Ability (Omnibus) (10 page)

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep her warm for you,” Garret said, winking at Derry.

“I know you will,” Brian said with a smile.

*****

October, 2044

Brian barely saw anyone for more than a few minutes in any given day over the next few weeks. He stayed at the cook house well into the early morning hours, working to not only make batches of Receiver, but to fiddle with the formula in ways that would result in being able to make small amounts at home with store-bought ingredients.

When he wasn’t cooking, he was a physical and mental machine, working from a new exercise station that had multiple wall-view and holo outputs, all while pouring over chemical formulas, reading what other underground chem hackers were doing on the black sites that didn’t exist without a hardware-encrypted VPNK connection from a public address.

Brian never posted on any of the black site message boards. He saluted the bravery, or the stupidity, of those that did, but he wasn’t one to take chances while banking hundreds of thousands of credits in illicit funds every year. He was taking too much of a chance by even reading the various threads. The chem hackers were a valuable source of information, and he’d spent three nights on a particularly promising set of threads that dealt with molecular reactions outside of a laboratory environment.

Chem hacks loved teaching others how to make illegal substances without the need for banned or tightly regulated components. A majority of them worked for the large chemical manufacturing conglomerates but spent their spare, probably lonely time sticking it to
The Man
by revealing how to convert or change chemical bonds without the need of laboratory equipment. They were the ultimate ‘pocket’ cooks.

After sixteen days of near-constant chemical wakefulness, he found his answer, spent another fourteen hours writing it up like an instruction manual, then went to sleep for almost twenty hours. He woke at three in the morning, feeling like someone had gassed him before beating him with a lead pipe. His left arm was pins and needles, but when he tried to move his shoulder, he realized Derry’s head was on it. He didn’t want to wake her up, but his arm felt like it was frozen and on fire at the same time. He tried to flex the hand attached to the numb arm and panicked for a moment when it felt like he had no arm beyond his shoulder.

Derry’s eyes opened, and her hand reached up to lie on Brian’s chest.

“My arm is asleep,” he whispered.

She smiled and sat up, rubbed her eyes, and looked at the digital alarm clock.

“How long was I asleep?” he asked her with another whisper, grabbing his dead arm with his good one and massaging it to get feeling back.

“Since nine,” she said in a low voice, trying not to laugh at his attempts to get the feeling flowing back into his dead arm

“That’s it?” he asked.

“Since nine on Wednesday.” Her quiet laugh, accompanied by the smile he loved to see on her face, made him smile through the awkward numbness that still plagued his arm.

After more than a minute of massaging, he could finally feel his fingers, move them, and lift his arm off the mattress. The first thing he did was put it around her shoulder, mostly to elevate it, but also to let her know he was glad she had kept him company while he slept. She moved, making his still-numb arm fall back to the bed before he could stop it. He was about to try raising it again when she straddled him, pulling off her shirt with a practiced motion. He gave up on the arm for a while to pay attention to more important things.

*

He woke with the sun pouring through the tiny window of his bedroom. Derry was gone, but she’d left her panties on the corner of the bed to let him know she’d be back. She had told him a few years earlier that if she liked a guy, she’d leave her panties or her bra on his bed so she’d have a reason to see him again. Enough of them were more than happy to have her drop by to pick up her underwear with the unspoken promise of another round in the sack. She’d left her panties on the corner of Brian’s bed the first night they’d spent together.

It didn’t always work out the way she planned, but overall, she’d never been afraid to get what she wanted when it came to sex. Dezaree Clarkson was anything but shy or prudish. She definitely didn’t consider herself a slut, or even easy. She had always adamantly proclaimed that if men could sleep with a hundred different women and brag about it, no one had better try calling her a whore for sleeping with whomever she wanted, whenever she wanted.

Brian put on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, then went to search out the coffee maker. As he passed by Garret’s room, he noticed the door was slightly open. He looked in as he passed by and saw Derry asleep, curled up around his roommate. He shrugged his shoulders and made his way to the kitchen. She’d made it clear that she was no man’s property, and neither he nor Garret had ever had a problem with her visiting each of their beds.

Derry had never rotated from one to the other in the same night though. Brian wondered if he should be upset at either of them, but decided he was too exhausted to care. He was happy that he’d woken up next to her
and had some release from the two weeks of straining his brain.

He was in love with her, and he was pretty sure that Garret was as well. He didn’t want to think about the day when she would most likely tell them both she was leaving for someone else. That was Derry though. Derry did what Derry wanted, and everyone else be damned. It was probably the biggest reason he loved her so much.

None of the three ever shared their feelings verbally, though everyone would have to be collectively blind to not see how the other two felt. Brian put it out of his mind the instant the aroma of brewing coffee hit his nose. It was time to get to the finish line with the drug that would change the world, and whatever he felt for Derry would only keep him from concentrating.

CHAPTER 9

December, 2044

“We have two choices,” Brian told his two cohorts assembled in front of him on the beanbag chair. “You can take the pocket Receiver, or you can take the lab Receiver.”

“What’s the difference?” Garret asked.

“I don’t know. I guess that’s what we are going to find out,” Brian answered with a grin. The other two could see the excitement in him. “What are we going to learn tonight?” he asked Garret.

“This might sound weird, but I thought we would try something totally off the wall,” Garret said with his own grin. Derry’s grin told him she already knew what Garret was going to say. “Tonight we are going to become the greatest chefs the culinary world has ever seen.”

“Really?” Brian said, genuinely surprised.

“Really,” Derry answered.

“That actually sounds really cool,” Brian said, his brain twisting and turning with all the possibilities. “But we don’t have diddly-squat in the fridge, and even if we did, we don’t have but maybe two pots and a few pieces of silverware.”

“Gotcha covered. I hope you don’t mind, but I uh…borrowed some money from the stash. Derry knows the guy who runs the Outreach Co-Op, and they teach cooking classes there. We got the place for the night, and I gave him a shopping list of stuff to get so we could make whatever we wanted.”

“Awesome,” Brian said.

He wasn’t concerned about the money at all. He’d let Garret know a long time ago where the bag stuffed with paper credits was hidden. It was better to stash it in the bottom of a closet than try to explain to the Feds how a recent graduate, an
unemployed
recent graduate, could have a bank account with a balance of almost a million credits. One look at his major in chemistry and they’d have to be stupid not to make the connection. Brian’s fake website business laundered almost quarter of his money, and he paid all of his
taxes
on time, but if anyone took a closer look, they’d see it for the house of cards it was.

He knew Garret felt like shit every time he had to dip his hand into the bag, but Brian had told him what they were doing was too important for Garret to go out and get a job beyond the part-time game design gig he was doing from home. Garret’s paychecks were going almost exclusively toward upgrades for his main workstation and the small server farm that had overtaken a small walk-in closet. The credits spent to upgrade the hardware allowed him to convert more modules in less time, a necessity as the complexity of the induction modules increased with each new revision. Brian encouraged Garret and Derry to use the extra cash in the closet. If they’d predicted correctly, then once they set the whole thing in motion, whatever cash was left over would be less valuable than toilet paper.

“Why ‘cooking’?” Brian asked, purely out of curiosity. He wasn’t opposed to it at all, but he wasn’t sure why the other two had chosen it as the experimental activity.

“That’s easy, bro,” Garret said with a smile.

“It’s to keep you from starving when all you have left is a lonely potato, you crackhead,” Derry added, getting a cackle from Garret for her wit.

Garret nodded at her. “That’s some of it. But the first thing we learned was almost pure textbook application of a knowledge. Medicine is such a specialized field, and almost all of it is learned from facts and books and holos and such. There’s room for opinions in medicine, but only in terms of an expert’s opinion within his field. Just like Derry said that night, we might all know how to treat headaches because of our very broad, expert knowledge of medicine. Our opinions would be within the facts of our field…we know that oxygen, psychedelics, and sumatriptan therapies are all valid, but we might have differing opinions on which one to use first, on which one is the most effective.

“The ice hockey module was about taking a set of factual rules of the game, some facts of physics and motion, and applying them to a skilled, strenuous activity. We needed to know if our bodies were prepared for heavy-duty physical skill training. Humping a hill under fire in a simulation is one thing, but humping a hill in stifling heat and humidity, carrying fifty kilos of gear, some asshole on the top of the hill shooting down at you while his buddy lobs grenades or maybe some flamethrower gel…we wouldn’t really know the induction was a success unless our bodies were physically able to master the specific moves and motions.

“Cooking is all about subjective opinion. It’s a test to see if we can actually write a book without sounding like a robot wrote it.” Brian gave him a confused look. “See, we can teach a computer how to write novels, right? But since a computer doesn’t understand emotion, it only uses the rules of language and the rules of writing stories to create new stories. But those new stories are emotionless, and they are really nothing more than bits of other stories copied and pasted together to form something that the computer can then evaluate as having all of the language rules obeyed, all of the story rules obeyed, and the story itself different enough from every other story in the computer’s memory so as to not be considered plagiarized.

“There are rules to cooking. An egg has to be boiled for this long to be soft, this long to be hard.” He paused while Derry and Brian snickered at his unintentional innuendo. “Emotional amateurs. Anyway, all of those rules are only good enough to tell you the facts of food. Your emotions and your senses guide your creativity in combining flavors and foods into a pleasing, palatable dish.”

Brian and Derry broke into howls of laughter at Garret’s seriousness, at the way his voice and his words changed to almost emulate a proper Englishman. Garret looked hurt for a moment, until Brian passed him the pipe. He took few heavy puffs, then finished his explanation.

“So…all of the rules of the module will deal with frying, baking, boiling, broiling, mixing, seasoning, everything we’ll need to know to be able to follow a recipe perfectly. The point of the experiment shouldn’t be whether or not we can follow a recipe. We’ve already proven that the modules work when combined with Receiver. What we should hopefully prove tonight is whether or not pure knowledge can be shaped creatively. If all we can do is make the greatest cookies that were ever made, but only because we followed a recipe to the letter, then that’s maybe a bad sign.”

“Because if all we do is follow recipes, we won’t be able to take the knowledge stored in our brains and apply it in ways that will modify it to fit any given situation that might randomly require it,” Brian said.

“Exactly. Creativity is equally important.
After
you’ve learned the facts and rules.”

“You can’t break a rule and improve its function if you don’t understand why it’s a rule,” Derry added, causing the two roommates to groan as loud as they could until she flipped both of them her middle finger and stomped away to the kitchen.

*****

The ironic thing about having an entire night in a Co-Op kitchen was not having enough storage, nor enough plates and silverware for everything they’d created. The night had been a lot of fun, with the three of them inventing endless challenges, each more complex and difficult than the last. None of them had eaten much of what had been created, but that was due to the parts of the LSD and MDMA making food not nauseating, but not appealing either. Food tended to have a rubbery, tasteless, uninteresting quality to it in the middle of a trip. They had been clear-headed enough to realize this, and had made sure Derry’s friend also supplied them with enough plastic wrap, aluminum foil, storage bags, and containers to transport it all home when they were finished.