Ability (Omnibus) (8 page)

“My eyes are bugging for sure,” Brian said, rubbing them. Garret gave him a funny look, and he realized he’d said it in Japanese. He repeated it in English. “But it only took thirty seconds or so to flash. How long does it last?”

“Two hours and twelve minutes is the maximum I’ve been able to coax out of it. If I try to loop it for longer than a couple of minutes, it feels like someone is smashing my eyes in with a hammer, and it doesn’t seem to increase the retention time. There seems to be very little difference between flashing for thirty seconds or one minute. Or two. Other than the major eye pain. Anything less than twenty seconds, and I can’t get the module to do a full run, so the retention is either of partial, incomplete information, or a total failure. But there’s another cool thing I found. If I mess around with the strobe rate and the display rates, I can do neat things.”

“Like what?”

“Like make the retention only last five minutes. Or make it last twenty minutes. I’m still messing around with it. I want to try it with Receiver though. Thirty seconds, plus Receiver, equals full retention. I’m hoping. I want to try the three of us using different settings while dosing, to see what happens. I’ll go with the shortest retention frequency setting. You go with a longer one, and Derry can have what I guess would be the full retention. The one I’ve maxed out at two hours.”

“Okay. I won’t be able to make a new batch until Saturday night. She got me thinking about some stuff that I want to test out. I want Receiver to keep all of the good attributes, the attributes that make the brain open up, but I want to eliminate the ‘tripping’ part, or at least tone it down. It’ll go over a lot easier down the road if we don’t have to fight the perception that it’s some deadly new hallucinogen that makes you jump off buildings or eat live babies.

“I’ll make ‘proper’ doses for us to use, but I’m going to make a couple of experimental batches. Real small ones, like maybe four doses total,” Brian said, thinking aloud. “Also, we should pick a module that none of us have messed around with. Just to make sure we don’t have something we’ve tested before floating around in a hidden memory cell of our subconscious.”

“I think I have one we can do,” Garret said. “I’m still tweaking it, but it should be ready in time.”

“Well, let’s get high to celebrate then,” Brian said in Japanese, heading back to his desk to refill the pipe.

CHAPTER 7

March, 2044

“We’re going to do what?” Derry asked.

“We are going to drop Receiver, wait for it to kick in, flash with our H-Vis through my tablet, and then play ice hockey,” Garret told her.

“I’ve never been on skates in my life. Not even roller skates,” she protested.

“Neither have I,” Brian said. “Well, I think I roller skated maybe twice when I was little. I’ve never been on ice. They didn’t have ice rinks where I grew up.”

“I’ve been to hockey games,” Garret said, “and I’ve been on ice skates a fair amount. I never played hockey though, just typical skating around and stuff. But I’ve probably got the most experience, so I’m going to go for the shortest flash retention. Since Brian has been on roller skates a couple of times as a kid, he’ll get the middle retention setting. You’ll get the full experience, so to speak, since you’ve never been on either kind of skate,” he explained to Derry.

“And…why are we doing this?” Derry asked. Her eyes narrowed into slits, and she looked from Garret back to Brian. “Is this why you two have been all over my ass for the last month with all of the ‘Derry, how far can you stretch?’ and ‘Hey, Dez, shouldn’t you be working out at the gym?’ bullshit?”

“The answer to your first question,” Brian said, “is because it’s a skill that takes years to master. All the pros you see on the holo, they’ve been doing it since they were three years old. Especially the Canadians. There’s nothing better to do in Freezerville, so they strap their kids to a pair of skates, put a stick in their hand, and send them out on a frozen pond or river to learn how to play.”

“Good for them,” Derry said, glaring at him.

“Skating is hard enough,” Brian continued, “but then you’ve got a stick in your hands and a ton of equipment to keep you safe, plus all these rules about what you can and can’t do in the game. It’s going to be awesome, trust me. As for your second question, if you tried to go out and do some serious physical exertion when you’ve spent the last few years sitting on your ass, reading old, dead authors, you can almost guarantee pulling a hamstring or suffering some other injury that our new medical skills won’t be able to do much about, other than diagnose.”

“So…we just flash and then go skate with a stick and a…what do we hit with the stick? A ball?” she asked, her frown firmly in place.

“No,” Garret laughed. “A puck is what’s used in hockey. But we won’t just be flashing and going for a skate. Brian paid the guy at Chaparral Ice to let us get in to the shop and buy all the equipment we need, do a chemical and heat mold of the skates to our feet, and then go out on the ice with some of the guys from the local high school and the UT-A club team.”

“So…like a pick-up game then?” she asked, still not convinced it was a good idea.

“I guess you could call it that. But we’ll be playing full-contact. So keep your head up,” Garret winked at her.

“Wait. Wait. Waaaait. I’m like a hundred and twenty pounds, and you guys are like two hundred pounds. I don’t know how to skate. I don’t even know any of the fucking rules, and you want us to go out and smash into each other like they do on the holo?” Derry looked like she was ready to bolt from the car.

Brian laughed. “Relax, Dez. You won’t get hurt. Remember, you’ll know how to play, how to skate, how to check everyone into the glass, how to absorb a check without losing your head, how to shoot, all of that. Even how to fight, though we won’t be going that far. It took a lot of money, and a waiver that we wouldn’t sue if we got hurt, to get Mr. Stiles to agree to any of this.

“Plus, the Receiver is a little juiced. You should have enhanced perception for retention, as usual, but also enhanced reflexes. You won’t be Superman, made of steel, but your reaction times will be shorter. Think of yourself as a combat pilot on stimulants in a live-fire situation.” He smiled and patted her on the leg as he turned into the ice rink parking lot.

“Let’s do this shit!” Garret yelled from the back seat.

Derry looked like a frightened deer about to become roadkill on a lonely mountain highway. The boys laughed at her, calling her shrimp, midget, two-by-four, and a number of other insults intended to break her fear by making her angry. When the E-V pulled into a parking space, she’d finally had enough.

“Fuck off!” she shouted, near tears from the thought of being run down by a bunch of men racing back and forth across an ice surface. “I don’t want to do this!”

Brian and Garret howled with laughter, though each of them put a reassuring hand on on her to let her know that they were only teasing her.

“Listen, Dez,” Brian said after he’d calmed his laughter down to an occasional giggle. Garret wasn’t helping with the goofy faces he made from the back seat. “Remember a couple of weeks ago when we made a big stink about being active?” Derry nodded. “It wasn’t just because Garret is fat,” Brian continued, ducking an exaggerated karate chop from his roommate. “It’s because we realized that some of the modules we would be fooling around with would require more than just mental acuity.

“It’s great to know how to rush into a burning building, stay low and calm under heat and pressure, and be the hero by safely rescuing citizens. But it’s not so great when you realize the equipment is almost thirty kilos when you have on just the protective gear and helmet, not to mention another ten when you add in the air tanks. Imagine carrying all of that, through a burning building, while trying to also carry another person.”

“A really fat person,” Garret said helpfully. This time he had to duck the karate chop.

“We didn’t anticipate playing ice hockey,” Brian went on, “or any sport really, but this is exactly why we got on the exercise kick. I’m not sure if Garret has been cheating or not, but while I’m at the house, I spend my downtime between processes doing things like running in place, lifting ten kilo dumbbells, doing push-ups, all that stuff. Even yoga for all of the stretching. A timer will go off, I’ll swap out trays or mix something into the batch, set the timer for another ten minutes, then huff and puff until the timer goes off again.”

“It’s a necessity,” Garret said, finally becoming serious. He leaned back and patted his stomach. “I definitely needed it more than you two assholes and your stupid high metabolisms. But even you two sticks needed to get your muscles in shape. It’s hard to play hockey if your legs are weak from sitting on your ass all day.” He frowned at Derry. “Or lying on your back with your legs in the air.”

“Eat shit,” she replied, matching his frown with one of her own.

“Seriously,” Garret went on after winking at her. “Remember how much your fingers ached, how raw the tips of them were when you started playing my guitar all the time? Remember your middle finger bleeding and scabbing over? Imagine your body being your fingers, and the guitar strings being hockey. Or whatever shit we are going to be getting into that will require us to be able to walk or run a long distance, carry a heavy load, do something strenuous and physical for long periods of time.”

“Like ice hockey,” Brian pitched in, receiving a punch to his shoulder from Derry.

“Like ice hockey,” Garret agreed. “Trust us, Dez. This is going to be painful, but in a really good way. Nothing bad is going to happen to you as long as you are padded up. Mr. Stiles assured us that with proper gear, you can still get hurt, but only if something like a skate blade meets bare skin, or you take a hard shot in the few places that aren’t covered by your pads.”

“Like a knight in full plate armor,” Brian helped again, getting a laugh from her this time.

“Or,” Garret admonished them while patting his stomach again, “you know, from not being in shape, not properly stretching, not having the physical stamina to stay mentally alert when shit is hitting the fan.”

“I hate you both,” she said.

*

Derry had never been so angry in her life. The
douche
on the other team, the one with the green helmet and green skate laces, had body checked her into the boards at every opportunity for the first half hour.

“It’s like he thinks it’s game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals,” she spat at Brian while they sat on the bench, waiting for their next shift.

“Don’t sweat it,” Brian said with a chuckle. “All of them told us that there was something about hockey that would make us aggressive. They weren’t kidding either. I kind of want to kill that guy in the red jersey. He and I don’t see eye-to-eye about things.”

Derry burst into laughter. She knew where he was coming from. Green Helm talked more shit than he skated. Most of them treated her like one of the boys, but not Green Helm. She imagined he was the type of loser who had to get campus girls drunk before they would sleep with him. He was rude, crass, sexist, and knew at least ninety different ways to insult her vagina.

Garret skated by their side of the bench, tossing out a colorful insult about her vagina that he must have learned from Green Helm. Garret had ended up on the Colors team. Brian and Derry were Whites. She wanted to make Green Helm bleed red.

“I think I’m going to slash him across the shoulder blades,” she told Brian as she jumped over the boards and onto the ice when one of her teammates came to the bench.

“Don’t kill him, dear!” Brian shouted after her.

Derry didn’t kill Green Helm, but after exchanging increasingly violent body checks into the glass, she finally caught him with his head down in an open-ice hit. Green Helm was still for a couple of minutes before he was able to sit up. He looked around, a bit dazed, and saw Derry skating toward him. She pumped her legs hard for a few more strides before digging her skate blades into the ice as hard as she could, showering Green Helm’s face with a thick cloud of ice shavings.

“Cool your shit, asshole,” she warned him, “or next time I’ll remove your fucking head.” She skated away, banging her stick on the ice to let everyone know it was time to resume the game.

*

“You guys were right,” Derry told them on the ride back to their apartment. “That was a complete blast!”

“Jesus, Derry, you nearly killed that guy,” Garret said, exaggerating his concern for Green Helm.

“Fuck that guy! I would have fought him if Bri would’ve let go of my fucking jersey!” she yelled, the anger of the moment filling her again.

“You probably would have kicked his ass too,” Brian smiled. “You needed to calm down a little.”

“The skill needed to play that sport is absolutely incredible,” Garret announced from the back seat. He’d been worried when Mr. Stiles let them out onto the ice before flashing. Brian and Derry had fallen down every two steps. “All I could think of was ‘no way in hell.’ No way in hell we were even going to be able to skate across the ice to the bench.”

“Those guys were scary,” Derry said, nodding her head. She nearly did bolt as she stood on the other side of the glass, watching the men on the ice buzz around, pass with laser accuracy, stop on a dime, and shoot the puck hard enough to make the glass waver. “I didn’t think we were going to be able to keep up. You two aren’t the most athletic, you know.” Her admonishment hit home, but was delivered with a smile.