Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (10 page)

“What’s all this, then?” James said, motioning to Red’s apparently bafflingly intact limbs.

“We gots a
contract
,” Zippy whispered with the pretend gravity of a child playing at doctor, “so now we have to go to Red’s house to play.”

“You rotten little bastard,” James laughed at the bashfully shuffling Red, “you know how we work in the ‘Wells, yeah? Business is business. Any job is more important than any relationship, but you never mix a paycheck and your mates. The second you offer work to a friend, you ain’t friends anymore. You dumb sod; did you have the slightest as to what you were doing?”

“Red knows all the rules. I told him those already and he’s pretty good at the game already so
let’s go already
!” Zippy snapped the release and swung the front door open. Red looked out at impossible grass, at singing birds and flowering trees in a concrete stairwell.

James whistled appreciatively: “You knew the etiquette and you still burnt her like that? You’re a bit of a bloody cunt, aren’t you mate?”

Red had no rebuttal.

“Got a search-alert hit while you two was making nice in there,” James addressed the impatiently bouncing Zippy, “a couple of ‘loggers up in Prince Johnny’s territory talking about headhunters renting access. Looking for a pretty serious runner, by the money of it. They were wearing blue suits, to hear tell.”

Zippy’s eyes went wide, with mock or genuine astonishment, Red couldn’t tell.

“So what?” Red asked, and bent to examine the grass between his fingers. The identification game he’d been playing in the parlor was still bouncing around his subconscious.

“Sew buttons,” Zippy retorted, “use your noodle, Red. Don’t you ‘member your nursery rhymes? Blue suits and black boots mean…”

“New recruits. Jesus. Oh, holy hell. You don’t think they were A-Gents?” Every joint in Red’s body locked at once.

Zippy nodded, emphatically. And for a moment, nobody moved.

“Welp, flitting about with our dicks firmly in hand doesn’t seem to be helping, so let’s try another tack,” James said and strode to the edge of Zippy’s lawn. He stared up at a solid mass of steel, and banged once. A voice answered immediately, and James launched into the careful web of lies, bribes, threats and insults that negotiating for passage entailed.

“Shredded circuit boards,” Red said.

“What’s that, mister?” Zippy turned on her tensile heel. She bobbed slightly, up and down, like a buoy in gentle seas.

“The grass,” Red continued, “couldn’t place it. It’s shredded circuit boards, isn’t it? The jellied kind, I mean. The living ones.”

“Ayup,” she answered, “they’re bio-lodge-ick-al. I feed ‘em bugs sometimes and sometimes other things.”

James was wrapping up a short spiel that mostly consisted of the word ‘bollocks’ and an elaborate pantomime of punches. When his argument was finished – the denouement consisting of a rapid series of furious uppercuts and mock sobbing – the man on the other side of the peephole stared quietly for a few seconds, then disappeared out of sight. A section of the wall swung back, crackled like electricity, and slid away. He and Zippy quickly ducked through, and Red turned to follow after them. Having only the one springboard leg, he noted, leant the girl a whimsical, comical gait.

Almost like skipping.

The man kicked lightly in his sleep, like a dog dreaming.

It was precocious and pathetic, though the effect was somewhat diminished when QC realized it was most likely muscle spasms from an abiding gas-trip. She hardened her posture, forced alert tension into her joints, and sat forward on the edge of the dining bench, a mouthful of sour, stale, disassembler-laden spit at the ready. Sad cuteness aside, the muscle twitches meant he’d probably be waking soon. In full effect, a gas trip meant near-total paralysis. Presence tended to shut off the nervous system more completely than Voyeur, but any kind of movement was only possible in the ramping down phase of either - what they called ‘The Shame.’ It was Factory Girls like her that originally coined the term, to describe the leg of the trip just before the finish, when the posh, Presence-using attendees first started to disengage their genitals from one another and get used to the idea of behaving like human beings again. Eventually, the phrase carried over to the casual users too, though most didn’t have the funds for Presence, and certainly not to rent private viewing rooms at the Fights, so they had no idea what the actual significance of the word was.

But the Shame only lasts for a few minutes, and always comes at the very tail end of a trip. The stranger would be coming up soon.

QC made an ornate shape with her fingers - the index crossed under the middle and extended, the ring and pinky fingers splayed out wide - and pressed twice into her thigh. She waited a few seconds, until the square patch of skin began to pulse a dull emerald, signifying confirmation. She extracted the double-sided needle/spoon that she kept threaded into her collar, and pricked at the center of the luminescent flesh. She spooned up a single droplet of blood, and deposited it on the sleeping man’s temple. He was lying on his side now, and any substantial movement on his part would shift the blood, thus tripping the Motion-Sensing nano-bots within. The MS weren’t an official strain; just leftovers that her regular flushes couldn’t catch. They might be going rogue inside her right now, tearing and mutating her cells from within. But if she was stuck with them, she figured she might as well use them, and had them wired to her black market control kit. There was no telling if there were enough still active in there to actually signal the alert to her BioOS, but a chance was better than nothing.

QC stood and went to her toes, stretching her calf muscles. They had been seized up from stress, ever since the altercation in the alley, and were now starting to cramp. She alternated pointing her toes as she walked, and used the exercise to justify a bit of snooping into Red’s apartment. There were few adornments, aside from the factory default furniture and an Rx-feed terminal, but a small handful of personal belongings stood out against the faded plastic like beacons, and she homed in on each in turn: An old photograph, actually imprinted on dumb-paper, sat inside of a scratched chrome frame. An elderly man and a young boy (Red by the looks of that nose), beamed out happily. They were somewhere green, likely on mandated vacation to one of those community garden pads, back before they tore most of them down. The colors had all faded equally, save for the blues. Older printers did that – the chemicals they recycled to make the blue were quite a bit more resilient than the rest, and stood out with age. It made the scene look cold, austere. Red was smiling with abandon, like boys do, but a look of concealed nervousness hovered about him even then. The old man held Red tight by the waist; Red’s hand sat uncertainly over the man’s shoulder, as if he had reached out for an embrace, then decided against it mid-photo.

She set the picture back into the groove it had worn in the plastic counter -- it must have been moved often -- and picked up another. This one, a thin wooden frame (real wood? It felt oddly heavy and textured, but QC hadn’t seen enough actual wood to compare), held a picture of young Red viciously hugging the legs of an elegant but stern looking woman. His brow was knit. His eyes were closed. It was a posture of desperate, spontaneous affection on the child’s part. The woman was certainly striking, but seemed a bit too acutely aware of the angles of camera: Her neck was craned just so, her hair fell a little too perfectly over the one eye. The last picture was unframed. It was a stiff, smart-paper image of a stark-naked Red, much younger and leaner, and a pretty little teenage girl with a purple tri-hawk. They were standing atop a portable ‘feedpot in some slick corporate housing project -- all clear corners, bright storefronts, and wide, open windows. The girl looked to be trying to reason with Red, whose penis, ragingly erect, was mid-wag in the general direction of a confused and angry security officer. The officer’s liquid blackjack was also ragingly erect, and mid-wag in Red’s general direction.

That dated it. The picture, and by extension Red, were both older than QC had thought. She’d only seen liquid blackjacks in dated video feeds. It was an inefficient and somewhat goofy weapon: A floppy, flaccid gelatinous tube that, upon contact with a solid object, snapped to rigidity. It was too close quarters for the liking of modern security forces, and the amplified impact of the whip-like motion was tricky to control. It sometimes ended up being lethal when it wasn’t meant to be. Corporate security used the less (physically) damaging microwave soundguns now, beaming their spoken commands to the inner ears of potential perps with a crippling, unavoidable volume.  QC held a thumb on the image until the info bubble popped up, and read the simple, unpracticed scrawl: “You only fall when you look down, Coyote.”

A reference to something she didn’t get.

She set the photo back down amongst the trio, and moved on. In the bare kitchen, the storage unit was beyond empty. A still-sealed instructional manual slipped from inside the door when she opened it, and floated to the ground. Not only was there no food in it now, but she doubted there ever had been. The only window in the apartment, a porthole set partway up the far wall, faced the vast interior chimney between the Four Posts. From it, she could only see brightly flashing signs advertising porn games through the ceaseless rain. Seated upon the sill was a fragile ceramic bird, its bright red paint now chipped and faded. She recognized it instantly. It was from the night they met.

QC had just finished her second stint as a Factory Girl, still utterly convinced that she would make some quick, easy money and get out well before the damage could take - not like all those other, stupider girls. She literally tripped over Red at the top of the stairway leading back up and out of the backstage trough: He was sprawled on his belly directly in front of the exit, giggling happily at something cupped in his hands. She fought back the urge to kick his teeth in, and knelt down to look in his open palms instead. There, shielded from prying eyes, was the little red bird figurine. Red noticed her looking, and defensively shunted the bird away to his jacket pocket. He hopped quickly and with surprising agility to a standing position, straightened himself in a poor pantomime of righteous indignation, and cleared his throat.

“I’m QC,” she spoke, forcing more politeness than usual, so as not to jeopardize her new job, “you work here? Cause if not, you’re not allowed back here, you burnout fuckwad. The fights are over.”

“I work here,” he answered, affronted, “I’m a beta-tester. Very important.”

“Yuh huh,” she rolled her eyes, “what’s with the bullshit bird?”

“Oh man!” His face instantly dropped all pretense and brightened with childish joy. He dug into his jacket pocket and held the bird up before her, too close for her eyes to focus on, “did you see this bird I got?”

“Yeeaaah, just a minute ago? When you were laying on the floor like a cunt, and I almost broke my motherfucking neck?”

“It’s the best!” He proclaimed.

“You’re bleeding,” she noted the nasty cut, still oozing above his left eye.

“Somebody tried to take my bird,” he said sadly, “back before I knew it was mine.”

“You mean you stole it…”

“No. It was mine from before, I just didn’t know it and the shop-keep didn’t know it either. I tried explaining, but he wouldn’t listen. He hit me in the head and I ran away.”

“I have to ask: Are you high, or just…simple?”

“FivepartsBZthreealphaAPSonenonbindingcatalyst,” he recited in a single monotone breath. “New mix. Trying to emulate the emotional mindset of late childhood. Is it working?”

“I…” QC reflexively started to form an orchestra of obscenity to unleash on the man, but his eyes glimmered with earnestness, and she opted instead for: “Yeah. Like a charm.”

“Yes!” He exclaimed, pumping his fist.

The two of them spent the rest of the night in a cramped, four-person micro-diner. The owner gave up on shooing them out to make room for paying customers, when it became obvious that there were none. He fell asleep instead, and snored loudly from a hammock behind the serving counter. As the drugs faded, Red matured (slightly) right before her eyes. Eventually QC found herself talking to a sincere, thankful, very sleepy and very hungover adult male. They’d been something like friends ever since.

The nostalgia was sharply and abruptly broken by her Overdose Alarm. A deep blue light flashed in her peripheral vision, mirrored on her forearm panel.

“OVERDOSE,” the sub-audible warning conducted the message along her large bones, “OVERDOSE OVERDOSE.”

QC hadn’t been able to afford a full body workup for the black market control kit installed in her thigh, so she’d opted for catch-all integration with the official panel in her forearm instead. The official panel, annoyingly, only came with one default alert: The overdose alarm. It functioned as a universal notification for everything she did with her unsanctioned nanotech. In this case, it meant the drop of motion-sensor-containing blood that she’d left on the junkie’s forehead had moved.

He was waking up.

She ran around the kitchen bar and stood immediately across from him, well within spitting distance. He was groaning and shifting now, the blood smeared halfway down his cheek. He coughed, turned, and threw a hand up over one ear. And that’s when she heard what had caused the man to stir in the first place: It was so faint from her place in the kitchen that she’d chalked it up to an electronic squeal; a high-pitched, struggling whine. But now she recognized it for what it was…