Ability (Omnibus) Read online

  “Brian,” Derry said, putting her comm down and grabbing both of his hands. “Garret is being a bitch about it because he’s jealous.”

  “Jealous?” he asked. “Jealous of what? He gets free weed, free pills, free rent, and even free rides on you.” Brian immediately regretted saying it, but it was true.

  Derry didn’t flinch. “Except I don’t want to ‘ride’ him these days because of how much of a bitch he is being toward you. And do you think having you take care of him, his needs, his financial well-being…that he isn’t allowed to be jealous that you’ve got some gig going where you bank hundreds of thousands of credits per year, hell, per month for all we know, while he’s slaving away making video games for teenagers who have no social life?”

  “I suppose…” Brian said, not really convinced. “If our roles were reversed, I’d be grateful that Garret was my friend, that he was helping me get through some rough spots. And I’d definitely be thankful that he could make or buy any chemical pleasures I could want.”

  “Brian, that’s all probably true, but the one thing he is absolutely, positively jealous of you about is that you did some shit with your mind that no one else has ever been able to do. And he can’t.”

  “It can’t be about that. We don’t even know if it really happened. We were really wasted that night.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Bri, you know I love you, right?” she asked. When he nodded, she went on, “But sometimes you are really stupid. Do you truly believe what happened that night was just a hallucination? That all three of us saw the exact same thing?”

  “I don’t know. I guess not.”

  “You guess not? Then why the hell are you obsessed with figuring out how to make your dope mesh with Garret’s induction crap so you can maybe do it again?”

  Brian sighed. “I don’t know. You’re right. I’m stupid. But it’s crazy that he would be jealous of me for that. It was an accidental discovery, and none of us have ever been able to do anything like it since!”

  “And because of that,” Derry said, “you are the only one that has experienced it. He hasn’t. You know how competitive he is. We’ve both been here when he’s screamed until he was hoarse to his buddies in that war game he plays on the net. He’s always trying to outdo your weed with his crazy hydroponic schemes. He’s always been jealous that I frequent your bed more than his. It’s typical male competitiveness. That’s all.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. You do fuck me more than you do him. Why is that?”

  “Because you actually take the time to push the right buttons properly, and in the order I tell you to.”

  She winked, then moved his hand between her legs. Brian forgot about his tablet, his balancing act of neurotransmitters, and Garret’s jealousy of his one-time ability to do something possibly supernatural. Derry was good at making him forget everything except her body, her breath, her needs.

  *****

  November, 2043

  “I think I might have something,” Brian said, his voice coming over the link distant and tinny.

  “Like what?” Derry asked.

  “I’ll tell you when I pick you up. Don’t be doing anything in twenty minutes, or for the next day or three.” Brian hung up, leaving her scrambling to get ready.

  When he rang the buzzer to her dorm half an hour later, she was dressed to impress. Her hair wave was now a powdery blue, her makeup a mix of solid hues and transparent neons that would glow under black lights. When she met him in the lobby, his gaze at her rear end told her she’d gotten the skirt just right. Just enough of her ass hung out of the bottom to attract attention, but not enough to be considered scandalous. In 2043 Austin, it was a fine line to keep from crossing. The crazy lawmakers in the eastern end of the state were on one of their morality kicks again. Slut shaming was coming back into vogue for anyone who still prayed to Jesus, which seemed to be almost everyone that didn’t live in Austin or San Antonio.

  “You look good, but you might be a little overdressed for tonight,” he told her as she tucked herself into his luxury E-V. The car shot out into traffic without a sound once they were both in, an unusual light rain on the windshield.

  “We aren’t going out?” she pouted.

  “I think we might be going out of our minds tonight,” he said, a mischievous grin plastered on his face. She realized that it wasn’t rain beading on his face, but perspiration.

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “I finally realized what I needed to do. I think I got it right this time.”

  “What did you do?” she asked again.

  “I could go into minute detail and bore you to death. You wouldn’t get to trip with us then. So take your pick. You can have an explanation with all kinds of scientific jargon and chemical formulas, or you can put this in your mouth and help us figure out if I’ve hit the jackpot,” he said, handing her a square green pill.

  “I think I’ll take door number two,” she said with a laugh, swallowing the pill. “How long and what am I supposed to expect?”

  “About thirty minutes with your metabolism, and you should expect to meet Jesus,” he answered, turning the E-V south on San Pedro. Derry leaned back in the seat, waiting for the drug to kick in while Brian guided the car toward his apartment.

  *

  “What’s the story on the modules?” Brian asked Garret as they settled in to wait for the drug to peak.

  “Okay, check this out,” Garret said, already beginning to slur his words. “I figured that if I slowed down the data stream, but sped up the image stream, the peripheral vision can pick up the data easier. I’m up to three minutes of speaking Japanese. You’d think I would know how to speak the fucking language fluently by now.” He shook his head. “Anyway, the thing I hadn’t thought of until I was listening to NAR, some program about audio-visual stimulation shit, was that I was forgetting a really important factor: sound.”

  “You?” Derry asked, peeking over the edge of her beanbag chair. “You, listening to North American Radio? I thought you hated tree-hugging granola eaters and their ‘pseudo-liberal bullshit.’”

  “Shut up, Dykee. Men are talking.” He grinned at her, ducking when she threw one of her heels at him. “Anyway, this nerd was yapping about how audio, when used as either backdrop or filler, can improve certain memory functions by factors of three or more. I should have seen this all along, sheesh. You know how when I’m coding, I put on my ears and crank up the music? It’s how I concentrate, how I block out all the distractions of whatever is going on in the world. It helps me focus solely on the task of whatever my hands and eyes are doing.”

  “Shit,” Brian breathed. “How did we not think of that?”

  “I know. So anyway, I created this audio track that loops with the video. It’s just a lot of white noise, kind of like the ocean, but it made an instant difference. I’m itching to give it a shot while under the influence. But I also have something else.”

  Garret’s excitement made Brian and Derry excited. Garret hadn’t been himself for a few months. Tonight would be their six-month anniversary of ‘the incident,’ as Derry called it.

  “I’ve been working on a couple of new modules. I’ve got this new gravity one. I’m still tweaking it, but we’ll give it a go. You should love it,” he said to Derry. “But since you guys will accuse me of only making a gravity one so I can pick up a car with my mind, I’ve mostly been working on this medical one. A serious one. One that will have practical applications, instead of one that might only be ‘supernatural’ so we wouldn’t be able to actually test properly.

  “Anyway, I linked in to the V.A. Hospital and got a few of the vets to talk to me about battlefield medical procedures. You know, super-trauma surgery and shit. I recorded everything. Then I was lucky enough to get these two surgeons to talk to me. One is from UT-A Hospital, a cardio guy, and the other is a lady from Beth Israel in New York City. She’s a neurosurgeon.”

  “How much of a lie did you have to t
ell them?” Derry asked.

  “A pretty damn big one. I told them I was working on this new induction technique, and the venture capital guys wanted me to do a little brain picking of some of the top surgeons in their field,” he answered.

  “Venture capital?” Brian asked.

  “Yeah, you don’t think surgeons are just going to talk to some stranger over the net without both an ego boost and the chance they might show up as a credit once the company starts to mass-market the product, do you?”

  “Company?” Brian asked. “Product?”

  “Jesus, Brian. Stop being dense. I lied to the doctors, telling them we had a company, backed by the venture capital boys up in Silicon Alley and Houston, working on prototypes of a revolutionary new learning system. I told them I wanted to talk to some top technical people in their fields of expertise, while hinting at the possibility that if they talked to me, gave me a good half hour or more, they’d maybe get a secondary gig of being an adviser when we went public with the product.”

  “I think he’s too high to understand you anymore,” Derry whispered to Garret.

  “I’m not too high. I just don’t understand what this has to do with anything,” Brian said, annoyed.

  “Look. I got the point of view of the real vets, guys who were getting shot at and blown up over in Namibia and Turjistan. Real good descriptions with references to all kinds of field manuals. Stuff that is public, but isn’t part of the e-pamphlets that the military puts on the net for everyone to read. The good stuff. How to clamp down on spurting arteries. How to cauterize a stump after an emergency battlefield amputation. Shit like that.”

  “God,” Brian said in awe.

  The Receiver was beginning to kick in hard, his mind almost visualizing the chaos and terror of having to amputate a fellow soldier’s leg while bullets whined around him.

  “Yeah. Then I got the two surgeons to fill me in on proper, standard surgical techniques. Stuff that is done in a hospital setting. All the tools, procedures, all that. They linked me out to university holos and textbooks. Videos. Actual lessons from teaching hospitals. Real solid data on shit that only a real doctor would be able to decipher.”

  “Okay, so what’s the point again?” Brian asked, still not quite understanding, his ability to understand anything quickly fading as the air he breathed started to glow and change colors, depending on if he inhaled or exhaled.

  “The point is that if I did everything right, and you did everything right, all three of us should be able to walk into a hospital or onto a battlefield and perform surgery. Assuming we can’t just fly like Superman through the doors of the hospital.”

  CHAPTER 5

  November, 2043

  None of them learned how to fly like Superman. However, all three were uneasy knowing that they could probably walk into any clinic or surgery ward and pass as a real doctor. The three of them thought they would be elated to have found success with their experiment. Instead, as they quizzed each other for hours, too many ‘what if’ scenarios where they debated or agreed on advanced or emergency surgical procedures ended with an uncomfortable silence.

  “This is just too heavy,” Brian said after they’d decided that the induction lesson wasn’t going to fade, at least not within the first six hours that they’d been testing each other’s knowledge.

  “Think about it,” Derry said, “We all learned the same exact thing. I’d bet before the flash, we all had about an equal understanding or expertise in the subject of trauma medicine.”

  “And…?” Garret asked, but without his usual snark toward her when she started to wax philosophical about science.

  “We just proved to each other that we all know the same thing. The only time we argued about a technique or course of action was when we prioritized a solution that could achieve similar results, just not the solution the rest of us would have chosen as an initial treatment,” she said.

  “You’re high,” Garret said.

  “Listen. What’s the best way to alleviate acute cluster headaches?” she asked both of them.

  “Oxygen therapy,” Brian answered.

  “Intranasal Sumatriptan,” Garret said.

  “Right. I say psilocybin or LSD,” she told them. “See? Three different answers, because we know those three solutions are valid, but since none of us has ever treated a patient suffering from cluster headaches, we have no basis to say which treatment would be the most effective, in our experiences. Because we have no experiences. So all of us could treat someone who suffered from cluster headaches.”

  “Get to the point, Derry,” Garret said, losing interest.

  “Our experience timelines will now branch from here. What if we all started treating patients for headaches from here on? In one month all three of us would have a much different take on the experience. You,” she said to Garret, “might be frustrated that your Sumatriptan therapy didn’t work for most of your patients, while Brian might find a lot of success in using oxygen on his patients. A year later, we could get together and pool our knowledge, with hard statistics and anecdotal evidence that has come from our experience in treating patients with headaches.”

  “Yeah, doctors and scientists do that all the time,” Garret explained as if she were a small child. “It’s called research. It’s called shared knowledge. There’s nothing new here.”

  “Now imagine four hundred million Americans knowing how to treat cluster headaches. Imagine the people that actually suffer from them being able to prescribe proper medical care for themselves. They’d know that if oxygen didn’t work, they could try triptan therapy. If that didn’t work, they could try some good ol’ LSD therapy. They’d probably already know how to make LSD, by the way, since their natural tendency after learning how to diagnose their own severe condition would be to learn how to treat it. Every aspect of it.”

  “Jesus,” Brian said with a heavy exhalation. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Exactly,” Derry said, a victor’s smile plastered on her face.

  “That’s great,” Garret said after she stuck her tongue out at him to rub it in a little more.

  “Actually,” she said, sticking her tongue out once more, “it’s absolute madness.”

  “Why?” Garret and Brian asked together.

  “Think about it. Four hundred million citizens now have a giant chunk of specialized knowledge about something that only the top half of one percent ever learn. Are ever able to learn to the point they don’t flunk out or fail at their jobs. You don’t hear about too many surgeons who botch surgeries too many times, right? They are probably run out of the surgery field quietly to keep the malpractice suits from ballooning. Anyway, every citizen in the country now has this specialized ability. Maybe only half have the actual physical ability or mental capacity to truly use the ability. Can’t cut people open with shaky hands, and you can’t treat patients effectively if you are a crazed lunatic or obsessive-compulsive.

  “That’s still a couple hundred million Americans that can now do what only a few hundred thousand did before. For free, and in an hour, or however long it takes to get flashed. No more going to college for eight to ten years, then a couple as an intern, then a long tenure as a resident at a hospital before finally being able to go out on your own and start your own practice.

  “Hospitals suddenly see a downturn in their patient volume. Insurance companies practically go bust overnight. Medical supply stores become like food handouts in third world nations as half the country flocks to their stores or websites to purchase the items needed to treat themselves and their families or friends. Everyone now knows how to do something that a hell of a lot of people and industries depended on to produce jobs and goods and research to further the advancement of medicine itself.”

  “Holy shit,” Garret said, finally understanding. “That’s a massive trigger for economic collapse.”

  “Exactly,” Derry said, proud of the fact she’d thought of it before either of them.

  “Imagine,” Brian adde
d, “we teach everyone how to repair their own car. No more mechanic shops. A huge drop in sales of new automobiles, causing factories to close. Who needs to buy a new car when you can fix the one you have, cheaper and without the inconvenience of having to take it to a mechanic or a dealer. The Big Six going tits-up would cause almost all but the largest parts suppliers to go under. I wonder if people would even go so far as to want to be flashed with the ability to machine metal parts, or forge alloys to make and mold their own parts.”

  “That seems a little too extreme for anything but hobbyists,” Garret argued.

  “Not really,” Derry chimed in. “Imagine suddenly being able to learn anything you wanted. Wouldn’t you want to go out and plant your own organic, pesticide-free vegetable garden? Who would you trust fixing your tablet more than you? And mechanics, we’ve all felt like we were being screwed over somehow when we’ve had to take our cars to be fixed. Especially when they see a woman coming. The credit signs start flashing in their damn eyes.”

  “I’m with Derry,” Brian said, wheeling his computer chair back to the beanbag chair she sat in so he could put a hand on her shoulder.

  “None of that really matters though,” Garret said. He had a strange look on his face.

  “Why not?” Brian asked.

  “We’ll be the ones with all the money. Anyone that wants to learn any of this shit is going to have to pay.” Garret’s face seemed lost in a fantasy of him swimming in a pool filled with paper credits and gold coins.

  “Who said we were going to charge for any of this?” Brian demanded as he wheeled back to his desk.

  “Hey, you can give your dope away if you want. I’m charging for the masses to learn the easy, care-free way. You guys can try to ‘change’ the world for free, but it takes money to make real change happen. And once I change my situation from mooching off my best friend to riding around in luxury, I’ll do whatever I can with the fortune of a person who could buy a small country. Imagine if just one module was purchased by every adult on the planet. And who wouldn’t do whatever it took to make the money to buy the one thing that could or will change their lives? Knowledge is priceless.” Garret looked at the both of them with defiance after finishing his speech.