Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (15 page)

“My dear, quality custom Gas-mixing is a small world. There are a billion hacks in the industry, to be sure, but simply judging by the quality of his work, I sense that Red has some amount of pre-eminence in his field. It should only be a matter of finding another quality mixer, and asking them. Politely, or with ah…shall we say, salivary conviction?” He gestured at the discolored spot where QC’s spit had landed.

“Somebody must have fucked my frontal lobe, because you’re making a lot of sense all of a sudden. But I don’t know many mixers, and not one of them worth a damn. You?”

“Madam,” Byron answered in mock offense, “what kind of junkie would I be, to have only one source? There’s this wonderfully terrifying faux-colored fellow I know down below. He operates out of a gauche little barge in the Reservoir. A fellow Biographiliac, come to think of it, though he’s only into these vulgar twentieth century aborig-”

QC held up a hand to silence him while she mentally calculated the likelihood of their various increasingly horrible fates.

“Shit. It’s a terrible plan,” she finally shrugged.

“Irrefutably,” Byron nodded with genuine enthusiasm.

“I’ve got nothing better,” she added.

“Indisputably,” he countered.

“Shut the fuck up, Byron,” QC said, and raised one foot to push off the wall. She rolled her shoulders, exhaled the tightness in her chest, and slipped back into her swagger. She spotted an opening almost immediately, and slipped easily between the dead-eyed bodymodder with a lizard’s face and the prostitute clad only in shifting holograms - most of them stylized phalluses; an entire cloak of sparkling, glittering, erect cocks.

Red was feeling something implacable and disconcerting; an unbearable and alien lightness, as though his whole body had become vaporous, just waiting to be dispersed by the next stiff breeze. 

Red was feeling uncrowded.

After they’d stepped through the immense steel portal -- the sheer presence of the monstrously solid
thing
still throbbing dully behind him – Red turned to find nothing at all. Just a vast and wholly empty square.

The clearing was forty feet at its widest point, and half that much again long. Its far end terminated at two wide sets of stairs surrounding a thin central path, which ran up at an angle for a few hundred feet, then jackknifed around a wall and disappeared from view. Red dimly recognized the flat, empty space’s dimensions as belonging to one of the central stairwell’s gargantuan landings, located midway between floors; the steps and promenade must have been the original walkways, as laid down untold decades ago. There were no jury-rigged tenements here; no micro-bars crowding the path; no food stalls suspended from the ceiling by lift cables.  Even the telltale stink of the ‘Wells – an odorous slurry of cooking grease, graphite, sweat and decaying pressure-board – was conspicuously absent.  This was merely one landing and the subsequent connecting flight of a central stairwell, in their original condition. Every inch of space in the ‘Wells meant a gallon of blood spilled, and whoever owned this stretch wasn’t even using it. The very concept made Red shudder.

Two guards flanked the group to either side, their faces covered by smooth, blank slabs of reflective metal. The leftmost one motioned them forward, while the other stripped them of their weapons. He dropped James’ heavy metal resonance fan immediately, not anticipating its heft. A piercing clang rang out, only to be absorbed by the emptiness of the space. James stifled a laugh, but even Red thought the gesture seemed forced.

Red was still staring numbly about, trying to spot the pixelated haze that might mark the whole thing as some sort of holographic overlay, when Zippy shoved past and started bouncing happily up the steps. Her rapidly disappearing form seemed comically tiny against the vaulting cathedral of the empty stairwell. The guards scrambled to catch up with her – obviously anticipating more of an adjustment period from the newcomers -- while James and Red shuffled nervously after, unsure of what else they could do.

The discomfort eased only slightly when the group crested the stairs, and found the next landing populated. Elongated, vertically-oriented buildings hugged the length of every wall, running unbroken up to the next flight. But the frantic buzz of the ‘Wells was still missing; what few people they passed on the stairs seemed to only risk the central pathway for short distances, crossing it at a brisk jog and quickly disappearing behind stooped doorways. There was a muffled buzz of life behind those walls, but it was apprehensive and subdued, like an audience sitting quietly in the dark, anticipating the show. 

They summited several floors in this fashion, each identical in appearance: Narrow upward path banked by two long, continuous structures with dozens of short doorways set into their facades.

From his brief, tense commute through it, Red had gotten the sense that Zippy’s entire fiefdom spanned perhaps a third of the space between two floors; he had already lost count of the number of flights they’d taken since the behemoth door had sealed behind them. He was, in fact, struggling to recall a point in his life when he hadn’t been trudging painfully up an endless parade of dull grey steps, when they turned the corner on another sparsely populated landing and he found himself staring into infinity. Where the stairwell ordinarily turned back on itself and resumed its upwards tack, there was only a towering reflective wall – the same dull reflective material as the guard’s featureless masks – ascending straight up for several hundred vertical feet. The stairwell itself was just…gone.

Or rather, the bulk of it had been erased – upon closer inspection Red spotted a single narrow flight continuing along one side of the structure, barely wide enough to fit a single man. But that was it: The rest of the path had been replaced by an unfathomably large and immaculately polished cube. A half-dozen floors of stairwell must have been knocked out to accommodate the thing, Red thought, idly wondering how he’d ended up on the floor, desperately grasping for handholds against the bare steel. He looked to James for assurance, but found the man glaring sternly at the ground, refusing to look at or acknowledge the wrongness of the space. One of the mirror-faced guards harrumphed arrogantly at the pair of them. 

After searching through his mental catalogue of altered states, Red recognized the encroaching tide of a panic attack. His heart felt stretched, threadbare -- worn to a fragile sheet of loose fabric by years of careless abuse. He could hear its laborious beat; his ears and eyes pulsed with it. He giggled a little and ran through the PANIC mnemonic:
PAss NICely, don’t try to fight it, PAck it tightly, Never Intensify it, Cool the blo
-

A sharp ping, quickly swallowed by the cavern. Another. And another.

All four of them – James, Red, and the two mirror-faced guards – snapped to attention and scanned the cavern, searching for the source of the noise. One by one, their gazes fell to Zippy, standing defiantly beneath the looming mass of glossy wall, her curved prosthetic clacking out a steady, regular rhythm as she kicked playfully at a door-shaped outline in the cube.

“Can we go inside?!” She squeaked, and clapped.

***

King Big Dick was a fat, hairy cylinder of flesh with a middle-aged man’s head poised precariously on top. His bare arms poked out of two holes in a delicate golden vest that seemed to have the texture of foil. His thighs were draped in a metallic platinum skirt; his calves wrapped in an ornate pattern of sandal straps, pallid flesh bulging between each loop and knot, porcine and vulgar. He actually wore a crown, Red noted in astonishment: A literal crown. And on top, a huge platinum phallus, joined together with gel-mesh – so as to allow some organic sense of movement – flopped and wobbled from its apex.

“Like I said,” James whispered to Red, “bloke’s a bit unsubtle.”

Red did not respond.

King Big Dick sat cross-legged atop a huge, brass-hued chair in the center of a smallish room somewhere in the heart of the mirror-cube. The floorspace of the throne room was downright modest when compared against the vast, empty stairwells and towering walls of the exterior, but a sense of sucking absence pulled at the hairs on Red’s neck until he followed their urging upwards, and saw that it had no ceiling – the walls ran up the entire height of the cube, presumably terminating out of sight, somewhere unknowably far above. Red struggled with the urge to lay flat on his back again, like a turtle, and clutch at the floor with all of his strength.

It was a struggle he lost.

When at last the vertigo passed and Red regained his footing, King Big Dick and Zippy had been arguing for hours. The central debate seemed to revolve around Zippy wanting to organize a game of hide and seek, while King Big Dick wanted to rape her inside out. Zippy spoke in her childish sing-song, and Big Dick answered with slurred, muttered growls, peppered with crude sexual propositions and demented tangents. It scanned as gibberish to Red, but he got the sense that, on some higher lingual plane, threats, bargains, pleas and honorifics were being exchanged. Though if hard-pressed, he could only say that he’d just listened to a man describe his genitals in exquisite detail to a ten year-old girl who really, really wanted to be “it” first. 

“This is mind-numbing,” Red said, shuffling carefully over to James, whose gaze was still bolted to the floor beneath his feet.

“Just don’t look at it, yeah?” James suggested, “Forget it’s there.”

“No, these two: This is ridiculous. I get the whole second personality thing, I do, but we don’t have time for it. Obviously he knows she isn’t a little girl - though he does a real bang-up pedophile impression – so why doesn’t she just drop it? She’s not fooling him.”

“That isn’t it at all, mate. See, playing that little kid card down here in the ‘Wells, that’s novice shite. Rank amateur. That’s the bloody remedial class of public personas. Of course nobody is fooled by it: It’s so obvious that it’s silly. Only an enormous arsehole would even try it, and be laughed right out of the ‘Wells for their troubles.”

“So what’s…?”

“So the whole point of a public persona is to hide strengths and invent fictional weaknesses. Playing the little kid card down here – no, nobody’s going to buy it. They’re going to think you’re a bit slow, yeah? Which is exactly what you want, innit?”

“What about him?” Red said, nodding to the man with the gleaming, wobbling penis jutting from his head.

“He’s playing at insecurity. Broadcasting the biggest, boldest weakness he can. He’s nothing but weakness, from the name to that big empty tomb out there. You think a bloke who straps a huge cock to his head with no sense of irony is savvy enough to take this much territory?”

Red had no answer, but refocused his attention on studying the plush carpet beneath his feet. It felt different somehow. More insistent. A looseness crept into his bowels -- the same kind he got when he touched ceramics or those tiny trees the Chinese sold at the looping bazaar. It was too solid; too complicated for nano-tech. This was handmade. The rug’s pattern, which at first glance he took to be some basic circuitboard, resolved into a dense chain of stylized monkeys, each hooking their lower paw into the upper paw of the monkey below them.

Somebody, somewhere, at some point, had taken
years to produce this one single item.

Red felt cold drops of sweat begin to itch their way out of his pores.

“Problem?” James glanced at Red’s shins in concern, as far up as he was willing to look.

“We’re surrounded by monkeys,” Red answered, shuffling a shoe over to block a particularly sinister simian link.

“But that’s silly!” Zippy’s protested shrilly. “Not if nobody plays. There can’t be a game just between you and me. That’s no fun!”

“Gotta good game for little girls here,” the congealed patch of bald fat that was King Big Dick’s face emitted a barely distinguishable train of grunts. “Called chase the snake. You gotta wrestle ‘im when you catch him. Watch out though, little girl, he spits poison. Hawwww….”

“You guys want to play too, right? I promise that it’s going to be hoots!” Zippy turned to address Red and James. The latter nodded emphatically, without lifting his gaze.

“Play what?” Red asked.

“Shut up, mate! Just say ‘yes.’” James hissed.

“But it sounds like literally the worst game ever,” Red protested, but came up short when James caught him with a surprisingly painful elbow.

“Wh…yes. Yes of course I want to play. Games are just…just so much fun. All the time,” Red finally added, annoyed.

Zippy nodded at each of their answers, then turned back to Big Dick and stuck her tongue out. King Big Dick, for his part, immediately started to undo his skirt. Red returned James’ elbow, and gestured impatiently.

“He wants to execute you and is generously offering to split the bounty with Zippy’s fiefdom,” James explained.

A rubbery weakness surged down the back of Red’s legs. His vision focused suddenly, with laser clarity, on a single woven monkey in the far corner of the rug: It grinned back at him evilly, and extended a long, cruel, unwavering middle finger.

“Listen,” Red turned to the impassive mirror beside him, his own visage reflected back in fisheye. “You have a secure terminal here, right? Something landlined?”

There was no answer. The mirror simply swiveled in the general direction of King Big Dick and Zippy, both staring silently at Red from the raised dais. 

“I’m not just some worthless god damn beta tester. I’m the best Mixer you’re ever gonna meet. You got a secure terminal -- something with a direct connection, something that can run a tunnel into the blackmarket ‘Feed subforums -- and I can get you stuff nobody else has even heard of. Just last week I pirated something that’ll make you feel eighty feet tall. Literally: It messes with your body image. Spent all day trying not to step on the people next to me. They’re not even going to release that. It’s a collector’s item, and I swiped the recipe. In a few years, that alone will be worth triple the bounty to the right people, and
I know all the right people
.  I can make this worth your while. All I need is a terminal.”