Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (25 page)

“Naw,” he finally continued, exhaling happily, “them spears is just for show. We all got guns. We ain’t
stupid
.”

***

QC tasted ozone.

Or rather, she tasted the idea of ozone. She had no idea what the actual ozone molecule tasted like, but she’d heard the concept referenced so often that she began to automatically associate the word with the vaguely metallic, electrical taste of nanotech. She’d tasted it when they first installed the disassemblers in her salivary glands; she tasted it every time she ordered the gritty rations from a public ‘feed station; and she tasted it a moment ago, when the cuntswab they called Little Deng slipped the Inertia Ballgag into her mouth.

She’d worn Inertia Units before. Every time she passed through a checkpoint the inspectors made unhappy faces at the scanner results and told her to slip on that papery little retainer. It vacuum sealed over the mouth, like the surface tension on a spit bubble, but you could breathe and talk through it just fine. As far as QC knew, it served two purposes: To coat any nano-material that passed by the membrane in junk elements, thus weighing it down and rendering useless, and to make whoever was wearing it look really fucking stupid.

Those Inertia Units – the spit bubble kind – QC knew for a fact they were available for any conceivable orifice as a free build option at every public ‘feed terminal in the Four Posts. Which meant that the dickhole with the garbage in his hair had the thing in her mouth custom-built specifically to humiliate the wearer.

It pissed her right and directly the fuck off.

…but it was better than the wrap.

In the wrap, she couldn’t move a muscle, even to breathe: Maybe if she’d puffed out her chest when it hardened, she’d have had enough room to exhale and inhale comfortably. But when they were hosing her down, she’d been too busy screaming out the exact volume of her semen that her captor’s mothers had ingested over the years, and didn’t have time to think about trivial things like breathing. She could only manage shallow, rapid little gasps until they’d cut her loose. It felt like being crushed by atmosphere; like being strangled by a weak but persistent midget; like dying, slowly. It was, of course, entirely worth it.

Six gallons, for the record. Six gallons of semen.

The skinny redhead turned out to have a mouth on him and a pair of clanking steel balls. In twenty minutes, he had the grey men half-drunk, hollering and guffawing like gibbons. QC couldn’t decide if he had a plan, or was just a hell of a fun alcoholic.

The dark-skinned woman with the doe eyes and Springsteel leg was sitting next to Byron. She was either mentally handicapped or drugged, and wouldn’t stop babbling like a little girl. Byron looked terrified, nervous, and relieved all at once. He had ceded total control to fate – you could see the ‘it’s out of my hands’ look in his eyes – and seemed to be happier for it.

“-I’ve killed like half your guys. We’re good though, yeah?” The redhead finished his anecdote smoothly.

“No! No friggin’ way you said that shit to King Motherfucking Big Dick himself! What’d he say? What’d he do?!” Deng’s face was turning a deep shade of purple. The laughter and the booze working on him.

“Not a thing, but you should’ve seen his bloody great silver willy wiggle,” The redhead smiled wryly and swirled his empty glass at the grey man wavering drunkenly behind him.

The man gave him a look like warmed over death, then shrugged, took the glass from his hand, and stepped in front of the redhead to duck through the bar. QC almost registered something wrong with that – there was a reason the guard shouldn’t have done it – but before she could figure out why, exactly, the redhead was up on his feet, kicking out the man’s knees and pulling the pistol from his waistband as he fell.

The grey man flung his spear as he went down, and for a moment looked like it was going to impale the dim, wide-eyed woman sitting on the floor. But she reached out a hand as if to wave, and gently redirected the point. It didn’t connect with Little Deng, staring dumbly from his stool at the bar, but it came close enough that he screamed, diverting the attention of the grey man closest to him. The idiot woman pushed off the floor and used the momentum to fold her prosthetic leg beneath the solid-looking metal table at her feet. It heaved up from the ground, flipping end over end into the distracted guard’s temple. When the flash of movement was over, the redhead had two of the grey men pinned against the bar: One with a pistol in his mouth, the remnants of his shattered teeth clacking noisily against the barrel, the other apparently paralyzed by the small man’s fingers, resting on the flesh beneath his eyelids. The dumb woman was now mounting Little Deng like a cowgirl, and holding a long, thin, bloody blade against the bottom of his throat. It looked like she’d hurt her hand. Her prosthetic leg was bent almost double into the kidneys of the grey man lying on the floor. He writhed in pain, but could not seem to find the purchase to wriggle free. There was one grey man still standing, at the far end of the room. He’d been stationed near the exit, the only one not drawn to the bar for the revelry. He was brandishing a large, crimson pistol with four barrels, waving it back and forth between the redheaded man and the dumb girl, barking meaningless commands: Wait, no, wait, hold on, stop now, wait.

Byron laughed nervously, like somebody had told a joke of questionable material.

***

The ceiling looked like wood, but that wasn’t possible. Too rare, too expensive, and even treated wood would have rotted long ago under the constant static pattering of the incessant rain. But if it was emulation, it was a hell of a job: A jagged crack ran diagonally across the surface of one plank, and Red could see splinters where it terminated at the border. On another, a swirling knot of orange and blonde worked itself deep into the brown surface. Red had been on his back, staring dully up at the enigma for the better part of half an hour. The skeletal woman in the cheap plastic scrubs was a blur of activity. She plugged tubes into him, took others out, re-sterilized them, connected them to a variety of thwacking, humming and vibrating machines, and frowned down at the results she saw there. A small, balloon-mounted terminal buzzed timidly around her, and occasionally she would reach out and grab it. She’d tap on it, scowl, and then slap it away. It emitted a nasally howl as the tiny rotors kicked on, and wavered back to her side like a kicked hound.

“That’s not real wood, is it?” Red finally asked.

They were the first words he’d spoken to her. He was silent even when she told him to disrobe. He had expected some sterile medical garment in place of clothes, but she just motioned him impatiently to a table and he quietly, nakedly obeyed.

“The knot got you, didn’t it?” She pinched a pair of tabs on either side of the tube in his arm, and a hose of milky white fluid disconnected from the needle-patch with a vacuum pop.  She swapped another in its place, full of what looked like molten lead. “Look at the corner behind me, to your left. See it? It’s there again. Same knot, same crack. It’s a good pattern – expensive - but the installers weren’t paying attention. They throw in all these unique little details, but in the end the illusion hangs on how they’re mounted. If you’re not careful, you repeat patterns, and the façade is shattered.”

She squeezed the tabs on his other arm: A pop, and then a new tube. He watched his own blood pool at the closed seal between patch and hose.

“This is going to feel odd,” she said, and seized the roving balloon again. Red knew it was just anthropomorphization, but it seemed to writhe with happiness at the attention.

He heard the whispered rush of a million microscopic intake fans kicking on, and then the shiny blue lunchbox next to his head, decked out in vaguely Asian characters and obscure iconographics, rattled to life. There was a sensation like cresting a hill too fast, and then intense, bone-deep fatigue. An unidentifiable feeling – something sad, but also elated; heartwrenching and joyous at the same time – washed over him.

“What are you doing?” He asked, every movement of the tongue a conscious effort.

“Complete transfusion. I’m replacing your blood,” she motioned at the tube full of flat, metallic liquid.

“With what? What is that?” The implacable emotion throbbed and twisted in Red’s chest. It was something from a long time ago, a feeling he’d had in…

“Early childhood,” the sharp-featured woman finished for him.

“I…I wasn’t talking. How did you?”

“That’s what they all say,” she adopted a thick, dopey tone meant to serve as a universal impression of all men. “This feels like something from when I was a kid. What is it? It’s so familiar…”

“Okay. So what is it? The feeling.”

“It’s nostalgia. Or rather, it’s nothing, really. Chemical misfires. It doesn’t actually feel like anything that’s ever happened to you before. Well, probably not anyway.  It’s just your brain starting to shut down because I’m pulling all the blood away from it. Oh, don’t give me that face: You’ll be fine. This would be a pretty roundabout way to kill somebody, wouldn’t it? We’re just swapping your blood for HDMPAS.”

“H-what? H-what?! You’re draining all my blood?” Panic scratched at the inside of Red’s head, but the fatigue was too much. If he could just get her to stop, to let him rest for a minute…

“Hush. Let it take you. It’ll all be over soon,” the acute, boney woman tapped at her little pet balloon.

Red’s vision went black, all at once. Like somebody flipped a switch.

“Jesus Christ. So this is…” Red tried to speak, but his tongue flopped limply in his mouth, and refused to articulate any more words.

“Yep,” the doctor supplied casually, drumming her nails on the hollow plastic tabletop. “This is what dying feels like.”

“Gentlemen, please,” The skinny uplevel snob was waving his hands around, fussing and fretting like one of those addled little hens the Chinese sold at the Looping Bazaar. Little old ladies would come up all bold and shit, blocking your path and silently holding up this stupid, scrawny, twitchy chicken. You’d have to either pay them or knock them aside – only way to get past. The hens themselves, they didn’t make much of a bother. Just cocked their heads dumbly and looked all over the place. But when it came time for slaughter, the fucking birds would start screeching and warbling like a falling freight elevator, right up until you cut their damn heads off.

“There is simply no call for this kind of chicanery. Elevating a simple misunderstanding to the level of physical discourse is the basest possible option with which we are presented, and it is one by which I, personally, will not abide. Though the nature of our relationships vary…” The Penthouse Kid moved his whole head as he talked. The purple haze had crept all across the whites of his eyes, and started in on his pupils. Tunnel vision.

Sera had seen his type before, the kind that gets harder to understand the more important it is to understand them. Punk had grown up talking instead of scrapping on the catwalks behind ‘tech shops. That primal switch in their heads -- that fight or flight center -- it got rewired all wrong. Whenever they should be throwing punches or running away so fast their calf muscles split off from the bone, this kind of veil came down over their brains instead, and random words started leaking out like somebody stabbed a dictionary.

“Whether our motives are in service of that most pure and noble endeavour, friendship, or in the vital and utilitarian conscript of business, the one mutual goal we must all agree to share, for the shortest interim at the very least...”

Sera shifted her hips on Little Deng’s lap to keep her leverage, and felt a broad, fleshy poke from below. Deng locked eyes with her and grinned.

Fearless son of a bitch.

The big grey man across the room, the one out of range when she and James had made their move, kept right on rattling off mono-syllables – no, stop, down, drop, wait – his mouth stalling until his brain had time to catch up with his eyeballs. It was taking a while.

“Surely we can all agree, as level-headed and reasonable persons, that violence is, at best, premature. Far be it from me, good sirs and ladies, to besmirch the means by which you ply your bloody trade, but allow me to suggest – just suggest, mind you, as an impartial observer – that thus far we have seen no cause to believe an irrevocable schism of wants has arisen.”

The grey man that James had by the eyeballs was emitting a soft, high-pitched whine, like idle electronics. He was shellshocked. He was untested product. He was done.

The one pinned beneath the tip of her prosthetic leg kept trying to scrabble for purchase, though, despite the pain. He, at least, was a vet. She twisted the thin shaft between his third and fourth cervical vertebrae until the agony immobilized his arms, but as soon as she moved that leg, she knew she’d only get two or three seconds, tops, before he was back up and on her. She could probably sever his spine with her full body weight, and maybe put Little Deng down with her sub-dermal blade in that window too, but no way she could turn, target, and nail the rambling bastard with the gun, too. James would be ready for the move as soon as she made it, but he had the same battle scenario: Two seconds, minimum, to put down his marks before turning on the gunman. Any way she cut it, the grey man would have time to fire on one of them. But not both, and no guarantee he’d hit what he was aiming at.

Shit.

Even odds.

No way to swing them, either. Sera would have to wait until the gunman bought himself a chance to think, and hope he thought wrong. Sometimes you just have to let a stalemate play out a bit. Let them change the scenario for you. In the meantime, Deng had started softly, slowly thrusting against her. She put her blade into him a little and beamed her most precocious smile.

“Please!” The Penthouse Kid squeaked, “no need for bloodshed! If you see some fallacy in my assessment of the situation, by all means speak and allow the group a chance to rebut.”

“You make your guy stop talking queer!” The grey man snapped, shaking the barrel of the great red pistol towards Sera, “it’s freakin’ me out!”