Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (18 page)

Hockner Industries: Chief opiate distributor for all of the Four Posts.

Red closed the reply before panic could seize him completely.
Hockner
was after him? He knew they had some tenuous connection to the lab where Red beta-tested, but there was a whole network of subsidiaries, franchises and dummy corporations between it and the official Hockner Industries corporation. If Hockner themselves were coming after him, then that was it, then; it was all over. Hockner owned everything – everybody. The opiate feeds, the Gas channels, the implant markets -- Red was pretty sure they even technically owned his apartment. You can’t run from a beast when you’re already inside of it. Red shifted back to the Blackboard one last time, and checked the new replies to his barter thread. There were six mocking him, two still calling him a fraud and decrying the intelligence of everybody that wasn’t, and one at the very end that read simply:

               
Barter accepted. Send transaction details immediately.

                               
--A Friend.

QC’s fear was effervescent. She’d sloughed off the brunt of the panic as soon as they got inside, but it kept welling back up like a shaken champagne bottle. Her apprehension formed tiny bubbles on the insides of her eyelids; pinpricks, itches in the brain. Waves of euphoric giddiness crested and receded under her skin, leaving only a shivering, wet sickness. She wanted to laugh, but knew it would only manifest as screaming, or sobbing, or mental shutdown.  Instead, she did her best to manage the fear as a physical thing: She pictured it as a black sludge coating the insides of her bones. She pulled it out, pushed it upward, all the way to the skin, and let it slide down her extremities to congeal inside her toes and fingertips. When it all conglomerated there -- throbbing and pulsing, swelling her limbs with thick, tired anxiety -- she touched the bare metal of the corridor, and let all the oozing black terror dissipate into the walls. It was a simple psychological meme, one of the few her parents taught her that she still remembered.
A little white lie you tell to yourself
, they said,
only believing makes it real
.

Slowly, after the fear puddle poured away into the floors and bled into the walls, she settled back into her body again. She tested the flexibility of her fingers, rocked on her heels, felt the tensile movement of muscles beneath her calves. She rolled the strain from her neck, shook her posture loose, and finally managed to uproot her gaze from the backs of Byron’s heels as he flounced along in front of her. His gait was clumsy: A hesitant, flopping walk that alternated between huge, loping strides and a mincing, scuffing shuffle. He had no cadence; he worked his own body like a character in a game that he didn’t know the controls to. He had been enthusiastically babbling for some time now, QC was dimly aware, but she had been too lost to hear it. The words were spoken underwater; almost familiar, but ultimately too muffled to resolve.

She was worried, but could not place the source. Byron, for all of his awkward uncertainty, seemed to know where he was going and what to do when he got there. She’d heard the Reservoir was a rough place, but it couldn’t be worse than the shantytowns and Pirated Gas clubs that festered around the Fights, could it? Still, ceding control to a thing as wholly fucking inept as Byron sat ill at ease with her. She tried to congeal the worry as well -- spilled it through her veins, rigged the sluices to channel it down into her fingertips -- but she still felt the lingering fear there, at the periphery, and knew that her mental buffer would take no more load. So she let the worry alone, and tried distraction instead.

She focused on the floor: A dull industrial green covered in a thin patina of scratches, each filled with the glittery graphite-colored dust of dead nano-bots. The ceiling: Old-style LEDS, still hung in archaic pinecone clusters instead of worked into the steel itself. Their unfiltered protective lenses scattered the rays, casting a wan, draining, lifeless light. Unfiltered LEDs always instilled a sense of hyperreality in her: Details were too clear, shadows too sharply defined against the whitish blue haze. A broken strand of fuses hung between two small cylinders. Heaters? Filters? Whatever. They’d sat idle for so long, their original purpose was irrelevant. The nano-dust was thick in the corners; the cold was biting.  A stray hair swung loose from her bangs, stubbornly refusing to budge from directly in front of her left eyeball. She could see it was split at the end. The dusty white carcass of a moth in the corner, where the access corridor turned. A loose thread -
actual thread? As in cloth? The motherfucker was how rich, exactly?
– frayed from one of Byron’s pantlegs.

As if hearing her thoughts, Byron suddenly stopped and swiveled to face her. QC shook her head, willed her eyes into focus, and after a few muddy attempts, finally recognized the words he was speaking.

“What?” She mumbled.

“Are you quite all right?”

“Yeah. Me?
I’m
good. The fuck is
your
problem?”

“Terribly sorry, milady, I must have misspoke. I did not mean to imply that I had any sort of quarrel with you, I was merely requesting that you stay close beside me now, for the Reservoir sits just beyond this portal.” He gestured extravagantly to a nondescript, round, three foot door with a bisected wheel in the center. “It is quite dark from this point on, and it can take a good bit of time for one’s eyes to adjust. All the pathways are docks, you see - just floating on the surface – so a single misstep and one might find oneself in the water, night-blind and lost. I don’t suppose you know how to swim? No, forgive me, of course you wouldn’t. It’s ah…well it’s all rather unpleasant business, in a nutshell.”

“Hold on,” QC said, and dropped into a squat against the corridor wall. She traced a series of shapes on the exposed flesh of her thigh, then pressed deeply. “I think I might actually have some nightvision strains still active. Or at least a white adjust program. Had to double as camera for a fucking perv expo last year. I think we’ve updated since then, but that pig bastard Henry never does a complete flush. Ah, there we - AHH! SHIT! SHIT ON YOUR FUCKS.”

“Oh my! Oh no!” Byron swatted frantically at the air about his face, “what is it?! Moths?! Oh good lord, it’s moths, isn’t it!?”

“God. Damn. It.” QC whispered through clenched teeth, her eyes squeezed so tightly shut that flashing orbs of color pulsed in the darkness there. “I just turned on nightvision in a well-lit hallway, dickhead. But good to know your killer fucking instincts are so finely honed. Moths, pussy? Seriously?”

“Sorry, I ah…I saw a dead one back there and…” Byron let the thought trail off, and offered his hand to QC by way of apology. She did not take it.

“Byron?” She asked finally, still clutching her clenched eyes.

“Hmm? Oh! Apologies.” Byron took her arm and did his best to help her to her feet. He escorted her over to the hatch and gingerly leaned her against the wall. He struggled with the old valve, splay-legged and shaking like a newborn doe, but eventually managed to crank it, and the door popped open. The difference in atmospheric pressure sent a dry, chemical wind rasping down the access corridor. He steered QC through the opening, followed suit, and shut the portal behind them.

“We’re in.”

QC cautiously moved her hands away and opened her eyes.

“Fuck me!”

“Oh dear, no, this is hardly the time or place for-“

“Shut the fuck up, Byron. It’s just a phrase. I didn’t know if the janky-ass nightvision strains would even work, but this shit is crazy. It’s like mid-day in the desert. I think I can see the fucking South Post from here.”

“Fantastic!” Byron clapped his hands heartily and the sound echoed sharply across the water. The abrupt silence that followed was full of menacing attention.

“We’ve just got to make sure to avoid those,” QC pointed to a thick slab of LED-woven pressboard atop a thin metal pole, “the light banks. See them?”

“Not in the slightest,” he answered genially.

“What, really? Jesus: They look like miniature suns to me. There’s one like a hundred feet to your left.”

“I see a dim little dot in a vast abyss, shining pathetically.”

“Poetic,” QC rolled her eyes, though the gesture was lost on Byron. “All right, listen, this is going to get complicated: The first thing to go on the more disposable strains, like this nightvision, is the generators. The little guys that turn glucose into energy – there’s no repair strain bundled in with disposables, so when they burn out, they’re gone. Starting them up over and over again is a lot more strain than just leaving it on. Get me?  If I turn this bullshit off, it might not come back on. So when we get to those lights, I’m going to be blind. Just get me out of there and pointed away from them as fast as you can, and we’ll be copa-fucking-cetic. I’ll lead you in the dark; you lead me in the light. Cool? Cool. So let’s go.”

Byron smiled eagerly, happy to have direction again.

“Byron,” QC snapped, a bit too loudly, “that’s you again: Where the fuck are we going?”

“Little Deng’s house,” he answered quickly, waving his hands in every general direction.

“Oh, right! Little Deng. There’s a big god damn neon sign right over there. I’ll just follow that.”

“Funny, I don’t recall a sign…”

“Sarcasm, jackass. Which
direction
am I going, Byron?”

“Ah…”

“No. No you are not allowed to fucking say that. Do not ‘ah’ me you flighty little cockhole. Tell me you know where we’re going.”

“This is not the usual protocol! I’ll typically send a polite message at least two days ahead of time, and when I arrive, two very large men grasp me in the dark and escort me bodily to my destination. It’s all very well put together,” Byron reasoned.

“So you brought me to the god damn Reservoir – the Reservoir, Byron: Where the very concept of rape is too scared of getting raped to visit – and now you’re telling me you have no fucking idea where we’re going. In the darkness.
In the god damn Reservoir
.”

“No! Of course not. I happen to know exactly where we’re going. It’s just the getting there that eludes me at the moment.”

QC stared furiously down into the still, black waters. She fantasized about holding Byron beneath the surface, rebutting every one of his pleas to live with anecdotal evidence of his own staggering incompetence as a human being. She drew a deep, gulping breath into her belly, held it there, and slowly released it. She turned her gaze upward. The light filtering in from the city above was indistinct, but unbearable. A pure white void overlaid with a thousand dark silhouettes: The catwalks, cart-lines, bridges, and myriad other structures crisscrossed one another in vertical paths up to infinity. A fractal snowflake; a web of sharp, artificial edges set against the backdrop of a blank and shining void. Somehow, the web calmed her. It was all still up there.

She turned to face Byron again.

“Do you at least know what it looks like?”

“But of course! It’s a horrid thing. A grand, three-story barge, all classless kitsch and tasteless novelty. On the roof, there’s a crude tableau of an oasis – trees made from chipboard and the like. If that wasn’t gauche enough, it is all painted up in the most garish scheme: Red, green, yellow – all utterly atrocious, really. Though from what I remember, it didn’t seem as though anybody else bothered to paint anything down here in the dark, so it should be a snap to spot.”

“Nightvision’s colorblind, Byron.”

“No offense, madam, but if you’re having trouble spotting the enormous pleasure-barge with the artificial forest on top, I would not think the color scheme to be the deciding factor.”

 “Son of a whore.”

“So you can dish it, but not take it, eh? Sensitivity, my dear, is more a vice than a virtu-“

“Not you, cheesedick. I think I see the place.”

“Fantastic!” Byron moved to clap again, but QC reached out and caught one of his forearms. He completed the motion with the remaining arm regardless, throwing off his balance in the process and falling to one knee. He looked like he might cry.

“No. Not fantastic.” QC whispered.

“Why ever not?” Byron asked innocently.

“There’s not many people out right now: A few little pockets of grody-looking motherfuckers here and there, but they seem to want to stay out in the open as little as possible. It’s the same everywhere...except where we’re going. The place we want to go? I see what looks like a god damn fireworks show. There are lights everywhere. There are half-naked women dancing through an artificial forest, and oh yeah – about a dozen hulking motherfuckers with what look like spears just fuckin’ hanging out, plain as day.”

“Well!” Byron exclaimed happily, “That sounds like our place, doesn’t it?”

“No, dipshit, you don’t get it. Everybody else here is hiding in the dark. As far as the eye can see. There’s only one place where the motherfuckers aren’t hiding at all, and do you know why? Because
they’re what everybody else is hiding from
.”

                RED: Be more specific.

                HOWCANIHELP: How so?

                RED: “I can help.” That’s not helpful.

                HOWCANIHELP: How can I help?

                RED: Is this a spam AI? I swear to God…

HOWCANIHELP: No. It is a legitimate question. What would be helpful? I can provide it. There is nothing beyond my means. It is that simple.

Red’s eyes phased in and out of focus. A tiny Cyclops holding a shiny, squirming fox automaton eyed him balefully from the far corner. When he turned to look at it directly, it disappeared. Red sifted through his mental catalogue, looking for persistent hallucinogens with flashback potential but no euphoria – Prophetus, Focalene, that crap dose of Merit the SpaniTard insisted was pure vintage, or maybe just plain old Dimethyltryptamine bound to something fat soluble. Atomic structures slotted together like bricks in his mind.