Chapter 128: Medicinal Heart Attacks
The afternoon sun came through the panoramic glass in one wide warm band by the time Nia and I settled into Nora’s room for the sched, and on the desk in front of the radio set, twenty injectors stood waiting in two neat rows.
Black, palm-sized, label-less, with a little red dot on half of them and a blue one on the other half, all of them lined up like drugs at a party, which was more or less what they were.
I called up the damage anyway, because some wounds need looking at.
"System... Balance."
-Ding!
{
Balance: 1,714,500 Credits.
}
[Nine and a half million... poofed]
Tikki hopped up onto the desk while I was busy mourning, and walked the length of both rows with his nose working overtime. Then he looked up at me for one long second and left the room with his tail held straight up.
"Even your quality control department just walked out on you..." Nia said from the operator’s chair, watching him go.
"He’s had one of these before..." I replied with a shrug. "He knows exactly what’s coming."
We had talked the whole thing through, the two of us, over a breakfast neither of us finished, the doses and the order and what the increments would do to a body.
Nia had asked her questions one by one, and her answer at the end of all of them had been yes.
Now we just needed everyone else’s.
So Nia spun the dial two clicks, checked the clock, and keyed the mic right on the hour.
"Home to West, home to West... Morning sched, and your two favorite patients come bearing an agenda~"
-Kzzzt-
"...An agenda," Kara said, suspicion already loaded into her voice. "What did he do this time?"
"Why do you always assume it’s me..." I said into the mic.
"What did you do, Nikki?" Kara deadpanned.
"I bought something."
"How much was the something?"
"Nine and a half million."
The static hissed on for a long moment, and somewhere on their end a chair creaked under somebody sitting down very slowly.
"...Out of the eleven we had," Kara said.
"Out of the eleven we had," I confirmed.
"I would like to calmly state, for the record," Nora came in, wearing her most formal register like a lawyer’s coat, "... that my big brother spent nine and a half million credits overnight, in a single purchase, and that I am being extremely normal about it."
"What did you buy, big bro?" Leo asked, careful as always.
So I gave it to them plain.
"Twenty enhancers... Ten Physiological, ten Cognition. The Physiological ones rebuild the body... make it stronger, faster, tougher, and every dose multiplies whatever you currently are by a factor of one point five. So they stack on themselves... and believe me, the numbers at higher increments go stupid. The Cognition ones do the same thing for everything upstairs... reflexes, memory, processing, learning speed. With my TK out of order for who knows how long, all Nia and I have left is our hands... So the plan is, we upgrade the hands. Five and five for each of us."
"And for the record, he didn’t decide this alone," Nia added, leaning in over my shoulder toward the mic. "He pitched the whole thing to me, answered every question I threw at him, and I signed off with the one working hand I’ve currently got... which should tell you how good the pitch was."
"How are they administered?" Mr. Norton asked, and everyone west went quiet around the question, because this part of the conversation belonged to him.
"The Physiological one goes directly on the heart," I said. "The injector does the aiming, so you just press it to the chest and fire... and then for the next several minutes it feels like a full-blown heart attack, because as far as your body can tell, that’s exactly what’s happening. The Cognition one goes on the temple, and that one feels like your brain swelling against the inside of your own skull, with a piercing pain riding along the whole while... Also several minutes. Also survivable... I’ve done one of each before, so I’m speaking from experience."
-Kreek-!
"Dude, on the heart?!" Nora detonated somewhere behind. "You’re planning to give yourself FIVE heart attacks?! On PURPOSE?!"
"Medicinally..." I corrected.
"Oh, well, MEDICINALLY, that changes everything, please carry on-"
"Nora." Norton again, level as a table. "Nikki... about the injectors themselves. Twenty identical units and no labels. How do you tell the heart ones from the head ones?"
"The injectors with the red little dot are Physiological Enhancers... the ones with the blue dot are Cognition Enhancers..."
The pause that came back down the line was a long one, and when he spoke again, he had already finished deciding everything he was about to say.
"Understood. Then you will do this slowly, son," Mr. Norton spoke over the static, "... and you will do it my way... Not ten doses in an afternoon, or whatever it was you were planning."
"I was planning ten doses in an afternoon..." I admitted.
"I know you were," he said. "We will spread it over two days... One injector every hour or two, and you alternate the lines, Physiological then Cognition, so neither system takes two beatings in a row... light and easily digestible meals between every dose, and a nap in the middle. You are stopping that heart five times in two days, and it needs to be rested for every single one of them."
"The clock, though-"
"Two days out of twenty-five," Kara said, quiet now. "... Nikki, we can spend two days making sure your own medicine doesn’t kill you... Besides, those enhancements are worth it."
I looked over at Nia, who shrugged her good shoulder at me like the matter had never really been in question.
"...Fine," I said into the mic. "Two days..."
There was a short pause on their end, and then Leo’s voice came through slow and a little amused.
"Huh... You agreed... just like that."
"Don’t make it weird, Leo."
"Then let’s make it official," Kara said, "All in favor of these two injecting themselves into super soldiers over the next two days, under Mr. Norton’s schedule, say aye."
"Aye," Leo said, first and without ceremony.
"Aye... under loud formal protest regarding the recreational heart attacks," Nora said.
"Aye, on my schedule," Norton said.
"Aye~" Nia sang out beside me.
"Aye," I said.
"...Aye," Kara finished, with a long sigh riding underneath it. "And I’m timing all of it. Doses, meals, sleep, everything..."
And from somewhere down the hallway, faint but unmistakable, one cracked little voice made it seven for seven.
"Mea."
[Unanimous...]
"Then eat first, both of you," Norton said. "A real meal, not whatever you two have been calling breakfast... First injection in one hour, Physiological. I want that heart rested before you go stopping it."
The channel clicked over into soft static, and the afternoon kept pouring in across the desk, lying warm over twenty small black injectors that were going to hurt us very badly and make us so very, very strong.
"One hour," she said, grinning at me sideways.
[...God help my heart.]