Albert sought comfort in the numbers again. He ran the attendant’s stance through a close-quarters combat algorithm — made each joint a focus; each long bone a directrix. The potential skirmish became a pre-mapped series of arcs. They were calming, even beautiful, in their own way. Though Albert knew, objectively, that each parabola terminated in the attendant’s potential dismemberment or death.
“Who are we aaallll?” Byron droned, ragdolled in the corner of the large and spotless lift.
The walls were a reflective blue metallic color. Some aesthetician or behavioral psychologist had doubtlessly decided the hue was soothing, or invoked patience. Just the thought of it sent Albert into a dim rage, the origins of which he could not quite place. He flicked his eyes to the upper left corner of his field of vision, bringing down his BioOS. He rotated the circle, highlighted the Relevant Persons wheel, and selected their secondary objective.
Redding Firth.
Age: 36.
Height: 5’10.
Weight: 160 lbs.
Occupation: N/A, partial embargo.
Last Recorded Occupation: Targeted Marketing, Vid-ee-yo! Targeted Ad Insertion.
Threat Vectors: N/A.
Authorized Actions: Detainment, maiming, termination.
BioOS: TWS Superpanda 176.017 [[ERROR: USER CANNOT BE FOUND ON REQUESTED GRID. POSSIBLE ILLEGALLY MODIFIED SYSTEM]]
Current Position: Unknown.
Last Known Position: North Post, 3306, Old Forthe Township, Auxiliary Freight Docks.
The black market lift that the secondary objective had taken wasn’t licensed, but the jumpy, dark-skinned man with the uniform row of scars was more than happy to reveal its terminus in Middle Industry. Despite Victoria’s complaints, they should arrive not long after the secondary, even with his substantial headstart.
In the corner, Albert heard Byron snicker and coo at something only he could see.
In the corner, Byron played the hapless addict for everything it was worth.
Holding onto reality was like tensing a muscle. Byron’s control waxed and waned, only to be snatched back again at the last possible moment. Through the swirling purple fog that reduced his field of vision to a narrow tunnel, he could see brilliant white flowers and tall grasses popping up, fuzzing out, and disappearing into the ether again. Two laughing women in elaborate Victorian dress skipped merrily along just out of reach, but Byron squeezed his teeth down into the soft flesh at the side of his tongue, and they dissolved back into mist. He had held out as long as he could, but inevitably, the Gas would take him. His vision would constrict into a tiny, muddled circle of velvet, and then the kick would come, and he would see his Lord again. He reviled himself for the pleasure he took in the prospect.
Byron had learned three things while playing the fool, but it was a start: They were bringing him somewhere in the Penthouse levels. They only wanted Red; QC was not an objective. And they could not hurt Byron if they wanted to collect their fee.
With their relative safety confirmed, he lapsed into a grateful drugged stupor.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“I cannot fucking believe we just up and lost Byron,” QC kicked at nothing. Unsatisfied with the gesture, she turned and sent a foot into the ribs of a teenaged Neo-fascist with a bright red lump in the center of his forehead. He said nothing in response.
QC glowered down at the back of his Mohawk, held two fingers up to the side of her eye, as if pinching something, and wiggled them around.
She did that when she was upset sometimes. Red had asked her about it once, but she shrugged it off as a meaningless twitch; side-effects of some muscle-stim strain gone bad. Much later, substantially drunker and quite a bit more honest, she’d confessed that it was a remnant from her childhood. As a girl, she’d worn glasses.
The concept was so backward that Red couldn’t help but laugh, which she silenced with a thrown shotglass. Her parents were ‘Loons, she’d gone on to explain in a voice thick with rotgut. They were part of a small but notorious cultural movement that peaked right along with the introduction of consumer-grade nanotech. The ‘Loons opposed nanotech, sometimes violently, and set up insular sub-communities with scanners at every entryway to keep the augmented out. They were called Redfingers back then, because the best way they knew to scan for nanotech, without actually using the stuff themselves, was via old fashioned blood test. The constant pricking eventually left their digits swollen and red. But there was too much seepage with a simple checkpoint system – there was so much nanotech, it was in the air itself — so the Redfinger colonies eventually conglomerated into a single super-commune. They rigged up floating homes riveted to giant balloons, all slung together and moored to the outer shell of the West Post. Residents rich enough to afford a windowed apartment kicked up some fuss about the things ruining their view, but the ‘Loons argued that there was no ownership of the open air, and they were technically right: Their entire settlement contacted the Four Posts through one thick, woven braid of cables, plugged into the support structure of a modest two-bedroom apartment they all chipped in for, together. They were, at worst, a minor annoyance — just a group of anachronistic throwbacks spoiling the skyline for some upper-middle class property owners. Until a series of bombings were tied back to one of their members.
QC was out to market when security cut the central anchor. She watched as her parents helplessly floated away into the clear blue sky.
Nobody had ever thought to put motors on the damn things.
‘Loons were forever after synonymous with unbelievable idiocy, especially if that stupidity cost you your own life.
“We have to go back for him!” QC continued, flicking the Neo-fascist in the back of the ear. A single, frustrated tear rolled down his cheek, but he stayed silent.
“I’m sure he’s fine, love” James said placidly.
“The fuck would you know? You didn’t even know his god damn name!”
“True, but I know some other things: I know a lift port is a great place to get your hands on some bootleg Gas. And I know we were standing in line for a nice, long ride to god knows where when he disappeared. And I know your mate had some pretty dense looking fog creeping up in his eyes…”
The stocky woman in front of James took a tiny, mincing step forward, and he followed suit.
They’d been filing out of the elevator for the better part of ten minutes, but it was slow going. The massive accordion-gate was nearly as wide as the lift itself, but it was pressed up against a narrow maintenance tunnel – little more than a dark slit in the outer shell of the Post.
“It’s better for him if he is dosing up somewhere,” Red added.
The others stared at him. It was the first he’d spoken since they boarded.
“He didn’t need to be here,” Red continued, “he’s got no stake in this, anyway. He was only ever looking for a fix. And he succeeded. His long and storied quest is at an end, and he lived highly ever after. Hurrah.”
“He might be in some kind of trouble…” QC started as if to argue with Red, but merely trailed off. What could she say? He might be in trouble with the hired killers we didn’t tell you about, because we were going to sell you out to them to save our own asses?
“What if he’s…? Bitch, we’re in trouble!” James spat, “What do you bloody think happens from here on out? Best case scenario, we meet up with our boyo’s pervert contact, and he rats us out for immunity. Then we spend a dime in an Industry prison-line, strapped into manufacturing webs by day, and passing the evenings in the company of large gentlemen with colorful one syllable names like Stab or Rape, where we’ll get buggered in the arse until we die from getting buggered in the arse too much.”
“You horrible, foul man,” the rotund woman tried to swivel to face James for the admonishment, but the crowd was pressing them together too tightly.
“Lady, when we finally get up to that extremely small exit, who do you think’s job it’s going to be to wedge your fat arse on in there? Think car
eful about all the places I can put my foot while doing that, yeah?” The woman opened her mouth to speak, but only managed a strangled squeak. Satisfied that he’d quieted her complaints, James turned back to QC. “Losing Billy-“
“Byron!” She snapped.
“- is probably the best thing that’s ever going to happen to the bloke. And honestly? What’s your bloody stake in this? From where I stand, you’ve got no reason to stay and a million very convincing ones to go.”
“I don’t fucking run, for one” she said simply. I would also enjoy not being hosed down in god damn chemical fire, for two.
“No, he’s right,” Red spoke. His tone was flat and weary, “what are you doing here? Why were you even down there in the Reservoir?”
“I uh…I went looking for you at your sad fucking rathole – needed help with a scan — and met up with that Byron kid. He offered me a lot of money to find your pasty ass,” QC lied, “guess he really needed that fix.”
“So why are you sticking around?”
“Just for the shits and giggles, I guess,” QC shrugged, “isn’t this what friends do?”
The line advanced incrementally.
James was foremost, QC behind him, then Red. Zippy had been separated and now kept a space in line a few paces back. She was babbling happily to a man that Red could not see, but knew, by virtue of his impeccable patience and distracted, monosyllabic replies, was probably staring at her tits. After untold frustrating minutes, they found themselves pressed against the outer shell of the Post, staring up at a three foot square of blackness, its bottom edge level with their chests.
The stocky woman was first to enter.
Before she did, James leaned forward and whispered something in her ear. She swung her arms wildly, as if to protest, but Sly, the captain, was already furiously packing her bulk into the cramped and darkened crevice. James stood patiently immobile, a friendly smile on his lips and amusement in his eyes, until Sly finally turned to him for assistance.
“Who, me? Why, I’d be happy to oblige, sir,” James said, and stepped forward.
The screech of bare skin sliding on steel was virtually indistinguishable from the squealing, but somehow, the woman struggled through, and disappeared into the black. James followed after, vindictively chuckling, then QC, sulking and quiet.
Red peered up into a seemingly solid block of darkness. His skin went cold.
***
Red kept his eyes shut so tightly that dim orange stars misfired in the black oceans behind his eyelids, but it made no difference. The hallucinations came, just the same.
Hands made of hot flesh and cold metal pawed, stroked and pulled at him. Whispers spoken in strangely accented, guttural languages flowed out from spaces that he knew – knew as a fact – were solid steel. A painful scream echoed and rebounded, as if from deep in a forest. A tiny hand grabbed his ankle, but whatever it was attached to did not have the strength to pull. Instead, Red felt its weight drag along with him. He crawled onto something soft and fleshy, and then moisture – a giant face, the tongue licking him licentiously. Zippy had closed the gap between them, through no doubt brutal means, and shoved at his rear. She started to quip something precocious, but lapsed into shocked silence when she had to wrestle Red back and away from the unseen things tearing at his tattered grey jacket.
And then the light: The blinding, brilliant safety of beautiful light.
Their group splintered off from the other passengers – mostly wary-eyed immigrants, just hoping to slip the security nets long enough to secure a work permit – and Red led them deeper into Middle Industry, in search of Luka. His feet moved independently of his body. He could not feel their contact with the ground. His thoughts were hollow shells that shattered as soon as they began to form. Red knew from experience that the trip from the lift terminus to Luka’s office was a good hour at a brisk pace, but he blinked and they were there.
Luka’s workstation was directly beneath one of the four central filtration plants. The plants screened contaminants from an unceasing stream of cool water pumped up from the Reservoir and into Industry, where it was vaporized, condensed into clouds, and fell into the Reservoir again as rain. To maintain the dense tangle of tubes and filters, a vast labyrinth of metal-grated accessways ran zigzag patterns below the plant. It was confusing on the best of days, but somehow Red’s auto-pilot had led them through the maze and into a fenced-off cube deep at the center of the knotted passages.
Luka was a morbidly obese man in an era where being merely pudgy took non-stop effort. Metabolic boosters were so commonplace as to be unavoidable. Like pharmaceuticals at the turn of the millennium, so many people took the basic nanotech strains that some amount was inevitably flushed out through urine, or coughed into the air, where they inundated the populace before the ‘bots had time to go inert. There were filters in place, but most catwalk stalls didn’t have the funds to rent time on the good ones. You couldn’t help but catch a few secondhand doses from cheap drinks, boiled noodles, or a patch of stale air beneath a broken ventilator.
To remain fat, despite everything, spoke of monstrous appetites, and Luka was not short on those. He bought batches of illicit Presence from Red every week. A few hours after delivery, without fail, Red’s inbox would beep, and there would be a long-winded, plaintive and shameful message from Luka, begging for libido-restrictors, various exotic poisons, or some new kind of beta-blocker that would help him get up the courage to turn himself in. Red would always go out of his way to deliver those requests promptly – even the poisons - but after a few days of silence, the order for Luka’s Gas would always come again.
The fat man did not bother to turn around when he heard them enter. He waved a hand in simultaneous greeting and direction, motioning them toward a large metal bench set into the wall beside the changing lockers. The workstation was built for a team of four men to monitor the plant on rotating shifts, but Luka did all of their jobs alone. He did nothing but work and dose up on the four-hour rest periods, when the feed was outsourced to another station. He was seated before a featureless, glossy semi-circle, rippling with projected graphs, spiking lines, flashing beacons and scrolling alerts. Judging by the flurry of activity on the screen, Luka was executing a particularly harrowing series of adjustments. When he was done, the screens all blipped off as one, leaving him staring at an empty white bowl, six feet in diameter. Luka finally spun in his chair and assessed them with tiny, bored eyes.
“Red,” he said, without intonation.
“Luka.”
“You brought friends.”
“Don’t worry. They’re all criminals.”
“I see. So what do you need scanned? New beta? You finally got smart and turned runner?”
“Maybe, depends on what we turn on up on the scan though, doesn’t it?” Red forced a smile. He knew Luka liked to think of them as something like friends, or at least comrades in mutual addiction.
The thought of it brought bile bubbling up into Red’s throat. Red knew what Luka was, though they were both careful never to speak the words. People like Luka preferred the term ‘metasexuals,’ though most everybody just called them what they were: Self-molesters. Luka used Presence to flip back into his own chronological history – an illegal enough act on its own– and revisit his childhood. Seven years and two months old. Always the same night. He hid in his own closet, until his mother turned out the lights, and then…
Like most self-molesters, Luka would protest the revulsion: Who was he hurting by doing this? It’s no different than masturbation. He gives his consent now, and that’s the same as consent then, no matter how much his younger self might struggle. Besides, it’s only a controlled hallucination anyway. The rhetoric went on and on. They filled entire boards with new justifications for their proclivities, but come week’s end, another request for chemical castration would always ping Red’s mailbox.
Red had facilitated more than his share of morally questionable Gas trips: He beta tested for a few safari m
ixes — organized hunts to track down and murder great figures throughout history; he pirated copyrighted strains of countless historic orgies, both consensual and otherwise, for resale on the black market; he’d even built a few custom killing sprees through the Four Posts (breaking both morality and chronology standards in the process). But it was mixing Luka’s Presence that always reminded Red how dirty his hands really were.
Luka waved a thick, soft wrist at the felt-covered worktable beside him. Red shuffled up to it, and waited. Luka’s eyes went slack, inputting commands into his BioOS, and a thin film began to form atop the black-sueded slab. It deepened by a fraction of inch, and then another. Slowly, it took on the form of a thick-shafted needle, six inches from hilt to tip. At one end was a rough sort of handle, though no care had gone into programming the shape of it. It was a formless, colorless, textureless cylinder of plastic, spat out by the 3D printer in response to a hasty set of barebones schematics.
“The coccyx, through the cheek,” Luka said, “most painless way to guarantee simultaneous fat, blood, muscle and bone samples.”
Red sucked in a preparatory breath, thought better of it, and decided to force the act before he had time to consider all the implications. He swung the needle down in a hard arc, plunging through his trousers and sideways, cleaving through the fat and meat of his buttock until he hit bone. He withdrew the needle instantly and threw it back down on top of the printer. Then he allowed himself to scream.
Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity Page 24