The morning stirs with a distant ring from Cade’s Existence. His body sits upright on the edge of the bed. His mind goes static across the skyline. A Nightjar glides to a delicate landing on the sill and ruffles its scaly feathers. Three feet and half an inch of glass stand between Cade and the curious, prehistoric-looking bird. It finds Cade with a black eye that demands, What are you thinking? At this hour, the best reply he can manage is a blushed quasi-glance that responds, There is no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do… The Nightjar leaves a swirl of green waste and shifts out across the city. Cade trails it until it dives behind the horizon and is replaced by a flit of sun.
The city below him unfolds in rows of color-coded tenements – the dwellings of low souls and feeble minds, all lives cut and dried. Cade once heard some knife-nosed Overlords on the third-tier murmur that the closer you are to street level, the closer you are to your Existence. He presses his face against the cold glass window and looks down. Brief mental calisthenics determine that it would take three seconds to fall to the street and approximately seven minutes to climb all thirty flights to his floor. From this, he extracts a metaphor for gratitude and smiles, gratefully.
The only walls in Cade’s loft enclose the bathroom and all to be seen in the main room is a primitive dinner table and a swing bolted to the rafters with its trajectory extending out a window. The swing provides the occasional contemplation of self-eradication and a few laughs at dinner parties. The table is made from wood planks said to be harvested from the barn of our 43rd president.
Information on George W. Bush Jr. was scarce. Cade was ecstatic when he got his hands on an old picture book that showed the former president mounting a steely Percheron and roping cattle. He’s especially enamored by a picture of Bush Junior kneeling to hog-tie a calf. It’s a captivating composition with strong lines that guide the eye from a proud yet aloof president down to the ground to the murderous scowl of the calf. When Subterraneans bomb a pharmacy or annual tickers show China ahead by a quarton, Cade takes down the book and stares at that picture for five, sometimes ten minutes. The meditation has a way of reviving his pride for country and dinner table.
But Cade is no monk. Some ninety percent of his belongings lay underneath gleaming slabs of morrisonite flooring. If he wants to watch the migratory patterns of snow geese, which fly in a series of symbols believed to belong to an ancient human alphabet, he need only press a button and up rises his cremrose sofa. If his many limbs have atrophied from a 120-hour work week, the Ellipticon will shlang up and trigger Holojim, a sadistic holo-trainer.
Holojim is supposed to be cruel, that’s the point, but Cade draws the line where his insults breach the perverse. Just last week he had Cade on a foreset, but he went beta in the twenties and Holojim demanded that he finish or he would flood his subtube with footage of geladas giving birth for the next 72 hours. Cade could finish the reps, but the threat of having his subconscious hacked was now a matter of principle that mustn’t be ignored. After a grueling volley of obscenities, they stood fast in their stalemate. If Cade refused to submit, Holojim now threatened to infiltrate his firewall and give his system Abraxas5 – the human equivalent of herpes for a Local System. Unbeknownst to Holojim, Cade recently installed Backdraft 66.6 and in the few days the firewall has been on the market there have been zero intrusions reported on both personal and local systems. Cade pigeonholed his paranoia to address a more imminent concern, Holojim’s disease-ridden hardware. He shut down the LS and retired the defective holo-trainer. Days later, Holojim was debugged after coming up positive for fifteen System to System Transmitted Diseases.
Cade loves his earthly possessions. They represent years of monotonous labor. But this love is secondary to his affinity for mind abuse. He’s nursed a daily habit for twelve years now. Mind abuse, also known as free thought or meditation, is the closest one can drift to their Existence without being hauled off to reclamation. It’s a complex process that aims to rid the mind of the mandated and desensitizing pharmafog. Pharms have, without a doubt, improved the efficiency and duration of life, but there are still some with an insatiable curiosity for the bare, unrefined reality.
After two years of mind abuse, Cade cleared the living space for Kundalini yoga and contemplations from an ancient text, On Being and Nothingness. He was struggling to see past the objects around him. Glimpses of pristine voids were disrupted by anxieties of dust anomalies lurking under the sofa. Yearnings, no, salivatings for extended exposures to this intoxicating clarity were matched by his love lust for material things so Cade compromised. He worked twenty hours of overtime a week for one-hundred and twelve weeks and installed a moveable floor. All this for the hope that one day he will open his eyes and find himself suspended in space and time with the material world gone forever.
* * *
Cade moves to the kitchen space, gurgling a wail like that of the kookaburra. This triggers the jaba machine which spatters out his morning quad. The perplexo reeks the sweet punge of grabuberri. This elixir is exquisite, he thinks while moving to the living space and opening the window in front of the swing. He climbs on, upturns the perplexo, and pumps defiant thrusts against gravity until his body lingers out the thirty-story window. Sometimes he swings when he is feeling perplexed. The morning breeze mixed with the terror has a stimulating effect.
He contemplates the day ahead. His official position is Second Tier Overlord at FDA Subsect Five. In short, Cade is responsible for counting, shipping and testing state-of-the-art pharms before they hit the market.
Counting and boxing are Cade’s least favorite details. Ten conveyor belts run in eight hour increments, hustling a varicolored weave of tablets and capsules. He lords over twenty-three Liners – two per line and an extra three to pick up the slack. They sort through the ongoing current of pharms, ensuring all the same siblings are headed for the same home. In one minute, a swarm of twenty-five thousand pills could pass by a single belt. Significant injury to extremities occurred on a weekly basis and it’s beginning to cause some problems so the FDA is installing small hospitals in each subsect.
By now you are perhaps envisioning Cade with his fat feet propped up, barking orders at some Lexichrome junkies. But such imaginings couldn’t be further from the truth. Half of these guys don’t even have the mandatory three years of Pharmacognosy. They fuck things up on a regular basis but Cade keeps them on because they are never late and they never complain when their eyes start to bleed. He has discovered that the smarter workers are usually the fastest but they inevitably throw crying fits and file formal complaints and basically fuck up the works before year one.
Pre-pharm testing is, by far, the most entertaining part of the job. The FDA sends out pre-tested pre-pharms to select pharmacies and sells them at half-price with consumer report software. These pharms have yet to receive the FDA’s hallowed stamp of approval, but people who are bold enough, or cheap enough, can give them a whirl and send in a detailed report of all the side effects.
While those brave consumers are doing a necessary civic duty, Cade and the second tier boys are running a three-ring circus of trial and error. The first ring is strictly chemical. Samples of a specific drug are set to withstand the standard hydrofluoric wash, a boron tribromide bath and a flanking of fumaryl chloride. Slight loss of coloring is acceptable, but if a tablet or capsule dissolves by any measurable amount, that pharm is sent back to ring one. The average human gut contains thirty-three synthetic acids. If a high dose of triglycerall hit that acid bath and dissolved within an hour, the result would be explosive.
The second ring is trial by mammal. Each morning, large crates of swine, opossum and proboscis monkeys are wheeled in from the service elevator and fed extravagant three course meals, which are almost always their last. Some of the guys say Cade is soft for treating these creatures with such kindness. Cade couldn’t care less. He sees the beasts as noble suicide soldiers, willing to lay down their lives for the sake of the FDA. Sometimes, in secret of course, he would weep when a lifeless carcass was wheeled off the floor.
The final ring, and by far the most controversial, is dedicated to human testing. The subjects are lifers from reclamation who committed unspeakable acts while under the influence of Existence. Patients serving life at Reclamation have the option of self-extermination but with the gauntlet of hoops to jump through it could be ten years before your ticket is called. If a patient wants to expedite their extermination and enjoy a few days of Existence while they’re at it, they can offer themselves up to the FDA for ring-three testing.
Cade has a certain fascination with the test subjects, especially when they are in the throes of their Existence. Sometimes, when no one was around, he would press himself against their glass encasing and wonder what it felt like. Their bodies were small and simple. Eyeballs slipped back behind the nose. Teeth quiet and still. They’d lay flat and extend their bodies long ways, muscles moving real calm and easy. Sometimes they’d have a thought and their jaw would clank open and spew a howling up from their chest. Finkle lost sleep wondering what sort of thought could invoke this peculiar reaction. Unfortunately, there were strict laws preventing him from asking the patients himself.
* * *
The sun is up screaming over the horizon. Cade considers launching himself from the swing. He imagines tucking in his knees and completing five, maybe six backflips before he hits the ground. He pumps a few more times and decides against it.
Cade moves to the bathroom. A throbbing pain pulses through his body, indicating that yesterday’s pharms have completely dissolved. There is a solution for this problem and most others and that solution is strictly chemical. Before stepping in front of the bathroom mirror, he recites the first twenty-six decimals of pi, causing a galvanized shield to sling down in front of it.
It’s imperative to avoid looking oneself in the mirror. An entire ward at the hospital is full of people gone downright cryogenic after catching their own eyes for two flat seconds. Once you’ve gone cryo not even fifty ceecee’s of Pineachrome can slap you back out of it. No pharm can. You could come to on another planet. You could come to and discover that you are the last person on Earth.
Dosing up is the most significant event of Cade’s day. Without it, he would be nothingness. Transphetamines, Concentrax, even good ol’ fashioned Methylcarbox will do the trick. Of course he has his preferences, but ultimately they all take him to the same place.
He sets square before his most prized possession, a Sterling Pharma Sovereign, equipped with retinal recognition and pinprick blood familiarity. The safe sprockets to a jump start and greets him with the customary, insultary “Good morning, you look like shit.” to which Cade responds “Well howbout you shimmy your lazy ass open so I can wipe this shit off my face?” Those are the magic words. Now the safe, or Sterling as Cade calls him, shoots laser beams in his eye balls, plunges a five-inch syringe inside his kidney and slurps out a rather greedy blood sample. The tests are passed, Sterling sings the star-spangled banner and clacks open.
Sterling is kept at a balmy eighty-five degrees. Newer models sing Gospel and give you an extra cubic foot, but Cade is a tenor in the work choir and he knows his pharms better than his mother, so he knows these additions would be simply gratuitous. Sterling came equipped with five slipdraw shelves, each housing thirty-six digestible cubby holes, and that’s all that was needed.
His body is eating itself on the inside. In a fluster of fluid motions, he flips the slips and crackpops the top seven. That’s thirty feebs of Drexler, ten on Supernaut, fifty feebs of the most delicious Fanferonade money can buy, twelve point five of Hexedron, a twenty milly slurp of Oxonite and five feebs of Leeronesh to top it off. “Wait for it… Wait for it…” he says.
Blood surges around his track of arteries. The motor ka-chunk-ka-chunk-ka-chunks at about three hundred arpeems. It’s going so fast it’s boiling now. Alligator veins protrude and bubble up under the epidermis. He blurts out Shpackle and the mirror guard flings itself closed. Now he sees all of him. Transformation is the fun part, he thinks. Fun, but painful. He steps closer to the mirror and leans in. Pupils consume his irises. A considerable suction slurps his eyeballs back into his skull. Then – for the action there is reaction - and the pressure that was pulling in pushes out and his eyeballs are set bulging.
The first rush is always the fastest. Before Cade moves to the next shelf down, anti-excitements, he blurs into the kitchen where he prepares and consumes a wheat grass smoothie and eggs benedict all in a matter of forty-five seconds.
Cade crackpops the next row of five: Alarmasol, Eunerta, Alopexa, Clamadol and Rammex. He gurgles them down one at a time. Then he waits for it. Anti-excitements don’t have quite the effect on the circulatory system that stimulants do. Mostly, it’s a thick phog that comes and floods your mind and your vision. Of course, there’s the piercing ring in the ears, but when the fog lets up you realize that the ringing belongs to a bell in a lighthouse and if you follow the light in the tower you can find your way out. The physical side effects aren’t so bad. Most of your hair falls out immediately. Cade is prepared for this. He has installed a high-powered vacuum under the cabinets at his feet. All he has to do is spin around once and grab his crotch in a singular thrusting motion and the vacuum comes slurping and sucking to life.
After the chute has ingested all of his hair, Cade starts gently massaging his face. A trick he learned from the Dr. Cromwell Show. This helps with the stretch marks sometimes associated with face melting. His skin goes sloppy and drabble. So loose that his fingers protrude past his jaw and into his throat and he gives up the massaging all together. The flesh of his forehead hangs down partly over his bulging eyes, giving him a ghoulish expression. For this pesky face melting Cade has constructed a mask that keeps his skin packed and prevents his face from disrupting his line of sight or damming up those holes essential to his survival. He retrieves the mask from a cabinet and begins molding his face in position. This may be the most tedious part of Dosing Up. It takes two hands to mold half his face in the proper position then he’s got to switch to the other side with a quickness or all his hard work goes drooping away. Today his hands finesse his flesh like a great clay sculptor from antiquity and it only takes one go.
This last round of pharms is for Cade’s frail, 42-year-old body. Painkillers and skeletal muscle relaxers. He started noticing the calcium deposits in his elbows after five years on the job. They’re like swollen clumps of bone matter resulting from constant grinding on the joints. He’s lost three inches over the past ten years.
He gobbles down the pharms and waits for it. Eyes bulge out of the mask with all the faceless tranquility of nirvana. His feet float a few inches off the ground, body suspended, detached from gravity. But the euphoria slips away as he is gently returned to the floor and two sets of five fingers start clawing out from inside his torso. They’re made visible through the flesh stretched translucent at his sides. Pushing and poking further and further, they finally break through, bringing with them a second set of arms.
A swarming itch crawls over his body. He swats and slaps his flesh, replacing one pain with another. A clock on the wall tells him only thirty seconds remain of the first wave. Down to ten – the poor boy drops and rolls across the floor. He goes beta with three seconds left and digs his nails into his forearm. He claws at it good and proper until the wave is a thing of distant memory.
The source of scratching on his forearm goes deep red to purple then ivory white before, like clockwork, a thick patch of black fur sprouts up. The first time this happened he tried to shave it off but the fur choked his electric razor and broke his scissors. Fortunately, he discovered that the fur falls off in his sleep. All he has to do is endure two more waves.
* * *
Quarter to eight, spot on the dot of time,,,punching-in time that is. Cade slips on his dark blue jumpsuit, specially tailored for all his arms, and retrieves his pre-packed lunch from the ice box. On his way out the door he hollers “ah-beep-ba-deep-ba-deep... that’s all folks!” and everything he left turned on goes back to sleep.
The sidewalk is a traveling zoo of gnarled human bodies, some too disfigured to recognize as human. The Lexichrome-heads crawl on all four paws. Others move backwards on their way forwards. Cade nearly flattens a pod of joggers standing three-inches tall. Each building comes with doors of all shapes and sizes. Despite this gross conglomeration of humanity, everyone moves in unison – the little ones catch rides on the shoulders of giants. The giants thank the little ones when they shout up at them that their shoelaces are untied. Even Cade plays his part, scooping up four runaway children and kindly returning them to their mother. She smiles a smile that says something suggestive, seductive perhaps? Cade looks down at his feet, smirks something about his loft on the thirtieth floor.
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