Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (6 page)

Red turned to take a step, and heard the robot’s spokes clang against the shelving.

It hadn’t been more than a few feet behind him.

There was a long, wet scrape as the shelf began to slide, and everything inside of Red froze. Silence. Then a sharp ping as it finally caught on something. The thing was stalled, for now. Red took a deep breath, expelled all of the panic and desperation welling up inside of him, and in spite of his survival instincts, every one of which screamed for him to run, he slowed his own pace to a careful crawl. His headlong flight and subsequent falls were only losing him ground. He wouldn’t move much faster than his pursuer this way, but every minute the robot spent on the shelving, and every minute Red maintained a steady, stable pace, would be a minute gained. He paused, and listened. There, ahead and to the left: That was where the turbines sounded the loudest. The four great central water pipes were bolted to the exterior of each Post, and that was where he needed to be – not lost in the ruined aquatic catwalks, risking dead ends and collapses --  if he was ever going to find a way up.

Red heard the twanging of plucked metal, as Reggie bent and began picking at the obstacle. He hesitantly extended his own foot, and then planted it. And again.

Time was measured in tiny, agonizing, crawling steps. Their chase progressed, one deliberate movement at a time, like a waltz in slow-motion – Red one two, Reggie one two, Red three four. He kicked his way around a vast glass sphere blocking most of the walkway, and planned his next move: Eventually, by following the turbine roar, he would emerge from the catwalks into one of the Four Posts. Their only common intersection was at the interior corner of each mega-structure. Also located at every corner: Stairwell access. It wasn’t certain, but it was hope.

Red stretched a leg out in front of him and felt around until it contacted the flat surface of a wall – not the curving glass of a catwalk, but real, solid, steel wall. Explorations to either side confirmed it: The entrance to a Post. He placed his hand against the surface, and began inching sideways, feeling for the frame of a door.

His path took him closer and closer to the turbines. As he closed the distance, Red discovered an entirely new dread: Though the constant, unceasing pocks of Reggie’s advance had unnerved him, he could at least track the thing’s progress, no matter how imprecisely. Now, with the static wave of the turbines drowning out all other noise, he was at a loss. Was he still making faster progress? Had it been slowly gaining on him all this time? Reggie could be there right now, for all he knew, silently staring at him from just inches away, and reaching….

He stubbed his fingers against a raised metal bump, more solid and compact to the touch than the concrete and graphene mesh of the Post’s walls. The bump ran vertically, bordering a smooth, level plane. A door, and its frame. It was huge. Way too wide an opening for any ordinary room.

The stairwell
, he thought desperately,
it had to be
.

The colossal stairwell doors had been designed for a dozen commuters pass through, shoulder to shoulder. But the stairwells haven’t functioned as “stairs” for many years: With space at a premium, any usable, livable area was bound to be claimed eventually. Every descending and ascending flight could fit ten men abreast, and the open plateaus of each landing were larger than the average housing project. It wasn’t long before enterprising homeless realized the value of the wasted real estate. Their transition from footpath to neighborhood was piecemeal, at first. Just cardboard shanties tucked away in the corners, and mobile sleeping kits hastily set up for the off hours.  Most commuters took the lifts anyway, so not much fuss was raised at the temporary settlements. But temporary always becomes permanent, if you let it: Soon makeshift platforms were slung from the underbellies of every flight. At first, they were only accessible by rope ladders, and weren’t much more than places to sleep without getting arrested, assaulted, or trampled. But they were so unobtrusive -- webbed into disused corners of the ceilings like eggsacs -- that even these permanent structures remained unnoticed. Inevitably, they grew outward. Platforms were strung together, others slung below them, and still others below those, until the “unobtrusive” structures ran all the way to the floor below them, and the ‘Wells were stairs no more. Unlike the primarily abandoned floors he found himself stumbling through, where roving, psychotic janitors and tube collapse were looming threats, the ‘Wells were sound. They had doorways that were easily secured, clear, delineated borders that could be maintained, and free, unmonitored access to every floor above and below.

This ‘Well would not be vacant. There would be a guard on the other side of the door.

…

A guard meant to keep intruders out, not admit and protect them.

A guard that would likely either ignore his rapping, kill him for the disturbance, or just enjoy the evening show while the janitor’s monster tore him apart. Nowhere in the list of foreseeable options did “help the bleeding stranger with his dick in the breeze” appear. But Red was out of choices. He knocked timidly, like a neighbor there to complain about the noise, and awaited a response.

“What can I do for you, mate?” The voice came back instantly.

 “My name is Red,” Red screamed in reply, all self consciousness lost upon hearing another human voice, “and I need help.”

“Fuck you,” the guard replied plainly. There was no malice in it. Just a statement of fact: Fuck you.

“Please, there’s something out here. The janitor on this floor, he’s got these uh…man-bots, I guess?  One of them is after me. I don’t know if it….I think it’s very close.”

“What part of ‘fuck you’ did you not comprehend, friend? Was it the ‘fuck’ part? If so, I’d be happy to explain in detail. Draw you some pictures, yeah?”

“Please! I’ve got connections. I can get you authorization for any chemical ‘feed you want. I can print open Rx Cards. I can build the craziest mixes you’ve ever ingested. Ever wondered what blue tastes like? Want to punch a hole in steel with your cock?
I’m your man.
Just please, open this door!”

Red felt an abrupt change in air pressure. Everything became strangely…closer. He was certain it meant that Reggie had entered the room. He couldn’t know it for sure, of course, it was just paranoi – 

“Who says I don’t already?” The voice replied, chuckling.

“Don’t what?”

“Shag holes in steel. Who says I don’t? Was it Beryl? Don’t listen to that bird. She’s just mad coz I said her brother’s better in the sack. He was, by the by.” The voice was downright jovial now, laughing at Red’s pathetic bribery.

“I know somebody that used to live on this floor, in the ‘Wells,” Red tried, desperate now. This was the floor that Zippy had her modest hidey hole in, after all, the last time they’d seen one other.

“Her name is…uh…it’s…”

“It’s what?”

“It’s Zippy. I know that sounds made up!” Red added quickly, his words blurring together, “I swear to god though, she exists! I just don’t know her real name. But she knows me. I’m sure she’ll vouch, please! I think it’s in here now. The robot. I think it’s right here!”

The door swung inward.

A smallish man with a shock of ridiculous red hair stood inside of it. He was wearing a comically antiquated tweed suit, complete with a thin yellow tie. The guard blinked out into the darkness, then, apparently satisfied that Red – with his bleeding face and prancing dolphin vest -- wasn’t a threat, motioned him in. Red gratefully scrambled inside, and plastered himself against the furthest wall from the door. He turned back to the man and started to speak, but the words died in his throat.

He saw a dull plastic gleam begin in the darkness beyond, and then two grasping, black hands, advanced into the light. The guard swiveled about crisply, braced his feet, and pulled the trigger on what looked like a blender mounted to a shotgun handle. The entire room blazed into brilliant clarity. The crackle of electricity, the sound of shattering plastic, and then an aqueous, organic pop.

“Those bloody zombies the janitor makes,” the man droned, turning back to Red and swinging the door shut with his heel, “they can’t get through the steel, but they’ll scrape at it all night unless you put ‘em down.”

“Thank you,” Red replied numbly.

“James,” The man pulled the blender section from the handle, and plugged it into a metal base mounted on a small, flimsy plastic endtable. “And don’t thank me, mate: I only let you in on account of Zippy. Though I gotta say, if you’re pulling my leg here, she’s gonna eat your balls.”

Red giggled uncomfortably.

“Nobody’s joking, friend” he added evenly.

There was a pleasant whistle, like a tea-kettle set to boil, and the spritely ginger fellow reached down to pull the blender back out from its base. He returned it to the handle, twisted it into place, and leveled it at Red’s face.

QC brushed past the few conscious audience members. Some were just waking up, groggy and shameful after their hedonistic trip, while some were still under, and would be for hours. The users’ timelines all synced up during the trip, but not necessarily before or after. Some of the audience members that had just been ogling her ass in the forest seconds ago, by her perception, had already awoken and left for home by the time she came around. She distributed the expected timid bows and lurid winks to the stragglers (a Factory Girl’s social role being somewhere between expensive geisha and trashy strip-club waitress), then slipped out the private backdoor of the viewing area.

She emerged into a lengthy, trough-shaped room that served as the employee’s station. The trench was ten feet deep, but only five wide, and the ceiling was completely open to the arena floor above. Its original use, back when these had all been airship hangars, had been as a mechanic’s pit. Or at least that’s what she’d always assumed, judging by the neglected tools, spare parts and other miscellany still littering every corner of the place. Other Factory Girls, officially sanctioned Dealers, security guards and bookies stood before the banks of lockers that ran the furrow’s length, changing in or out of their respective uniforms. At one end, a bare-bones laundry service chugged away (though machine washing was one of the first things nano-tech made obsolete, years ago). Still, she’d never seen the laundry not in operation, sending its gouts of sour steam up at regular intervals. Somebody must be using it, or maybe it was just that nobody had ever bothered to shut the damn thing off.

Wafer thin partitions denoted laughably inadequate ‘office spaces’ to either side of the channel, but their boundaries were largely ignored, and most were abandoned. Old workbenches lined every open expanse of wall not dedicated to lockers, and these surfaces simultaneously served as desks, chairs, shelves, medical offices and laboratories for intent men and women in elaborate glasses, who tweaked unseen nano-bot factories, tended to minor wounds, or just quietly overdosed on their down time. She found an unoccupied length of plank beside a shaven-headed young woman and a man in a white coat.

“Hey yo,” she snapped her fingers to get the girl’s attention, “I’m up on the post-event orgies tonight. Cover?”

“Eat shit and die,” the girl replied absently.

The man in the white coat plucked a barbaric, inch long hypodermic – one of the old ones, with the actual visible needle and everything – from a rack, and jammed it in her arm. She yelped in protest, but he’d already depressed the plunger and turned away, leaving the needle waggling limply in the flesh of her forearm. She extracted it herself, orated on the virtues and failings of his mother’s vagina for a solid minute, and then turned back to QC.

“Swap me tomorrow’s title?” She finally countered.

“Fuck you,” QC eyed the amber-skinned girl warily, “that’s Gettysburg with battlemechs, right? That shit is mind numbing, and it lasts forever. The orgies take like an hour, tops.”

The girl simply shrugged and turned to leave, but QC caught her arm.

“Fine. Done. You suck cocks in hell,” she said, by way of goodbye.

“Suck cocks in hell,” the girl answered back automatically, already drifting away, back down the trench.

It was a crap deal, but she had to find Red. QC was practically a veteran amongst the Factory Girls, at two years. Most either quit, took ill with the ‘tech cancer, or else succumbed to temptation and tried to bolt with the strains. She stayed alive and active only by virtue of careful monitoring, some black market strains to hold the cell decay at bay, and a keen vigilance on her cloaking software, to keep the tyrannical organizers as ignorant as possible. There were better private techs around than Red to do the work, but not many that worked at his rate: Free. He had kind of a thing for her, QC knew -- or at least he did when he remembered to. Which wasn’t often.

She stopped at her locker to change into her civvies. The demure, suggestive yoga-suit (cut low into the cleavage, open at the midriff, and way too tight on the ass, evoking equal parts “spiritual time-yogi” and “eager chrono-hooker,”) was abandoned. In its place, she donned a loose-fitting pair of black engineer’s trousers (a thick, triple-reinforced nano-resistant material), a plain, white long-sleeved shirt, and a dull silver duster. The latter was a remnant she’d discovered when she wrestled open the dusty locker on her first day. It had likely been part of a uniform, leftover from the hangar days. Maybe even a captain’s, or at least one hell of a fancy flight attendant’s.