Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (34 page)

In the upper left corner of his vision, a bright yellow light flashed, and a pair of shrill bells sounded in each ear. An alert scrolled across his field of vision in the thin, angular font of Hanover: “2:30AM: 1.1 – Early Morning Calisthenics.”

Albert laughed, broken.

He felt the strength go out of his legs, and let himself sag against the cool metal hall. He gestured after the blonde and the skinny fellow.

“Fuck it,” Albert said, “just go.”

“Wh-you pulling my leg, mate?” Tweed Overcoat stood straighter, warily relaxing his stance, just slightly.

“I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to do my calisthenics,” Albert answered glumly.

“Ha!” Tweed overcoat guffawed, “I broke your bloody brain! Always wanted to do that to somebody.”

“It’s not fair. How are we supposed to ‘Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize,’ if they can’t even properly formulate a simple workout schedule? It’s shoddy math, is what it is. People just don’t take pride in their jobs anymore.”

Tweed Overcoat shot him a disbelieving look, but was already turning and sprinting back toward Victoria.

“Your friends went the other way!” Albert called after him, but if he heard, it did not slow him.

Albert let his body slide painfully to the floor. He flicked his eyes upward and to the side, dismissing the alarm. His credit account opened instantly, registering the non-compliance fine from Hanover. He closed that as well. Albert opened his control circle, highlighted the compose message box, and focused on Victoria’s avatar. It expanded. The input window blinked eagerly.

“Victoria,” he thought, and the words resolved almost before he finished thinking them:

I kind of want to fuck you,

but you’re just such a bitch.

Xoxoxo,

-Ralph.

He hit send, revolved the circle over to his media browser, and watched cartoons.

Gutshot.

Sera tried twisting right before the trigger-pull, like she’d practiced a thousand times, but if the bitch in the suit showed a tell before firing, Sera couldn’t spot it. She ran over the fight again, and could find no fault: She had moved the second the blonde slashed her palm open and sprayed the lights with that shit in her blood. Sera had pushed off strong, felt the Bounder flex downward, and hit a perfect approach line, spinning sideways at the apex of each bounce to make center mass as small as possible. But it didn’t matter. The damage was already done by then. She had felt the faint slap and the long, slow burn somewhere on her back right after the first shot; felt her limbs get a little bit heavier, second by second. If there was a better time to act, she hadn’t seen it, and if there was a better move she could’ve made, she didn’t know it. You do the best you can, and that’s all you can do. After that, all that’s left is to die laughing.

But James had that little ‘x’ between his eyebrows that said he was worried.

“Zip,” he started, but had nothing to finish with.

God, fine.

“Got a owie,” she said, and slapped his hand away. She stood and even managed to walk a few steps, but her knees were shaking, and she knew she wouldn’t make it far.

“Drop it, Sera. Not a soul around.”

“Red and the blonde get away?” Sera unclenched her throat and let her natural voice came rattling out.

“Think so. There was another Gentleman, the Albert, caught up to us in the hall. I punched his bloody mind out.” James fell into lockstep beside her.

“Bitch threw me, baby,” Sera waved a dismissive wrist, “I saw that suit, and I assumed A-Gent hardware. You know: Those little bullshit woven pistols they got. I figured phosphorous or explosive rounds, maybe, but smaller projectile mass. Darts. Then she pulls out that ancient fucking hand cannon. And it’s like, shit, where do you go? Bullets were the size of my fist.”

“You got her though, yeah?”

“Tried. Took an eye and got some quality breaks in, but she said some crap about ratings and took off on me. Couldn’t follow.”

Her muscles felt dull and unresponsive. She tried to keep moving, but felt herself drifting downward with every step.

“Jesus, Sera…”

“This is good though, you know? Always thought I’d bleed out to some ‘Well-rat with a shiv, or maybe the Penthouses would send in a ‘bot-strain for us when they finally wanted the real estate back. Did you see that pistol she had? That was class. It was beautiful, loud, and cruel. If I gotta get got, at least I got got by something pretty.”

“Oh, bollocks to that,” James snapped. He looped her arm over his shoulders and pushed onward. “Both of us have taken worse than this and still gone out drinking.”

“Ain’t the hurt, it’s the time. Unless you got some medic friends squatting in this plant, we’re the fuck up and gone in Middle Industry without a work permit.” She motioned around to the narrow, empty corridor, surrounded on all sides by more narrow, empty corridors.

“Blood loss is blood loss,” she finished.

Her prosthetic slipped through a thin slot in floor, where two pre-fabricated sections of hallway were shoddily bolted together, and she stumbled. James caught her weight and laid her down easy.

“I said bollocks,” James smiled, and Sera caught the rhythmic twitching eye movements that signaled BioOS access.

“Useless. You know it. Don’t be a punk. Don’t let me go out with you spraying fucking punkness all over me.” Her tone was harsh, but she touched his neck while she spoke, and his eyes blurred back into focus. 

He watched Sera in silence for a moment. Then slumped down across from her, and pulled her feet into his lap.

“Yeah. You’re done. Even if I knew a medic up here, I’m still bloody lost. Never bought the Mapworks license for Middle Industry – why the hell would I ever need that, right?”

“You’re gonna kill this bitch for me, of course.”

“Of course.”

“You take that cannon when you’re done. That shit is way too badass for some uptight accountant cunt. She fought like a god damn math problem; every time she threw a punch I could see her tryin’ to carry the 1.”

James started to laugh, then lapsed into abrupt, bitter silence. He thought better of it, and laughed again.

“What am I going to do without you, Zip?” He finally asked.

“Kill a bitch, steal a gun, get back home and have yourself a drink or twenty, then secure the borders. Same as always.”

“Well, I’ll tell you right now: I’m not waiting on that drink,” he said, and reached into his pocket.

James withdrew and unscrewed a small green bottle.

“This was way too fine a vintage for that bloody boatman savage, anyway.”

She smiled at him and took the flask. The liquor was soft, brown and warm. Her gut went numb for a second, but bloomed back into agony quick enough.

“Tell me true now…” James took the bottle back and downed a shot of his own.

“Sure,” She answered.

Her legs had been tingling painfully when James first laid her out on the diamond-mesh grate, but they weren’t anymore. They felt like dead weight; like rags that been tied to her.

“Are you scared, Zip? Every time I think about the ending, I’m so bloody sure that I’m ready for it. But I’ve always wondered if it’d be different, when the time actually comes. Is it?”

“Yeah,” she admitted.

Sera felt a sort of fullness behind her eyes, but fought back the surge of tears. She felt the impulse move away and start to dissipate, but then James leaned forward to kiss her softly, and when he sat back, she found his form had gone blurry around the edges.

“Let me hear it,” she said. Her mouth felt disconnected. Like her voice was coming from a speaker somewhere above and behind her.

“What?”

“You know what.”

“Zip. No. That can’t be the last thing you hear.”

“I can’t think of anything better,” she said, and she hoped she was smiling at him.

“I bloody love you, Sera,” James said simply, in a voice high and cracking, like a pubescent chipmunk.

She died laughing.

***

James filled his chest with air that had suddenly gone stale. He drew a hand across Sera’s lips, then gently moved her feet from his lap and set them aside. He stood, carefully tucked the emerald bottle into her hands, and moved briskly away, retracing his steps.

There was nothing in him.

No thoughts, no plans, no rage; just a dim sense of purpose and a frantic energy collecting in his fingertips. He felt like his hands could pass through walls. Like the steel would melt as wax beneath his touch. He kept them balled into fists. He kept the energy for himself. He kept walking.

He came upon the bloody intersection where he’d fought with the older A-Gent. But the man was gone now.

Well, he’d had to come from somewhere, didn’t he?

It was a three way crossroads: One path led back to Sera, one led off in the direction Red and the blonde had fled, and the other…

A vivid tableau of Zippy blinked on in his head. Her blood spilling out across the grating, down into the sluice below, and flowing away, into the filtration plants. They would suck it dry, pull everything that was her out of it, and piss it down as filthy rain on the floors below.

A quick surge of madness arced up his arms, trying to form a circuit to his brain, and he knew that if he let it close, he would become a howling, sobbing mess of grief.

And grief does not put bullets into heads.

James swallowed hard, found the emptiness again, and kept moving. He retraced the Albert’s path down a long, straight corridor, each side lined with a series of staggered alcoves. In a few of them were strobing terminal screens, blinking requests for authorization codes, and complex, scrolling graphics -- but most lay dormant. Blank, black spaces that swept past and blurred together as he strode purposefully down the accessway. 

And then he stopped.

He took two steps back and peered into an unremarkable little cube, dimly light by the soft green of some enigmatic filtration chart.

Byron waved sheepishly from the floor. He was barefoot. His shirt was untucked and hiked up above one arm. A column of dried drool flaked off of his cheek. His eyes were shot through almost entirely with rolling velvet clouds. If he was out of the trip, it was only just.

“James?” He asked uncertainly.

“Yes, Byron.”

“What’s happening?” He hefted his slight frame up onto his elbows, and swiveled his head with the dreamy slowness of the stoned.

“A-Gents. They killed Se-“ he started, but caught himself. “They killed Zippy. Red and the other one are gone.”

“QC,” Byron supplied.
“If you’ll excuse me, Byron, I’ve got to find me a gangly bitch and then I am going to kill her for a very long time,” James turned to leave, and almost missed the words that Byron yelled after him.

Almost, but not quite.

James stopped dead, and waited for the voice to repeat.

“I know where she’s going,” Byron yelled again, crawling out from the murky alcove and squinting up into the bright industrial LED panels. “I think I can take you to her.”

“Brilliant,” James replied flatly.

The doors on the ancient freight lift had to be raised manually, with a pair of handcranks. QC had little difficulty with the operation, but Red seemed to be exerting himself tremendously; his legs wobbled and shook like a newborn calf.

The doors skittered to a stop, only halfway up, and Red sat hard on the floor, panting. QC locked her handle in, then walked over to Red’s and did the same. They waddled under the gate together.

The neighborhood they emerged into was suspiciously, unwholesomely clean.  They were somewhere above Industry, Red knew, but couldn’t be very far into the Penthouses. The archaic lift was still using an obscure shorthand code, it’s meaning lost to time and advancement: Red jabbed in their destination coordinates as best he could guess while operating under the immense blanket of panic that the A-Gents’ appearance had thrown over him. Luckily, he managed to get the elevator going in a vaguely upward direction. Which meant that they were now vaguely upward from where they had been. That was about all he could tell, from his surroundings. The paths around him were all impossibly wide – more like streets than walkways – and utterly sterile. It was like set dressing in a vid-feed, or some kind of theme park. How did they do it? How did they erase every trace that human beings walked these corridors, even as they were walking them?

Red guessed that they were somewhere in the corporate worker dormitories; a kind of limbo between the enviable luxury of the sky levels, with their verdant glens and pastoral hillsides, and the severe, ultra-secure research laboratories of Upper Industry. The apartments and storefronts themselves weren’t much bigger than the ones Red was accustomed to seeing in his own neighborhood, but their use of space was more efficient, the lines that defined them were crisper and more precise, and there was an obscene amount of room – several feet, in some cases -- between each unit. Down in the Blackouts, every surface was covered in a dense patina of structural limpets: A chunky glaze of old wiring, unpowered business graphics, and mooring bolts. They pockmarked every wall, leftover from several generations of interstitial, mostly illegal establishments -- unlicensed food shacks, black market commerce stalls, ad-hoc Rx dens and tiny, two person bars.

But here, in this corporate dormitory, everything was exactly as it was first built: Glossy, neatly delineated, and perfectly clean. A whole neighborhood, straight out of the package. It felt peculiar and lonely.

“Shitdicks,” QC sighed, “wrong floor.”

 “Wait,” Red barely got the words out of his throat, “we need to find somewhere for a minute. I need to get to an Rx ‘feed before my endocrine system falls out.”

“Shit, what? Can you even dose up with that grey piss in your veins?”

“I can damn well try,” Red answered, trying to make sense of the bafflingly uncluttered cube that Mapworks was showing him.

“Is there time for this? Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to stand up there in the fuck-all open blue sky while stone-cold sober, but you’re kind of operating on a time-limit here. We’ve got like four hours to get you to that extraction machine, or you’re fucked from the inside out.” QC said tenderly.