. More like a mean uncle. Big Deng was the shit back in a place called Sudan. Rain god and what not. Shit’s important in the desert, rain. Rare. Not like here. Deng, he’d help you out of a jam or two, sure, but you always gotta do something back, and he ain’t exactly gonna powder your behind after.”

  “And these blokes here,” James said, gesturing with his glass at the grey men scattered about the room, “tell me something: Is what they say true?”

  “Eh, you know people: They say things.”

  “The ghost spears. Pass through your armor before you get a chance to bleed an’ all.”

  “Nah, they ain’t shit. Too friggin’ dark in the Rez to throw ‘em worth a damn, and outside the Reservoir, there just ain’t enough room. We just like the story, is all. A good story, you know? That shit’s worth a thousand spears.”

  Little Deng shuffled around the bar. The toenails clacking and glass tinkling composed an awkward little melody, like a child carefully picking out all the wrong notes to a song on a broken piano. He settled wearily onto the stool beside James and threw his elbows up on the counter. He sipped at his own whiskey gingerly, and closed his eyes.

  “Naw,” he finally continued, exhaling happily, “them spears is just for show. We all got guns. We ain’t stupid.”

  ***

 
; QC tasted ozone.

  Or rather, she tasted the idea of ozone. She had no idea what the actual ozone molecule tasted like, but she’d heard the concept referenced so often that she began to automatically associate the word with the vaguely metallic, electrical taste of nanotech. She’d tasted it when they first installed the disassemblers in her salivary glands; she tasted it every time she ordered the gritty rations from a public ‘feed station; and she tasted it a moment ago, when the cuntswab they called Little Deng slipped the Inertia Ballgag into her mouth.

  She’d worn Inertia Units before. Every time she passed through a checkpoint the inspectors made unhappy faces at the scanner results and told her to slip on that papery little retainer. It vacuum sealed over the mouth, like the surface tension on a spit bubble, but you could breathe and talk through it just fine. As far as QC knew, it served two purposes: To coat any nano-material that passed by the membrane in junk elements, thus weighing it down and rendering useless, and to make whoever was wearing it look really fucking stupid.

  Those Inertia Units – the spit bubble kind – QC knew for a fact they were available for any conceivable orifice as a free build option at every public ‘feed terminal in the Four Posts. Which meant that the dickhole with the garbage in his hair had the thing in her mouth custom-built specifically to humiliate the wearer.

  It pissed her right and directly the fuck off.

  …but it was better than the wrap.

  In the wrap, she couldn’t move a muscle, even to breathe: Maybe if she’d puffed out her chest when it hardened, she’d have had enough room to exhale and inhale comfortably. But when they were hosing her down, she’d been too busy screaming out the exact volume of her semen that her captor’s mothers had ingested over the years, and didn’t have time to think about trivial things like breathing. She could only manage shallow, rapid little gasps until they’d cut her loose. It felt like being crushed by atmosphere; like being strangled by a weak but persistent midget; like dying, slowly. It was, of course, entirely worth it.

  Six gallons, for the record. Six gallons of semen.

  The skinny redhead turned out to have a mouth on him and a pair of clanking steel balls. In twenty minutes, he had the grey men half-drunk, hollering and guffawing like gibbons. QC couldn’t decide if he had a plan, or was just a hell of a fun alcoholic.

  The dark-skinned woman with the doe eyes and Springsteel leg was sitting next to Byron. She was either mentally handicapped or drugged, and wouldn’t stop babbling like a little girl. Byron looked terrified, nervous, and relieved all at once. He had ceded total control to fate – you could see the ‘it’s out of my hands’ look in his eyes – and seemed to be happier for it.

  “-I’ve killed like half your guys. We’re good though, yeah?” The redhead finished his anecdote smoothly.

  “No! No friggin’ way you said that shit to King Motherfucking Big Dick himself! What’d he say? What’d he do?!” Deng’s face was turning a deep shade of purple. The laughter and the booze working on him.

  “Not a thing, but you should’ve seen his bloody great silver willy wiggle,” The redhead smiled wryly and swirled his empty glass at the grey man wavering drunkenly behind him.

  The man gave him a look like warmed over death, then shrugged, took the glass from his hand, and stepped in front of the redhead to duck through the bar. QC almost registered something wrong with that – there was a reason the guard shouldn’t have done it – but before she could figure out why, exactly, the redhead was up on his feet, kicking out the man’s knees and pulling the pistol from his waistband as he fell.

  The grey man flung his spear as he went down, and for a moment looked like it was going to impale the dim, wide-eyed woman sitting on the floor. But she reached out a hand as if to wave, and gently redirected the point. It didn’t connect with Little Deng, staring dumbly from his stool at the bar, but it came close enough that he screamed, diverting the attention of the grey man closest to him. The idiot woman pushed off the floor and used the momentum to fold her prosthetic leg beneath the solid-looking metal table at her feet. It heaved up from the ground, flipping end over end into the distracted guard’s temple. When the flash of movement was over, the redhead had two of the grey men pinned against the bar: One with a pistol in his mouth, the remnants of his shattered teeth clacking noisily against the barrel, the other apparently paralyzed by the small man’s fingers, resting on the flesh beneath his eyelids. The dumb woman was now mounting Little Deng like a cowgirl, and holding a long, thin, bloody blade against the bottom of his throat. It looked like she’d hurt her hand. Her prosthetic leg was bent almost double into the kidneys of the grey man lying on the floor. He writhed in pain, but could not seem to find the purchase to wriggle free. There was one grey man still standing, at the far end of the room. He’d been stationed near the exit, the only one not drawn to the bar for the revelry. He was brandishing a large, crimson pistol with four barrels, waving it back and forth between the redheaded man and the dumb girl, barking meaningless commands: Wait, no, wait, hold on, stop now, wait.

  Byron laughed nervously, like somebody had told a joke of questionable material.

  ***

  The ceiling looked like wood, but that wasn’t possible. Too rare, too expensive, and even treated wood would have rotted long ago under the constant static pattering of the incessant rain. But if it was emulation, it was a hell of a job: A jagged crack ran diagonally across the surface of one plank, and Red could see splinters where it terminated at the border. On another, a swirling knot of orange and blonde worked itself deep into the brown surface. Red had been on his back, staring dully up at the enigma for the better part of half an hour. The skeletal woman in the cheap plastic scrubs was a blur of activity. She plugged tubes into him, took others out, re-sterilized them, connected them to a variety of thwacking, humming and vibrating machines, and frowned down at the results she saw there. A small, balloon-mounted terminal buzzed timidly around her, and occasionally she would reach out and grab it. She’d tap on it, scowl, and then slap it away. It emitted a nasally howl as the tiny rotors kicked on, and wavered back to her side like a kicked hound.

  “That’s not real wood, is it?” Red finally asked.

  They were the first words he’d spoken to her. He was silent even when she told him to disrobe. He had expected some sterile medical garment in place of clothes, but she just motioned him impatiently to a table and he quietly, nakedly obeyed.

  “The knot got you, didn’t it?” She pinched a pair of tabs on either side of the tube in his arm, and a hose of milky white fluid disconnected from the needle-patch with a vacuum pop. She swapped another in its place, full of what looked like molten lead. “Look at the corner behind me, to your left. See it? It’s there again. Same knot, same crack. It’s a good pattern – expensive - but the installers weren’t paying attention. They throw in all these unique little details, but in the end the illusion hangs on how they’re mounted. If you’re not careful, you repeat patterns, and the façade is shattered.”

  She squeezed the tabs on his other arm: A pop, and then a new tube. He watched his own blood pool at the closed seal between patch and hose.

  “This is going to feel odd,” she said, and seized the roving balloon again. Red knew it was just anthropomorphization, but it seemed to writhe with happiness at the attention.

  He heard the whispered rush of a million microscopic intake fans kicking on, and then the shiny blue lunchbox next to his head, decked out in vaguely Asian characters and obscure iconographics, rattled to life. There was a sensation like cresting a hill too fast, and then intense, bone-deep fatigue. An unidentifiable feeling – something sad, but also elated; heartwrenching and joyous at the same time – washed over him.

  “What are you doing?” He asked, every movement of the tongue a conscious effort.

  “Complete transfusion. I’m replacing your blood,” she motioned at the tube full of flat, metallic liquid.

  “With what? What is that?” The implacable emotion
throbbed and twisted in Red’s chest. It was something from a long time ago, a feeling he’d had in…

  “Early childhood,” the sharp-featured woman finished for him.

  “I…I wasn’t talking. How did you?”

  “That’s what they all say,” she adopted a thick, dopey tone meant to serve as a universal impression of all men. “This feels like something from when I was a kid. What is it? It’s so familiar…”

  “Okay. So what is it? The feeling.”

  “It’s nostalgia. Or rather, it’s nothing, really. Chemical misfires. It doesn’t actually feel like anything that’s ever happened to you before. Well, probably not anyway. It’s just your brain starting to shut down because I’m pulling all the blood away from it. Oh, don’t give me that face: You’ll be fine. This would be a pretty roundabout way to kill somebody, wouldn’t it? We’re just swapping your blood for HDMPAS.”

  “H-what? H-what?! You’re draining all my blood?” Panic scratched at the inside of Red’s head, but the fatigue was too much. If he could just get her to stop, to let him rest for a minute…

  “Hush. Let it take you. It’ll all be over soon,” the acute, boney woman tapped at her little pet balloon.

  Red’s vision went black, all at once. Like somebody flipped a switch.

  “Jesus Christ. So this is…” Red tried to speak, but his tongue flopped limply in his mouth, and refused to articulate any more words.

  “Yep,” the doctor supplied casually, drumming her nails on the hollow plastic tabletop. “This is what dying feels like.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Gentlemen, please,” The skinny uplevel snob was waving his hands around, fussing and fretting like one of those addled little hens the Chinese sold at the Looping Bazaar. Little old ladies would come up all bold and shit, blocking your path and silently holding up this stupid, scrawny, twitchy chicken. You’d have to either pay them or knock them aside – only way to get past. The hens themselves, they didn’t make much of a bother. Just cocked their heads dumbly and looked all over the place. But when it came time for slaughter, the fucking birds would start screeching and warbling like a falling freight elevator, right up until you cut their damn heads off.