Ability (Omnibus) (4 page)

As he watched the taillights of the two Ivans leaving with their bounty, he calculated how much the next batch of Crash would eat into his Lyborsol supply. The Ivans had brought him two kilos of it, of which he would have just over four hundred grams left when he made the next batch. Brian calculated how much of that he would need to create four different variants of Receiver, twelve doses for each variant. He became slightly distracted when he thought of his roommate and his…Derry wasn’t his girlfriend. She wasn’t anyone’s
girlfriend
, or as she liked to call it,
property
.

Garret was going mad at his failure to reproduce the same kind of ability that Brian had demonstrated by accident. He’d tweaked a few of the induction modules what seemed like a hundred different ways. He was the most hardcore when it came to downing the pills that Brian brought home to begin the next leg of their experiment. It finally came to a head one night when Garret had almost come to blows with Brian after being told there would be no Receiver to test out for another two weeks. He’d erupted in fury at hearing the cook house had nearly burned down. Garret was so obsessed that he refused to believe it, even after being forced to acknowledge the odor of burning plastic that accompanied Brian’s two very singed eyebrows. He then raged at his best friend for almost an hour, spewing accusations at him until Derry had stepped between them and threatened to punch Garret in the mouth.

Derry, on the other hand, seemed to be in a state of bliss. Her natural guitar playing skill had become almost as good as her flashed skill. She never wanted to experiment beyond the guitar module and the
Physics - Gravity
module that Garret had included in his original six prototypes. Brian had asked her about the gravity thing, and she told him that if he’d frozen a few things after being flashed with
Fluid Dynamics - Heat Transfer
, then she hoped to be able to move objects with her mind if she should ever chance to even briefly gain the ability through their experiments. When Garret had laughed and told her to go back to her dead, boring British authors from her Lit studies, she promptly told him the first thing she would move was a lamp to the side of his skull.

Brian was still a bit blown away by his impressive display from that night. Just like the missing detail that kept his Receiver drug from being
complete
, there had been something gnawing at the back of his mind ever since he’d frozen the objects. He had been so astonished the first time that he couldn’t remember how he’d done it. When Garret and Derry had set up random objects on the counters in the tiny kitchen, he figured out how to do it again with a glass of water. It felt natural, but there was some kind of…something…in his mind that instinctively knew how to manipulate atoms at the molecular level. By the time the ability had worn off, he’d been no closer to grasping the concept of what he was doing. It had felt instinctive each time, whether freezing water, dinner plates, or metal rulers. The inability to understand how to manipulate that instinct consistently had left him feeling as if he’d been trapped in a paradox.

Brian grabbed one of the sealed bags of Lyborsol and headed back into the kitchen to weigh out what he needed for a Receiver cook. This would be Receiver v11 to v14. Each batch would have one or two minor details altered. He’d been tinkering with the formula for months, and each new revision of the drug brought out sometimes subtle, sometimes heavy new reactions during a trip. Batch v9 had almost killed him when he’d ended up producing a mild cyanide reaction instead of the hallucinatory effect he had theorized.

“I laugh in the face of death,” is what he’d announced to Derry and Garret after he stopped foaming at the mouth and convulsing on the living room carpet.

The incident had left him shaken though, and he’d finally had the realization that fiddling around with powerful psychotropic drugs made out of highly toxic, sometimes illegal chemicals should be faced with a proper seriousness. Receiver would never be the ultimate high if he was dead and unable to finish what he’d started.

*****

August, 2043

Garret stared at the latest version of the
Cryostemic Reaction - Thermal Decay
module he had been working on for the last two weeks. He ran his hand through his hair and slapped it down on his desk. The diploma from the University of Texas - Austin stared back at him from the wall behind his desk, mocking him. He’d only passed his final project by tweaking the language modules and then having volunteers go through the induction procedure. Instead of the twenty minute loops he had originally set, he’d been able to get the induction to work in only six minutes. Every six minutes for a couple of hours, his fellow students, and even Professor Long, sat down and learned how to speak either Japanese or Arabic fluently for thirty to sixty seconds at a time. The climax was when he’d revealed ten tablets and had ten of them at a time all learn the same language. Once the six minutes were up, ten very shocked humans would babble for up to a minute in their new language while the next ten were going through an induction. Garret had even joined them for one round, and had once again been stunned at how his brain understood Arabic perfectly, how he had been able to converse with nine other inducted classmates fluently before it started to fade.

The diploma hadn’t netted him any serious job offers. He was putting in part-time work with a video game developer out of Seattle. They sent him the updated code each night, and he’d spend a few hours fiddling with it, looking for flaws, pointing out errors, trying to extract more performance without bloating it or causing it to bog down the various gaming systems. It was routine, boring work that he could almost do with his eyes closed. The paychecks weren’t spectacular, but they meant he didn’t have to mooch off of Brian too much, something he’d unfortunately had to do a lot in the three years since they had become roommates at UT-Austin.

His latest obsession centered around trying to replicate Brian’s ability to freeze objects with his mind. It sounded so goddamn stupid when Garret said it to himself. The other two were equally embarrassed whenever they held a brainstorm session before ingesting a new dose and melting their brains, looping induction modules for hours at a time. Manipulating objects with the mind was bullshit, something that only happened in bad science fiction or horror movies. Freezing something just by thinking about it was stuff that belonged in comic books and teenage fantasy novels.

If Garret and Derry had not been there to witness it, they would have had Brian committed to the loony bin if he’d tried to tell them what he’d done. All three of them might need to be committed to the loony bin after having what Garret was starting to believe was a mutual, mass hallucination concerning the event itself. In three months, the best they’d been able to reproduce was splitting headaches and crazy trips on whatever version of the drug Brian plopped down in front of them.

He checked the code in his Cryo module again. Proper molecular structures appeared on the screen with strobed measurements, compositions, cycles, and a ton of other detailed information around and on it, while the data track that rolled horizontally along the bottom instructed the inductee with the proper mathematical equations concerning each function, each reaction required to manipulate molecular structures to bleed or gain heat.
Basic chemistry and physics shit
, he thought,
so why was it so hard to convince the learning mind to imprint and retain the information?
He’d messed with the cycle speed of the data, the frequency of repetition, even the brightness levels of the information being displayed on the holo.

He was missing something. It had taken him four months to get from nowhere to almost thirty seconds of retention. It had taken him another six months to get from thirty seconds of retention to…thirty to forty seconds of retention. Garret knew from his success at getting to thirty seconds that he was on the right path. He knew from his failure to move but a tiny step forward from there that he was either over-thinking the problem, or more likely, not thinking
around
the problem correctly. He steepled his fingers along his unshaven jaw while pondering what to try next.

*****

September, 2043

Derry’s fingers wandered across the fretboard of Garret’s beautiful Martin acoustic guitar, each press with her fingertips producing another brilliant, clean note. The steel strings resonated in loud bursts and soft salvos of melody, matching her voice as she sang about long lost loves, kissing girls, and being alone in the dark. She’d become adept at playing the instrument after so much practice. At first, when the module’s effect had begun to wear off, Derry became depressed, as if she were losing a natural ability such as sight or smell. Unlike the boys, she looped the guitar lesson module exclusively, each time picking up the barely-played Martin and working to get her fingers strong enough to press the steel strings down properly. After a couple of weeks, she no longer needed the flash inductions to sound like she’d been playing for most of her life.

She’d barely passed her semester finals. Spending weeks eating pills and burning her eyes out with looping Holo-D meant that she hadn’t studied nearly enough to maintain her Dean’s List status. No doubt when her mother saw Derry’s grades, she would be frantic with concern at first, fading quickly into criticism that would start as friendly advice, eventually becoming cutting, cruel insults. Dezaree Clarkson was never good enough at anything to please her mother. The only thing that pleased her mother was her mother’s new boyfriend, who was barely two years older than Derry. The kid, she’d never lower herself to think of the boyfriend as anything other than
the kid
,
no matter how rich and successful he was, had his own software research company, his own Mercedes, and his own McMansion in Plano. A McMansion that was worth at least three million dollars, her mother liked to remind Derry as often as possible.

She put the acoustic on its stand and picked up her tablet. She sighed as she called up Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur” and worked her way through another tale. Derry only had to kill another four hours before Brian would show up and whisk her away to another crazy experimental session. Her mind wandered as she tried to guess what tonight’s dope would do to her mind, her body, and maybe her ability to successfully retain flash induction permanently. That was the goal she was after. Brian seemed to want to create the perfect drug, but he’d also become caught up in Garret’s obsession with the learning modules. Garret only seemed to care about being able to freeze or burn things with his mind. Derry had noticed over the last few weeks that the relationship Brian and Garret had as friends and roommates had cooled considerably. The problem, in her opinion, stemmed solely from the fact that Brian had used his mind to freeze a bunch of stuff, and Garret had, so far, been unable to duplicate it himself.

The fact that Brian was the producer and supplier of the Receiver drug burned Garret up, causing him to become whiny, almost childish at times. She’d avoided bedding Garret for the last two months after spending a few nights with him while he bitched about how Brian was intentionally going too slow, intentionally messing with the Receiver formula so he could achieve the results again first before letting Garret and Derry experiment. She’d finally reached her snapping point, asking him in an angry voice if he was going to fuck her, or bore her to death crying about his boyfriend Brian. Garret had grown silent, and though he still treated her as part of the gang, she could feel the resentment that she’d sided with Brian instead of him since that night. All she had wanted was to have an orgasm or two, not listen to him complain endlessly.

CHAPTER 4

October, 2043

Receiver v18 was the first revision of the drug to achieve the kind of results the trio had been hoping for. Brian’s altered formula for v18 was only subtly different from v17, the differences mainly dealing with serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. Brian knew that the brain’s ability to produce these chemicals was the key to unlocking Receiver’s full potential. The trick was in fooling the brain to either produce more of them, inhibit the production of them, or a mix of both. The first eight revisions of Receiver had not tampered with the brain in this way, but after the disastrous ninth revision that had almost killed him, he’d had a revelation after doing a bit more studying up.

Trying to balance all three of the neurotransmitters while keeping the mind stimulated enough to produce them, yet relaxed enough to unlock areas that science had only theorized about, was much harder than Brian had anticipated. Dopamine was good for focus and memory, while serotonin was a major factor in relaying information and thoughts from one area of the brain to another. Norepinephrine wasn’t quite as important for spatial thoughts and memory, though it was extremely important in regulating blood flow to areas of the brain as well as affecting attention span.

“This shit gives me a headache sometimes,” Brian complained while flipping back and forth through pages on his tablet.

“What’s the problem?” Derry asked him, slipping a hand down to his thigh.

Brian gave her a look that said he was interested, just not at the moment. She sighed and went back to her comm. Brian could hear what sounded like Japanese being spoken from her tiny earbuds.

“The problem is that in order to unlock the brain, to make it wide open and available to suggestion, there has to be a delicate balancing act of chemicals called neurotransmitters,” he said, wondering if she had already forgotten that she’d asked him a question.