Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (4 page)

“I could go for pants,” Red admitted, “it’s uh…you know it’s cold down here, right?”

Red obediently followed the janitor, staying close to heel like a cowed dog, as they made their way through the crumbling labyrinthine corridors. They were never less than ankle deep in debris - office supplies, building materials, torn clothes, the corpses of failed maintenance robots – and spent the bulk of their effort scrabbling over heaps of garbage stacked nearly to the ceiling. When they couldn’t summit the piles, they’d corkscrew themselves through tight, serpentine trails dug into the wreckage. And when they couldn’t go through, they crawled around, using a series of freezing, cramped rubber tunnels that been slung out into the cold, deep waters of the Reservoir. At a towering mountain of beige, the janitor gestured widely and turned around. Red picked a reasonably clean, intact pair of trousers from the thousand-strong pile, and did his best to slide them on, though he couldn’t quite seem to catch his footing.

“I just don’t know how you people take it,” the man spat.

“Take what?” Red wrenched an ankle free from the sucking mass of a torn foam mattress and stuck it through a pantleg.

“All that air up there. You can feel it, all around you. Feels like you’re gonna explode outta your skin like an overcooked sausage.” The janitor swung open a latch in the far wall and squeezed himself through the porthole of an old airship cabin. “I know those rat-fuck Penthouse sons-of-bitches were trying to screw me, busting me down to janitorial like this. But honestly? Best thing that ever happened to me. Lots of nice, safe water all around, keeping the pressure even. You gotta keep the pressure even, you know. Ain’t nobody else gonna do it for you. You leave it up to them, and the lack of atmosphere up there will stretch you too thin. You’ll goddam disperse like… like steam. You know? Not down here. Nice tight garbage all around, millions of tons of water on every side. Keeps a man solid. And as long as the worklogs are filed on time, the structure stays sound, and the Posts don’t leak, he can do whatever he wants.”

“With…what, exactly?” Red eyed a heap of cracked tablets spilling from a box with a cartoon starfish on the front.

“With everything! This here is gold,” the janitor said, wrenching a length of knotted rope from a nearby pile, and holding it up for Red to examine. “You need something, you just go into the piles and get it. And for what I can’t find, I got a monthly stipend and plenty of free bandwidth. What more does a man need?”

A creeping unease prickled Red’s skin. He’d had the sense that something was missing for some time, but couldn’t quite place it, until now.

“And your Rx-feed too, right?” Red put forth hopefully.

“Shit no! Don’t need that junk anymore. Besides, these were the first floors, remember? Didn’t have feed-lines of any kind – Rx or otherwise -- down here, ‘cause they didn’t have the ‘feed back then. Nah, if I order something online, they send it the old fashioned way: Pneumatic Tube. Still got the old system snaking around here, in some places. And they don’t ship drugs in the tubes. Aw, it was hard going cold turkey at first, sure, but a few weeks sober, and you realize you’re better off without it.”

“Weeks?” Red’s stomach churned, and a skittering panic clawed at the base of his brain.

“Hoo dang!” The janitor turned and thrust his lantern up to Red, “you should see your face! Unclench, buddy. We still got a few working lifts down here. Like as not, that’s how you got here in the first place. Soon as you get finished helping me, I’ll have you up and gone, back slowly dying up there in space, if that’s what you want.”

“Yes, please” Red laughed in relief.

“Why were you running around flashing your jimmy and puttin’ fire-axes in my robots, anyway? Dare? Scavenging? Deathwish? We get that occasionally. Won’t pretend I’m going to talk you out of it; most that come down here to die find a way to do it sooner rather than later.”

“No, no, nothing like that. I do beta-testing for the Gas-fights. You know: Scout out locations, make sure the gas is dialed into the right time-period, map out a clear landing spot so nobody’s spending the entire trip in the middle of a tree somewhere. They don’t let you leave the NDA area with prototypes in your system, obviously, but sometimes a flush doesn’t fully take. And if that happens, and what’s left of the beta doesn’t play nice with some other Rx…well, then you might find yourself half-naked, underwater, meeting interesting machines and putting axes into them.”

“Hell, maybe you got that deathwish after all.”

“It’s not that bad. As long as you report back immediately so they can recover any traces of the prototype, they take pretty good care of you. Pay off most of your fines, reimburse you for lost, damaged or eaten goods.”

“Eaten?”

“Ate my cleaning robot, one time. They bought me a new one.”

The janitor came up short. Red ran into his back, caught his foot, and went sprawling down into a pile of animatronic kittens. One snapped to life, briefly, and mewled at him in a deep, slow, dying voice. Then the last of its battery went, and it was silent.

“Here it is,” the Janitor nodded toward a spot of ashen decay on the surface of an immense steel beam above them. They were standing atop a twenty foot high mound of broken children’s automatons inside a large, otherwise empty auditorium. A surreal nausea shot through Red as a small section of the garbage pile rumbled into life, rolled forward, and sat obediently to one side of the janitor. Red barked a little in shock.

“Ah, that’s just Reggie. He’s one of my ‘bots. Brought him in for the assist, at first, but you can see he ain’t gonna do much good here. That’s rot up there. Rogue metalworking nanotech. Somehow it got on the 32nd Support Strut, and now it’s just makin’ cups.” The janitor kicked at a pile of crude, half-formed coffee mugs piled below the discolored tract.

Red looked closer, and saw the beginnings of a handle start to emerge from the patch.

“If I send Reggie too close to that, well – I already got a mug I like just fine.”

The robot made a sound partway between muffled laughter and a groan.

The janitor handed Red a hefty, bright orange spray can. The lower half was covered in pictograms detailing a litany of unpleasant outcomes, with the word ‘Exterminators’ written across the top in large, plain black letters. All purpose nanotech deactivators.

“Got a good bit of diagnostic kit in me, so I try not to actually use that crap. You mind?”

Red shrugged – he had no external gear for the Exterminators to seize on, anyway – and clambered up to the decay. He depressed the small, round plastic tab and a glittering stream of pink foam shot out. He waved it back and forth until the rot was covered, then eased himself down. But his ankle turned on the last foothold, and he ended up on his hands and knees before the maintenance robot.

“Oh, hey: Your ‘bot took damage somewhere. It’s leaking,” Red informed the janitor, as he struggled into a crouch atop the shifting robo-cats.

“Oh that’s nothing, pay it no mind,” the man answered sharply.

“Must’ve nicked some hydraulics,” Red continued, extending a hand to examine the gash.

His fingers brushed something oddly pliant, and came back bright crimson. He sniffed at the fluid, and found the odor faintly metallic -- not the usual cloying chemical stink of hydraulic fluid. Red made a puzzled noise.

“Now,” the Janitor sighed wearily behind him, and rummaged for something in the debris pile, “why’d you have to go and do that?”

Red twisted his neck to squint into the tear in the ‘bot’s casing, just as the janitor’s lantern swung to one side, casting light over his shoulder. For a split second, it lit with perfect clarity a swath of hairy, bleeding flesh, encased in shattered plastic.

“What is…?” Red started to ask, but something jarred the lantern abruptly, and the shadows around him danced wildly.

When he instinctively flinched back, he found a three foot steel screw bored into the spot where his head had been. The screw stuck fast, and the janitor, expecting more resistance to the swing, lost his balance. He rolled and skipped down the long, sloping face of the pile, triggering barks, whines and tinny, recorded laughter with every impact. When he finally found his feet again at the bottom of the hill, he was surrounded by dislodged automatons, triggered into life by the motion. A bevy of seals surrounded him, clapping; a tumbling clown did somersaults away into the gloom, while two dragonfly ultralights circled his head uncertainly. The janitor let loose a savage yell and tried to charge back up the hill at Red, but he couldn’t seem to find purchase. The mound of rubbish only gave way beneath his weight. Red stared down at him in blank confusion.

“Why?”

The janitor did not answer, but instead kicked a hole in an ancient glass monitor and hopped about in angry circles.

Assured for the moment that the man couldn’t reach him, Red turned back and peered into the thin mesh of the ‘bot’s headpiece. Nothing. Just blurry, indistinct colors and shapes. But there -- movement? Red couldn’t identify what he was seeing, at first, until his eyes readjusted into a closer focus. He’d been looking too deep, expecting chipboard and cameras buried within the oval skull. But there they were, right there on the surface: Eyes. Human eyes.

Bloodshot and blue, just a few centimeters from his own.

They scanned his face in precise, ceaseless lines. Red tried to back away, lost his balance, and took a clumsy seat on the precipice of the mewling pile. The janitor stared balefully up from below.

“This…this is sick!” Red finally found his voice, “you use human parts in your robots? What is
wrong
with you?!”

The janitor blinked, stunned, then broke out in uproarious laughter.

“Lord! You are dull. Ain’t no ‘parts’ anywhere. Why I gotta spend most of my days just trying to keep some scrapheap, obsolete robots from imploding, when I can dose up and use the junkie scabs those management motherfuckers keep sending down here to take my job? You think I wasn’t on to you? You think I don’t know what you’re down here for?”

“This is…?” Red eyed the robot skeptically.

No, this thing wasn’t human. A humanoid was too inefficient a design for most specialized automatons. There are twenty muscles in the foot alone – not to mention all of the gyroscopes and positional sensors needed to accurately place that foot and stand on it. A tread was crude, but functional. A wheel cruder still, but adequate for most purposes. And even if a robot needed complete mobility, the nano-materials used to build it usually weighed no more than a few pounds, at most. It was easier to make one fly than walk.

People have legs; robots don’t.

And Reggie was no exception. His torso ended at a flat swivel-joint. A thick metal pole protruded below the slab, joining up with an axle, at either end of which sat a featureless plastic wheel. Seated on the hub were six evenly-placed spokes, to lift the robot out, up, over, or onto any obstacle it encountered. It was slow and clumsy, but a cheap and relatively common method of locomotion. Most industrial robots like Reggie used the stilt wheels, and there was certainly no room for a single human leg, much less two, in that skeletal lower half.

But hands were hard too: 29 major joints, 34 muscles in the palm and forearm, well over a hundred ligaments. Hands were effective, agile and useful, but a simple set of electro-magnetic claws could do most industrials jobs just fine. So what was a janitorial robot, an infamously bare-bones design, doing with ten perfectly molded digits at the end of each arm?

“How do you…?” Red’s mouth was opening and closing automatically, just making words to make words.

“Well, see, the first step is…” the Janitor started sarcastically, then heaved a jagged scrap of steel up the slope, missing Red’s head by inches. 

Red yelped and backed away from the edge, out of the man’s line of sight.

“Welp,” the janitor called up after him, “so much for the fun way. Reggie, switch to voice control. Full voice authorization keyed.”

“Keyed,” Reggie answered with a dull, monotone, but distinctly human voice.

Red’s eyes went wide with realization, and he stood to run, but the ground was shifting and uneven, and he couldn’t muster the speed.

“End repair directives. Begin security directives. Complete lockdown. Terminate all non-authorized personnel.

The robot swiveled at its midpoint and began scanning the room.

“Listen, man,” Red was almost to the door when he stopped, turned, and called out to Reggie: “Come with me. I’ll get you out of here.”

“Ha!” The janitor called up from the amphitheater floor below. “Ain’t no human left in there. Dose a man with enough speedballs of fear and trust hormones, and he just…disperses. Like steam. You know what I mean, buddy?”

“I’ll burn you for this,” Red shouted back, but the robot had caught him in its scan and began advancing. He turned, and stumbled blindly back out into the pitch black maze of corridors.

“When I want you dead, boy, you get dead!” The janitor yelled after him. And then it was quiet, save for the hollow, hobbling clank of the robot’s spokes fading in the distance. Fading, but not stopping.

Byron was running.

He was not terribly good at running.

He spent too much time lost to the gas trips; he was unfamiliar with the base operation of his own flesh. Byron was almost never given occasion to regret that fact, but if he was going to start, now would be a good time. He tripped over his own feet – again -- and dropped to all fours in a desperate attempt to preserve momentum. He settled for scampering, his rear thrust in the air, palms slapping concrete as he maneuvered between the thinning crowds.