Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (28 page)

“Hanover: Vitals,” she said just a little too loudly, and a dozen pairs of eyes shot their direction, then quickly looked away and sped up their pace. A small, but noticeable radius of avoidance fluttered outward from their position. The bones in her skull vibrated, and she heard the thin, ghostly tones of Hanover reading off the vitals in her area.

Albert glared at her.

“Overt tactics. Using societal position to lower threat levels,” he noted dismissively, “public confirmation of A- Gent status dictates entirely new algorithms.”

Albert’s gaze followed Victoria’s, to the man who’d been struck by her flicked cigarette. He was now trying desperately to hunch down in the crowd while stumbling in panic toward the catwalk exits.

“New primary?” She asked him pleasantly.

He chewed his lower lip and ran the numbers.

Ambient temperature in Catwalk seven-hundred-forty-six: 101.4 degrees. 80% humidity. Foot traffic: Severe to dangerous flow. Capacity reached or imminent. Primary Threats scanned in area: Maxwell “Axe-well” Tax, murder in the first degree. Samiya Cole, aggravated manslaughter.

Security stills of an emaciated figure sporting a row of blue spikes on his head and a demure woman in a yellow Sari flashed up. They disappeared when she finished scanning them.

Anya Volich, sixty-two counts of assault. Record expunged.

An image of a familiar face – the old scrub-shop nurse – flickered onto her BioOS display. Victoria resisted the urge to turn and stare.

Sweat began to spring up on Albert’s brow. The numbers were inconclusive, she gathered; he was having trouble identifying a primary in-grid threat.

“Your fellow agent,” she quoted code back at him: “In absence of sufficient primaries, vigilance should be diverted to fellow operatives. There is always a threat: Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize.”

He swiveled to face her slowly, his raw skin pinching at the edges. She smiled winningly back at him, and almost laughed when his nose began to twitch.

“Result!” Albert practically screamed, grateful to break the tension.

A pulsing red dot thrummed in her peripheral vision. She glanced over to it, then slowly returned her gaze to center, confirming interface permission. Scrolling text filled the conical area in the center of her visual field. Images and thumbnail videos flung themselves outward in staggered concentric circles. The text was a cobbled together mini-biography of a smallish blonde girl. Pretty. Her delicate features offset by short hair done up in haphazard spikes. In the thumbnail, she was glaring up from a plate of garbage noodles at a lean-to on some lower-level catwalk. She was sticking her tongue out at whoever had taken the picture, indicating some level of affection or intimacy. She was wearing the same antique, silver-foiled duster and one-legged trousers as she had been when they’d first encountered her, down in the fleeing Beta’s flat. Victoria gave the bio a quick scan, pulling out key points: Quintessential Caroline McGinnis -- with a name like that, her parents had probably been ‘Loons. She was either very lucky, or very resourceful to have survived the severance. Psychographic web-crawl indicated recklessness, anger, and strong impulses. An empathetic streak was revealed by her video-feed queue -- mostly cute animal clips and social injustice memes. A tendency toward anti-corporate sentiment showed up in her shopping habits: Sparse purchases, even for the poverty line, indicated that Quintessential Caroline preferred to spend her money on off-market goods and software. Employment was also unlisted, but her search history – side-effects of unbranded strains, what to look for in a flush – hinted at a recent stint as a ‘Factory Girl in the arenas. Likely littered with malfunctioning or unstable nanotech. Last official housing was a hovel slung below Catwalk 393 on the North Post side of level 4566, time-shared with a Sim-porn addict named Moon. She took days, he took nights. That was two years ago.

It was one of the barest Hanover bios Victoria had ever seen. She couldn’t help but be a little impressed at somebody staying that off the grid these days.

Victoria let her eyes fuzz out of focus, then directed them upwards, turning off the scroll function and activating the auxiliary ring. She focused on the blinking video feed – the one that first triggered the result – and a short clip played silently. It was Quintessential Caroline, standing in a cramped corridor surrounded by a motley group of tired and angry looking men. To one side, a heavily-muscled Arabic woman bounced merrily in place on a prosthetic leg. The viewpoint abruptly shifted away to a security lens on the ceiling just outside the doors of a small lift. She watched from a bird’s eye view as QC staggered out of the elevator, tripping over her own feet. She turned to glare back at an unseen party, and the Arabic woman appeared on-screen. She said something and a short, red-headed man laughed. QC turned and stomped way, around a corner. As she rounded it, the POV shifted again to a shaky, constantly shifting camera. Its focus was scattershot and frantic. It paused only briefly in any one place - to alight on a rack of blades, a plate of meat, a random assortment of women’s cleavage. It was a feed culled from an unsecured eye camera; some tourist that just happened to be looking the right direction at the right time and didn’t know how to set up a proper firewall. The first-person movement clashed with the natural scanning pattern of Victoria’s own vision, and she fought back a wave of nausea. The tourist’s gaze settled on the rolling hips of a silver-clad woman, and then quickly scanned up across her unimpressive breasts. It flicked upward to briefly register QC’s face – a look of disgust as she caught the user’s stare – and away again to match eyes with a surly-looking teenager, then down at the floor. The POV jumped, and Victoria was looking through the security camera of a dusty, unlit vacant commerce stall. Before she could make out the details, a blur of distant silver strode past the far window and out of frame. The POV started to switch again, but she flicked her eyes sideways and the feed slid away to the left, replaced by small, pulsing white text that listed the timestamps and locations of each of the cameras.

“Got it,” Albert interrupted, “targets came back active on the 1.5Ks, heading from the West Post Reservoir Freight Express Elevator to the North Post Unlicensed Lift Station. Secondary and primary objectives have joined ranks with several unknowns. No ID tags on those as yet. Let’s move.”

“Hanover update,” she put out a hand to stop him, “hold.”

“What?”

“Getting a new objective now.”

“Are you kidding me?” Albert spat. He was feigning detachment, but Victoria could see the anger he’d been holding in his neck and shoulder muscles from the moment the blonde girl had burned his face.

“Check that first feed. The corridor. See the junkie kid on the left? He’s our new primary objective: Marked as ‘not to be harmed under any circumstances.’ Zero risk, zero engagement.”

“I shall repeat myself: Are you joking? Why would some anonymous addict ever warrant shifting a primary objective in fulfillment?”

“Check with Hanover yourself if you don’t believe me,” Victoria answered curtly, “I don’t braid the god damn thing’s hair. I don’t know why it does this shit.”

She swiveled on her heel to make for the public lifts, and almost plowed through an elderly black man. He was standing right in her 02-175C grid. Not two feet away, and she’d been too distracted to register him, much less categorize his threat level. He smiled genially at her, and then stepped aside with a grand flourish, signaling for her to pass.

Victoria punched him in the throat.

QC had the man by the tongue, and was twisting it cruelly. He whimpered something unintelligible, but the tone seemed properly plaintive, so she released him.

The poor old junkie was covered with scabs, his eyes gone crusty at the edges, his lips peeled permanently back from his teeth like a grinning skull. He whimpered, and tucked his torn and wadded tongue back into his mouth like a wet tissue. Byron felt a kind of base, pathetic kinship with the addict: His own tongue was already growing thick. His thoughts were slow and circular, and his mouth had long since gone dry and began tasting of acid. A persistent, building pressure settled behind his eyes, and the fluttering of a vague and ill-defined anxiety rattled around behind his ribcage. Every moveable inch of him felt improperly lubricated, like a rusty old door hinge.

The fear of it is worse than the reality.

It was his mantra for early-stage withdrawal, but he’d cursed that white-lie in the throes of too many screaming fits to earnestly believe it any longer.

The now-lisping troll tapped at a spot on the ground with a filthy, shaking finger. A deep hum vibrated through the floor, while their group stood, waiting, in the ramshackle lean-to. The hum intensified, then silenced abruptly. There was a shift deep beneath them, and the chickens began to quarrel. They were hemmed in by the birds on all sides: Each cage stacked vertically upon the other, floor to ceiling, covering every inch of every wall. The warbling birds flew into a panic as a whole section of wall popped out, and swung back inward.

When his eyes finally adjusted to the gloom, Byron saw a whip-thin child clad in overalls and a ludicrously ill-fitting pair of giant goggles, standing in the dark just beyond the recessed wall. The aged junkie slurred something to the gawky boy, and the child nodded in response. Byron tried desperately to pay attention to the conversation, but focus was elusive and unctuous; it slipped further and further away the more he tried to grasp at it. He registered each word they spoke sequentially, but had forgotten the start of them by the time the sentence ended. They’d apparently agreed to follow the child, which Byron gathered more by the actions of those around him than his own tenuous grasp of the situation.

The old junkie stumbled fearfully into the corner, while the child slid his comically large goggles down over his eyes, and disappeared into the shadows. James was first to follow him, then Red, and then the dull woman with the skipping step whose name Byron could not quite remember -- Slappy or Bozo or something equally preposterous. QC glared expectantly at him, but Byron could not recall what he had done to displease her. She said something: He grasped the meaning briefly, and then dropped it. She tried again.

“What?” Byron blinked rapidly, trying to shake the dumb fatigue that settled on him like a fine dust.

“Fucking move!”

“Oh, indeed. Indeed. Apologies.”

Byron shuffled hesitantly into the black space beyond the wall. His feet felt impossibly distant – when did his legs get so unmanageably long? – and it was all he could do to try to stand somewhere that he guessed might be out of the way. QC followed immediately after him, yelling something harsh and horrible that made Byron’s genitals briefly retract. The wall of chickens set to warbling again, and swung shut.

The walk was long, black, and cramped. The absoluteness of the void was interrupted at random intervals by thin, shining slices of light. Byron had initially taken them for LED strips, until one of them displayed a pair of darting eyeballs. Slits, he realized, all looking out onto the catwalk marketplace. He bent to examine one set just below waist level, and found himself staring at a man’s knee, bare through shredded trousers. The telltale pattern of small, black pin-pricks dotted his hair follicles. It spoke of Neotene addiction. Byron remembered trying the drug, once, in a little rat-hole that a girl called Spotlight kept behind the South Post Arenas. Byron had forgotten, at that point, just how terrifying it was to be a child. The wonder and curiosity that the stories spoke of had never infected his own youth. His adolescence was a period of constant awkwardness and uncertainty, defined by the unique fear that comes from operating in a society where all of the rules are considered too ‘adult’ to explain. The Neotene brought it all screaming back, and he’d spent the entire trip hiding beneath Spotlight’s mattress. 

Another slit showed a dark woman’s face in profile, chuckling quietly to herself. Her eyes darted about rapidly, lost in a BioOS feed only she could watch. An unseen hawker screeched nearby, peddling blank Rx cards.

“Thirty mixes, clean!” He yelled.

The woman covered her mouth, overcome with laughter at something she’d witnessed in her own private little theater.

“Untraceable! High-yield injection mesh! Five first tier allotments! Ten second tier! Fifteen third!”

More slits and more two-inch tableaus -- tiny little portals into backrooms and bar stools and crowded hallways. They looked out onto a rack of graphene whipsticks in the storage room of a weapons smuggler, and a booth that specialized in Nekojin: Animatronic cat-people that Penthouse kids sometimes kept as pets. The first slit peeked into the main pet-store, open to the public, catering mostly to children; the next slit peered into the private backroom that catered to adults. Another slit displayed a fat woman with deep-set eyes and an enormous purple hat demonstrating a singing staff by touching its imperceptibly resonating tip to a thick length of steel, which shook and wobbled wildly in response. A middle-aged man in archaic coat-tails conducted crude action holograms for two bored teenagers, their faces obscured by pixelating hoods. Then a decomposition tube, the receptacle kicked over and vacuum seal broken. It spewed ultralight nano-garbage out into the air, where it floated gently down like dirty snowflakes.

Byron’s knee contacted something hard in the dark. He brought the other up to compensate, but it, too, came up short.  He crumpled into the ground. QC came crashing down on top of him a moment later. When they had extricated themselves from each other’s limbs, Byron was a torrent of confused apologies. He wanted to explain why he’d been so distracted, but it came out sideways and disconnected.

“A black knee,” he found himself mumbling, “and the lady that wasn’t laughing or selling anything. Some kids – he should have been more careful. They didn’t like the show.”

QC said something condescending and shoved him out of the murk and into a blinding light. It was so unbearably bright that it bored through his clenched eyelids and planted an instant, reeling, nauseous migraine straight into his forebrain. He pushed Bozo the One-legged dimwit aside, and threw up into a Decomp tube… that turned out to be an old Latino man’s fish stand.