Rule 34 - Charles Stross [65]
The nearest pharmacy turns out to be inside a red-brick Tesco superstore, the shiny green glass cylinder of a government-run vertical farm rising from the former parking lot behind it. You sidle up to the counter and make yourself known to the government employee behind the counter. She bustles off into the back room, and the pharmacist comes out. She’s a pretty, petite woman, thirtysomething Anglo-Indian. “Mr. Christie?” she asks. It’s an alias—it’s your alias, for the next hour at least. “May I see some proof of identity?”
You show her your entirely authentic driving license and she reads it with dark, unreadable eyes then scans your thumbprint and verifies it. “Thank you,” she says. Into the back, then back out again with a bag: “You’ve had this prescription before?”
You nod, eagerly. It’s a selective metabotropic glutamate agonist, sturdy and well-understood, a neuroleptic firewall proof against the rape-machine fantasies and mind-control issues you’ve had ever since the disastrous clinical trial they put you through during your teens. “My luggage went missing. I, uh, I really need this.” You reach out, watching the minute tremors in your hand as if from a great distance.
“I’ll say you do.” She hands the box over with a curious expression on her face. “There’s no charge: You’re in Scotland, we still have a National Health Service. That’s you, then. Have a nice day.” They have a working health-care system here, don’t they? You nod jerkily, then back away.
Outside the shiny socialized factory farm, post office, pharmacy, and general-purpose omnistore, you gulp down two tablets—one of the doctors at the clinic told you how to do that, pump-priming, years ago—and stand there shaking for a minute. Grey streets, tall buildings looking down on you with eye-socket windows. Bats glide overhead, or pigeons, or RPVs with terahertz radar eyes, vigilant for the deviant. You shiver. You need to get under cover before they come for you . . . give the meds time to cut in. You haven’t had an attack this bad since . . . since . . .
Don’t think about it.
You are the Toymaker’s avatar in this nation-state. You’re the executive: strong, and determined, and entrepreneurial, and skilled. You’re not some kind of paranoid-schizophrenic personality-disorder case, stoned on his own brain chemistry. There really is a chip in your skull, monitoring and controlling and stabilizing on behalf of the conspiracy for which you work. There really is someone or something watching over you, controlling from afar. The hallucinations are going to go away, then you’re going to take this reality by the throat and twist it until it crackles under your fingers like . . . like . . .
The replacement prescription sits heavy in your pocket, reassuring, a chemotaxic anchor pulling you closer to the harbour of high-functioning quasi-sanity. Just knowing it’s in your system makes you feel better. So you walk back along the main road towards town, taking your time (and avoiding the nosy buses and their intrusive cameras). About half a mile later you pass a hole-in-the-wall diner, where you pause to order a mixed meze and a plate of falafels. The bored Middle Eastern guy behind the bar spends his time between serving you hunched over an elderly pad, handset glued to his ears, evidently talking an Alzheimer’s patient through replying to an email: “No, look, at the top, it says get mail, write, address book, reply, tap reply—no, not the red dot, below the red dot, what do you see?” His despairing half-duplex monotone soothes your rattled nerves, reassuring you that he’s not remotely likely to be spying on you.
When you leave the restaurant, the day has brightened considerably. There are no bushes for concealment, no sinister shapes flitting past overhead—an unmanned police segway rolls up the hill, cameras panning in all directions, but even the neurotypical can see that.
Another fifty minutes of walking sees you back in the West End, approaching the marble-fronted monolith of the Hilton. You are relatively