Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  It was one of the barest Hanover bios Victoria had ever seen. She couldn’t help but be a little impressed at somebody staying that off the grid these days.

  Victoria let her eyes fuzz out of focus, then directed them upwards, turning off the scroll function and activating the auxiliary ring. She focused on the blinking video feed – the one that first triggered the result – and a short clip played silently. It was Quintessential Caroline, standing in a cramped corridor surrounded by a motley group of tired and angry looking men. To one side, a heavily-muscled Arabic woman bounced merrily in place on a prosthetic leg. The viewpoint abruptly shifted away to a security lens on the ceiling just outside the doors of a small lift. She watched from a bird’s eye view as QC staggered out of the elevator, tripping over her own feet. She turned to glare back at an unseen party, and the Arabic woman appeared on-screen. She said something and a short, redheaded man laughed. QC turned and stomped way, around a corner. As she rounded it, the POV shifted again to a shaky, constantly shifting camera. Its focus was scattershot and frantic. It paused only briefly in any one place - to alight on a rack of blades, a plate of meat, a random assortment of women’s cleavage. It was a feed culled from an unsecured eye camera; some tourist that just happened to be looking the right direction at the right time and didn’t know how to set up a proper firewall. The first-person movement clashed with the natural scanning pattern of Victoria’s own vision, and she fought back a wave of nausea. The tourist’s gaze settled on the rolling hips of a silver-clad woman, and then quickly scanned up across her unimpressive breasts. It flicked upward to briefly register QC’s face – a look of disgust as she caught the user’s stare – and away again to match eyes with a surly-looking teenager, then down at the floor. The POV jumped, and Victoria was looking through the security camera of a dusty, unlit vacant commerce stall. Before she could make out the details, a blur of distant silver strode past the far window and out of frame. The POV started to switch again, but she flicked her eyes sideways and the feed slid away to the left, replaced by small, pulsing white text that listed the timestamps and locations of each of the cameras.

  “Got it,” Albert interrupted, “targets came back active on the 1.5Ks, heading from the West Post Reservoir Freight Express Elevator to the North Post Unlicensed Lift Station. Secondary and primary objectives have joined ranks with several unknowns. No ID tags on those as yet. Let’s move.”

  “Hanover update,” she put out a hand to stop him, “hold.”

  “What?”

  “Getting a new objective now.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Albert spat. He was feigning detachment, but Victoria could see the anger he’d been holding in his neck and shoulder muscles from the moment the blonde girl had burned his face.

  “Check that first feed. The corridor. See the junkie kid on the left? He’s our new primary objective: Marked as ‘not to be harmed under any circumstances.’ Zero risk, zero engagement.”

  “I shall repeat myself: Are you joking? Why would some anonymous addict ever warrant shifting a primary objective in fulfillment?”

  “Check with Hanover yourself if you don’t believe me,” Victoria answered curtly, “I don’t braid the god damn thing’s hair. I don’t know why it does this shit.”

  She swiveled on her heel to make for the public lifts, and almost plowed through an elderly black man. He was standing right in her 02-175C grid. Not two feet away, and she’d been too distracted to register him, much less categorize his threat level. He smiled genially at her, and then stepped aside with a grand flourish, signaling for her to pass.

  Victoria punched him in the throat.

  Chapter Thirty

  QC had the man by the tongue, and was twisting it cruelly. He whimpered something unintelligible, but the tone seemed properly plaintive, so she released him.

  The poor old junkie was covered with scabs, his eyes gone crusty at the edges, his lips peeled permanently back from his teeth like a grinning skull. He whimpered, and tucked his torn and wadded tongue back into his mouth like a wet tissue. Byron felt a kind of base, pathetic kinship with the addict: His own tongue was already growing thick. His thoughts were slow and circular, and his mouth had long since gone dry and began tasting of acid. A persistent, building pressure settled behind his eyes, and the fluttering of a vague and ill-defined anxiety rattled around behind his ribcage. Every moveable inch of him felt improperly lubricated, like a rusty old door hinge.

  The fear of it is worse than the reality.

  It was his mantra for early-stage withdrawal, but he’d cursed that white-lie in the throes of too many screaming fits to earnestly believe it any longer.

  The now-lisping troll tapped at a spot on the ground with a filthy, shaking finger. A deep hum vibrated through the floor, while their group stood, waiting, in the ramshackle lean-to. The hum intensified, then silenced abruptly. There was a shift deep beneath them, and the chickens began to quarrel. They were hemmed in by the birds on all sides: Each cage stacked vertically upon the other, floor to ceiling, covering every inch of every wall. The warbling birds flew into a panic as a whole section of wall popped out, and swung back inward.

  When his eyes finally adjusted to the gloom, Byron saw a whip-thin child clad in overalls and a ludicrously ill-fitting pair of giant goggles, standing in the dark just beyond the recessed wall. The aged junkie slurred something to the gawky boy, and the child nodded in response. Byron tried desperately to pay attention to the conversation, but focus was elusive and unctuous; it slipped further and further away the more he tried to grasp at it. He registered each word they spoke sequentially, but had forgotten the start of them by the time the sentence ended. They’d apparently agreed to follow the child, which Byron gathered more by the actions of those around him than his own tenuous grasp of the situation.

  The old junkie stumbled fearfully into the corner, while the child slid his comically large goggles down over his eyes, and disappeared into the shadows. James was first to follow him, then Red, and then the dull woman with the skipping step whose name Byron could not quite remember — Slappy or Bozo or something equally preposterous. QC glared expectantly at him, but Byron could not recall what he had done to displease her. She said something: He grasped the meaning briefly, and then dropped it. She tried again.

  “What?” Byron blinked rapidly, trying to shake the dumb fatigue that settled on him like a fine dust.

  “Fucking move!”

  “Oh, indeed. Indeed. Apologies.”

  Byron shuffled hesitantly into the black space beyond the wall. His feet felt impossibly distant – when did his legs get so unmanageably long? – and it was all he could do to try to stand somewhere that he guessed might be out of the way. QC followed immediately after him, yelling something harsh and horrible that made Byron’s genitals briefly retract. The wall of chickens set to warbling again, and swung shut.

  The walk was long, black, and cramped. The absoluteness of the void was interrupted at random intervals by thin, shining slices of light. Byron had initially taken them for LED strips, until one of them displayed a pair of darting eyeballs. Slits, he realized, all looking out onto the catwalk marketplace. He bent to examine one set just below waist level, and found himself staring at a man’s knee, bare through shredded trousers. The telltale pattern of small, black pinpricks dotted his hair follicles. It spoke of Neotene addiction. Byron remembered trying the drug, once, in a little rathole that a girl called Spotlight kept behind the South Post Arenas. Byron had forgotten, at that point, just how terrifying it was to be a child. The wonder and curiosity that the stories spoke of had never infected his own youth. His adolescence was a period of constant awkwardness and uncertainty, defined by the unique fear that comes from operating in a society where all of the rules are considered too ‘adult’ to explain. The Neotene brought it all screaming back, and he’d spent the entire trip hiding beneath Spotlight’s mattress.

  Another slit showed a dark woman’s face in profile, chuckling quietly to hers
elf. Her eyes darted about rapidly, lost in a BioOS feed only she could watch. An unseen hawker screeched nearby, peddling blank Rx cards.

  “Thirty mixes, clean!” He yelled.

  The woman covered her mouth, overcome with laughter at something she’d witnessed in her own private little theater.

  “Untraceable! High-yield injection mesh! Five first tier allotments! Ten second tier! Fifteen third!”

  More slits and more two-inch tableaus — tiny little portals into backrooms and bar stools and crowded hallways. They looked out onto a rack of graphene whipsticks in the storage room of a weapons smuggler, and a booth that specialized in Nekojin: Animatronic cat-people that Penthouse kids sometimes kept as pets. The first slit peeked into the main pet-store, open to the public, catering mostly to children; the next slit peered into the private backroom that catered to adults. Another slit displayed a fat woman with deep-set eyes and an enormous purple hat demonstrating a singing staff by touching its imperceptibly resonating tip to a thick length of steel, which shook and wobbled wildly in response. A middle-aged man in archaic coat-tails conducted crude action holograms for two bored teenagers, their faces obscured by pixelating hoods. Then a decomposition tube, the receptacle kicked over and vacuum seal broken. It spewed ultralight nano-garbage out into the air, where it floated gently down like dirty snowflakes.

  Byron’s knee contacted something hard in the dark. He brought the other up to compensate, but it, too, came up short. He crumpled into the ground. QC came crashing down on top of him a moment later. When they had extricated themselves from each other’s limbs, Byron was a torrent of confused apologies. He wanted to explain why he’d been so distracted, but it came out sideways and disconnected.

  “A black knee,” he found himself mumbling, “and the lady that wasn’t laughing or selling anything. Some kids – he should have been more careful. They didn’t like the show.”

  QC said something condescending and shoved him out of the murk and into a blinding light. It was so unbearably bright that it bored through his clenched eyelids and planted an instant, reeling, nauseous migraine straight into his forebrain. He pushed Bozo the One-legged dimwit aside, and threw up into a Decomp tube… that turned out to be an old Latino man’s fish stand.

  More swearing, more slapping, more confused apologies, and he was being dragged again.

  The hidden passageway was a series of still images whose theme was jumbled and unclear. But it was better than the open catwalk, which was a disjointed montage on fast forward: Faces blurred into one another, merged, changed, and divided. Turns and steps and stumbles. Doorways opened, closed, zipped past before he could reach for them. Byron recognized an elevator, and asked where it went, but by that time they were somewhere else and somebody was laughing at him. He knew that somewhere far away, his own mouth was incessantly asking for Gas, and explaining why everything would be better with it. If he could only dose up, even just a little bit, he could make sense again. But he couldn’t make them listen, or they didn’t understand him when they did, or they just didn’t care. People elbowed him forward, kicked him backward, and shoved him aside.

  Eventually, the frantic fugue paused long enough for Byron to register his surroundings. Their group was standing on an enormous platform, one side open to the air. The distant sky ran a gradient: From blue at bottom, to black at top. A dozen large, misshapen structures hung from tangled masses of cable out there in the air. Men stood near them, inside of them or atop them — each yelling, jostling, and pleading at passerby. Small fistfights broke out here and there, presumably when one grew too bold.

  The elevator docks.

  Familiarity, at long last.

  Byron knew the docks well: They were often the fastest untraceable path down to Deng’s place, or Red’s flat, or Spotlight’s hole, or Knock-kneed Bill’s, or Fan City or The Wash — or any of a dozen other pirate Rx suppliers Byron frequented. The barking men he recognized as attendants, though most of them presumptuously preferred to be called captains. Their black market lifts varied in shape, structure, and carrying capacity, and they mostly serviced different floors — but there was enough overlap to make every fare a fight.

  The chubby-faced child, what was his name? He had a little stash somewhere around here and you could always catch him peddling to the waiting crowds of passengers. Kev? Keb? A ‘k’ sound, Byron was certain of that. The boy was always bothering him to come take a look at the feed tube he’d tapped into, but Byron had always brushed the sick-looking little thing away. Ah, but those were better days, when he could be choosy about his strain and time period. Now, he’d take Presence to the damnable Cretaceous if somebody would just fill the aching space between his cells with Gas.

  “Fatface Ken,” Byron said, pulling at the sleeve in front of him. The person swiveled around, and Byron peered up at them, but the haze had settled deeply into his eyes now, like a shifting purple snowstorm, wiping out all fine detail.

  “The bloody hell?” The person said.

  “Presence please. 1821, Pisa, if you have it, but I’m not picky today.” Byron nodded at the face he could see, but not recognize, and waited optimistically for confirmation.

  “Yeah, sure, ya daft knob-end. Whatever you say,” James answered, and returned his attention to the two captains hurling vicious insults at one another. Zippy stood between the pair of lift attendants, half-smiling at the show, and throwing in a new number for them to haggle over whenever they started to settle down. James watched with amusement. QC had seized onto Red the second they saw sky, and had her face pressed fearfully into his arm.

  Byron nodded, content in the knowledge that his request was received, and picked a friendly-looking direction to stagger off.

  “This man is sewage. His mother? Sewage. His father? Sewage! They have bred together, because there is no God above to prevent such things from happening, and they had this fat, stinking, sewage-child you see before you!” The portly, ruddy-faced captain screamed in the general direction of a dark-skinned man with tiny scars running the length of his exposed forearms.

  “What? WHAT!” The other captain gestured wildly around him, “this man talks? This man! How many have you dropped this week, Sly? Four? Six? That deathtrap you call a lift isn’t fit for a ‘Loon!”

  QC’s head snapped up at the remark, but she stayed silent.

  “You speak ill of me, sir, and that is fine. That is fine. But do not disparage the Plumb Hussy. She has ten times the capacity of your slipshod Aspiration!”

  “We only got this many credits each,” Zippy interjected, holding up ten fingers, “and we need to get home to Middle Industry.”

  “I could not possibly!” The fat man, Sly, threw his hands up dramatically. “Wouldn’t even cover the electricity!”

  “Ten credits,” the scarred man piped in happily, “it is very generous! Of course! Of course!”

  “Nine!” Sly screeched, his deep-set eyes narrowed in reproach.

  “Eight,” the scarred captain returned.

  “Five,” Zippy put in quickly, and Sly answered with a sharp, barking sound. He took her by the hand, and stomped unhappily off in the direction of his lift before the scarred man could open his mouth.

  “But we go NOW!” Sly hollered at the idle queue milling about in front of his lift: A long, cylindrical piece of steel wrapped in black mesh, the words ‘Plumb Hussy’ lashed across the bow in sloppy, bright pink paint. “North Post Express Line! Stops at Buster’s Market, the 7K Public Pad, Celestial Dome, The Alkaloid Gardens and Middle Industry!”

  James laughed, and turned to follow them. Red and QC came close at his heels. His expression was distant and distracted; her eyes were locked firmly on the ground. A press of commuters shoved in behind them, and they let themselves be borne along with it. The Plumb Hussy creaked and swayed sickeningly with every shift in weight.

  “Fatface Ken!” Byron shouted to nobody in particular, numbly scanning the crowd for activity he could not see.

  There was a fl
at thwack of air, and then the steady thump of winch engines kicking on. Byron turned to watch a large chunk of pink and black steel rise up and away. A tubby, red-faced man stood atop it, on a flat section of roof, punching at a glowing square and yelling obscenities at a scarred man below him.

  The event held no significance for Byron.

  He turned back to the docks, and cried out again: “I need you, Fatface Ken!”

  Two blue and gold smudges – one shorter and thick, the other ropy and elongated - swiveled to face him suddenly, and after a moment, started in his direction. Neither seemed likely to be Fatface Ken, the tiny drug-pirate Chinese boy, but Byron remained, as always, optimistic.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Red sat cross-legged on a bare patch of cold metal. Oscillating patterns of light swept across the floor as the Plumb Hussy ascended behind support beams, around atmospheric fans, and through haphazard docks slung to the outside of the North Post. A ladder of yellow squares and thin shadowy bars slid by, blurred into a flickering zoetrope, and disappeared. A series of stark white ovals flashed across the far wall. They wandered like roving spotlights over the huddled mass of passengers. An elongated pyramid of light built itself on the western side of the lift, enlarged to encompass the south, then shrank and inverted.