Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (2 page)

Small miracles, again.

Red backed out of his inbox and opened the utilities panel. He flicked off the display on his forearm, and sat staring into the dark until his nightvision started picking out indistinct forms. He felt around the metal thing that he’d hefted off of his own legs: Glossy, plastic shields and steel tubes. A maintenance robot? He swept his hand across the faceplate and caught his palm on a jagged shard: The source of the oozing fluid. Somebody had put an axe through its head, and even Red was hard-pressed to find a scenario where he was not the culprit. A significant fine would be levied against him soon, if the thing had time to scan his ID code before Stoned Red had struck.

No use regretting it now.

Red took a few steadying breaths, paused for a quick pre-hike vomit, and set off toward the slightly less impenetrable side of the catwalk. There followed an eternity of tripping and swearing: He split his hands and cracked his knees on more sharp corners than had any right to exist in a former pedestrian highway, but he eventually managed to bumble out of the tunnel and into the comforting solidity of a Post hallway.  Some of the lower levels were pretty seriously neglected, and the map programs in his BioOS didn’t have accurate guides for anything below the waterline, but maintenance always made sure the main structure was sound and at least partially clear.  If he just kept a hand to one wall, he would eventually stumble across an elevator…which probably wouldn’t be running.

So it would have to be a stairwell entrance.

The thought gave Red pause. He flicked his eyes upward to the pulsing oval for the dozenth time, and stared at his empty Sent box.

She has no idea I’m down here,
he reassured himself, and willed his feet to move again.

Four hallways and a busted lip later, a pinprick of light came dancing at him through the darkness. Red paused to watch it advance. More maintenance ‘bots? Scout drones? As long as it wasn’t a janitor, he should be able to just follow it back to its port and god…

Damn it.

Red saw the man before the man saw him, and quietly dropped to his knees in the narrow corridor, cursing under his breath. Of course it was a janitor: Too crazy to work in proper society, janitors were engineers that had been banished below the Reservoir to mind the foundations, seal structural flaws and repair the fleets of maintenance ‘bots. Sometimes “crazy” merely meant “heard messages in their teeth,” and sometimes “crazy” meant “occasionally eats people.” It didn’t really matter to the higher ups, either way: The valuable workers who manned the filtration plants down in the foundations all took special elevators to their sealed off sections, far below these abandoned floors. And those were all express lifts, straight from the worker’s dorms to the plants, with no floor access to the sealed shafts from any point in between. Nobody of consequence had any excuse to cross paths with a janitor, so what’s a little serial rape or homicide on the off-hours, as long as the worklogs get updated on time?

No, that’s the cynic talking,
Red told himself.
You can’t assume the mentally ill are evil. That’s ridiculously bigoted of you. People are basically good, or failing that, mostly harmless. This is probably just a guy who pissed off the wrong boss, or maybe thinks he’s a meatship piloted by a crew of tiny elves. That doesn’t mean he’s a murderer or a sexual deviant.

Besides, the janitor was definitely working his way towards Red, and without a light, Red could not outpace him. He straightened his spine as much as the crooked jags of chemical agony in his veins would allow, and called out. The janitor jumped at the noise, then swiveled in every direction, listening for the source. Red steeled himself and hollered again, and this time the janitor set off purposefully in his direction. When the man reached him, Red smiled benignly and blinked up at the silhouette behind the blinding light.

Comeoncomeonnorapistnorapistnorapist-

“Been waitin’ for a man like you,” the janitor crooned, in a voice thick with disuse.

Dammit.

Byron was pale, even by the Blackout’s standards.

He had to remember not to speak the term aloud: They could call themselves that, of course, but coming from his lips, it would seem a sneering, derogatory term to the inhabitants of the city’s lower levels. If his gangly frame and absurd height didn’t differentiate him enough, his excessive pallor – even amongst these people, who had likely never seen actual sunlight – rounded out the effect: Byron did not belong in this repurposed hangar. It wasn’t just that he was of a lighter tone, but that his paleness was somehow deeper. Sicklier. It was a shade that spoke of willful malnutrition cultivated through years of neglect. It singled him out as a career addict, even amidst a city full of the same.

And there was danger in this: Aside from the faint, but permanent discoloration that crept into the edges of his eyes, his unhealthy complexion, and his embarrassed posture, Byron had the look of one tastefully well off. His hair and fingernails were expertly trimmed. His palms were uncalloused and soft. His clothes -- plain and black --were wrinkled and haphazardly worn, but obviously new, custom tailored, and immensely expensive.

To anyone looking closely, Byron was two things: An addict, and a Penthouse Kid. Add them together, and you get: Victim.

But he had his hungers, and they required feeding. Caution and discretion lost out to addiction, every time.

He wandered absently through the thick press of the pre-fight crowd, stopping every few feet to scan the outliers for Dealers. They should be everywhere (the sign out front proudly advertises that they had twelve on staff at all times), but he’d been fumbling through the crowd for minutes without spotting a single one. Byron knew the man he was looking for worked the graveyard shift, but there was no sign of his – wait, there: The short, unassuming man in the uniform grey jacket. Byron breast-stroked through the crowd with a staccato burst of “excuse me, sirs” and “terribly sorry, ma’ams.” The pleasantries would give him away all the more, but he only had to reach the man in the grey jacket, and all would be taken care of. Plastering on his most earnest smile, Byron stepped up alongside the man, and saw that it was not Red. He lapsed back into the crowd with a heartbroken sigh, even as the Dealer began hawking his wares:

“…gas, euphorics, corticosteroids, nootropics! Got your Voyeur, Kharon, SlimZ and Merrimene here! Gas, euphorics…”

It seemed like hours that he drifted: Washed up, caught in tides, and spun about in the circling eddies of the pre-fight crowd. He was having trouble focusing. The screens flashing their surrealistic violence, the dreary-eyed audience members, the deep thrum of the infrasonics that only the Kharon-addled could hear – it all blurred together into a nebulous fog of irrelevancy. The only objects that retained meaning in his purple-rimmed eyes were the disposable C-ring gas inhalers, sealed over the nostrils of those lost to the pre-fight shows.

Couldn’t he just…? No, no he could never resort to something so base. He simply had to find Red. Red had his mix. Red could help him away to a more refined world where his limbs… were not moving independently… from his body?

What was this?

Why were his hands struggling to slip one of the cheap plastic strips from beneath the nose of a vacuously smirking blonde girl?
He would not resort to petty thievery
, he insisted to himself, but his hands would not listen: They had already broken the vacuum seal, and were desperately scrabbling to get the plastic tube up to his own face when somebody caught his forearm, and twisted it back. Byron laughed and started to explain
– it’s these damnable fingers, you see; they’ve minds of their own
-- but he was off his feet now, sprawled on the ground before three gamblers who were too caught up in the match to spare him more than an annoyed kick.

“Well, they certainly deserved that,” he thought. “I don’t know what those hands were thinking, trying to snatch the inhaler right from that nice young user’s nose.  Simply barbaric.”

And besides: He wasn’t here to watch the fights. He was here for Red. Red had the only gas that Byron needed. His eye twitched up to an ornate cruciform, pulsing in the upper left quadrant of his peripheral vision. His Biological Operating System expanded outwards, drifting fluidly down over his field of vision. He compulsively checked his inbox for a reply from Red. It remained empty. He double-checked the buffer account that held today’s drug funds, and ensured that Red hadn’t accessed it yet. It remained full. The deal hadn’t been accepted. He whisked the BioOS away, and it collapsed back into the baroque cross icon of its idle state. Funds were never the problem. Scarcity was the problem.

Where in the world was Red?

Byron did not want to be in this shipping district, elbowing his way through slack-jawed, hallucinating fight-fans, and watching televised barbarism throw curtains of crimson across the hangar floors. He wanted to be home. Home with a thin sheet of purple squares loaded into his Rx card; home with the servants to watch over him while he was under; home with his large black chair and his hand-knit shawl; home, where tea was always waiting for him when he came up; home, where coming up never lasted for more than a few blissful, sleepy hours.

For the tenth time today, Byron cursed his esoteric taste. Droop-eyed addicts happily indulged all around him, transported away by the cheap and ubiquitous strain of Voyeur gas that the fights distributed. They didn’t care what they took or when it took them to, and it was their apathy that Byron envied most of all. There are addicts, and there are addicts, and then there are people like Byron: Even junkies looked down on him with pitiful haughtiness, simply because he’s clocked more life-hours following the Lord than in his own skin.

His own tight, uncomfortable skin.

Without fail, when he first detailed his mix for a new supplier, they would sneer and spit and slur at him – waste, meat suit,
biographiliac
- but he simply could not find any solace in these tawdry fights, nor even in the more ubiquitous mainstream biographies. At least if he followed historical figures famous enough to have the entirety of their life pre-mapped for him -- the Jesus Christs, George Washingtons, Queen Elizabeth I’s – he could just slot his Rx Card into his own home ‘feed whenever he ran low, and he would never again have to venture below the cloudline into the claustrophobic, choking, dangerous Blackout floors.

But Byron’s lot was to follow his namesake, and the vast bulk of Lord Byron’s life went chemically unexplored, save for a few choice moments and his own custom-created gas trips. For the latter, each batch had to be specially commissioned from blackmarket dealers like Red. And on nights like tonight, when Red was nowhere to be found, the fog of withdrawal set upon Byron with its dull-edged, vicious throb: The itching first, then the nausea, and now the peripheral blindness, settling all around him like an amethyst mist. The last would eventually tunnel his vision completely. Eventually, there would be seizures strong enough to tear his muscles in twain. Eventually, he could even risk death.

But it all paled in comparison to spending one more minute in this miserable, boring, awkward body amongst these filthy, boorish thugs and their vulgar fight-trips. For a brief moment, he felt a surge of righteous entitlement turn to fury inside of him –
he would claw their eyes out, rip the precious gas from their lungs and inhale the entire damned room, suffocating all inside with the terrible vacuum of his hunger
– but his rage quickly collapsed beneath the blitz of fear.

In a panic, he shoved his way through the press and into a dark, relatively unoccupied corner. He took a few asthmatic, shuddering draws of air, and steadied himself.

Red was here, he reassured himself, he had to be here. The fight nights were always good to Red. He subcontracted as a house Dealer and peddled his obscure concoctions on the outskirts, catering to the more jaded addicts, looking for something new. He would be here. He was always here.

All around Byron, the dusty old screens showing the pre-fight entertainment blipped off. The house lights – giant, archaic LED panels set into ceilings a hundred feet above his head – all went dark at once. One by one, the main projectors fired up (the last coughed twice before sputtering into reluctant life and completing the three dimensional image). There, above the crowd, ten feet tall and faintly luminescent, stood a tall, lanky, frightened man, alone in a wooded clearing.  Every audience member too poor, busy or unconscious to be present via gas trip craned their necks for a better look. The camera snapped forward abruptly, showing the figure in close up: Ropy limbs. Misshapen face. Chinstrap beard.

The man was immediately, instantly recognizable, though even the veteran gas-fight addicts would be hard pressed to tell you exactly why that should be. They only knew that he was an icon -- important to history in some vague, ill-defined way -- and therefore that it was entertaining to demean, torment, and maybe even murder him, depending on how the day’s match went. The bookies fell largely silent. They didn’t waste their energy on the opening matches. These weren’t the interesting fights. They merely served to whet the bloodlust for the main events. Byron could already guess at what came next, because the opening bouts all followed the same basic template: Some random historical icon set in mortal combat against an inherently ridiculous or overly powered opponent. The basest coupling of cheap violence with an even cheaper laugh.

Sure enough, trees began to crack and fall in the unfocused patch of greenery just behind the lanky man. A throaty, rumbling squeal sounded somewhere beyond the shrubbery. Then its source slowly emerged from the brush: A thick, horned head whipped from side to side, clearing the foliage around it, followed by broad, leathery shoulders, a stumpy midsection, and a long, blunted tail. The beast stumbled and struggled to breathe, unaccustomed to the new atmosphere it found itself in. But when it spotted the tall fellow, it dutifully lowered its spiked skull into a charging posture, and pawed at the earth.