SF in The City Anthology (29 page)

“You still bring in your own food?” Ernst looked at the dabba
[44]
sitting in front of Esteban. 

“I can’t afford the junk they sell here,” Esteban pulled his favorite pair of chopsticks out of his backpack. “Besides, the kitchen staff just laces it with more Minervite to keep us working hard.”

“Oh yes, I forgot,” Mael sneered, “you’re mister purity.”

“Can you blame me for wanting to get through school on my own two feet? I don’t need a chemical pick me up. Besides, Minervite calcifies your penal gland.”

“Man that would suck,” Ernst continued to chuckle, his eyes still squinted from smoking.

“Well I suppose you guys can make whatever choices seem best to you,” Mael shook his head. “If you wind up poor and homeless don’t blame me.” He secretly envied Esteban, since he received better grades. At least he could say that he involved himself in more clubs than his friend.

“Not everyone in the world wants to work themselves to death for ritzy VTOL flights and a Cockaigne Avenue penthouse,” Esteban sighed. “Let’s talk about something less life altering. Did you guys see last night’s episode of
Artifacts of Film
? They did an interview with Cadeo Mokhov, and he indicated that holographic versions of Georges Méliès’s films are in the works.”

“I…I really have no idea what your talking about,” Ernst stared into space.

“Come on, you guys had to have watched
Electric Enfilade
last night?” Mael looked at his friends in surprise. “It’s only the best mech show since Trojan Wars AD 3050!”

Much of their lunchtime conversations went like this, except for a few digressions in which they complained about the school’s sanitation problems. With only five minutes to go until the students, bloated from heavy eating, would saunter into the school’s many hallways and head to class half asleep, a very unusual student approached the trio’s table.

For whatever reason, though Ernst’s regular marijuana usage probably contributed to the situation, people didn’t like hanging out at the trio’s table. An outsider himself, the boy who approached their area (they could tell he was a lowerworlder from his lack of hygiene) whispered an offer to them.

“I’ve got a new hallucinogen, here, in the school, that you might like to try,” the boy’s eyes shifted about distrustfully. “Believe me; it required a lot of work to sneak it past the guards. I guarantee you that it will take you on an unbelievable trip.”

“No thanks,” Ernst spoke first. “I don’t do drugs. I just smoke weed.”

Esteban motioned the youth to leave. Mael had the most ambivalent reaction of all three. Though he never spoke about it, the pressure he placed himself under had taken its toll on his mood. Not a day went by that he didn’t dwell on the possibility of leaping out a high story window, or throwing
others
to their deaths for that matter. He had long hoped for something to give him some small share of relaxation, and his family was antireligious enough to make joining a cult impractical.

“What’s the name of this drug?” Mael asked hesitantly.

“Mixx,” the darkly clad youth responded. “You buy it in two parts – a blue powder at 20 ECUs an ounce and a black liquid at 5 ECUs an ounce. After you’ve combined one ounce of each part into a whole, you ingest it. An ounce of each part should last a moderate user a week. The high will last for about four hours, with the first three being the real peak of the experience and the last hour serving as a ‘coming down period’.”

“It sounds like you know your stuff,” Mael crossed his arms and looked at his new acquaintance curiously.

“Oh yes, he knows all about selling you on poison, just like the school sold you own Minervite,” Esteban reflected sadly.

“This stuff isn’t natural is it?” Ernst asked calmly.

“No it’s synthetic,” the kid in the jet black clothes answered.

“Yeah, don’t touch that crap, Mael.”

As many youth unfortunately learn during school, wisdom and intelligence are not truly the same thing. Mael had always been a boy with a “good head on his shoulders,” as his father would say. No matter how many school events he participated in or tests he aced or hours of hard work he put in at Vigil Brothers Inc., he was just as likely to make mistakes as the next person.

“I have a ten minute brake to change clothes between Kendo Club and Student Council this afternoon,” Mael addressed the boy. “If you meet me during that time, I guess I would have to consider your offer.”

The youth made a pleased bow to his prospective buyer and left. Doubt had already crept into Mael’s mind, and he refused to look at his startled friends’ faces. A part of him wanted to try Mixx very,
very
badly. Perhaps the newness of the substance appealed to him. Perhaps the boy who had just left them had the makings of an award winning salesman.

“You should just use weed ya brainle
ss sap,” Ernst shook his head.

***

              “Will I become addicted to this crap on the
first
try?” Mael asked his new acquaintance in the locker room after school.

             
“No…not on the first try,” the youth responded hesitantly. “You can’t overdose either, but I would recommend staying away from open windows and weapons…and roads.”

             
“Why’s that?”

             
“Because you’ll feel invincible once you’re on Mixx.”

             
Mael had to admit that this was far from the most comforting news he had ever heard. As his new found “friend” handed him a baggy and a small liquid container, both objects obscured the contents inside them, the aspiring Mixx user slid his card through an ECU transfer device, purchasing chemicals that would combine to form a substance that could not only land him a seriously long prison sentence, but also drive him to the point of accidental suicide.

             
“How do you plan to sneak this out of the school,” the black clad boy asked innocently.

             
“I thought I might use it now, since I only bought enough for one go around,” Mael said nonchalantly.

             
“Don’t use it here idiot! Every drug has a tell.”

             
“A tell?” Mael scratched his head. “You mean like a pot smoker’s squinted eyes?”

“Yes, preciously like that,” the boy sighed. “Mixx is even worse. It’ll turn the inside of your mouth blue and shrink you
r pupils to the size of fleas.”

             
“That would have been nice to know before I paid you!” Mael gave the other boy a halfhearted shove. “How am I going to get it out of the school if I don’t use it?”

             
“You could insert it in your anus.”

             
“What?”

             
“You,” the boy pointed at Mael like he was talking to a child, “could…insert it…in your anusssss.”

             
“Screw off,” Mael took the substance mixing apparatus that he had also purchased from the dealer and poured all of the blue powder and foul smelling, dark liquid into the mixing device. “The only places in this school were there aren’t cameras are the bathrooms and locker rooms. Its stands to reason that I’m not going to get out of here with these substances, unless there inside me.”

“Do what you want. I’m out.” The young man disappeared as quickly as he ha
d appeared at the lunch table.

             
It took only a moment for the electric mixing device, something akin to a sake cup sized blender, to produce a usable goop of Mixx. As foul as the black liquid had smelled, Mixx in its final form produced a taste far,
far
worse. Mael was questioning the decision to go with a drug because of its novelty and sense of danger when the substance took effect on him instantaneously.

             
Staring into a mirror above one of the bathroom’s sinks, Mael saw his pupils shrink to such a miniscule size that his eyes just looked like solid white eggs, without a hint of color in them save a small speck in the center of each one. The mirror started vibrating like Jell-O on a racecar’s dashboard. Mael instinctively spat in the sink and rinsed the blue sputum into oblivion, but that didn’t make the inside of his mouth any less conspicuous.

             
All of his senses were jacked up to their full potential. The tiniest sound passed through his ears at the same audio level as a normal conversation, every smell was heightened, and Mael could swear that the air had different tastes depending on where he stood in the locker room. His skin felt like it rippled in waves, a sensation that would put a masseuse’s best efforts to shame. Stumbling through the pulsating room, Mael felt like the whole world was a giant violin string, and the deity he had never believed in had just plucked it.

             
“I know the secrets of the universe,” he laughed to himself as he emerged from the dimly lit locker room into an even more eye catching hallway. Despite his fascination with the oscillating environment around him, he had enough sense of mind to put on the pair of sunglasses he always kept in his backpack.

Walking at a very slow pace to the school’s cafeteria, he passed a girl he had never met walking to art club. As she continued on her way without noticing his odd behavior, he could see glowing footprints following after her, like the tracks left by an angel. By the way she dressed, she had to have been a lowerworlder, but at that moment, she seemed like a seraph to the Mixx user.

Slumping down near the back of the student council’s meeting room, Mael tried not to draw attention to himself, though he stared into space for more than half of the meeting. A stupid grin remained on his face, even when the council’s president announced that one of the school’s janitors had passed away recently and left a financially needy family behind. His reaction was almost as hard to explain away as his blue lips.

“Did you eat a bunch of Blue Blasta gummies or something?” a fellow council member named Alvin Cosme
asked as he sat next to Mael.

“Yeah, yeah that was it,” the boy replied quickly, rubbing his hands together as paranoia started to set i
n. It was then that he saw it.

Mael’s left index finger was blue at the tip; the kind of hue that one could tell was the result of an artificial die and not an injury. He thrust that hand into his pocket and kept it there. The guilty limb vibrated more fiercely than the rest of his body in his state of altered perception. It was as if his hand itself was
self-conscious.

***

In the three years he had worked for Vigil Brothers Inc. Mael had only taken two days off for a vacation with his family. He had given his employers two weeks of notice before he made such a drastic move as to take time for himself. Even though he had saved up enough vacation days to take off a month from work if he so needed, the drugged up youth still felt badly about calling in sick.

“Sure take off all the time you need,” his boss, Chuntao Patois responded to his telepathic call. “You’ll be no good to us if you bring in
a virus and infect the place.”

“Thanks,” Mael thought back with a wry mental inflection.

While avoiding the workplace in his current condition had been a wise move, Mael’s decision to drive home on his Karadag 3000 did not rank up there with his brighter moments. It took him a few minutes to figure out how to start up a vehicle he had owned for seven months, but once he got it in the air, it was an easier ride than he thought;
at least at the start it was.

“Oh goodness, goodness, goodness in a glass,” he muttered aloud as the Karadag zoomed in and out of the airborne traffic that extended between Thrashtown High and Tetsuo Tower – his place of residence. He had been managing well in the parking lot, but once he got airborne and mingled amongst the Avispa class personal transports, their bright taillights opened up dimensions that Mae
l really didn’t care to visit.

With no small degree of luck, or divine providence (Mael’s mind had been opened up to new possibilities by this time), the student made it back to his home and into his room. His parents wouldn’t be home for hours. He really only saw them on Sundays, and even then he normally spent three quarters of the day of rest working on homework, while they spent their time sleeping or trying to keep t
he house somewhat presentable.

Meandering into their empty kitch
en, he picked up the bento box
[45]
his parents left him and decided to eat dinner early. For some reason, Mixx had made him rather hungry. Putting a pickled ume fruit into his mouth, his eyes widened with pleasure. Next he tried the salmon, closing his eyes to savor the experience. He had never appreciated his sense of taste as much as he did in that moment. It was like every bud on his tongue had its capabilities enhanced tenfold.

When he had finished his meal, Mael wandered into his bedroom and collapsed on his bed, admiring the spirals the paint on the surrounding walls formed in his mind. After what seemed like a small eternity, for time had completely slowed down since the youth ingested Mixx, he shifted his gaze to the nos
talgic “Baburugamu kuraishisu
[46]
” poster he kept on his wall. He had had a tough enough time finding an image of this old work on the net and printing it off for his wall, but all that effort paled in comparison with the kind of interest he showed in the poster at that moment.