“I guess that makes some sense,” Sylvie said. “Look no further. I volunteer.”
The damned juice wiggled and did its thing, unbidden, ending with Sylvie pumped without Gail having to exert herself. “Sylvie?”
“In fact, I refuse to let you even mention this to anyone else besides me, without my approval,” Sylvie said. She got a look in her eye, a Sylvie look Gail had never seen aimed at her: the ‘cross me and I’ll punch out your lights’ look. “I’m your volunteer. Period. End of question.” Pause. “The others aren’t even close to strong enough for what you want.”
Gail frowned, not sure she understood her old friend. Even Sylvie’s second statement shivered Gail’s juice. Strange. Unexpected. “This is going to be painful, difficult and likely dangerous. If what I’ve read is correct, I might find some way of slipping up and killing you. For real. No joke.”
Sylvie blew out a snarly breath of exasperation. “As if. I’d throttle you first.” She paused, reveling in the truth that she was indeed the proper person. “So, do I get to see ahead of time what sort of abuse I’m signing up for, or are you just going to wing it?”
“Got it,” Gail said. “Both the functional optimum at 22.2 and the normal point at 20.7 are sticky, at least somewhat. I know where they are, now, and how to keep someone at these numbers, if I’m concentrating.” If she set Sylvie’s juice to either, they stayed at these points for minutes on end, unlike any of the other juice settings. Unless Gail’s emotions got in the way. Despite all her practice, she couldn’t change in the slightest what her emotions did to her control over the juice. “If these two numbers are real and not media disinformation, I can use them to calibrate the rest of the scale.”
“Gaah,” Sylvie said. She held her head in her hands. “Write this down. If you haven’t moved my juice for hours, the first time you yank it around quickly, if the juice is in this area, it’s actually pleasurable. The second time it’s neutral. Anything after the second time becomes unpleasant. Like bad post-sex play.” Pause, then quiet: “Get your hand away from there, I’ve already come three times, dammit.”
“I didn’t need to hear that,” Gail said, muttering as she wrote down notes. Sylvie’s explanation did carry an awful lot of emotional weight, giving Gail an empathic desire to avoid doing what Sylvie described with the juice. “I’ll try and move the juice slower.” Why did juice moving mirror sex so much? Why hadn’t she been able to find word one about this in any of the crap articles she had read? “Think calm thoughts. It helps.”
Sylvie lay back on Van’s cot and stared at the ceiling. “Calm thoughts, she says. You’re pulling my puppet strings and you want me to think calm thoughts?”
“You did volunteer.”
“I never said I wouldn’t grouse.”
Gail would have never asked. Why ask for the impossible? “Well, okay, my next calibration is going to be much worse. I need to know where you end up when I do my thing, get emotional, and yank everyone’s juice into the juice buffer.”
“You need help?”
“Help?”
“Getting you in the right mood.”
“Huh?”
Sylvie sighed. “Gail, you’ve got to be the most incompetent Focus this planet has ever produced. I know tame rats who could do a better…” Sylvie’s voice cut off. “Owwwh!”
Well, if Sylvie wanted to get her in the right mood, she succeeded, Gail thought. She concentrated, and visualized the thermometer scale she built in her mind. “I’ll be. 17.5”
“Which means,” Sylvie said, slowly and painfully.
“If my information is correct, 17.5 means ‘low juice’. Withdrawal happens, for a Transform, at 15.5. There’s an intermediate state they call ‘peri-withdrawal’ that starts at 15.9. I think anything below 15.9 actually does damage to the Transform, so we won’t try that. 17.5 is the official boundary of what is called low juice, supposedly lying between 15.9 and 17.5. Let’s see what lies below 17.5. Ready?”
“We…” Sylvie’s voice cut out, replaced by an aching gasp. She found her voice a moment later. “Gail, you’re…oh, fuck. Owwwwwwwh!”
Gail slowly lowered Sylvie’s juice, searching for the 15.9 mark. Something that caused real damage should be visible to her metasense…and it was.
“Holy mother of Hell,” Sylvie said, panting as if someone had broken her arm. Gail agreed with Syl’s comment. She shared Sylvie’s pain, an unfortunately familiar feeling. As well as another emotion that wasn’t a Sylvie echo, a scary feeling Gail, embarrassed, kept quiet about.
“Focus Adkins said I was supposed to take my people down below 15.9, stripping them down to just above withdrawal, so they would know who’s boss.”
“You’re boss! You’re boss! No arguments! Just make this stop!” Sylvie said.
Sylvie’s emotions got to Gail; before Gail could even think about moving the juice, the juice moved itself, taking Sylvie back to some random point above 17.5. Gail marked the point in her mind, wondering why she automatically put Syl at this point.
“That’s bad,” Sylvie said, after a minute of sobbing and clutching herself. Gail tried to put her hand on Sylvie’s arm, instinctively knowing the body contact would help, but Sylvie batted her hand away with a strong slap. “I take back everything bad I’ve said about you and your juice moving. You could be doing much worse to us when you accidentally strip us. You could put us below 17.5”
“I can’t. Not by accident,” Gail said. “When I strip people accidentally, I strip until it hurts me.”
“Huh?” Sylvie said, her voice squeaking with surprise. “You feel what your crazy juice moving does to us?”
“Uh huh,” Gail said. Needless to say, this sharing of her Transform’s pain wasn’t something written up in any of the literature her research crew had found. “I have enough low juice problems myself that I don’t need to be adding to them. I feel something akin to a static shock when you hit 17.5, and then I stop.”
“Uh, Gail, how bad off are you?” Sylvie said. “I know you’re supposed to have low juice, but, uh, where on this scale are you?”
“I don’t know,” Gail said. “Let me give this some thought.” Calibrating her own numbers took her almost no time at all, just working the ratios. Her juice numbers seemed obvious to her, at least to whole number values. “I’m at, uh, 69, which is about 16 for you.”
“Shiiit,” Sylvie said. “I’m sorry. All the time?”
“Yes.” Gail paused. “You learn to cope. Early on, back in the clinic, before I got my three Triads, I was in peri-withdrawal. Damaging myself.” She knew that now. She didn’t, then. She hoped she had recovered. She feared, deep inside, that she hadn’t. “You can learn to function with low juice. You can’t learn to function in peri-withdrawal.”
“God, Gail, why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t know what to say,” Gail said. “Hell, until I started this calibration training, today, I’m not sure what I could have said that would have made sense to anyone, including Van. I mean, I run out of adjectives when I try and come up with different ways of saying ‘oh, this hurts’.” She leaned forward, hoping to engage Sylvie’s affections. “I got Van to give me an IQ test last week. I’m down twenty full points. I’m losing who I am, and I’m afraid, over time, I won’t be able to think my way around the ‘use the juice weapon to control people’ lure.” Worse, if you broke the loss into categories, her old strength, verbal reasoning, was down almost forty points, balanced by a thirty point gain in spatial relations. The results of the test got Van’s attention, because of the reality of the changes, more than anything she had done or said to him since she had become a Focus. Knowing his attraction, his damned Schuber need to socialize with the ultra-smart, she suspected this wasn’t good attention.
Sylvie leaned forward, anger on her face, and unsympathetic. “I failed Beckman because of this crazy Transform shit I’m not yet used to. I don’t get to graduate, either. This is all bad, for all of us.” Gail reached forward to give Syl
a hug, and again Sylvie batted away Gail’s hands. Gail had to wipe her eyes.
Sylvie didn’t. Her eyes remained dry.
“So,” Syl said, after taking a moment to stare at the plywood reinforcing the tent ceiling. “What’s next?”
Gail winced. “The top end. Approaching Monster. The real dangerous stuff.”
“Go ahead,” Syl said. “I’m not sure becoming a Monster would be much worse than my life already is.”
Finally, Sylvie allowed body contact. The horrifying near-Monster juice levels cracked her snarly resolve; she lay with her head in Gail’s lap and whimpered. Syl had also puked all over Van’s cot, which Van wouldn’t appreciate one little bit.
“I can control your juice better when I’m touching you,” Gail said.
“I’ll bet I can get you to lose control.”
“Go ahead; I’ll see if Kurt can wake you from your coma in a couple of days.”
Sylvie giggled. “Say, Gail, what’s my juice level right now? It’s, well, different.”
“Uh, just one that seemed to fall out as I experimented,” Gail said. “This is where you ended up by accident after the near peri-withdrawal test. I think it’s a good recovery point. Of course, this isn’t anything mentioned in any of the information we’ve been able to come up with.” She paused. “How does it make you feel?”
“Like I’m half asleep on a hammock, swaying in the breeze. Not much willpower, and not many brain cells, either.” Sylvie paused. “This is restful, for some odd reason.”
“After what I’ve been doing to you, this might be for the better.” Gail wanted to heal Sylvie, the same way she healed herself after the minor cuts and bruises she suffered. The strangest thing Gail had found, though, after analyzing the data they had collected so far, was a total lack of any reports of Focuses being able to heal other people. Gail once suspected healing others would be an obvious Focus trick, given the rest of their nurturing skills, but no. Nothing. The best a Focus could do, apparently, was keep her injured and sick Transforms pumped, perhaps even above the stimulation optimum, allowing them to heal a little quicker. Compared to Focus self-healing abilities they had read about – including stopping a major arterial bleed from an auto accident in less than three minutes – keeping a Transform pumped to heal a tiny bit faster was a joke. The ‘pumped’ trick, however, worked only for physical damage. “This is a good rest state for you.”
“I want numbers, la perfecta Concentra,” Sylvie said.
“18.3”
“You’re kidding. This is a lower than normal juice state? Then why is it so pleasant?”
“Dunno. You tell me, I’ll take notes.”
“Hell,” Sylvie said, a half-asleep mutter. “You fell into this by accident? And it’s not in the literature? Sounds like yet another conspiracy to me. I wonder what this state is really good for?”
The answer came unbidden to Gail’s mind. She almost gasped, and took a deep breath to hide her reactions. “Just rest.”
This state would be perfect for juice-slaves doing mindless manual labor.
For the umpteenth time, Gail had to bank down her internal terror. She swore everything she learned implied Focuses should be serious badass Fascists.
“So,” Gail said, many minutes later, after boredom set in, “are you ready for some more experimentation?”
Sylvie groaned.
(19)
“Tricia, where’s Virgil?” Bart said. Early evening was the gathering time, with most of the household out behind the house, eating supper. Ed Zarzemski stood over the grill, flipping burgers, and three people stood in line waiting for him. The food sometimes ran out before everyone had eaten, so people were real prompt about dinner these days. In Van’s family’s last visit, last weekend, they had dawdled so much they missed the burgers and hot dogs, ending up stuck eating the overcooked canned sweet-corn field-corn mix they provided and, their eternal usual, the decaying tub of macaroni salad.
Gail wished for something besides hamburgers. It seemed like her household ate hamburgers every other day. Alternating with hot dogs, spaghetti, chicken and dumplings, and anything else good for feeding lots of people at low cost. She couldn’t remember the last time she had a roast. Her stomach rumbled just thinking about roasts.
Worse, when she got hungry like this, she tasted juicy hamburger every time one of her Transforms took a bite. Which was manifestly unfair and had to be a trick of her mind, because like so many things, the ability to taste what her people ate wasn’t something the annoying pamphlets had even hinted at. She was so tired of hamburgers she could spit, and she would still like to eat another six or so. She was always hungry, even after her nighttime garbage can missions. She ate twice as much as anyone else in the household and she still starved. She had even lost weight, weight she didn’t have to lose, not with her boyish frame and the fact she swore she was growing womanly breasts and hips for the first time in her life.
Some people in the household already resented the amount she ate. Tricia Bluen was one of them. Gail clamped her mouth shut and resisted the lure of the hamburgers, and wished she had a way, somehow, to get enough to eat without depriving her household. Not only did she raid the garbage pails at night, she had Van buying her treats out of his extremely limited personal cash stock. Despite how sweet he was for doing so, he had no idea how much more food she craved.
Perhaps she should buy her own private bag of dried beans…
“Dunno,” Tricia said, in answer to Bart’s question. Tricia was a couple of years older than Gail, with an underfed body and bottle blonde hair. She wore her hair big and her clothes small.
Gail didn’t say anything. Bart didn’t like Gail’s game, but he played along and asked her questions for her. Gail stood behind him and waited. Tricia watched Gail with a resentful frown. The Focus, by paying attention, was cheating.
“Well, when do you expect him?” Bart said.
Tricia shrugged. “He’ll come when he wants to. He didn’t come in at all last night.”
“Don’t you know? He’s your boyfriend. Don’t you talk to him?”
Tricia shrugged again, pleased at her uselessness. “I left him a message today. He didn’t call back.”
Bart crossed his arms and turned to Gail. “How badly do you want to talk to him?”
“What about his apartment?” Gail said. Gail had dug information out of difficult people before, and she wasn’t about to give up on some intractable junior accountant. Something about all this bothered her mightily, and her sense of foreboding only got worse as time went on.
“I called an hour ago. He wasn’t there,” Tricia said.
“Let’s go there,” Gail said, her reporter instincts kicking in again. “Then his office, then wherever else he usually hangs out.” Bart sighed. Queen Gail on another rampage, yet another waste of time, she could practically hear him think.
“How are you going to find all those places?” Tricia said.
“You’re coming with us,” Gail said.
Tricia’s mouth compressed to a line. “I have things to do tonight.”
“So do them tomorrow night. Let’s go now.”
“Gail, aren’t you over-doing it a bit?” Bart said.
Gail shrugged. “Nowww.”
Bart sighed again. “All right. We need a car, we need a bodyguard.”
“Hey!” Tricia said. “I have other plans.”
“Tough,” Bart told her.
Virgil wasn’t home and the day’s mail was still waiting in the mailbox. The paper lay unread on the doorstep.
They went next to Virgil’s office, where they found a different junior accountant working late. He was a short man, thin, and barely older than high school age, but he knew Virgil. Virgil hadn’t been there, today, either.
“All right, can we go now?” Tricia said, as soon as they exited the office building.
No one answered. Gail looked at Bart, and he wasn’t any happier than she was.
“Bars,” Gail said to T
ricia.
“What?”
“Bars. Where does he hang out when he’s not with you? Friends. Does he have any friends?”
Tricia sighed. “Do we have to do this? Why can’t you wait until tomorrow?”
“Now, Tricia,” Bart said.
They checked the local bars. Nothing. They contacted his friends, and no one had seen him. The search took hours, and they turned up nothing at all.
“Tricia, how well do you know this guy?” Gail said. They sat in Bart’s car in the parking lot of Fourth Down Sports Bar, completely out of ideas.
“A long time.” Gail glared over the back of the passenger seat to where Tricia sat in the rear. “Since right after my Transformation.”
“After?”
“Yeah, after. What’s wrong with that?” Tricia said. After she spoke, she winced in pain.
Bart frowned and Gail found she had stripped Tricia down to the magical 17.5. She fought off the urge to yank Tricia down to 15.5, and put Tricia’s juice back. Putting Tricia’s juice back took a real effort of will.
Bart twisted around from the driver’s seat to glare at Tricia. “How did you meet him?” Bart said, his voice cold.
“Hey, what are you looking at me like that for?” Tricia glanced around, but even Ed Zarzemski’s solid form was cold.
“How?” Bart said.
“At a bar. Nothing special. The first one we went to tonight, believe it or not. I went there with Angie. You don’t know Angie. She’s a friend of mine.” Tricia chattered on, panicky.
“What made him take up with you in particular?” Gail said.
“Well,” Tricia said. “I’m not bad looking, you know.”
Gail shook her head. “What did you talk about?”
“I don’t remember. How am I supposed to remember something like that?”
“Women always remember that stuff,” Bart said. Gail repressed a smile; in her mind she heard ‘shit’, not ‘stuff’. Yet another crazy Focus trick. “Think about it.”
No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) Page 15