Ability (Omnibus) (3 page)

“You guys already drop?” he asked them.

“Yeah, about twenty minutes ago. I just cooked these bad boys up. I had a bit of a revelation last night and wanted to try something different. Hopefully we won’t be clutching our throats and gasping for breath when the shit turns out to be hydrogen cyanide. Probably wouldn’t be good if we were found by the landlord in a few days after our corpses started stinking up the entire floor.”

Brian’s jokes were always morbidly funny, but he never gave anyone dope that he hadn’t tried himself first. Garret had worried for him at first, telling him that he could be swallowing or smoking pure poison, that it wasn’t smart to experiment on himself. Brian had just laughed and said he’d had enough chemistry to know where the difference between getting high and getting dead was in a molecular formula.

“So, what’s it feel like? What’s it supposed to feel like?” he asked.

“It’s supposed to feel like getting a rusty iron bar shoved up your bunghole, you douche,” Derry piped up from the beanbag chair. She wasn’t even looking at the two boys anymore, too engrossed in whatever her H-Vis was seeing in 3DH from her mobile comm.

“Cram it, Dykee,” he called out to her, getting a no-look middle finger from her for his efforts. “Seriously, Bri, what’s this stuff supposed to be?”

“Well, I was thinking about your project right?” he said, not really asking Garret. “How you were having trouble tapping the brain and eye thing to sync up. It got me thinking about the way synapses fire while under the influence of certain drugs, and what chemicals the brain releases during certain trips. You know, how acid is a different trip than X, which is a totally different trip than Crash, and so on?”

Garret nodded. His interest in neuroscience centered around his curiosity about the effects of drugs on the brain, as well as figuring out how to manipulate the brain to do things that it had never done, or things that humans had forgotten how to do over the millennia.

“Right. So I decided to tweak that v6 stuff from a couple weeks ago. Welcome to Receiver v7. It’s actually Receiver v7.4, but that sounds lame and pretentious.”

“How you feeling, bro?” Garret asked. Brian looked like he was about to float out of his chair.

“On fire,” Brian said with a sigh of pleasure.

Derry must have heard him, as she raised a no-look thumbs-up over the rim of the beanbag chair, still absorbed in her Holo.

*

“What is this shit anyway?” Brian asked after sitting down in Garret’s chair.

“What’s what shit?” Garret asked from the kitchen.

“All these floating numbers and rotating images,” Brian said, watching the middle monitor.

“Oh, that. That’s my latest variation of the induction module. Still stuck at thirty seconds, so not much of an improvement.”

“What’s the module lesson?” Brian asked.

The trio had been peaking for an hour, a mix of physical pleasure sensations, mental acuity, and emotional bliss. Brian felt
almost there
, like he was one tiny fraction of a step away from where he really wanted to be with this test of the drug. Everything was fluid, glowing, soft, and solid all at once. As he watched the numbers on the middle monitor tick away to some unknown equation, he became fascinated at how they seemed to sync with the way new three-dimensional models would appear on the screen, rotate, and then disappear to be replaced by the next.

“That one? That one is on the mechanics of refrigeration and heat transfer. Boring shit really,” Garret said coming back to stand next to Brian.

“Can you play it from the beginning? I want to see if it works for thirty seconds on me like it does you. If you want, you can break the fridge or the air conditioner unit while I’m watching, and we can test it out. Maybe take turns being flashed and work on it all night while blitzed.”

“Nah, wouldn’t you rather do something like learn Yaqui Indian dialects, or how to dismantle a VZ-1 assault rifle?” Garret asked, reaching over to touch the control pad on the desk.

“No way,” Brian said, shoving Garret’s hand away. “I want to be a refrigeration specialist. I have absolutely no clue about it beyond basic physics. I know how refrigeration works, but not like…
how
it works, you know?”

Garret laughed and said, “Lamer.” He reached over again and set up the induction module to play from the beginning. “Ready?”

“Wait,” Brian said. “Can you do it through the H-Vis?”

“Not really, not yet.” Garret frowned. “I was hoping to get it to actually stick before I started bothering with converting it all over to H-Vis.”

“No worries. Hey Dizzy, I’m gonna be a fridge repairman!” Brian cried out to Derry.

“Fix my icebox?” she asked.

“I’ll make it a moist box,” Brian said, cackling laughter when she wrinkled her nose.

“Gross,” Garret said, and thumbed the start key for the module.

*

“How long was I staring at the damn thing?” Brian asked, rubbing his eyes.

“About twenty minutes,” Derry said, her hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah, sorry about that. I accidentally had it on loop instead of a single run.” Garret looked sheepish, but still high as a kite.

“Man…” Brian trailed off, lost in thought for a moment before continuing. “It was actually really cool though. Like…weird cool. I could see images crystal clear, and they were in like…super resolution and super slow motion.”

“Really?” Garret asked in surprise. “I always get to the point where they slow down and I don’t notice the numbers or the text on the information line, but never in ‘super resolution’ or ‘slow motion.’”

“He’s really fucked up,” Derry pointed out. “Same as you. Same as me. And I hate to point this out, but I’m really horny, and one of you is going to take care of that for me.”

“Jesus, Derry,” Brian said. “Don’t be coy about it or anything. Just come right out and say what you mean.”

“Well,” she complained, “I’m high, horny, and bored. Garret just sat and watched you watching that stupid video the whole time. Nothing new is on YouTube. I’m bored.”

“Yeah, you said that already,” Garret said.

Brian reached for his orange juice, and grimaced when he took a drink. “Urgh. Warm orange juice is nasty.”

“Hey, Mister Fridge Repairman, did you learn how to put some cold into it?” Derry taunted.

“Don’t be stupid, Derry. You can’t inject cold into things,” Garret said before Brian could admonish her. “Freezing is the removal of heat, not the injection of cold.”

They were always amused when Derry, a Lit major, said something so ridiculously
female
, so stereotypically ditzy that they had to correct her. It was their way of teasing her to let her know she was important to them.

Brian was staring at the glass of orange juice in his hand as if he were having a mental tug of war with it. Derry and Garret insulted each other, arguing over her lack of science knowledge, when she happened to notice the glass in Brian’s hand.

“What the hell?” she asked, surprised. Garret turned to see what she was talking about. His latest insult to Derry died on his lips.

“Brian…how are you doing that?” he asked.

“I…I think I’m…removing heat from the orange juice,” Brian answered, sounding both terrified and awed.

All three watched for the next fifteen seconds as beads of condensation formed on the outside of the glass, then the liquid inside froze solid. After ten more seconds, the glass resembled a beer mug that had been stored in the freezer. Wafts of steam rose from Brian’s hand where his fingers and palm gripped the glass. All three jumped, and Derry let out a little scream when the glass, and the orange juice frozen inside it, shattered into thousands of icy crystals and fell to the floor.

“Jesus Christ, Brian. How the fuck did you do that?” Derry asked, reaching out tentatively to touch his hand.

She winced in anticipation when her fingers brushed the back of his hand, steam still rising off it. It felt like a hand to her. The same hand that had found its way all over her body on numerous occasions.

“I don’t know!” Brian shouted, surprising himself. “I don’t know. I just thought ‘freezing is the removal of energy from the molecules’ and in my mind I saw a vision or scene or something of how it all worked.”

“How what worked?” Garret asked.

“How freezing worked,” Brian answered. “Like…I could concentrate hard enough and the heat started bleeding out of the OJ. I wanted cold OJ. I guess I could have stopped when it just got really cold, but I was kind of freaking out. I didn’t know I could get it that cold. Fuck. I didn’t know I could even get it one degree colder. I’m really freaking out.” Fear had replaced the goofy half-smile that had been plastered on his face for most of the night.

“You sound pretty calm for
freaking out
,” Derry said. Garret gave her a burning look. “I’m just saying. He’s pretty calm for just having frozen a glass of juice like it was dunked in liquid nitrogen.”

“You think you could do it again?” Garret asked, his face a mix of drug-induced intensity and mad scientist curiosity.

“I don’t know. Let’s try it.”

*

Two hours later, when their trips were on the downward decline, the kitchen was littered with all kinds of impromptu experiments. After Brian had frozen three more glasses of water, then one of the ceramic dinner plates until Garret’s finger stuck to it and had burned from the cold, and one of Brian’s metal rulers that had shattered into pieces, Garret and Derry both wanted to experiment with a module. Garret had only configured six others in the format the refrigeration module was in. Derry chose a guitar lesson, while Garret went with the welding module.

The three of them spent the next four days with very little sleep, trying to replicate Brian’s initial feat of completely removing heat from objects with his mind until they froze. Receiver v7 was a drug of the most experimental nature, and as their lack of sleep began to take its toll on their bodies and minds, Brian finally called a halt to the tests. He had finals coming up, as did Derry, and he needed to be ready for them. Garret was the most depressed about their failures. The eerie nature of Brian’s ability to freeze objects through sheer willpower never manifested itself again in any form, no matter how many pills they swallowed, no matter how long they looped the modules.

If there was one positive thing that had come from their experiments, it was that Derry was fairly adept at playing a guitar, Brian could probably get hired on as an A/C technician, and Garret could perform six different kinds of welds. However, within two weeks, Derry was the only one of them to have retained any part of the induction. Brian speculated that it was because once she could play without having to think about it, she practically owned Garret’s acoustic, playing it for a few hours every day. Brian had no evaporators, condensers, or compressors to repair, nor did Garret have any welding equipment to tinker with. Their knowledge and expertise faded quickly after five days, and was completely gone before two weeks had passed.

CHAPTER 3

July, 2043

Brian watched the perimeter security camera through his H-Vis link as Markov’s boys pulled into the driveway to pick up their monthly supply of Crash. Brian couldn’t really see the appeal in Crash, but it was easy to make, and it brought in a lot of money. More importantly, one of the ingredients for his Receiver experiments was Lyborsol-8n, which happened to be a necessary component to make Crash. If he lost his Crash ‘contract,’ he’d have one hell of a time getting the Lyborsol. The chemical chain that formed the toxic reaction to oxygenated blood and made it poisonous could easily be broken to form the new chains Crash needed for psychotropic reactions.

Lyborsol was a godsend to farmers and government agencies tasked with keeping vermin populations down. Since it had a high toxicity rate and was extremely hazardous if breathed, swallowed, or applied to bare skin, it was restricted and closely regulated, purchasable only by approved entities. Brian had to rely on his Russian partners to supply it. Like everything else his clients provided, he never asked where they got it or where he could get it himself. As a chemistry major, he easily found out everything he needed to know on the internet, from how much a 1kg canister would cost if purchased in lots of one thousand, to its hemotoxicity levels when broken down or combined with other agents. The warnings pasted all over every single distributor page that offered Lyborsol alerted Brian that he’d need to supply his PIN and the Federal Authorization Code assigned to his ‘company’ before he could put an order in his shopping cart. He knew better than to even bother thinking about it. He could possibly forge a company identity, and even apply for the FAC, but it would draw the wrong kind of attention. Brian was all about staying in the shadows when it came to his moonlighting.

Ivan and Ivan, the two Russians that he’d given the nicknames to, moved containers and a twenty-gallon barrel into the garage. The two Ivans weren’t always the regulars from New York, but they were the most frequent. As far as Brian knew, neither of them spoke English, but he didn’t say anything offhand, insulting, or even suspicious around the two of them, just in case. They always handed him a delivery invoice, written in English, which he always burned after locking the numbers into his brain. In return, he always handed them two boxes of vacuum-sealed gray powder that they’d press into pills before delivering somewhere else. He had no idea what happened to any of the substances he produced once they left the property, and he didn’t want to know.