Ability (Omnibus) (14 page)

“I think you’re high,” Brian said.

“Maybe. You also think I hit it on the head. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. You don’t hear me complaining about getting to ride that ass, do you?”

“Don’t be a pig about it,” Brian said, upset that Garret was talking about her as if she were just a piece of ass from the club or a campus whore. That she
was
known for being a bit of a campus whore made Garret’s words sting even more.

“All right, that was shitty of me,” Garret admitted, backing off. “But you weren’t complaining about it either. Both of us got lazy because of it. Why bother to go look for a steady piece of ass when we knew good ol’ Derry would wander back into our lives any day now, or she was already in our lives, in your bed, and so I could just wait a week, or maybe even just a night, and she’d be in mine again.”

“It sounds shitty and cold and mean,” Brian said numbly.

“Yeah, it does. It’s a hard truth. We used her,
use her
, just as much as she has us. She gets free dope, free dick, free place to crash, and free of worry about either of us pissing and moaning about her promiscuous lifestyle.”

“It sounds like we’re her best friends,” Brian said, “but it doesn’t feel like we are.”

“Sure we are, bro. Sure we are. Best friends hand you the pipe, hand you the cock or the pussy, whichever they have that you are into, whether theirs or a friend of theirs just to hook you up. Best friends hand you a couch to crash on when you need it. And best friends hand you the pipe again instead of being your mom or dad and telling you what a piece of shit you are for the choices you’ve made.

“Best friends look out for each other. Just like we do for each other. We wouldn’t let anything happen to her. If some guy she was banging beat her up, we’d probably pay to have him buried alive in the desert. And we’d pay extra to be there when they nailed the lid of the box on and put him in the ground, just so he’d know who and why.”

Brian looked at his roommate, his best friend, and asked, “Is hiding something as important as this what best friends do?”

“Sometimes best friends have to make hard choices,” Garret told him, slapping him on the back and going to the door. He unlocked it, stepped back, and asked, “Would you do the honors? I need some coffee, then I need to get really fucked up and learn how to do what you’re doing.”

Brian concentrated from where he was seated on the bed, willing the doorknob to turn, imagining his own hand doing it, feeling the cool metal of it in his mental palm. It jerked once, twice, then turned all the way, and he gave it a mental tug that swung the door back. Garret smiled at him before walking through the doorway and into their little kitchen a few feet away.

Brian sat on the bed for a few moments, wondering if he should sabotage the whole thing. He wondered if he could live with Garret’s hatred or resentment at ruining it all more than he could live with Derry’s hatred and resentment for lying to her.
Sometimes best friends have to make hard choices
, he thought.

*****

October, 2045

The next six weeks were a flurry of activity for the four of them. Brian rolled out the new formula to his contacts by hand at casual meetings in public places. It felt weird having lunch or dinner in a regular restaurant, as if he were a spy passing secrets along. He’d never been so paranoid in his life. The thing he worried the most about was what he would do if local cops or federal agents suddenly tried to accost him. His part of the plan was now finished, but if the authorities closed in on him, it would destroy everything they’d worked for the last two-plus years to achieve. Especially if he freaked out and hurt a lot of people in frightening, unnatural ways.

Garret barely spoke to anyone during that time, working for thirty and sometimes forty hour stretches thanks to the baked goods that Brian brought home from the cook house. He’d perfected the induction modules for learning, but after Brian had revealed the side effect, he decided to tinker with it one more time. Instead of having a hundred different learning modules ready for reveal, he was going to release just one.

Derry was like a butterfly, flitting to and fro, making sure everything was in place, meeting up with contacts that Brian didn’t have time for because of his cook schedule that couldn’t be interrupted. It was too close to reveal to have any of his clients question his sudden unavailability. A few of the men who’d shown up to the house had talked to him about
this crazy new drug
and the YouTube video, wondering what his take on it was. His Russian contacts were especially curious, knowing that he had extra interest in the Lyborsol-8n that they delivered to him to turn into Crash.

One particular chemist, after cooking up a batch, had run an analysis of the formula, cross-referencing it with other chemical compounds that shared the same chains. He’d posted it on a few newsgroups and an online discussion forum, where it got picked up by both the Russian mob and the DEA. The Russians were pissed at the number of new federal agents suddenly snooping around their territory. The DEA was pissed that the chemist posted his analysis as an almost step-by-step breakdown of the entire process in an
instruction manual
format, which instantly began to seed its way across the net.

The news reports for two straight weeks detailed how the authorities had captured the person responsible. Brian had felt guilty that the chemist was probably locked in a dungeon somewhere under a mountain, being endlessly
interrogated
. Derry had suggested they help the man out, but Garret argued hard, harder than she or Brian had ever witnessed, that while it was unfortunate for the poor, stupid chemist who didn’t bother to mask his identity and posted in a very public net forum, it kept law enforcement focused on the suspect and his social circles. Derry’s look perfectly described how she felt about it, but Brian had been forced to agree with Garret.

Michelle had her own role to play. She used proxies, a hardware encryption key that Garret had embedded in her tablet’s comm, and VPNK connections from hacked private access points to keep her nose to the ground in the medical communities, especially the psychiatric and psychology fields. Doctors and scientists were all over the spectrum in their discussions about the effects of Receiver. None would post more than an academic interest in Receiver in public net discussions, but on the black sites, they were hailing the drug as the next step in psychiatric and mental health care, if they could just have another year or two to study it.

Universities and governments did their best to shut down open discussions on such topic areas, firing or arresting anyone that might make a good lesson to others. Overall, it had little effect. The black sites were like shifting sands in the Sahara. The FBI and NSA hackers might gain access to one or some for a short period, but within hours they’d go to log in only to find the entire network gone, a black hole in cyberspace.

The entire net was aflame with discussion, trolling, denial, and cheering. News anchors and talking heads had adopted the net denizens’ unofficial name for the party or parties responsible for the drug and the induction module. “The Core” was apparently what Brian, Garret, Derry, and Michelle were known as, though they were more anonymous than anyone else. All four kept up their regular,
legal
net presence, just in case NSA computers went number crunching and noticed that one, or all four of them, had deviated from their long-standing routines of browsing for music, videos, pornography (in the boys’ case, Derry’s as well, but they never found this out), gaming, or their social networks.

The Core
had fourteen weeks left before reveal. Everything was in place, other than the final module’s distribution from their friendly networks to seed across the public net. Michelle and Brian had become a permanent couple, much to Brian’s dismay whenever he looked at Derry. He warred with himself over it too much, and did his best to avoid her so he wouldn’t be distracted by her presence. He was still in love with her, more than ever, and knew he was slowly crushing her heart as each day went by that she had to see him with Michelle.

He was definitely in love with Michelle, which made everything that much more complicated in his head. She was the archetype fiery redhead, complete with the temper, personality, and attitude. She was great in the sack, she was as intelligent as he thought himself to be, and she could get things done. That she also tormented Garret at every single opportunity, as well as laughed at all of their nerd and bodily function humor, was icing on the cake. But she wasn’t Derry, and that bothered Brian too much to want to dwell on it for too long.

*****

November, 2045

“Derry, sit down,” Garret said to her as she hovered near his computer chair. “We need to talk to you.”

“What is it?” she asked, looking from Garret to Brian and back. She didn’t look worried, but she knew something serious was coming.

“We need to tell you something, and you probably aren’t going to like it,” Brian said, causing her to look back and forth at their faces again.

“Tell it, then,” she said.

“Okay. So… Brian found something out by accident a couple of weeks ago. We initially decided to not tell you, but we kind of, sort of think you need to know this,” Garret said.

“Oh my God, you guys have brain tumors from too much Receiver and YouTube?” she asked. Neither of them could determine if she was joking.

Brian squinted at her, then sighed. “Look, I accidentally took too much of a test batch of Receiver one night, and watched the new module that Garret has been working on.”

“What module?” she asked, interrupting the rest of what he was about to lay out for her.

“Uh… it’s kind of like a ‘general’ module,” Garret said, trying to think of how to explain it to her. “Like, it doesn’t have any specific lesson on it. It’s sort of a… a base module. One that opens the mind for learning in a certain way.”

“So? Receiver already does that, and the modules are tuned to do that stuff already, right?” Derry asked, again looking back and forth at each of them. She narrowed her eyes. “Wait, what do you mean ‘opens the mind a certain way?’”

“Listen,” Brian told her, and she turned her head to look at him. “I took way too much of the stuff one night then watched this new module that had only been half-encoded. It had just the initial learning vectors programmed into it, not any specific lesson. He was testing the code on it, fooling around, trying to see if there was something specific in the way the information interacted with the brain while on the drug.” He sighed again. “Mostly to see if he could replicate what I did to the juice that night.”

“You guys are still trying to
juice yourselves like that again?” she asked, but this time there was no humor in the way she said
juice
, the group’s private little joke. “I thought you gave that up.”

“No,” Garret replied, sounding miffed at the thought of giving up that particular dream. “We never gave it up, but once we’d struck gold with the induction process, it kind of became a back-burner thing. Bri still fiddled with the formula a bit, and I was still fiddling with the coding to see if we could, you know, make it happen.”

Understanding dawned on her face. “And you did it?” she asked in a whisper.

“We did more than ‘it,’” Brian said, wanting to smile, but knowing this was the part where shit was going to hit the fan. “The latest formula I distributed? It’s the new formula, and it makes the Receiver about four times as potent. The pocket cook will only make two doses now, but that’s okay. It only takes one dose plus the modified induction module.”

Derry looked around as if there were others in the apartment that she didn’t want listening in on their conversation. “Show me,” she said.

Five minutes later, she collapsed on the beanbag chair, stunned into silence. Brian couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Garret wanted to go to her side, sit down next to her, comfort her, but he stood behind his computer chair, thinking it might be useful as a shield if she erupted in a rage.

“You lied to me?” she asked, looking from Brian to Garret. They both felt their hearts melt in their chests before boiling off into the vacuum of betrayal that now separated them from her.

“We lied,” Brian said. He didn’t think trying to explain it would change anything.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because we love you, and we didn’t want to have to make the choice between you trying to stop us, and hating us when we made it clear we weren’t going to stop, or you finding out in a few weeks that we’d kept it from you for almost three months,” Garret told her, wincing as the words left his mouth.

“Of course you love me,” she said, “but why would that stop you from telling me what you were really up to?”

“No, Derry,” Brian said, “we really love you. Are in love with you. Both of us. The real kind of love. Like husband and wife love.”

Her eyes went wide as her mind finally grasped what Brian was saying. None of them took a breath for what seemed like minutes, until she burst into tears. The two men looked at each other, not sure what to do. This was the one reaction they hadn’t anticipated when they’d decided two nights ago to tell her everything. They’d expected raging, screaming, throwing things, even demands to dose her and let her watch the module so she could then punish them with her new ability.