Ability (Omnibus)

by Hill, Travis

  CHAPTER 2

  May, 2043

  Garret sat in front of his three monitors, staring at the center screen in concentration, occasionally glancing to the left or right for a second or two before returning his attention to the middle. His Game Theory project was progressing, but at a snail’s pace. He thought he had the induction technique modeled as well as he could get it, but getting the induction to be successfully retained by the brain was still a bust.

  He’d spent the last week having smoke-outs with his neuroscience buddies, trying to pick their brains for the missing link. Most of them would get high and expound on chemical traits, or protein receptors, or synapse responses, completely missing the point of his goal. A few were interested to the point that they would engage in lively conversation, but it almost always turned to heated debate over some theory or fact.

  During his alone time, which seemed to be less than ever these days with a full class load on top of the think-tank sessions and the partying, Garret would try to think his way through the problem. Around the problem. Under the problem. Thanks to his roommate’s ability to generate the best dope money could buy, and some that money couldn’t buy when Brian only made a small test batch, the partying had taken precedence in his schedule.

  The problem, other than too much partying, was that he had finally progressed to the point where an induction session would be retained in his memory for about thirty seconds before fading in a quick decay. It had excited him at first, and it was wildly amusing to be able to speak fluent Japanese, or juggle eggs, or understand and interpret raw data from the Large Hadron Collider project in Switzerland for half a minute.

  Then it became depressing. After three months of no progress, and only a month left before his project was due, Garret Stewart was filled with a paralyzing, unfamiliar fear of the possibility that he might fail to complete the project, flunk the course, and fail out of school. He loved to party, and he loved the college girls and their willingness to take their clothes off after he impressed them with his quirky experiments and his ability to score the best dope in the country. He also loved to solve problems. And money. Who didn’t like money? If he could just figure out where he was running into a wall…

  Garret gave himself the luxury of fantasizing about the day he perfected his induction learning technique. He imagined only a fraction of the uses it would have to the human population, announcing them in his mind as if he were hawking them on a late night webfomercial. Want to learn how to fix your vehicle? Induce your brain with Module 167-A5: Car Repair - Hydrogen Engines. Need to know how the enemy’s T-G5 heavy tank works once you’ve captured one? Have HQ upload the Funang T-G5 Tracked Heavy Combat Unit - Operations & Fire Control module to you via Sat-Com. Want to learn how to cook authentic Indian cuisine? There’s a module for that.

  He imagined partnering with someone like Google, who gave away their H-Vis lenses to anyone that could come up with the fifty credits. They made their fortune in the software that was sold through licensing, as well as their own virtual storefront for in-house application development. Garret would mirror their business model, charging fifty credits for mundane things like cooking or music lessons. He could probably get away with charging a couple hundred credits for more advanced learning modules such as small engine maintenance and first-aid. He knew the real money came from corporations and the government. Especially the military.

  Corporations would pay millions to license a technique that could be flashed to their unskilled workforce to make them skilled at one particular task. Assembly line learning for assembly line production. Governments would spend hundreds of millions for any number of applications they could think of. If New New Orleans needed yet another savior after their almost yearly hurricanes, an entire segment of the population could be flashed with the proper engineering techniques to repair and rebuild the levee systems.

  The school system would become almost obsolete overnight with the ability to flash an entire school year’s lesson to a student in a few minutes. The graduation rate would soar to at least 99.999%, and all but those with the most severe learning disabilities would be able to pass any subject test put before them. Garret even imagined that the technique would eventually be able to correct, or at least lessen, such disabilities.

  But it was the military applications that fascinated and excited Garret more than any others. The Air Force and Navy would spend billions to develop an induction flight training system. The Marines and Army would spend billions to make better and more specialized soldiers that could perform multiple tasks, with the ability to learn new ones within a few minutes of flashing. The Pentagon would spend trillions to keep the technology out of the hands of every other government on the planet, and make trillions more from the governments the United States deemed friendly enough to license diluted versions of the technology to.

  The front door to the small apartment opened, interrupting Garret from his fantasy of success. Brian and Derry walked in, Brian making a bee line to his desk, Derry doing her usual of plopping on the ancient beanbag chair that no one could remember buying or bringing into the apartment.

  “What’s on the slate for tonight?” Brian asked him.

  “Ah, you know. Staring at columns of data, and then some porn when you leave or go to your room,” Garret answered.

  “What kind of porn?” Derry asked, giving him a sly eye.

  “Straight porn, shit you wouldn’t like,” he said.

  It was an old joke between them from the first time Garret had met her. He had been blasted out of his mind, and kept calling her ‘Dykee’ instead of Derry. Even after she punched him in the mouth hard enough to loosen two of his front teeth.

  “Har har,” was her reply, but with a wink and a smile.

  Garret and Derry had been partners for a time, but like most college relationships, it hadn’t lasted more than a couple of months. That didn’t stop them from occasionally finding each other on lonely nights, or during an Ecstasy binge. Derry and Brian had also had their time together, and also occasionally sought each other out for sexual release with no strings attached.

  “I got some new stuff I cooked up. I want to give it a whirl. Dez is down with it, what about you? Want to flip the fuck out for about eight hours?” Brian asked his roommate.

  “Does a robot shit bolts in a car factory?” Garret countered with a huge grin.

  “I do believe that to be an accurate assessment of the situation,” Brian answered with a deadpan seriousness, dropping a small purple pill into Garret’s hand.

  Garret popped it into his mouth and took a drink of whatever neon substance he was into this week. Moon Squeeze, or Radiation Milk, or some other marketable name that translated to has a ton of caffeine and tastes like heaven. When Derry started giggling, he shot her a look, then back to Brian. He squinted and took a closer look at Brian’s eyes. There was almost no pupil, just the green iris surrounded by white sclera with very few blood vessels. When he looked over at Derry again, her eyes were the same.

  “You guys already drop?” he asked them.

  “Yeah, about twenty minutes ago. I just cooked these bad boys up. I had a bit of a revelation last night and wanted to try something different. Hopefully we won’t be clutching our throats and gasping for breath when the shit turns out to be hydrogen cyanide. Probably wouldn’t be good if we were found by the landlord in a few days after our corpses started stinking up the entire floor.”

  Brian’s jokes were always morbidly funny, but he never gave anyone dope that he hadn’t tried himself first. Garret had worried for him at first, telling him that he could be swallowing or smoking pure poison, that it wasn’t smart to experiment on himself. Brian had just laughed and said he’d had enough chemistry to know where the difference between getting high and getting dead was in a molecular formula.

  “So, what’s it feel like? What’s it supposed to feel like?” he asked.

  “It’s supposed to feel like getting a rusty iron bar shoved up your bunghol
e, you douche,” Derry piped up from the beanbag chair. She wasn’t even looking at the two boys anymore, too engrossed in whatever her H-Vis was seeing in 3DH from her mobile comm.

  “Cram it, Dykee,” he called out to her, getting a no-look middle finger from her for his efforts. “Seriously, Bri, what’s this stuff supposed to be?”

  “Well, I was thinking about your project right?” he said, not really asking Garret. “How you were having trouble tapping the brain and eye thing to sync up. It got me thinking about the way synapses fire while under the influence of certain drugs, and what chemicals the brain releases during certain trips. You know, how acid is a different trip than X, which is a totally different trip than Crash, and so on?”

  Garret nodded. His interest in neuroscience centered around his curiosity about the effects of drugs on the brain, as well as figuring out how to manipulate the brain to do things that it had never done, or things that humans had forgotten how to do over the millennia.

  “Right. So I decided to tweak that v6 stuff from a couple weeks ago. Welcome to Receiver v7. It’s actually Receiver v7.4, but that sounds lame and pretentious.”

  “How you feeling, bro?” Garret asked. Brian looked like he was about to float out of his chair.

  “On fire,” Brian said with a sigh of pleasure.

  Derry must have heard him, as she raised a no-look thumbs-up over the rim of the beanbag chair, still absorbed in her Holo.

  *

  “What is this shit anyway?” Brian asked after sitting down in Garret’s chair.

  “What’s what shit?” Garret asked from the kitchen.

  “All these floating numbers and rotating images,” Brian said, watching the middle monitor.

  “Oh, that. That’s my latest variation of the induction module. Still stuck at thirty seconds, so not much of an improvement.”

  “What’s the module lesson?” Brian asked.

  The trio had been peaking for an hour, a mix of physical pleasure sensations, mental acuity, and emotional bliss. Brian felt almost there, like he was one tiny fraction of a step away from where he really wanted to be with this test of the drug. Everything was fluid, glowing, soft, and solid all at once. As he watched the numbers on the middle monitor tick away to some unknown equation, he became fascinated at how they seemed to sync with the way new three-dimensional models would appear on the screen, rotate, and then disappear to be replaced by the next.

  “That one? That one is on the mechanics of refrigeration and heat transfer. Boring shit really,” Garret said coming back to stand next to Brian.

  “Can you play it from the beginning? I want to see if it works for thirty seconds on me like it does you. If you want, you can break the fridge or the air conditioner unit while I’m watching, and we can test it out. Maybe take turns being flashed and work on it all night while blitzed.”

  “Nah, wouldn’t you rather do something like learn Yaqui Indian dialects, or how to dismantle a VZ-1 assault rifle?” Garret asked, reaching over to touch the control pad on the desk.

  “No way,” Brian said, shoving Garret’s hand away. “I want to be a refrigeration specialist. I have absolutely no clue about it beyond basic physics. I know how refrigeration works, but not like…how it works, you know?”

  Garret laughed and said, “Lamer.” He reached over again and set up the induction module to play from the beginning. “Ready?”

  “Wait,” Brian said. “Can you do it through the H-Vis?”

  “Not really, not yet.” Garret frowned. “I was hoping to get it to actually stick before I started bothering with converting it all over to H-Vis.”

  “No worries. Hey Dizzy, I’m gonna be a fridge repairman!” Brian cried out to Derry.

  “Fix my icebox?” she asked.

  “I’ll make it a moist box,” Brian said, cackling laughter when she wrinkled her nose.

  “Gross,” Garret said, and thumbed the start key for the module.

  *

  “How long was I staring at the damn thing?” Brian asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “About twenty minutes,” Derry said, her hand on his shoulder.

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I accidentally had it on loop instead of a single run.” Garret looked sheepish, but still high as a kite.

  “Man…” Brian trailed off, lost in thought for a moment before continuing. “It was actually really cool though. Like…weird cool. I could see images crystal clear, and they were in like…super resolution and super slow motion.”

  “Really?” Garret asked in surprise. “I always get to the point where they slow down and I don’t notice the numbers or the text on the information line, but never in ‘super resolution’ or ‘slow motion.’”

  “He’s really fucked up,” Derry pointed out. “Same as you. Same as me. And I hate to point this out, but I’m really horny, and one of you is going to take care of that for me.”

  “Jesus, Derry,” Brian said. “Don’t be coy about it or anything. Just come right out and say what you mean.”

  “Well,” she complained, “I’m high, horny, and bored. Garret just sat and watched you watching that stupid video the whole time. Nothing new is on YouTube. I’m bored.”

  “Yeah, you said that already,” Garret said.

  Brian reached for his orange juice, and grimaced when he took a drink. “Urgh. Warm orange juice is nasty.”

  “Hey, Mister Fridge Repairman, did you learn how to put some cold into it?” Derry taunted.

  “Don’t be stupid, Derry. You can’t inject cold into things,” Garret said before Brian could admonish her. “Freezing is the removal of heat, not the injection of cold.”

  They were always amused when Derry, a Lit major, said something so ridiculously female, so stereotypically ditzy that they had to correct her. It was their way of teasing her to let her know she was important to them.

  Brian was staring at the glass of orange juice in his hand as if he were having a mental tug of war with it. Derry and Garret insulted each other, arguing over her lack of science knowledge, when she happened to notice the glass in Brian’s hand.

  “What the hell?” she asked, surprised. Garret turned to see what she was talking about. His latest insult to Derry died on his lips.

  “Brian…how are you doing that?” he asked.

  “I…I think I’m…removing heat from the orange juice,” Brian answered, sounding both terrified and awed.

  All three watched for the next fifteen seconds as beads of condensation formed on the outside of the glass, then the liquid inside froze solid. After ten more seconds, the glass resembled a beer mug that had been stored in the freezer. Wafts of steam rose from Brian’s hand where his fingers and palm gripped the glass. All three jumped, and Derry let out a little scream when the glass, and the orange juice frozen inside it, shattered into thousands of icy crystals and fell to the floor.

  “Jesus Christ, Brian. How the fuck did you do that?” Derry asked, reaching out tentatively to touch his hand.

  She winced in anticipation when her fingers brushed the back of his hand, steam still rising off it. It felt like a hand to her. The same hand that had found its way all over her body on numerous occasions.

  “I don’t know!” Brian shouted, surprising himself. “I don’t know. I just thought ‘freezing is the removal of energy from the molecules’ and in my mind I saw a vision or scene or something of how it all worked.”

  “How what worked?” Garret asked.

  “How freezing worked,” Brian answered. “Like…I could concentrate hard enough and the heat started bleeding out of the OJ. I wanted cold OJ. I guess I could have stopped when it just got really cold, but I was kind of freaking out. I didn’t know I could get it that cold. Fuck. I didn’t know I could even get it one degree colder. I’m really freaking out.” Fear had replaced the goofy half-smile that had been plastered on his face for most of the night.

  “You sound pretty calm for freaking out,” Derry said. Garret gave her a burning look. “I’m just saying. He’s pretty
calm for just having frozen a glass of juice like it was dunked in liquid nitrogen.”

  “You think you could do it again?” Garret asked, his face a mix of drug-induced intensity and mad scientist curiosity.

  “I don’t know. Let’s try it.”

  *

  Two hours later, when their trips were on the downward decline, the kitchen was littered with all kinds of impromptu experiments. After Brian had frozen three more glasses of water, then one of the ceramic dinner plates until Garret’s finger stuck to it and had burned from the cold, and one of Brian’s metal rulers that had shattered into pieces, Garret and Derry both wanted to experiment with a module. Garret had only configured six others in the format the refrigeration module was in. Derry chose a guitar lesson, while Garret went with the welding module.

  The three of them spent the next four days with very little sleep, trying to replicate Brian’s initial feat of completely removing heat from objects with his mind until they froze. Receiver v7 was a drug of the most experimental nature, and as their lack of sleep began to take its toll on their bodies and minds, Brian finally called a halt to the tests. He had finals coming up, as did Derry, and he needed to be ready for them. Garret was the most depressed about their failures. The eerie nature of Brian’s ability to freeze objects through sheer willpower never manifested itself again in any form, no matter how many pills they swallowed, no matter how long they looped the modules.