Ability (Omnibus)

by Hill, Travis

  Garret flipped her his middle finger, then slowly reeled the finger in as if it was an anchor on a ship. Derry feinted a punch over the back seat toward him, making him jump. She gave him a feral grin that suggested she was still in aggressive mode from hockey before punching him twice in the chest in the time-honored tradition of two for flinching.

  “After a couple of minutes on the ice,” Brian said, “it felt like my mental knowledge of how to skate finally connected with my physical knowledge of how to do it.” The other two nodded, remembering their own experience of when their brain synced with their nervous system and everything felt natural, almost instinctive. “Once it clicked…man, I was flying around and doing things I never imagined. Even the checking was scary until I realized I knew how to absorb the energy of the collision. It was like my brain sort of just knew that the glass would absorb the majority of it, even though my unlearned brain was trying to shut down in fear. All I could think of was ‘it’s glass, and it’s going to shatter, or shatter one of my bones the first time I ram into it at full speed.’

  “However, we’re all going to be barely able to walk tomorrow. I guarantee it. That’s the most physical I’ve been in probably ten years, other than the exercise I’ve been doing for the past few weeks. Doing push-ups and lifting a dumbbell…there’s no comparison to what we just did. The skating alone is going to be murder on our legs, but I think we threw more body checks between the three of us than all of them combined.”

  Each of them felt the dull ache of cramped, overworked muscles setting in. They might need more than a day to recover from their latest experiment, but the knowledge that one more step had been taken toward refining and perfecting the induction learning technique kept them from complaining too much.

  CHAPTER 8

  June, 2044

  Three months later, Brian had another breakthrough. It was so obvious that he couldn’t fathom how he had missed it in all the time he’d been fooling around with Lyborsol-8n. He’d been flipping through some downloaded notes on inert chemicals used for liquid suspension in a sterile environment when he noticed the diagram showing the chemical chain of Unisteros, one of the chemicals in question. He’d swiped past it without a thought. Two pages later, something in his brain went off, causing him to swipe back to the diagram.

  Unisteros was an inert liquid by design. It wouldn’t react with any substance it came in contact with. It was used by the medical and pharmaceutical industries and was a multi-billion dollar a year income stream for Chemistar Solutions. Trichloristeros was the commercial grade version of Unisteros, easily purchased in bulk from any legitimate chemical outlet without raising suspicion. PowerLite was their consumer-grade version that was sold in every drug and retail store in America.

  As Brian checked the chemical diagram and then flipped forward a few pages to check Trichloristeros, then a few more pages to the PowerLite chemical chains, he had a revelation. All three versions had the exact same molecular structure. He checked three more times, even arranging all of the diagrams across the screen at once with an overlay of metadata that confirmed it. Brian couldn’t believe it, not yet, and frantically searched for the spec sheet of Lyborsol-8n he’d acquired.

  Lyborsol was still under lock and key of the new patent protection system, which kept the ‘industry trade secrets’ in it out of the public eye. With the advances in technology, especially in chemistry and 3D printing, it was too easy for regular citizens to obtain the project data and create a ‘home brew’ version. Because of the rise in unregulated, unlicensed, and sometimes unsafe home brew products sold on the internet, Congress had enacted the new patent system in the 2020’s. Brian couldn’t access patent files containing protected data under the new ‘secure’ system, not even from within the university labs.

  However, he was friends with Garret, and Garret had contacts within the jox communities across the world. The more elite hackers preferred to think of themselves as ‘fighter jocks’ after some of their encounters with secure system operators. Brian had laughed when his roommate tried to explain the jargon and the etiquette of dealing with them. After jumping through all of the proper hoops, Garret eventually linked up with a professional hacker that could pull the data he needed.

  Brian had paid twenty thousand credits for the single electronic spec sheet a month after Derry had questioned him about the number of doses he could make. He pulled the sheet up on the screen, squinted at it, then dropped it next to the other three. When he used the overlay function to compare metadata, he nearly dropped his tablet.

  *****

  “What’s cooking, bro?” Garret asked him a few nights later.

  “I think I have something,” Brian said without looking up from his tablet. He had been running on fumes for days with very little sleep, forcing himself to work through a couple of snags that had tripped him up.

  Garret plopped down into his own computer chair and asked, “What do you have? Speaking of have, do you have any grass? I’m out.”

  “No one calls it grass anymore, you noob,” Brian said, finally looking up. He reached into the top drawer of his computer desk and pulled out a plastic bag that he tossed to his roommate.

  “You just called it grass too, you noob,” Garret taunted him. When Brian gave him the stink eye, he grinned and began loading his pipe. “So…what is it?”

  “You ever use something called ‘Bonus Wash?’” Brian asked.

  “Yeah, isn’t that the stuff you can clean closed contact circuits with and not have them start rusting when you pull the caps off?”

  “Yep. It’s used for all kinds of other stuff besides that. Its real name is ‘PowerLite.’”

  “Yeah, yeah, Gunderson had a big bucket of that stuff in the lab,” Garret said, remembering their Chem 102 professor.

  “That’s the stuff,” Brian said with what looked like an evil grin.

  Garret decided his roommate’s expression probably had more to do with a lack of sleep, but he knew what Brian was experiencing, being so close to a goal that he couldn’t quit.

  “So…what about it?” Garret asked, puffing on the pipe until a thunderhead of smoke engulfed him.

  “You know that sheet we had Benny hack for me? That was the chemical structure of Lyborsol-8n…which is really just a slightly modified Lyborsol chain.”

  “English, man. I don’t speak chem-nerd,” Garret said.

  “Right. So, I was thumbing through some other data the other night, and saw something familiar from that hacked sheet. I couldn’t believe it, still can’t, but it turns out that Lyborsol is really nothing more than a slightly modified Unisteros chemical chain.” When Garret gave him another blank look, he broke it down a little more. “Okay, the main activator in Receiver is this Lyborsol shit. Unisteros is a pretty big-time chemical in industrial, commercial, and medical applications, all the way down to PowerLite and Bonus Wash and such. I’m still working on it, but if I can modify it, Unisteros becomes Lyborsol, and from there I can easily modify it to become Lyborsol-8n.”

  “Holy shit!” Garret said in mock excitement as more smoke swirled around his head. “So what?”

  “So, it means that I can send you down to Cold Rock Outlet to pick me up a couple of fifty-five gallon drums of PowerLite. Trichloristeros, if they happen to have that.”

  “Isn’t that suspicious?” Garret asked.

  “Only if you’re a dumbass and don’t know what any of this stuff is for.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Jesus,” Brian said, giving up. When Garret laughed, Brian pretended to throw the tablet at him. “The stuff is unregulated. It’s inert, harmless, no toxic reactions. You can say you make your own vinyl gloss for your car detailing business if they ask you, but no one will. You probably wouldn’t even raise any suspicion if you bought a thousand barrels at once.”

  Garret squinted at him through bloodshot eyes. “And …?”

  “And it means that instead of a few hundred doses per month, I can probably make somewh
ere around one hundred thousand. I still need some other stuff that’s regulated pretty tightly that my guys supply, but the Lyborsol has been the biggest hurdle.”

  “Can’t you ask your mobster buddies to just give you some more of what you need?”

  “No, I can’t. If I do, then whichever ones I ask will get suspicious that I’m cooking extra product to sell on the side, or worse, for their competitors. Mexican drug lords already hate Eight-Ball bangers, who hate guidos from New York, who hate the Russians. I have a delicate situation with all of them, and I don’t want to do anything that upsets it at all.”

  “Gotcha,” Garret said. “So what do I need to do?”

  “Sober up,” Brian said, motioning for Garret to toss him the pipe.

  *****

  September, 2044

  “You figured it out?” Derry asked as Brian passed out the latest batch of Receiver.

  “Even better,” Brian grinned.

  “Okay, and what is it?” Garret asked after Brian failed to explain what was even better.

  “I’ve got three hundred and thirty gallons of Trichloristeros. That will make me about two hundred and eighty gallons of Lyborsol, which will make me about two hundred and sixty-eight gallons of Lyborsol-8n,” Brian said.

  “You’re like one of those puzzles that reveal only one clue at a time,” Derry complained.

  “Yeah, you keep forgetting we aren’t chem-dorks like you are,” Garret added, getting a high-five from Derry on the gang-up.

  “All right, you simpletons. I’ll explain,” Brian said with an exaggerated sigh of annoyance. “The problem I was working on was how to modify one of the chem chains. Then it was how to maximize the cook with limited amounts of the other stuff I need. I don’t want to get all technical,” he said, frowning as Derry mimed hanging herself with a rope and Garret pretended to be so bored as to stab himself in the neck with a knife, “but I figured it out. I figured out how to synthesize a bunch of other ingredients in my little cook house setup. There’s a reason why Lyborsol’s formula is still locked away in patent protection. It’s one of those substances that I call ‘modular’ because it’s so adaptable. With surprisingly little effort, it can be easily altered to a very significant number of different forms.”

  “That sounds important,” Derry said with an exaggerated yawn.

  “It is. First of all, it means I could probably make about a million doses of Receiver per month if I had an extra hand or two. But second, it means that I could cook most of the dope my clients want without needing them anymore.”

  “So…you want to make and sell drugs on the side then?” Garret asked.

  “God no,” Brian laughed. “Unless you want me to just not come home one night. Or maybe have a couple of armed killers force their way in here and exterminate us.”

  “Okay, then…” Garret trailed off.

  “I think I’ve stumbled on something more important than cooking up meth or X or Crash. I think I might be able to make Receiver with the ‘pocket’ method.”

  “Shiiiiit,” Garret breathed.

  He’d heard Brian tell him about pocket meth a few years earlier. Pocket meth was ingenious in the sense that anyone could make it. He’d almost tried it himself, but Brian had seen the curiosity in him and forced a promise from him that he’d never try it. Brian had convinced him that it was a stupid idea after showing him plenty of pictures and videos of the aftermath of a pocket cook gone bad.

  “Really?” Derry asked, suddenly excited.

  “Really. It might take a bit, and I can only dink with the stuff while I’m standing around with my thumb in my ass during wait periods while cooking. I don’t want to go to the house any more than I have to. Which means a lot of late nights coming up for me.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll keep her warm for you,” Garret said, winking at Derry.

  “I know you will,” Brian said with a smile.

  *****

  October, 2044

  Brian barely saw anyone for more than a few minutes in any given day over the next few weeks. He stayed at the cook house well into the early morning hours, working to not only make batches of Receiver, but to fiddle with the formula in ways that would result in being able to make small amounts at home with store-bought ingredients.

  When he wasn’t cooking, he was a physical and mental machine, working from a new exercise station that had multiple wall-view and holo outputs, all while pouring over chemical formulas, reading what other underground chem hackers were doing on the black sites that didn’t exist without a hardware-encrypted VPNK connection from a public address.

  Brian never posted on any of the black site message boards. He saluted the bravery, or the stupidity, of those that did, but he wasn’t one to take chances while banking hundreds of thousands of credits in illicit funds every year. He was taking too much of a chance by even reading the various threads. The chem hackers were a valuable source of information, and he’d spent three nights on a particularly promising set of threads that dealt with molecular reactions outside of a laboratory environment.

  Chem hacks loved teaching others how to make illegal substances without the need for banned or tightly regulated components. A majority of them worked for the large chemical manufacturing conglomerates but spent their spare, probably lonely time sticking it to The Man by revealing how to convert or change chemical bonds without the need of laboratory equipment. They were the ultimate ‘pocket’ cooks.

  After sixteen days of near-constant chemical wakefulness, he found his answer, spent another fourteen hours writing it up like an instruction manual, then went to sleep for almost twenty hours. He woke at three in the morning, feeling like someone had gassed him before beating him with a lead pipe. His left arm was pins and needles, but when he tried to move his shoulder, he realized Derry’s head was on it. He didn’t want to wake her up, but his arm felt like it was frozen and on fire at the same time. He tried to flex the hand attached to the numb arm and panicked for a moment when it felt like he had no arm beyond his shoulder.

  Derry’s eyes opened, and her hand reached up to lie on Brian’s chest.

  “My arm is asleep,” he whispered.

  She smiled and sat up, rubbed her eyes, and looked at the digital alarm clock.

  “How long was I asleep?” he asked her with another whisper, grabbing his dead arm with his good one and massaging it to get feeling back.

  “Since nine,” she said in a low voice, trying not to laugh at his attempts to get the feeling flowing back into his dead arm

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “Since nine on Wednesday.” Her quiet laugh, accompanied by the smile he loved to see on her face, made him smile through the awkward numbness that still plagued his arm.

  After more than a minute of massaging, he could finally feel his fingers, move them, and lift his arm off the mattress. The first thing he did was put it around her shoulder, mostly to elevate it, but also to let her know he was glad she had kept him company while he slept. She moved, making his still-numb arm fall back to the bed before he could stop it. He was about to try raising it again when she straddled him, pulling off her shirt with a practiced motion. He gave up on the arm for a while to pay attention to more important things.

  *

  He woke with the sun pouring through the tiny window of his bedroom. Derry was gone, but she’d left her panties on the corner of the bed to let him know she’d be back. She had told him a few years earlier that if she liked a guy, she’d leave her panties or her bra on his bed so she’d have a reason to see him again. Enough of them were more than happy to have her drop by to pick up her underwear with the unspoken promise of another round in the sack. She’d left her panties on the corner of Brian’s bed the first night they’d spent together.

  It didn’t always work out the way she planned, but overall, she’d never been afraid to get what she wanted when it came to sex. Dezaree Clarkson was anything but shy or prudish. She definitely didn’t consider herself a slut, or eve
n easy. She had always adamantly proclaimed that if men could sleep with a hundred different women and brag about it, no one had better try calling her a whore for sleeping with whomever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

  Brian put on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, then went to search out the coffee maker. As he passed by Garret’s room, he noticed the door was slightly open. He looked in as he passed by and saw Derry asleep, curled up around his roommate. He shrugged his shoulders and made his way to the kitchen. She’d made it clear that she was no man’s property, and neither he nor Garret had ever had a problem with her visiting each of their beds.

  Derry had never rotated from one to the other in the same night though. Brian wondered if he should be upset at either of them, but decided he was too exhausted to care. He was happy that he’d woken up next to her and had some release from the two weeks of straining his brain.

  He was in love with her, and he was pretty sure that Garret was as well. He didn’t want to think about the day when she would most likely tell them both she was leaving for someone else. That was Derry though. Derry did what Derry wanted, and everyone else be damned. It was probably the biggest reason he loved her so much.

  None of the three ever shared their feelings verbally, though everyone would have to be collectively blind to not see how the other two felt. Brian put it out of his mind the instant the aroma of brewing coffee hit his nose. It was time to get to the finish line with the drug that would change the world, and whatever he felt for Derry would only keep him from concentrating.

  CHAPTER 9

  December, 2044

  “We have two choices,” Brian told his two cohorts assembled in front of him on the beanbag chair. “You can take the pocket Receiver, or you can take the lab Receiver.”

  “What’s the difference?” Garret asked.