Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (11 page)

A door-drill.

Somebody was boring through the walls, into the vacuum chamber, trying to spring the seal. Somebody was breaking in.

The junkie bolted upright, yelling a syllabic remnant of something he’d been saying while still inside the trip. It startled her into swallowing half of the weaponized saliva she was nurturing. She choked and gagged and gasped for air.

“Introduce yourself!” The man demanded, spinning around on the bench, trying to take in his surroundings, “Inform me of my whereabouts at once! If I broke in here then I am terribly sorry!”

“The fuck are you?” QC finally managed to ask, slurring her words around half a mouthful of spit, “and the fuck are you doing in Red’s house?”

“Ah, we both want to know the same thing,” Byron conceded, just as an atmospheric pop shuddered through the walls. The first vacuum chamber had ruptured.

“No fairsies!” Zippy squeaked, “we really got to get up in a big hurry an’ back when we killt that mean girl that kissed that other boy for you, you said you’d owe us one!”

“Ah, Zippy, lass: I told you,” the unseen voice replied in a lilting, dancing brogue, “iss naught up’t me.”

They’d progressed quickly enough through the fiefdoms immediately bordering Zippy’s own: A word from James or an eager smile from Zippy, and doors were thrown open for them. And if there was the slightest hesitation, Zippy signed a quick, two-pronged gesture to James, and he gleefully began cranking up something that looked like the access cover to a watermain: An oblong, flat black disc with a dense weave covering one side. When James finished spinning the oddly quaint, brass handle, it emitted a faint whine that quickly, exponentially built to maddening levels. If the stubborn inhabitant didn’t catch the hint and offer a string of rushed apologies in time, the scream terminated in a hollow concussive thump -- all shockwave and no explosion. The effects didn’t extend more than a paltry few feet before dissipating, but when James held the disc right up against something, that something ceased to exist in a large hurry.

They progressed haltingly in this fashion for hours – cajoling, flattering, and only occasionally blasting down each gatekeeper– until they abruptly ground to a dead stop. Red could see no clear boundary demarcating one territory from another, but all of Zippy’s influence seemed to end at a surgically precise, invisible line that ran between a little shop selling custom-built faux-leather jackets, and a wall comprised of an impassable network of interlocking rebar.

Zippy was engaged in an absurdly complicated war of false personas with the unseen Irishman, while James and Red stood quietly to one side, competing to see who could ignore the other the hardest.

James lost.

“So what’s this all about then, mate? Never met a bloke what warranted A-Gent level heat before.”

“They think I’m a drug-runner,” Red answered.

“Yeh, I gathered that, thanks. What I’d like to know is: What drug’d you sprint off with that merits breaching the ‘Wells? That means a stack of bills, a serious headache and a knife in the back, more times than not. Penthouse ponces don’t deal direct down here: Usually just freeze your accounts, drop a few work-credits to some hard up junkies, and sit back and wait until you turn up starved or gutshot.”

James spat unhappily in the corner of the cramped alley. To get there, they had crawled on their bellies through a living space that rose no more than two feet at its highest point, all while the residents obliviously tended to their lives. A young boy played a slow, prone game of tag with a simple aero-bot; a pretty little girl with a golden plate straddling her cheek and jaw hummed a chipper tune as she chopped tofu in a recessed kitchenette; an old man slumbered on his side, tucked away into an unlit corner and partially surrounded by a net of shimmering beads. The jacket-shop owner had extracted a small toll from them before unlatching the grate in his floor and allowing them through, out into the tiny gap between territories. The alleyway was just wide enough to fit five or six people abreast, and just tall enough so they could all stand at a slight crouch. As soon as they’d set foot in the miniscule demilitarized zone, the shopkeep slid a clanking metal curtain down behind them, effectively sealing the space. Their four credits had only bought them a one-way ticket.

“So what is it, mate? I’m dying over here – curiosity and the cat and all that.”

“Isn’t information the best currency down here?” Red answered, giving James his best evil eye. The creeping sobriety inching outward from his gut had given him an anxiety headache, however, so it ended up as more of a desperate, epileptic wink.

“Ha! Guess you’re not as stupid as you look,” James smiled and slapped Red on the shoulder. It sent aftershocks of migraine pain up his neck, and into his ears.

“But you look really bloody stupid, so maybe that’s not saying much,” he added. “Barter then? You explain this utter quagmire of a situation you’ve thrown us headlong into, and I’ll give you something in return.”

“Like what?”

“What d’you want to know?”

“What’s Zippy going to ask for in payment?” Red said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Shite!” James laughed earnestly this time, “but aren’t you a clever one? And here’s me, thinking you was just another tourist. You know the game, boy, I’ll give you that. So fine, let’s deal then: Who’d you bugger to end up here, how hard, and why didn’t you kiss ‘em nice after?”

“I do beta-testing for the fight labs, sometimes. They trust me with the high end stuff, because I keep mostly clean -- or at least I keep my addictions varied enough that they never get too tight a hold. And the only nano-strains I’ve got in my system are my BioOS, a rooted drug induction rig, and the visual recorders in my optic nerve to record trips.”

“Bollocks,” James glanced down at Red’s bare forearm in disbelief. “You’re practically a virgin! No older strains? Something a flush might’ve missed?”

Red shook his head.

“No nightvision? No toys leftover from childhood? Light bots? Nerve stims?” James’ whole face was contorted with incredulity, “you’re telling me you never, not once -- not even as a stupid bloody teenager -- hype up on oxygenators before sex? So what, you just didn’t need the stamina boost? You were a bloody natural love machine from the get-go?”

“Strains mess with the drugs.”

“Yeh, but it’s usually nothing. You wouldn’t even notice it.”

“It wasn’t worth muddling the effects, you know? The more ‘strains you introduce, the more you’re gonna wonder, even with the most basic ABC mix: How long, exactly, did that really last? Was the run-time fifteen seconds shorter this dose because of some malfunctioning strain pulling it apart, or did I just screw up the bonding? Is that bloody creep in my peripherals actually a side-effect of the mix, or is it my biotech interacting? Even as a kid, the drugs were always more interesting. It’s not worth gumming up the works.”

“Bloody hell,” James’ eyes widened as the realization hit him. “You’re a nerd! Hahaha! All this drama, and I’ve been sittin’ here thinking you’re some bigshot from upstairs. And you’re just a chem nerd!”

Red considered taking offense, but the idea seemed to shake a large chunk of murderous edge off of James. So he shrugged, and smiled timidly instead.

“No worries, mate. We’ve all got our quirks. I’m kind of an arms geek, meself. Designed this one, too” James said, hefting the significant weight of his shockwave disc up between them. “Based it on an old Nazi vortex cannon. They wanted to use it to take down aeroplanes. Never worked right back then, of course, and it’s still shite for range, but a few billion nano-fans in resonant sync does a little something at pointblank.”

“That’s…great,” Red replied uncertainly, “I’ve never seen anything like it. Wouldn’t have guessed nano-tech by the weight of it, though. Why so heavy?”

“It’s the intimidation factor, right? Every work-a-day bastard’s got himself a cheap, lightweight plastic somethin’ or another. It’s commonplace, is what it is. But when you bring out a cannon with some actual heft to it, people get scared. They figure it’s got to be some serious hardware to merit any kind of weight. Truth be told, I actually just lined the insides with lead. Totally functionless, but it makes it heavy as me mam’s teats.”

“Clever,” Red admitted, mostly in the hopes that James would put it somewhere farther away from his face. “And the crank?”

“Well that’s just a good time, innit? You ever cranked up anything? Bloody satisfying, that.”

They shared a laugh that lost momentum quickly.

“All right, then: So you’re a beta-tester. Still doesn’t say what’s in those veins that’s so all-fired important…”

“New brand of Presence,” Red replied, digging his nails into the ball of his thumb in a vain attempt to quiet the drumming in his skull.

James whistled again, long and low.

“Yeah, but that’s what I don’t get,” Red continued. “It doesn’t work. It’s supposed to make for substantially longer trips back, up to a week if you go by the numbers. But it didn’t do anything different. Certainly not enough to go murder-crazy over an accidental runner. You know I’ve only been outside of the NDA grid for twelve hours now? Who the hell hires anybody – much less
A-Gents
-- that quickly? Even the destination wasn’t anything special: We mostly use standard, non-title bouts while beta-testing. It’s boring, but a familiar scenario makes differences easier to spot. This was that Native American girl with the knife up against one of those old Mark II Security Bots. You ever seen that one? Next to that big old river?”

James nodded.

“The dose was supposed to put me back there for twenty-eight hours – just a bit longer than the max -- to see if it worked at all.”

“And it didn’t?” James’ attention was diverted. He’d caught something in Zippy’s tone. Red couldn’t detect anything amiss in the callow tittering himself, but the lithe, red-headed man seemed to find reason for concern there.

“Not even a little. Eleven hours into the trip, and bam! I wake up down in the Blackouts being chased by a bio-hacking hick and his pet monsters.”

“You sure you’re the only tester, then? Maybe they don’t know it doesn’t work yet, yeah? Or maybe it just didn’t work on yo-” James paused their conversation, and stepped silently up behind Zippy, listening intently.

Red straightened his spine, pushed air into his chest, and thrust his arms back, trying, futilely, to relieve the mounting stress between his shoulder-blades. His spine cracked painfully instead, and the lungful of air left him in a rush. A swirling vertigo took him, briefly, and the atmosphere turned sour.

Ah, hell.

Spinal cracks and sharp breaths. What was he thinking? That’s Flashback 101. Red couldn’t decide if he should be apprehensive of the unknown chemical cocktail he’d just released into his own brainstem, or grateful that he might not have to spend the next few hours totally sober.

Fortunately, the vertigo passed almost instantly, and the air quickly clarified in his nostrils. Almost…too much so. The mentholated sharpness in every breath -- it was like high-end Presence. But Gas doesn’t store in spinal fluids; it stores in fatty tissues.

Can’t be Presence, but it feels like it. So what feels like Presence? Nothing, really. Kharon mixed with hallucinogens? Some kind of muted Euphoric?

Red shook the concern away – it was all moot now, and worrying about it would only lead to a turn when the flashback eventually took hold. Whatever takes you, takes you. Roll with it or get rolled.

Red turned back to face the rebar forest where Zippy and James were arguing with the unseen Irishman, and stopped short. Standing kitty-corner from him in the little alley, not more than five feet away, was a twitching, gangly giant. He was seven feet tall if he was an inch, and hunched painfully against the low ceiling. Red glanced over at the metal curtain they’d come through, and found it still sealed. The rebar mesh was impassable for a normal person, but especially for a behemoth like this. He glanced around to confirm: There was no other possible entrance.

Red screwed his eyes shut so hard that his ears popped, and sketched out what the corner of the alleyway would look like – sans colossus – when he opened them again. It was a tried and true lucid trip technique: Vividly picture normality, and when you open your eyes, it will be there. At least for a little while.

But it wasn’t.

When the optical noise cleared and Red could see again, the giant still stood opposite him, its body layered in a fine patchwork of thin, razor-cut scars. In place of a face, there was a midnight-black leather mask with no visible openings. A bright blue bull stitched across the forehead was its only ornamentation. The man was breathing heavily, his hands in constant motion. His featureless head seemed to somehow regard Red with equal parts lust, insanity, and confusion. A narrow slit cut itself free of the mask at mouth-level, and parted. When the brute’s jaw opened as if to speak, Red saw that there was only a whirling mesh of gears inside.

He took in breath to scream, but the sound was muted by a hot, flat thump from James’ vortex cannon. When the debris settled and he finally regained his balance, the alleyway was empty again.

Roll with it or get rolled, Red told himself.

“Pardon me,” Byron, immediately chagrined by his initial outburst, more politely inquired after the unseemly young blonde standing over him: “I said, pardon me…”