Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity (29 page)

More swearing, more slapping, more confused apologies, and he was being dragged again.

The hidden passageway was a series of still images whose theme was jumbled and unclear. But it was better than the open catwalk, which was a disjointed montage on fast forward: Faces blurred into one another, merged, changed, and divided. Turns and steps and stumbles. Doorways opened, closed, zipped past before he could reach for them. Byron recognized an elevator, and asked where it went, but by that time they were somewhere else and somebody was laughing at him. He knew that somewhere far away, his own mouth was incessantly asking for Gas, and explaining why everything would be better with it. If he could only dose up, even just a little bit, he could make sense again. But he couldn’t make them listen, or they didn’t understand him when they did, or they just didn’t care. People elbowed him forward, kicked him backward, and shoved him aside.

Eventually, the frantic fugue paused long enough for Byron to register his surroundings. Their group was standing on an enormous platform, one side open to the air.  The distant sky ran a gradient: From blue at bottom, to black at top. A dozen large, misshapen structures hung from tangled masses of cable out there in the air. Men stood near them, inside of them or atop them -- each yelling, jostling, and pleading at passerby. Small fistfights broke out here and there, presumably when one grew too bold.

The elevator docks.

Familiarity, at long last.

Byron knew the docks well: They were often the fastest untraceable path down to Deng’s place, or Red’s flat, or Spotlight’s hole, or Knock-kneed Bill’s, or Fan City or The Wash -- or any of a dozen other pirate Rx suppliers Byron frequented. The barking men he recognized as attendants, though most of them presumptuously preferred to be called captains. Their black market lifts varied in shape, structure, and carrying capacity, and they mostly serviced different floors -- but there was enough overlap to make every fare a fight.

The chubby-faced child, what was his name? He had a little stash somewhere around here and you could always catch him peddling to the waiting crowds of passengers. Kev? Keb? A ‘k’ sound, Byron was certain of that. The boy was always bothering him to come take a look at the feed tube he’d tapped into, but Byron had always brushed the sick-looking little thing away. Ah, but those were better days, when he could be choosy about his strain and time period. Now, he’d take Presence to the damnable Cretaceous if somebody would just fill the aching space between his cells with Gas.

“Fatface Ken,” Byron said, pulling at the sleeve in front of him. The person swiveled around, and Byron peered up at them, but the haze had settled deeply into his eyes now, like a shifting purple snowstorm, wiping out all fine detail.

“The bloody hell?” The person said.

“Presence please. 1821, Pisa, if you have it, but I’m not picky today.” Byron nodded at the face he could see, but not recognize, and waited optimistically for confirmation.

“Yeah, sure, ya daft knob-end. Whatever you say,” James answered, and returned his attention to the two captains hurling vicious insults at one another. Zippy stood between the pair of lift attendants, half-smiling at the show, and throwing in a new number for them to haggle over whenever they started to settle down. James watched with amusement. QC had seized onto Red the second they saw sky, and had her face pressed fearfully into his arm.

Byron nodded, content in the knowledge that his request was received, and picked a friendly-looking direction to stagger off.

“This man is sewage. His mother? Sewage. His father? Sewage! They have bred together, because there is no God above to prevent such things from happening, and they had this fat, stinking, sewage-child you see before you!” The portly, ruddy-faced captain screamed in the general direction of a dark-skinned man with tiny scars running the length of his exposed fore-arms.

“What? WHAT!” The other captain gestured wildly around him, “this man talks? This man! How many have you dropped this week, Sly? Four? Six? That deathtrap you call a lift isn’t fit for a ‘Loon!”

QC’s head snapped up at the remark, but she stayed silent.

“You speak ill of me, sir, and that is fine. That is fine. But do not disparage the Plumb Hussy. She has ten times the capacity of your slipshod Aspiration!”

“We only got this many credits each,” Zippy interjected, holding up ten fingers, “and we need to get home to Middle Industry.”

“I could not possibly!” The fat man, Sly, threw his hands up dramatically. “Wouldn’t even cover the electricity!”

“Ten credits,” the scarred man piped in happily, “it is very generous! Of course! Of course!”

“Nine!” Sly screeched, his deep-set eyes narrowed in reproach.

“Eight,” the scarred captain returned.

“Five,” Zippy put in quickly, and Sly answered with a sharp, barking sound. He took her by the hand, and stomped unhappily off in the direction of his lift before the scarred man could open his mouth.

“But we go NOW!” Sly hollered at the idle queue milling about in front of his lift: A long, cylindrical piece of steel wrapped in black mesh, the words ‘Plumb Hussy’ lashed across the bow in sloppy, bright pink paint. “North Post Express Line! Stops at Buster’s Market, the 7K Public Pad, Celestial Dome, The Alkaloid Gardens and Middle Industry!”

James laughed, and turned to follow them. Red and QC came close at his heels. His expression was distant and distracted; her eyes were locked firmly on the ground. A press of commuters shoved in behind them, and they let themselves be borne along with it. The Plumb Hussy creaked and swayed sickeningly with every shift in weight.

“Fatface Ken!” Byron shouted to nobody in particular, numbly scanning the crowd for activity he could not see.

There was a flat thwack of air, and then the steady thump of winch engines kicking on. Byron turned to watch a large chunk of pink and black steel rise up and away. A tubby, red-faced man stood atop it, on a flat section of roof, punching at a glowing square and yelling obscenities at a scarred man below him.

The event held no significance for Byron.

He turned back to the docks, and cried out again: “I need you, Fatface Ken!”

Two blue and gold smudges – one shorter and thick, the other ropy and elongated - swiveled to face him suddenly, and after a moment, started in his direction. Neither seemed likely to be Fatface Ken, the tiny drug-pirate Chinese boy, but Byron remained, as always, optimistic.

Red sat cross-legged on a bare patch of cold metal. Oscillating patterns of light swept across the floor as the
Plumb Hussy
ascended behind support beams, around atmospheric fans, and through haphazard docks slung to the outside of the North Post. A ladder of yellow squares and thin shadowy bars slid by, blurred into a flickering zoetrope, and disappeared. A series of stark white ovals flashed across the far wall. They wandered like roving spotlights over the huddled mass of passengers. An elongated pyramid of light built itself on the western side of the lift, enlarged to encompass the south, then shrank and inverted.

“The fuck’s with him?” QC asked Zippy.

Once the hatch had closed behind her, and she was safely surrounded on all sides by the relative density of the mesh walls, the paralyzing tide of fear within QC receded. It was still there, though; giggling at the outskirts of her mind, waiting to come gleefully skipping back in at the slightest invitation.

“Nothing, silly! Zippy answered. “Red likes to play imagination, that’s all. Ain’t you never played imagination? What are you,
dumb
?”

James and Zippy had promptly commandeered a small corner of the elevator for their little group, while all around them, passengers were locked together like cigarettes in a pack. Most with barely enough room to sit, and some not even that: They slept upright with their arms looped out through the flexible mesh cells of the walls. Initially, James had staked out just enough territory to maintain a controlled perimeter, but the relative darkness of the lift’s interior triggered something in Red. He began raving about machine faces in the dark, and tore at the floor until his fingers went bloody. As soon as they’d gotten him settled down, Zippy stood, turned, and vaulted off of her Bounder into the back of a pale, cosmetically freckled fellow in a soiled pink cape. He bent nearly double before launching away and skidding to a halt atop a group of neo-fascists with identical blonde mohawks. One of the Neos got to his feet as if to fight, but James reached inside his jacket – a casual motion, as if going for a business card – and came up with something resembling a long, thin steel bolt. He hurled it nonchalantly into the air, where it unfolded and propelled itself with uncanny accuracy into the punk’s temple. The kid sat down abruptly, made a short sobbing noise, and lapsed into unconsciousness. A small but intensely courteous area cleared around them, after that.

Red had been the same ever since -- motionless, sweating despite the cold, his pupils swallowing his entire eye.

Two strips of dappled sunlight shuddered into existence against the west wall. They chased each other in a vertical line, strobed briefly, and vanished -- only to appear again, larger, two feet to the left.

Red tamped his breathing down, flat and narrow. He felt the solidity of the floor beneath him. He let his eyes go lax, and tried to mentally catalogue every unfocused shape in his field of vision. It was an old psychological meme that Beta testers used to control trips going off the rails: Focus intensely on the shapeless everything. Do not consider the implications of anything, just populate your cognitive world entirely with blurry, formless entities, and ride out the trance until the body has time to process and normalize.

Years of experience beta-testing dangerous new Rx mixes -- both professionally, and just because it was a Tuesday -- had kept Red from employing such base methods for as long as he could remember. Normally during a bad trip, he’d simply ping his BioOS and scan the chemical readouts.

Ferrosotrine 3:8

Dimethyltryptamine 1:6

Aspirated Euphorime 1:3

The display would read, in small, flashing blue letters. And Red would be reassured; it was just chemicals being chemicals. 

Red had pulled up a chemical readout immediately after the first hallucination: A little girl standing uncertainly in the middle of the cargo-hull. She had metal pinchers sticking out of her face. She pointed at Red and screamed.

He scanned it again when a group of stooped figures scuttled
straight through
the family sitting beside him. The figures paused for a moment, then one lifted a leg – a leg that terminated in a thousand bright and whirling insectile limbs instead of a human foot – and placed it against the wall. They scurried up the curving surface and disappeared through the ceiling.

Red finally closed the display, after the matronly old woman smiling directly in front of him dropped the blanket from her shoulders, and revealed a whirring mass of mercurial pupae clinging together in roughly the shape of a human skeleton.

The readings always came back the same, anyway:

Trochoidal Sopoforine 3:5

Thorazine 1:10

Chlordiazepoxide 4:15

Methylenedioxymethamphetamine 1:3

It was Red’s standard Hyper-Anxiety Mix: The one he’d frantically slotted against his wrist immediately after waking on Little Deng’s table.

There were no other active foreign agents. There was no chemical impetus for these hallucinations – or at least, nothing that his system could catalogue.

So Red sat, and he watched the lights chase forms through shadow. He considered the world around him, but did not think. He saw, but did not understand. He especially did not understand that thing over there -- just the upper torso of a man, his entire lower half nothing but a tangled mass of cables and jacks -- attempting to plug itself into the mouth of a comely Asian pre-teen. That, he did not understand. He did not understand it as hard as he possibly could.

Red pulled away from himself and cleared a space to think:

Ordinarily he’d chalk something like this up to undocumented drug interaction, but Deng’s acute-boned technician had done a complete transfusion. At first, Red thought she’d spiked him with Presence while he was under – it might start to explain that whole forest fiasco -- but his BioOS scan was perfectly clear of all chemicals, save for the infinitesimal traces of inert Beta-Gas still stored in his fat cells. The tech had pulled all of his blood, every last drop, and packed his veins with gunmetal sludge instead. He knew that to be true, if for no other reason than the god damn Hyper-Anxiety Mix wasn’t working. The HD-MPAS that pumped through his major arteries now instead of blood was a vicious form of automated leukocyte: Any foreign agent the solution found in his body would be devoured, disassembled, and have its core elements reassigned so as not to interfere with the extraction process. It was already hard at work, pulling the Beta-Gas remnants from his fat and spinal fluid, shuffling them down to his colon, and repacking them into a microscopic brick to be passed on command. Nothing was making a trip the other way; nothing was getting to his brain…unless it was already there. 

And even if something had stored itself in his neural tissue, no drug Red had ever heard of caused hallucinations with appropriate physical manifestations: The lacerations, the bruising, the bloody nose. Throughout his illustrious beta-testing career, Red had bled from the eyes, vomited up chunks of bone, and orgasmed through his fingertips, but nothing ever clawed his damn face open. It just wasn’t possible. 

But it was okay. Because they were on their way to see Luka.

Luka owed Red. He owed Red for his contacts, for his mixing services, for his all-hour deliveries and custom anti-addictives -- but most of all, he owed Red for his continued silence. Not much was frowned upon under the influence of Presence – it’s hard to police a shared hallucination - but any trips within the last hundred years were strictly forbidden. The law was ostensibly to prevent theft of Intellectual Property – a quick trip back a few weeks to the right factory at the right time, and you could steal any patented mix before the inventors even knew to protect it. But there were worse perversions to be had from in-lifespan time travel. Even the Anthromorphs thought meta-molestation was sick.