BigC cold turkey is always fatal. It is a life sentence. A death sentence. Malta's endless golden grasslands; you can checkout any time you like but you can never leave.
Ruzicka had the antidote to all that. Catalyst couldn't stop the mutation, far from it, it tended metastasize at a faster rate, spreading throughout the whole system in a matter of hours. What it did supply was control over the result of the mutation.

Later, in one of very many identical suites dotted around Sirius: Suppose, Ruzicka had said. All those Outcasts, poor bastards stuck with a brandy-barrel round their necks, suppose they could mutate off the stuff, Bittercress, Cressida, the Big C. What would keep them tied to Alpha? We could free an entire race of people. We would be heroes. We would be rich. We would be part of history.
His face was lit up with his third Sidewinder and the glow of original patents. Your horror at having to learn to make the stuff, Heike: Sidewinder Fang; So provincial. You caught my eye, and I think you misread my amusement at your distaste. You only spoke to me on a maintenance basis for several days after. Was that the beginning?

Freeing the oppressed masses? Cryer brass hadn't seen it that way. There was a roaring trade to be done, with a captive audience. The way of the future, a bigger slice of the cake, Skunk Cress, Synthetic BigC, Bigger, Better, Faster, More.
With our help, Ruzicka fled Cryer, The coding for Catalyst was with him. All we had to do was get to the right people in the Alpha families, to cut a deal.
I shuttled between Freeport 7 in the Sigmas and a variety of safe houses. Countless meetings with ever more powerful suits from our clients. Working my way up, with a few favours on either side; a disappearance here, a delivery there. The money came in handy but wasn't that important, I was focussed, maybe too focussed. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty, looking back it's all a bit fuzzy. Especially where the BigC is concerned.

Ruzicka, poor little guy, was easily amused. I got him a DNA coder. Really very bad tech to be caught with in Kusari, but it kept him from getting bored and trying to enlist me in the dream of saving the Outcast people. It also allowed me to get on with the serious business of feeding my habit.
Initially, Heike, you gave me a lot of hassle about the coder, it complicated things, added risk to our situation, it could earn us an orbital zap if it was detected, you said, I pointed out that we were dead anyway if either Cryer or Alpha found us and got Ruzicka, you didn't relent, but grew resigned to it in after a few days - it kept him occupied and out of your hair too.
He was okay though, short but lean, an enthusiast. God, with a drink inside him, he could talk couldn't he? You switched off and walked away after a few minutes of his chatter, his self conscious mateyness. I didn't mind him, but then I was stoned most of the time when I wasn't flying. It's amazing how small a suite can be when you can't go outside whenever you want.
A couple of days in, he hands me a small cylindrical flask from the coder. I almost drop it, smoothed out as I am with the slow downward slide off the Bitter rush. If I ever want out, he tells me. I take it to mean that it's a poison. I contemplate the likelihood of you using it on him, Heike...or on me given the deterioration of our relationship.

Time passes. Ruzicka codes some Catalyst apparently successfully. I decline to try it. You suggest I take the flask to a meeting with out clients; they can't decode it from the compiled materiel, they will need the source coding to make their own. If it works, it will clinch the deal.

Buddha: Wet grey light flares off his most excellent upper slopes. His expression is, I search for the appropriate phrase, impassive? no, it's not like he doesn't care. Meditative.
Lying on a concrete floor, Water pooling at my cheek I see Buddha sideways-on. Nothing new there, in my world view. I manage occasionally to inhale a little water through a hole which has conveniently grown in the side of my face. A voice:
"And what is the treasure of virtue? There is the case where a disciple of the noble ones abstains from taking life, abstains from stealing, abstains from illicit sexual conduct, abstains from lying, abstains from taking intoxicants that cause heedlessness. This, monks, is called the treasure of virtue."
Maybe I should strive to be virtuous from now on... You're kidding me right?

I return to the safe house, slightly stoned, from meeting representatives from our buyers, to find Ruzicka apparently in the late stages of acute toxic shock. Where are you, Heike?
In two hours, he has gone from healthy to convulsions, bloody spittle from his chin. The room smells very bad. There is no apparent cause. Hospitals are out of the question; the only thing I can think to do is use Catalyst on him. This I do, two hours later a blood test kit reveals him to be completely healthy, wrapped in a micropore blanket and laid on the couch without a care in the world. Unfortunately by this stage he is also quite dead. I lose it completely for about ten minutes, before taking more BitterCress.

Where are you, Heike?

There is a chime from the lab workstation perched on the end of the glass topped dining table. The script has quietly run its course some fourteen quadrillion times in four hours, coding the same complex molecular chain each time. Though I wasn't paying attention before, I am aware that it should be combining variants for iterative testing.
The internal microcuvette seals are missing. The molecules created in the machine are free in the room.
I lose no time at all in hosing the entire room with BlueGoo(tm), pausing only to choke back another handful of Alpha's finest. The spansules stick in the back of my fear-parched throat. I spend critical minutes trying not to choke, before trying to drink the blue cleanser to wash it down. It is like trying to drink paint gel. I later realise that this action would have been self-defeating anyway. I now want to be anywhere else but here, in a big hurry. I sweat it out in the Tahoe ice cloud for three days. I don't die. Bonus.

__________________________________________
...jack the sound barrier - bring the noise.

I go back to our suite...and find the mountain of spansules.
What did they offer you, Heike. Was it Cryer who did this?

I trail around Cryer people for several weeks, subtly checking out the routes of information. I get nowhere. It isn't even fast, my getting nowhere.
Over time I come to the conclusion that I'm looking at this the wrong way; Cryer security, though beefed up considerably since we snatched Ruzicka, has not reacted to his death, which implies that they may not know. Or care.
The only other party in this affair live in Alpha.
I trail through Outcast territory, listen to stories in bars. I discern your wake, Heike.

So Heike, correct me if I am wrong, but you wacked Ruzicka for the Outcast Dons. After all, and this is only conjecture, if the Alpha population could get free of the essence that both drives them and binds them, they would leave Malta and perhaps begin to integrate with the rest of the home systems. In short they would leave Malta empty. No more golden razor-grass, no more getting sick and dying if you forget your respirator. No more intubating your own kids and hanging a tin can round their necks.
No more workforce available to be indentured to maintain the cartel drug trade. No more trade, or at least a severe downturn as your captive audience goes awol. Tell me Heike; am I getting warmer?

I follow the BitterCress trail.
I missed you at Ainu by a few days, Mactan by a few hours. I thought I glimpsed you flashing past, a blaze of Cherenkov blue, in the opposite lane as I left the Freeport in 17. By the time I get turned around it was too late.
I sometimes wonder if what I saw is the way that it happened. I have seen it so many different ways on the news.

I still miss you baby.

I sit in my latest hiding place. Utility space on the two hundred fortieth floor of HappyCam(tm). Mount Fuji. The lights of Ginza casting long ethereal splashes of colour. The twelve by six hut, sloping walls of smoked glass matching the side of the arcology, a horizontal ledge to one side, louvres of black alloy vents providing shade and continuity over an array of boxy heat exchangers from the floor below. I fashion a hovel here, little more than an old pilots chair and an even older news screen, yellowing at the edges with wear. Bijou residence, compact and bijou I grant you. But just take in that two-hundred-fortieth-floor view.

Growing cold from the inside outwards, I scan channel after channel of news, all showing the same few faces, stumbling, blearily into the media spotlight at Manhattan. The endless procession of those same pitifully few faces; your own not among them.
I finally want out. Sinking into myself, weeping, I take it all, everything I can find. That bittersweet rush casting out all control. All the BitterCress spansules and the entire content of Ruzicka's flask that has worn a ridge in the side of my chest in these last days. It never makes it to my throat, but seems to run through my flesh. I panic. I fall over, the concrete of the ledge leaps up to playfully smack me in the face. I lose teeth that melt before my eyes. I lie still as the tsunami breaks over the entire world.
Buddha watches over me. It is enough to get a poor boy religion.

Buddha sits before me, benevolent and calming, fireflies dance between us. Sometime later I dream of falling, trapped in wreckage. I wake in panic, the gritty deck pressing down on my face, my left arm trapped, pinned by my side. I press back with my free arm, a futile attempt to delay the inevitable crushing. I feel my skull creak under the load. A yelp escapes me, I think it might have been your name, Heike. I push with all my strength - and , amazingly, the world turns around me, grey sky replacing concrete. I lie on my back and take in my surroundings. Buddha watches me impassively from his position amidst the towers of New Tokyo. The rain falls.

Three days after forcing myself upright: My vision is shot; late stage cataracts. My surroundings like badly edited sepia footage from a bygone age. My hair has fallen out but the hole in the side of my face has healed over. I wake in my pilot's chair and automatically spend three hours punching in a flightplan for Sigma 17. It usually takes a couple of minutes, but the autopilot is on the fritz; the screen keeps flickering through different modes. I am exhausted and frustrated. I sleep for a bit. I wake forty eight hours later in front of the entertainment screen. The remote in my hand. Outside, through the louvres, Buddha patiently waits for me to get a life.

When my vision clears a little and I can walk without falling over, I immediately go out on the street to score some more BC. I shoot it there and then, even though I, curiously, don't really feel like it. There is none of the bittersweet rush, no racing pulse. Instead I become aphasic, unable to get across to the dealer that his product is cut to the point of uselessness. I rage about umbrellas, a corduroy flag. I am not getting through to him. He laughs at me. My left arm goes numb, I take this as a sign and leave.
Returning to my hole in the wall. It's not even like I want to get high any more. I was just bored of being stared at by ol' meditating-boy. He is still there, all fourteen stories of him, when I finally reach my chair.

I have some money, but it is gradually dwindling. In the old days I could easily have burned through it in one night of entertainment. Now it seems to trickle down like sand, one grain at a time. I don't eat much.
I bought a ship again - I killed the last one as there was too much chance of infection after your little parlour trick, Heike. My hair grew back selectively, so I shave my head now. My face has changed, but not so much that you wouldn't recognise me, it has a geometrically flat surface, from the temple to the back on the left hand side. I think I may have grown up...a little.
I can't really get excited about smuggling any more. Or inter-faction espionage.
Sometimes I wonder if you really existed at all, Heike, your camera-shyness affording me no record of your face. My own memory of you swirls with dark dreams of another time. I have been very ill, but now I'm better and there is work to do.

I shave before setting out again, with extra care. I use a straight razor which really tests the steadiness of my hand. One day I'll find the corner I've always looked for and turn it, and there you'll be.
But, for now, I reflect: Your face, like condensation on the mirror, stopped me from seeing who I really am.



__________________________________________
...jack the sound barrier - bring the noise.

Edited by - alwyncooper on 1/10/2005 10:03:10 AM

i like it its gud

Wow, this is nice, very very nice. I really like the way you write the story. It's like a pro's story but it's on FL. Keep it up!

The Sirian Rogues, Scourge of the Sirius.
Unprotected Trade Convoy freight, is our freight >

Hand over the cargo or die...Either way, I'm taking your cargo

Thank you very much for your encouraging words.
It's mostly a homage to my favourite writers, William Gibson, Michael Marshall Smith and Neal Stephenson. With a nod to various others thrown in.
I don't get much time to write, but with a favourable response I'll certainly have another go.

__________________________________________
...jack the sound barrier - bring the noise.

I really like it.

It's dark. It's moody. It's crisp and doesn't hold back. Please write more.

Heike? I know a little about this subject, how a lowly subject falls in love with a princess or something?

ttfn

I really admire your style of writing. Keep it up