Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  “Oh, I’ll see plenty of forests, thanks.”

  “Let’s make it very simple: If you do this, I will shoot you in the face immediately after,” Victoria spoke, but her voice was thick and wet, and her hands were shaking.

  “The Revolution is a small demographic…” Hockner tried a new tack.

  “It’s big enough. Forty thousand? Fifty?”

  “Mate, think this through,” James gave Red a sympathetic look, but he couldn’t mask the horror. “We’re all pretty broken up here. But listen: I can take the bitch. She can barely hold that cannon and she’s only got the one eye to put on me, anyway. Let’s just peel this guy’s skin off for a few hours and go grab a pint, yeah? This isn’t the way…”

  “Absolutely not!” Byron spoke up, “Your misgivings lie solely with that rather terrifying lady over there. I did not bring you here to torture my own father, regardless of his obstinance! And Red, I’ve always thought of you as a brother or a…a dangerously irresponsible father figure. I look to you with both admiration and deference. I know that you cannot do a thing like this. Ask yourself: What Would Lord Byron Do?”

  “Are you serious?” Red took a step away from the pair. “After everything Hockner’s put us through? He killed Sera, James. And Byron, he’s treated you like crap your whole life-“

  “Actually, he’s always been quit fair with me,” Byron said.

  “He called you a continually evolving mess!” Red countered.

  Byron shrugged and gestured down at his own pallid, wasting body.

  Red whirled on James: “Zippy would…”

  “Don’t do that. She wouldn’t want a bunch of working stiffs to suffer for the sins of a corporate wanker, and you know it. Revenge is fantastic, Red. Don’t get me wrong: We’re not leaving here until I kill both of these bastards for a good solid week, but what you’re talking about? It’s just plain wrong.”

  “You’re wrong!” Red screeched, his calm monotone calm lost: “This is about the truth. People have to know that they’re destroying whole worlds, every hour of every day! Who cares if those worlds aren’t ours?! They’re someone’s! Somebody out there is paying for every harmless prank on history; every consequence-free rape and casual murder; every Sunday Night Robot Fight wrecks an entire universe! I’ve seen it!”

  QC felt a brief but powerful surge of anger — at Red for bringing her here, at Hockner for creating such a fucked up, godawful place, at all of them for ignoring her helpless terror in favor of their little melodrama. She sobbed her guts out on the floor. She begged them to drag her away. QC cried and wailed like a little fucking girl, shedding all of the quiet dignity she’d fought her entire life to maintain, and they ignored her. But her anger receded like the tide, and left behind only numbness. It was only air out there, she realized. Only air. The same as she was breathing right now.

  And there wasn’t enough of it in here. Her chest felt tight. She was getting a little woozy. She just needed to breathe.

  QC tongued the pads in her mouth to kick on her disassemblers, but the cartoon penguin of her BioOS merely frowned at her.

  SUPPRESSION, it read, in bulbous, balloon-like letters.

  That’s okay. She kept the strictest firewalls available on her black market control panel. She had to keep the unsanctioned nanotech concealed from the fight labs, after all, or they’d terminate her. It should still be working. QC pressed a sequence of symbols into her leg, and felt her skin flush as the requested nano-strain rose to the surface. She withdrew her needle, pierced the white flesh of her inner thigh, and flattened her palm against the upwelling of blood there. Bright red, in stark contrast to the cerulean sky. She slapped her hand down, and rubbed it against the glass between her feet.

  Nobody spared her a glance.

  Red chuckled disbelievingly to himself, ran a hand through his hair, and bounced lightly on his heels. Hockner started to speak, but Red threw a hand up and the ageless man lapsed into obedient silence.

  “Nobody? Really, nobody?” Red looked around at each of their faces, searching for approval, or at least understanding.

  James’ visage was pale and freckled. There was a look of barely contained fury beneath his messy red part. QC’s default churlish sneer was gone. Her whole face had gone slack from hypnotic terror. She wasn’t even looking at him. She was just pawing at the glass. Byron’s hawkish nose, narrow chin, and high, thin eyebrows all twitched and jumped in different directions. He was trying to say something without speaking, but was too unfamiliar with his own body to accomplish it.

  “Somebody’s got to do the right thing,” Red finally spoke, and flicked his eyes upward. He thought of a circle contracting.

  Somebody laughed. Somebody shouted ‘no,’ and somebody just shouted. Somebody pulled a trigger, and somebody closed a pair of strong, wiry hands around a tender, feminine throat. Somebody stared blankly down into a swatch of clear and freezing blue through a prismatic smear of red, and smiled when it began to bubble.

  THE END.