But What If We Found Them

ONE

When we started the fun drugs, diseases weren't a problem. Between the nano-robotic upgrades and the medical facilities, no one had any reason to get sick. It wasn't like the old chicken egg vaccinations injected through a needle. Organic bacteria was a food preservative. Bored kids downloaded viruses off the cloud to get their nano-bots fucked up. Gateway style stuff. The thought they'd pose a threat to humanity was a novel idea. A good joke. Drug out all you want. We didn't worry what mixed with what or who's needle charger was who's. We dove into the shimmering paradise of intoxication with eager veins and open throats.

Then, late one night, everything changed.

Four of us tight friends from base ed sat on the scratchy speckled grey carpet of Milky's parents' hang out room. Jug, the kinda kid who's everyone's bestie, had a glittering needle full of StarDust. They were mid-plunge, shoving down hard on bright green handle. Hoop, more into bots than humans, was just sitting on the couch and coddling a bobble headed bot that was half taken apart. I had my lips around a tall slender bottle, sucking one hundred proof blue shit down like it was water. Didn't even know what it was. Strong and sweet the label promised. It was. Reality was swimming and I was doing the backpaddle. Laughter bordered us on every side.

A noise broke in. Everything paused. It was weird enough that all four of us looked up, reaching for focus. Hoop pointed at the room's wall pad. Milky's parents were kind of antiquey old-school like that (read: couldn’t afford latest + greatest nex gen anything). On the screen, a no-name off-channel late night news thing had come on. Some grey-in-the-face announcer who's name none of us knew was droning on about some hoo-boo load of blow.

Why's that on? I asked.

Must be important, Milky said vaguely.

Doubt it, Jug said and plunged some more.

This just in! grey-in-the-face went on. Diseases strike the young and old!

Disease? Hoop wondered, stretching the bot's arms out straight in front. Like it was reaching for the sun, I thought.

Dunno, Milky shrugged.

I was dosed up enough to be interested. The report described how some rando had died after two days in the medi-fac. Reason—the drugs had given this cracker a sore throat. And from there, it was straight down to death-town.

Months before that, rando got these warts. Some nurse-bot put a lazer to one of the puffy knobbly patches of skin. The wart turned all black and red, and just when it fell off—rando got sick. Like sick, sick (What?). Like a hang-over before you take a long swig of FeReal Fresh ™ and everything's alright again. So, this crackerjack had this week long hang over, stayed in bed, and the nurse-bot logged treatments like drinking lots of flavored tea or something. Then, rando wakes up one day and can't stop coughing and bleeding. So, nurse-bot calls the medi-fac and in goes rando.

Two days, dead.

No explanation.

That was too weird to be wrong, but too scary to be real. So what the fuck?

Um, I said as way of checking if anyone else was listening.

Not our prob, Hoop said.

Truth, Jug confirmed.

Okay, I shrugged and picked my bottle back up.

Everyone simultaneously went back to the drugs and the world was fine.

For a while.

TWO

Next weekend, there was a big blow out binge block party in Milky's sector of district. There was this ramshackle replacement housing complex that got abandoned and left to rot. Lower Gutter we called it because it was close to the sewage plant. Not great, but the flood lamps from the plant made for pretty good mood lighting. We partied there all the time.

Mid-swing, Jug went into the toilet hole to throw up and came back out with an arm out. Err, I got the rash.

We gasped but were too far gone on whatever our drug of choice had been. Mine was WooLagoon and I was spinning. Cheers, I said in a woo-woo voice. Yep, someone in the back of the room echoed. Someone else laughed. Everyone kept dosing. Jug made a grumpy no-one-cares face, grabbed another beer, and sat down on a half-missing couch.

Bottoms up.

It moved crazy fast to the rest of us. Little bumps, red and scratchy, rose all over the skin real quick. Sometimes, it stayed like that. Other times, it turned into these raised red patches. Some got scabby stuff that went from red to grey and cakey. The cakiness went flaky and fluttered through the air. We all ran bits of ourselves under the nearest medi-station.

[Disease Free] the readouts came back.

We acted like that was true for a couple hours, but it only got worse. Bump arms with someone and you had an itch. The bumps came when you scratched and didn't go down. I got the chunky, callous ones. The ones you could pick at the edges of. If you did pick, this ring of tough skin would form, pull away from the ring of the thing. If kept picking, the thing would double in size. I picked the one on my pinky until it was tough to bend. Then I rubbed my elbow. Big mistake. In a couple of minutes, the wart on my elbow was pea-sized. I left it that way (too hard to reach).

I held it up for the core gang to see. They were assembled on a couch, all looking miserable. Jug's rash was full-cover. Hoop had an eye uglied shut. The skin on Milky's arm was basically gone. Just a lumpy crusty mess.

We sobered up fast using doubles and triples of SobrEaze ™ tablets dropped in pickle juice like the label recommended to halt hangovers. Milky went around and kicked everyone else out. We sat in a party trashed room feeling bad. Not one of us slept.

At three in the morning, I'd had enough. I'm going home.

Across the room, Jug got up. Let's go together.

On the walk, Jug showed me the worst of it. A thick patch covering the whole back of the left leg. It had cracks where Jug had gotten it to bend. The limp was hardly noticeable.

Did you pick it?

Jug's head shook.

Does it hurt?

I can't feel my leg at all.

That's bad.

Not as bad as Milky. What are we going to do?

Wait it out? I said because I couldn’t think of what else to do.

Jug nodded like I’d said something smart. Good call.

THREE

The next week, the four of us sent the same message. Things had changed. From bad to whoa worse. Everyone had the same story. Hoop did a rundown.

When the bumps go down, rash turns flaky. The flakes dry up and crumble into a kind of... dust. I mean, there's no better word for it. The dust makes you sneeze hard. You don't stop. First it's just kind of an 'achoo'. Then, it gets bad. You sneeze so hard, sometimes, you hear a crack in your chest or back. Every time, your nose bleeds.

we all texted insta-pics of bloody Absorbo Suck-It-Up TowellettsTM.

I have some old mag scans, Milky said in vid-chat response. They looked bad. Skin like eggshell quiet-room paint. The kind that's actually a subtle scatter program that calms ragers down. We could maybe read through them together. Like maybe this happened in the past.

The plan didn't sound bad. At least it gave us the illusion of finding a solution.

I hesitated, knowing if I got excited—they’d all go along. The gang’s like that. Have a little titch of fervor and everyone’s bandwagoning together. Especially when it was me as the driver. I didn’t want to bandwagon us in the wrong direction. I should be careful.

The line was silent. If I didn’t bandwagon us somewhere, we’d die like rando. Only nobody would notice cuz we weren’t even the first.

I sent without audio cuz I didn't trust my voice.

I got back a chorus of .

The four of us gathered on Milky's busted old couch and pulled up the digi in our nano-bot readers. It was like the old game days before we'd discovered drugs. Back then, we'd sit around and zone way out on first person RPGs and suck down FuuDuu JoozTM (the melon flavor). It was useless, maybe, but it’d felt important.

Like reading these mags, I thought, and then tried to shut my brain up.

The sound of our fingers tapping against screens waiting for some old web.6 archaic thing to load filled the room. Sometimes, it even came up as a box asking for permission to install instead of insta-download. When you hit [yes], nothing happened.

Everything was in TimesNewRoman. None of us had seen a word in roman lettering since grade school. Sure, maybe once we'd learned this shit, but Common was quicker and cooler. Some pages were even in other languages: English, Nihongo, Espanol, Deutsch. What we could trans-read had too many words with no Common equivalent. Anything in true-translation Common had complicated login pages for pro-researchers. Not a single article had a run-down of what to do in a situation like ours.

I stared at the screen, blinking. I kept seeing patterns in the spaces between the words. O's like little cherry pop-o candies. All I could think was how I wish I were eating candy and feeling dandy instead of being sick (or whatever we were). After eight hours, only big bold had stuff stuck with me. Acronyms were easy to log in a list of Things you Recall. I had pages full of 'em.

Jug broke the silence. I bet we could all say what we got from that at the same time.

Milky frowned.

I'm into it, I said and grinned.

We rattled off an item at a time from our memory banks. The lists were exactly the same. STD, AIDS, STI, HIV, H1V1, HPV, and so on. After about thirty seconds, we were over it. Everyone had slack faces with sagging eyes and a line of a frown.

That settles it, Milky said. We're fucked.

We don't even know what those mean, I huffed.

Maybe they're basic structures of treatments. Or codes in some dead program language. I mean, Basik and Key 7 alone are in their twenty-bazzilionth edition, right?