Chapter 7: Chapter 3 – Part 1

While he waited for her to return, Beez poked around the compound.  The living room and kitchen seemed so sparse.  It seemed that either Roxie was making some kind of aesthetic statement, given how spartan the rooms were, or she had found it this way.  Both seemed equally plausible.  

 

The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like this place had to have existed before the collapse of whatever was on top of here.  It’s one thing to hollow out a mountain of dirt, which is more or less done settling, and build a compound underneath that.  A mountain of trash has no internal structural integrity and therefore, he thought, there could be no tunnelling done underneath it.  That raised questions.  Roxie seemed like an extremely resourceful person.  Was this place given to her?  It had to have been.  Who goes looking through a dump to find something like this?  Then again, she might have been looking for something else.  

 

Beez muttered to himself, frustrated by the pointlessness of wondering about all of this when answers were more likely to materialize from thin air than come to him on his own.  He wandered over to his bedroom and found his bodysuit waiting for him on his bed.  He felt safer once he was in it and out of the hospital gown he'd awoken in.  As he strode out of his room, he noticed that Roxie’s bedroom door was still open.  He sifted through several pieces of advice his parents had given him about doors and settled on ‘An open door is an inviting door’.  He couldn’t remember the circumstances under which his mother had said that, but it was the closest advice he could think of to justify what he was going to do anyway.

 

Her room was just as minimalist as the rest of the apartment.  The walls were bare, and the bed tidy and unruffled.  He felt a little guilty crossing the threshold, but not enough to stop.  She had very little in the way of clothes, aside from many copies of her bodysuit.  They might have been different in function for all he could tell, but the appearance was uniform.  She had several brown dusters in a closet.  One had a bullet hole in the front and back of the left shoulder.  The stain was dark, but not gone.  In fact, most of the dusters had a hole or two in them.  

 

The nightstand nearest to the door was empty except for another handgun and some ammunition, but the other surprised him.  In the bottom drawer, he found a large pad of paper and several loose pencils of different colors.  As he flipped through the book, he found drawings of flowers.  Not a field of flowers or a bunch, but one flower.  No background, no hand holding them, no vase.  Just one flower, per page, elegantly sketched.  He only recognized two of them; a rhododendron and an orchid.  None of the flowers there seemed to match the tattoo he’d seen on her shoulder, but he had the strangest feeling he was staring at a deep and central theme for Roxie, even if he couldn’t understand it.  

 

He carefully put the pad back and headed to the kitchen.  The refrigerator had a pile of those green juice boxes, which made his lip twist into a ghost of a sneer.  Besides those, it was fairly well stocked.  The cabinets he opened were filled with boxes and cans of food stuffs, and a door by his knee had more spices in it than he’d seen in his entire life.  Curiouser and curiouser, he thought.

 

Eventually, his wanderings took him out of the kitchen, past the bedrooms, and down the flight of stairs.  With his contacts in, the keypad for access to The Motherfucker was visible.  It seemed to be the only purpose for this wing of the compound, as there were no other doors or hallways branching off from it.  Just a dead end with a keypad in the middle of the wall.  Beez stared for a minute.  The interface was holographic.  He didn’t know if he could get HI to interface with it to hack it, but then he had a much better idea.  

 

He ran back to his room and grabbed the little green box from his dresser.  It took him a minute to pop out one of his contacts, but he was glad to have a place to put it immediately.  With his one eye squinted shut the holographic interface was visible, positioned immediately against the wall and not hovering like HI.  With the other, the holographic interface was invisible.  As he stared at the wall, he could see a slight browning on the white paint where her fingers had deposited oil and dirt and who knows what else.  Blood.  Probably a lot of blood over the years.  It had been cleaned a few times, but it was visible.

 

She’d hit four numbers the first time she brought him down here.  He opened and closed his eyes in an alternating manner, and he found four brown spots corresponding with numbers; 1, 4, 5, and 7.  24 possible combinations.  He’d done some brute force hacking in his time, although it lacked elegance.  Number 18 was the winner.  5417.  With a hiss and a soft whirr, the wall next to him swung in and away.  

 

“Well this is an unexpected surprise,”  The Motherfucker said. “Up and about and looking rather spry.  …  Where is your nurse?”

 

“She told you I got shot?”

 

“No, but she had me synthesize an assortment of painkillers and treatments.  It wasn’t much of a leap when you didn’t accompany her during the same amount of time for which I had provided medication.  The larger question remains.”

 

“She’s not here.”

 

“Oh-ho!  Breaking and entering then, are we?  Roxanne will be so proud when she’s done pummelling you.  I do hope she finds you in flagrante so I can watch at least some of it.”

 

“She said she was going to be gone for a few hours.”

 

“Then she’ll be cutting it close.”

 

“Close to what?”  The red ball Beez thought of as The Motherfucker’s eye pulsed but remained quiet.  He walked around a little, looking more closely at the different machines.  He was getting tired of asking questions and not getting answers.  And then he had a thought.

 

“Motherfucker?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“Could you make something for me?  We… have a mission… and I think I might need something for my part of it.”

 

“Of course.  I live to serve.”

 

“Can you manufacture Sodium Pentathol?”

 

“I can…”  caahn.  The machine’s tone implied an unasked question.

 

“But?”

 

“For what?”

 

“I might need to interrogate someone.”

 

“And you want Sodium Pentathol?!”  Beez had seen numerous vids reference it as a truth serum, so The Motherfuckers incredulity perplexed him.   “Do you have any idea what I’m capable of?”

 

“Um, no?"

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“I have more computing power at my disposal than was available in the entire world combined through the year 2020.  I have an encyclopedic knowledge of chemistry, biology, history, and hundreds of other subjects.  I will live to see your children’s children die, and you want me to make a drug invented two centuries ago?!  Why don’t I just craft you a nice round wheel while I’m at it?  Do you have any idea how ineffective Sodium Pentathol is compared to something I could invent on the spot?  Do you?!”

 

“No?”

 

“It is my most sincere wish that during your lifetime canines rise up,  overthrow you, and force you to do their bidding.  Clean up my shit.  Scratch my ear.  Now.”

 

“C’mon!  That’s not fair!  I’m closer to your intelligence than a dog is to me!”

 

“No, you most certainly are not.”  He continued, almost mumbling, “Sodium Pentathol.  For fucks sakes.”  

 

Beez was momentarily distracted by two of the machines in the corner coming to life, but he turned back to the red ball.  “Well?”

 

“Well what?”

 

“Will you make it for me?”

 

“Sodium Pentathol?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“No.  But I am making you something better. All I ask is that you answer a question in return.”

 

“Absolutely not.”

 

“Don’t worry.  The stuff I’m brewing up will have a much more powerful effect than a common drugstore barbiturate, and you can have it for free.”  One machine shut down, and the other one, a miniature centrifuge if he wasn’t mistaken, kicked into overdrive.  “I won’t be able to stop you from taking it, and I don’t have control over the door.  I have no way of forcing you to answer the question.”

 

“You can ask it, but I’m not promising anything.”

 

“Excellent.  And now, the question.  Is this really for use in a mission you and Roxie have planned?”

 

Beez frowned.  

 

“I thought not.”

 

“I didn’t say anyth-”

 

“You didn’t have to," it snapped.  "Eye movement, pulse rate, body language, they all said it for you.  So this is for my lovely Roxanne, then?”

“How-”

 

“Good.  You’ll be glad I asked.  If you’ve been out of comission for a week, you may not yet have noticed Roxanne’s rather odd sleep schedule.”

 

“Actually, I had!”

 

“Oh, so you know about her 72 hour cycle?”  Beez frowned.  “60 hours awake running around like a lunatic, followed by 6 in seclusion and 6 asleep?  You know all about that?”

 

“Y-y-yes.”

 

“Then you know that the current 60 hour cycle is going to end in 67 minutes?  And that during her 6 hours of seclusion she’ll be… hmmm...vulnerable is the wrong word.  At her most... susceptible?”

 

“Of course.”

“Of course you did.  Because you’re such a smart boy.”  Beez began to feel very uncomfortable.  He scooped up the two vials from the centrifuge containing a clear liquid, and made for the door.  “You have an attachment in your suit on your left hip.  It will draw out the fluid and keep it ready.  Just pull your left hand back at the wrist and hold your breath.” Just as the door was shutting behind him, The Motherfucker began laughing again.

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