Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (3 page)

To his credit, the man’s shock died almost instantly. He quickly scratched together his composure, and narrowed his eyes at the animal’s uncertain approach.  His gaze darted away, spying something just off screen, and he rolled deftly out of view. When the camera panned back to him, he was wielding an enormous blade with both hands. He set his feet, and prepared to meet the charge.

Byron sighed in disgust and turned back to his search. Abraham Lincoln versus a Triceratops. Of course. How many times can one watch this dreck, he wondered, before even the feeble-minded finally grow bored of it?

The ultralight cameras on their silvery webs drifted down like snowflakes, and settled peacefully across the Recovery Pile. QC watched as they instantly started to dissolve, like rot in time-lapse. The Customer Service ‘bots -- wispy, wireframe humanoid skeletons -- came staggering up next, already disintegrating midstride, and fell headlong into the pile of shimmering dust. Then the bird-faced security drones -- not built for slow speed maneuvers, they dive-bombed themselves into the pile, kicking up plumes of mercurial ash with every impact. Last were the appliances: The microwave sound generators, the climate control units, the interference dampeners. This was QC’s favorite part: Watching the large, stout machines with their stubby, stiff legs, waddling determinedly to their doom within the pile. Though they were immense, and solid enough where it counted, the bulk of the heftier structures were still comprised of the same lightweight carbon nanotubes as the drones and cameras. Their larger panels and some of the support frames were were solid steel, but their hollow webbed bones were pure nano-tech; they all crumbled at roughly the same rate, leaving only the odd, lacey tube to jut out from the ash, like seafoam on sand.

The Disassembler nano-bots that, moments ago, had been coursing inert through QCs veins, were now devouring every piece of the set around her, dissolving and recapturing the more valuable elements for reabsorption before the trip back. The common ones - hydrogen, carbon, oxygen – they abandoned. They’d been pulled from the trees, rocks, earth and air around them to begin with, and could be safely discarded in the pile as detritus. The rarer elements -- lithium, helium, technetium -- couldn’t reliably be found in every staging ground. Those cost money. And the fight organizers were nothing if not cheap: If you have to bring it to the Arena Epoch, it’s coming back with you.

Hence, the pig.

And so QC’s Disassemblers went to work, pulling each construction apart and packing their worthwhile materials into a series of miniscule spheres, color-coded for easy identification. She sifted through the pile of silken dust once the ‘bots went inert, gathered up the kaleidoscopic marbles that remained, and hand fed them to the animal, one at a time. Some of the Factory Girls preferred the injector (it was quicker to just stab the hollow tube into the animal’s hide and load it up), but QC had found that pigs were quite happy to eat just about anything with a handful of real, organic grass. It was a futile gesture of kindness, she knew: Without proper care and careful monitoring of vitals, packing pure elements into a living thing was dangerous, and sometimes fatal. “Proper care,” however, took hours -- if not days -- and that, the fight organizers simply did not have. Plus, if a vat-grown pig contracts heavy metal poisoning, suffers catastrophic cell decay, or has an embolism during the return trip, who gives a shit? Even QC's eyes no longer welled up when the vat-pigs inevitably squealed and keeled over. It was a matter of exposure: Witness a tragedy every day, and it becomes routine.

But while you can pack element-spheres into a pig until it dies, and harvest them later without loss, Factory Girls like QC were needed for the strains of nano-tech that built and demolished the arena. It takes time and money to acclimate a strain to a new host, and the animals die too often and too easily to risk losing expensive strains on every trip. So QC had an occupation, while vat-pigs had an expiration date. But when it came time to jam that thick injector through their hides, she always opted for the small charity. She saw too little difference between the two of them: If the budget shook out a little differently, a vat-pig could have had her job in a heartbeat. And if the Fair Use of Human Resources contracts shook out a little differently, she could have had its job as well.

Being a Factory Girl wasn’t easy work: The first few months were filled with constant injection, and the Acclamatory Periods left her with ceaselessly aching joints. During the APs, her cartilage ground together like powder glass and she could feel her heart palpitate whenever it passed a microscopic clot of ‘bots that hadn’t fully dispersed in the bloodstream. But soon it was just a matter of showing up, taking the gas, bleeding out the strains, watching the fight with dull-eyed weariness, sitting on the mat, waking up, and going home. Shit, maybe she was a vat-pig, after all.

At least the Aps were over now. All of QC’s ‘bots – the camera-builders, the material dissolvers, the element packers – had successfully acclimated to her physiology, and went down just fine these days. At least until the organizers upgraded to a new strain. And those bastards were so cheap, that was a bi-annual occurrence, at most.

Wait, no. Fuck!

She had an upgrade scheduled this week: A new strain of control ‘bots that used the glucose in her blood for power instead of thermowave batteries. Supposed to be “safer and more self-sufficient,” which she knew was bureaucrat-speak for “cheaper.” Shouldn’t complain, though: At least they’d give her a decent flush before the upgrade. Knock out all the inert bullshit kicking around her veins right now. They said you couldn’t feel it, but she swore the creeping cell-damage was starting to wear on her, like a weakness in the bones.

But if the upgrade was this week, they’d be testing her for compatibility any day now. QC bit her lip and spat in frustration: She’d managed to bank a few odd strains for herself over the years, and even hired a body designer to route them to a universal control in her left thigh. If she was lucky, the organizers would only fire her for breach of contract if they found out about the black market nano-tech. If she wasn’t, they’d break her down for strain retrieval. She’d signed the contract, after all.

If she was going to be sure her contraband ‘tech was still cloaked for the Compat Test, that meant a trip to Red’s for a scan. How close was this thing to wrapping up? She surveyed the clean-up progress: The disassemblers had moved on to the audience’s clothing now -- vital-monitors were woven all throughout their uniforms, and the nano-strains there were valuable enough to warrant pig-space. But that usually came last, and seemed to be almost finished: The insubstantial fabric of their hastily manufactured coverings was already decomposing, literally falling off of their bodies as the ‘bots did their work. The audience always reveled in this part. The women giggled in mock-embarrassment, while the men goaded each other broadly as each became nude by inches.

She nudged the Harvester -- a broad, flat clear disk with a bulbous reservoir on the rear – and it dutifully rolled over the piles of crumbling unitards, pulling whatever ‘bots it found into itself, before trundling over to the Recovery Pile for absorption itself. And that was the last of it. QC waited a long moment for the strains to deactivate, then filled her lungs and exhaled strongly into the final Pile. It scattered in the air like pollen on a stiff breeze. When the dust scattered, all that remained was the dull heather mat that her inactive nano-bots conglomerated on. She rolled a patch of microdermic needles across the backs of her thighs, flipped out the gelatinous buffer blanket, and settled it over the pad. She sat on it cross-legged, making sure as much of the patch’s surface area was touching the blanket as possible, and waited. Five minutes, and the bulk of her strains should be back inside of her. The gas would wear off soon after, and she would be returned to her own time, hopefully off to find Red before the medics scanned her.

If this had been real, the vast open spaces and great, unblinking sky would have filled QC with a crippling dread. But the sharp edge to her senses assured her this was just the gas, doing its thing: Not much different than a hallucination. Comforted by the fiction, she used the moment to take in the forest, and try to relax.

A furry little rodent that looked kind of like a cleaning unit: It had a thick, bristly tail, and chattered at her from its perch in the branches before disappearing. A tiny insect with ample orange wings flapped in the middle distance. A lone, bloody horn sat wetly in the trampled grass at the far end of the clearing. Somewhere deeper in the forest, Lincoln was howling in confused rage.

He’d easily won this match. He easily won damn near every match, which made for a good teaser bout before the main events, but far too predictable for the title card. The howl sounded again, so loud you could practically hear his lungs splitting apart from the effort. It would’ve been bloodcurdling, if the ‘loop hadn’t gone viral years ago. She heard it ten times a day now, at least: Spliced into every cheap action vid on the channels, echoing throughout commercials for industrial adrenalin, or forming the backbeat for some chintzy panic-dub mix.

Her BioOS chimed three times, and blinked gently: The infusion had finished. She stood, and felt the sickly load of the ‘bots settling back into her blood cells. Objectively, she knew it was impossible for a human being to notice the infinitesimal weight of nano-bots – the medics called it ‘psychosomatic projection’ – but every single Factory Girl she’d ever known had told her they carried that same fucking weight.

The men in the audience, their bare arms and faces still sticky with dinosaur blood, casually groped their women, or held their stretched penises out for grunting contests of measurement. The ladies tittered subserviently (demure obedience was trending now in the upper floors; Victorian-era gas was all the rage up there these days, she’d heard.)

QC cracked her knuckles, and felt the first twinge of come-down. It would unfold rapidly now. First came the thirst: Sudden and unbearable. Then the headaches, light saturation, and eventually, a sour, fruity wave of giddiness. Then nothing, just the murky trance state between waking and sleep.

When she snapped to, her body, having not physically moved for several hours now, was numb and tingling. She had some dim awareness of being physically present in reality, even while she was deep inside the trip, but it was like she’d been incapable of paying attention to her surroundings at the time. She couldn’t fully remember what happened in real-time while under the gas, of course – there were vague notions of brightness, cold, heat or pain - but even those were fleeting and quickly forgotten. The trip, by contrast, had a lingering hyper-vividness to it, even in memory. More like watching a high definition video than pure mental recall.
Better memories than memory
, the early adverts bragged, back when they even bothered.

The audience was stirring now, too. They stretched and yawned pleasantly enough at first, but then suddenly recalled their surrounding, and expeditiously crept out of the private gas den in shameful cliques. They adopted a guilty gentility now, but moments ago they’d been freely penetrating one another like rutting monkeys. But then, the trip wasn’t real -- everybody knew that. What happened in the past was just an elaborate drug-trip; it didn’t actually
count.

QC arched her neck and felt her head swim. She rose painfully to her feet, picked her way over to the thin silver tube of the Rx-feed, and swiped her card. She palmed the rounded top, and authorized its attempted connection to her own BioOS. She flipped open her Drug Home, which held all of her usual custom menus and mixes. She focused on the rectangle titled “QC’S COMEDOWN MIX,” and listened to the comforting hiss of the compilers. When they quieted, she retrieved the still-warm Rx card, thumbed it against her wrist, and felt a wave of relief wash across the inside of her bones. Thick, slow, and shiny -- like mercury. It didn’t kill the hurt, but it sure made her care about it less. She shook the remaining stillness out of her knees, and left the den.

She went to find Red.

“Listen,” Red pleaded, “I’m lost, massively hungover, half-naked and completely broke. I literally don’t have a single bankable item on me. Even my internal gear is hacked black market crap. It is utterly worthless to anybody. Just like me. Exactly like me. I am, as a human being, entirely without value to you…”

The man eyed him appraisingly, but stayed silent. He was a few decades older than Red, but there was a wiry strength still present in his limbs. When he moved, the cords beneath his skin undulated.

“I am also just riddled with sexually transmitted diseases,” Red added quickly, “like, all of them. I have them all. And those sexually transmitted diseases are having unprotected sex and giving each other more diseases. Newer, more powerful ones. I have STD²s. Oh god, I’m going to die without pants.”

“Ease up, boy,” the man finally laughed, “have some dignity.”

Red took himself in: His bare genitals were shriveled in the cold, their exposure made all the more ridiculous by his calf-length boots. The faded blue floatation vest over his jacket, he saw now, was emblazoned with prancing pink dolphins. His hands and knees were bleeding, his lip was split, and his close-cropped hair was blotchy with dried oil and other, less savory fluids. 

“I am way past dignity at this point, friend,” Red shrugged.

The man chuckled again and turned to leave, gesturing for Red to follow.

“Sorry if I scared you, fella. The ol’ social graces are a bit wanting these days. I was just lookin’ for a hand is all. Come on, you help me out, and I’ll get you somewhere safe and maybe put a meal in you. But first: Pants.”