2. SaDex Drip #2

18:88:88 EST WEDNESDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2059:

He swallowed a litre and a half of water, paused to breathe and swallowed another litre.

Whatever they had been up to in his digestive tract, it had been commercially sensitive - the kind of thing they would rather keep from general exposure. Carelessly, Cruciate had given Proteus the right to keep him there as long as their ‘biological property’ remained in his gut - which, now he considered it, could be forever.

With their goods in his belly and without having legally reassumed ownership of his body, Cruciate was in felonious breach of contract and doubtless they would be coming for him.

He had remained at large two weeks. He had gone to ground in this grim, complicated region of St Kilda and, day by day, was discovering the nature of what he carried in his stomach.

He seated himself on the toilet pan. His shit was like a bird’s. When he flushed, it sudded like soap.

He sighed. Maybe there was still some SaDex in the dripsac.


18:88:88 EST WEDNESDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2059:

There wasn’t.

He felt a clench of disappointment in his solar plexus.

The wonderland of clams was gone from the window. Now a great chromium-plated machine with a non-threatening demeanour went through its graceful paces.

- CPF300: Silver Friend –

Desolately, Cruciate kneaded the plastic dripsac. Bone dry.

SaDex had the not-necessarily-annoying property of excising one’s memory. He had drained the sac last night. He was painfully aware of that now.

- Nguyen & Nguyen. Since 2015. Still the Leader in Peripheral Technology –

But, like any committed drug-user, Cruciate had a back-up.

There was no drip tray beneath the gravity-feed apparatus. With each administration several droplets of the thick SaDex colloid smattered on the brick-red dacron carpet. Cruciate had automatically logged this information in his subconscious and in the current desperate circumstances it rose to the surface.

He was sure he could process that piece of carpet for at least a single dose of the synthetic alkaloidoid that was his drug of choice.

- Intelligent, Incisive –

With a blunt Stanley Knife, he cut out the square-decimetre directly beneath the dripsac.

Beyond the window, the gleaming peripheral adroitly negotiated a domestic services contract with an officer from a utilites provider.

- Obliging, Amusing, Accommodating –

In the kitchen, Cruciate boiled up some tap water in a misshapen aluminium saucepan. He added the carpet scrap.

The peripheral checked the feedlines of a convalescing suburbanite who laughed at the machine’s pleasant banter.

- CPF 300: Our Latest Model: Your Most Reliable Friend -

18:88:88 EST WEDNESDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2059:

The carpet came apart into a watery stew. With constant heat, it thickened into a pale orange paste.

Cruciate filtered out most of the solids and was left with a litre of bad-looking liquid laced with acrylic fibres.

He tasted it. Tart. Chemical. He smiled.

Distantly, The Realistic yammered; a distorted, disembodied voice. He would get down to some serious viewing in a moment or two.

18:88:88 EST WEDNESDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2059:

Cruciate sat in the window’s gaudy light, careful not to let the crack in the orange polypropylene stool nip his buttocks. Painstakingly, he siphoned the mixture into the dripsac, picking as many fibres from it as he could.

He inspected the crutch of his arm. Dr Winebald’s work was characteristically shoddy - the flesh around the clear plastic spigot was hard, inflamed; the vein was cysted, collapsing, and administration of the SaDex colloid was agonising.

But he could ignore all that once the drug kicked in.

He fumbled with spigot and feedline, making a connection. A rivulet of deep red streamed down his forearm.

He took a lungful of cigarette smoke and vomited on his V-shirt.

2. SaDex Drip #1

18:88:88 EST WEDNESDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2059:

Cruciate stirred in a warm nest of bubblewrap. A little box beside him - the Realistic - blared in harsh, metallic tones:

- Nutritech’s Dietary Strategy for the World –

The Realistic blinked stupidly. Involuntarily, Cruciate checked the time, forgetting again that its LCD was snagged on 18:88:88. He had found the clock-radio in an aggregation of fusty rubbish in the corner and used it to receive AM transmissions from the expanse of videoboard outside his window, despite his tendency to be fooled by its dead clock function.

- Restoring the Consumer’s Right to Choose -

Above a thin white weasel nose, Cruciate’s bluish eyelids closed and he was asleep.

- And an End to the Tyranny of Undifferentiated Fungal Protein....

18.88.88 EST WEDNESDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2059:

- Three Thousand Submarine Hectares of Hearty Biomass –

Hearty biomass...

Something salty and savoury formicated on Cruciate’s tongue... Occasional burps carried the smell of something composting...

In his paramnesiac stupor, he identified it...

Hearty biomass...

- A Daily Yield of Nine Hundred Melt-in-the-Mouth Tonnes of Tender Adductor Muscle -

Cruciate was awake with flecks of pain in his throat, welling ache-nodes in his legs and spine, an unnatural nausea in his gut.

He was careful not to burn his hands as he lit a micromild on the glowing bar of a battered electric radiator he had found with the clock-radio. As he regarded the compacted strata of cigarette ash that dulled the chromium reflection surfaces, he visualised a C20 soul-brother doing just what he was doing now: discovering unintended versatility in this ancient, appealingly dangerous appliance.

- Clamchow: The Ocean is the Ultimate Solution –

Next: thirst.

Through the window, and beyond a sort of undulating green membrane, he saw a vista of the ocean floor, impossibly crowded with giant clams.

18:88:88 EST WEDNESDAY 26 FEBRUARY 2059:

Crunching through the scattering of Wiggletot wrappers and insulin casings left by a previous tenant, he made it to the niche that served as both kitchen and bathroom. He was lucky to have facilities. The squat had been a timely, almost miraculous find - a bastardised living space in a deteriorated apartment bank called The Bayview, crammed between a stained chipboard partition and the crumbling once-exterior wall of an adjacent building that still sported a flaking cat food advertisement.

Now the painted cat, poised by its can of Bounce!, cast a jolly gaze upon Cruciate as he vomited into the shallow toilet pan.

Green-grey porridge.

Distantly. From the living room:

- ClamChow: Invest now -

He remained over the bowl, waiting for the next spasm.

They had done something to Cruciate in the wards at Proteus. He had not eaten in two weeks and, though it solved many problems, he couldn’t help but worry. In his flight-bag there was packaged food still within its useby, but the thought of it set off a sharp, uncomfortable feeling in his gut. He wondered what his body was consuming as fuel. He wondered what the stuff in the pan was.

He vomited. It looked like fung.

He wiped a greyish-greenish foam from his mouth.

Thirst.

Over the last year, Cruciate had subsisted as an experimental subject for confidential medical procedures on the ethical fringe. Thus far, he had been fortunate; he had heard of others who had come from the Proteus wards with limbs like prickly pears and backbrains ready to govern the metabolism of a lobster. Even so, Cruciate’s toenails had come to resemble wet cardboard and a trial of the controversial melanin-pump had left him with a thatch of tortoiseshell-coloured hair which, thinking about it, he actually quite liked.

Cruciate rummaged through the tiny fridge, cold neon bringing the pocks and scars on his face into sharp relief.

But now things had turned sour. He could be in trouble. Proteus had it in their heads he was to be located and immediately returned to the wards from which - admittedly - he had prematurely discharged himself. Inadvertantly, he had caught a news update regarding the multiple deaths of Proteus experimental medical subjects, and the company’s complicity in suppression of the facts.

He fled, immediately, barely negotiating two hulking medics and a peripheral nurse.

1. Miss Semipalatinsk's Extraordinary Spasm #2

“What’s happening to her ?”

“Her molecules are seeking lower energy states, but you don’t need to worry about that.”

“How?” Mangels’ voice is frail in the attenuated atmosphere.

“A little way back we passed through a defensive sphere of microshells armed with homebrew nanoculture. Shabby. Fucks one up atomically. Reformats carbon into a crystal lattice, but Mangels...”

There are glowing orange patches of decay in the polyfluid hull; broad sections can be seen to sag as stricken machinery fails to maintain thresholds.

Yet Mangels will not leave.

“Two minutes now.”

He pays no attention to the peripheral. Single-mindedly, he makes hard work of collecting the jewels, which scatter like wilful insects.

“What are you doing?”

He makes a wild leap at a fizzing emerald, misses, rebounds painfully off an exercise rig.

“They’re not worth anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Help me.”

“Besides, you didn’t love her anyway.”

“Help me!”

Bolex considers the firm set of his jaw, and capitulates. With brisk efficiency, she begins to scoop up the gems with Ms Semipalatinsk’s vacant bodyglove.

The scent of freshly sharpened pencils fills the thinning air, indicating terminal deterioration in the hull material. The emergency tones grow strident.

“That’s all you can have,” says Bolex.

Circumventing Mangel’s awkward attempts to negotiate freefall, she cages him with her legs, speeds to the airlock and shoves him roughly into a zodiac. She secures him, then clambers in herself, punching the emergency release code with a slender, nervously quivering effector.

1. Miss Semipalatinsk's Extraordinary Spasm #1

Miss Semipalatinsk’s extraordinary spasm rips her body to pieces - but all Mangels sees is a flash of blurred motion.

Then a moment of clarity, a cloud of gorgeous jewels, scintillating in the rough shape of a woman. These crude contours then warp, stretch, compress to a dense sphere which explodes immediately in a spray of bright elastic. Again the iconography of the female body presents itself, before fracturing with the sound of breaking glass - and recreating itself a hundredfold.

Mangels cannot help but look at her - however mutilated, transformed. However monstrous her agony. Somehow, she is become the feminine mystery incarnate, coruscating in brilliant pieces, ricocheting hysterically from one end of his plush cabin to the other.

She is evolved and, at last, perfect.

Six months ago, Mangels plucked Ms Semipalatinsk 2037 from near-victory in a bogus international beauty quest. He has come to know her well since then. His affirmations of love have been many and mucid. She has been his constant companion through a full, hair-raising season of Solar Safari.

Yet these things are no longer important.

Suddenly and for the first time he can remember, he feels himself driven by an imperative not rooted in his glands. The germ of something sacred, a feminine quiddity, is exposing itself here, sloughing the girl’s base flesh as a lover, reckless for the touch of her partner’s skin, will desperately shed her clothes.

Mangels shows no sign of hearing the ship’s plangent distress tones. Absently, he tethers himself to a bulkhead as the atmosphere blows past towards a rent in the hull. Naked, but for a monogrammed jockstrap, he stares into what Miss Semipalatinsk is becoming…

A treasure beyond imagining.

Then loudly a generic female voice, urgent, intrusive...

“Raszewski’s out. Your turn now.” Bolex, the advenurer’s vintage Pratt & Whitney peripheral, is drifting towards him, legs trailing like the tentacles of a squid. “We’re compromised. The hull is shriveling. Counting four minutes to hard vacuum.”

But Mangels is transfixed. In her previous flesh the woman had been beautiful. Now she is transcendent...

“Mangels? You conscious?”

Bolex is beside him now, legs radiating from her shell like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, mooring her to the cabin walls.

“Kingsize chunk of frozen faecal matter. Mangels?”

There is no response.

“It totaled the airplant, Mangels. New Harmony is either weak on hygiene or very strong on make-do ballistics.”

With a beatific smile, Mangels allows himself to drift into the cloud of hot, miraculous jewels. He cannot abide the thought of leaving Ms Semipalatinsk.