Turning On

Logan, walking down the cathedral-like walls of merchandise, paused in his pilgrimage towards the holy Lite. Aisle 6, this was hardware, wasn’t it? He stopped and took in his surroundings. Cameras canvassed the floor, and he spent all of a quarter of a second mapping out their vision fields, overlaid on his vision like bright holographic cones of light. Cortical hookups were flashy; no one had ever made a real holograph. The cones intersected, passed, and missed a span of two seconds and a meter. During this time, he wiped the magnetic pattern on a handful of chips and a cheap neuro-programmer, and he continued on his way, pockets just a bit heavier than before.

The pharmacy desk had two counters, one for the usual stuff, and one for Lite. He took to the right, for the Lite, with the determination of a marathoner. He wasn’t an addict, he could stop turning on whenever he wanted to. He just didn’t want to now. It kept him on the edge, kept him balancing on the edge singing Wagner while solving quantum calculations in his head and doing back-flips. He had a job to do, a big job, and he needed that edge.

Lite was just that, and it was called ‘turning on’ for a damn good reason. Crack made you feel you could leap buildings in a single bound, run around the world, refute Einstein and Plato. With Lite, you really could. The designer used himself as a test subject. He used his first brief ‘trip’ to arrange molecular structure in his head to make a better version, before his gruesome death. Lite was healthy, safe, and non-addictive. And cheap, too. Government sanctioning had dropped it to a dollar for enough to keep you wired for a week. Legend had it that the entire Administration is constantly on it.

Lite was what made the modern world possible, and also what made it weak. Since it came around, the biggest, and most profitable market was and always would be Lite. Red China outlawed it, at first. 7 months later, Beijing was a glass-floored crater. Several Southeast Asian countries had moved to a Lite-based economy. All this made for an awfully long line at the drug counter.

But eventually Logan’s number came up, and he proceeded to the counter, where he faced the interface and the familiar set of questions.

The machine pinged, and a roll popped out with his pills inside. Lite induced fatal, and ugly, reactions in systems with normal hormone levels. In order to safely process the drug, you had to undergo certain radical personal changes. Of course, certain people, Slows, objected to these kinds of changes, preferring "natural" methods of producing children. Logan, however, was a complete and total neuter.

Logan understood a bit about people, enough to regret his understanding. He realized that if joints like the Pit didn’t exist, people would create them for the sake of having them. It was in the center of the Slow district, where it could pass for 30 years ago, before Lite hit the market and brought the tek revolution with it. He sat in the corner table, waiting for his contact.

He hadn’t been here for 3 years, since his last job for a Slow client, and it hadn’t changed. A cloud of blueish smoke hung over the ratty pool table, and empty bottles littered the felt.