2
He was months in the hospital in Flagstaff, staring out of a glass wall at a maze of other glass walls— office buildings and condecologies stacked halfway to Phoenix, flanking the silver alloy ribbon of an expressway. The snows fell heavily that winter, then in the spring melted away except for patches of white in the shadows. For the first three months he was completely immobile, his brain chemically isolated from his body to keep the pain away while he took an endless series of nerve grafts, drugs to encourage nerve replication and healing. Finally there was physical therapy that had him screaming in agony at the searing pain in his reawakened limbs.
At the end there was a new treatment, a new drug. It dripped into his arm slowly via an IV and he could feel a lightness in his nerves, a humming in his mind. Even the air seemed to taste better. The pain was no worse than usual and he felt better than he had since walking out of the meeting back in Granada with the money spike in his pocket.
“What’s in the IV?” he asked, next time he saw the nurse.
The nurse smiled. “Everyone asks that,” he said. “Genesios Three. We’re one of the few hospitals that has the security to distribute the stuff.”
“You don’t say.”
He’d heard of the drug while watching the news. Genesios Three was a new neurohormone, developed by the orbital Pink Blossom policorp, that could repair almost any amount of nerve damage. As a side effect it built additional neural connections in the brain, raised the IQ, and made people high. The hormone was rare because it was very complex and expensive to synthesize, though the gangs were trying. On the west coast lots of people had died in a war for control of the new black labs. On the street it was called Black Thunder.
“Not bad,” said Ric.
The treatment and the humming in Ric’s brain went on for a week. When it was over he missed it. He was also more or less healed.