Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

“Your merchandise is to your left,” Amberley-Ash tells him. “Take it and go.”

Ranveer confirms that there is indeed a black polymer case placed against the glass surface to his left. Inside it, he imagines, is the aluminum canister of aerosolized designer molecule, the formula for which was purchased from one of her neighbors and synthesized specifically for him.

“I must admit,” Ranveer says, “this isn’t the reception I was hoping for.”

“Well, this is the only reception you’re going to get,” says Amberley-Ash. “In fact, this is the last reception you’re ever going to get from me. After this, we’re done. Don’t ever contact me again.”

Ranveer isn’t entirely sure what’s going on, but this is one of the things he likes about her. She is every bit as headstrong and confident as she is intelligent, and he has no doubt whatsoever that even without four centimeters of glass between them, they’d be having the very same conversation.

The last time he bought from her, she invited him in and, despite the fact that Ranveer is old enough to be her father, they found themselves sitting close to one another in her upstairs conversation pit drinking various chilled gin concoctions and later ordering Indian pizzas (baked in-flight) along with several flavors of sorbet (packed in liquid nitrogen). She told him about her time at Stanford, and how she dropped out just a few credits shy of a degree in order to become one of the best-funded and youngest female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley history. Their backgrounds, upbringings, and life experiences could not have been more different, yet there they were, at that particular moment, in that specific location, both just happy not to be alone.

That night, while she slept, Ranveer took a cognac out onto the balcony and read several articles about her as well as excerpts from her unauthorized biography. As he suspected, there had been significant gaps in Amberley-Ash’s own account of her past.

Patricia Ash Westbrook died of breast cancer, but not before her daughter, Amberley-Ash, watched what happened as surgeons carved flesh off of her mother until it seemed there was nothing left but bone, and used a permanently implanted port in her neck to fill her with toxic chemicals that seemed to eradicate her will to live even faster than it killed cancer cells. Having watched her mother slowly die in a way that was anything but peaceful and dignified, Amberley-Ash knew that there was no way she could return to her former life and resume her previous routine. After burying what was left of her mother, rather than returning to school, she used her inheritance to establish her first lab in the Bay Area and declared that she was dedicating her life to discovering a universal cancer vaccine.

Corpuscule, the name she incorporated under, demonstrated promising early results, and Amberley-Ash’s passion, charisma, and clarity of vision enabled her to close one of the biggest initial rounds of investment Silicon Valley had ever seen. Almost overnight, she became the focus of intense regulatory scrutiny and was constantly pursued both by her competition and by the media. That was when Amberley-Ash decided to stop sleeping.

To keep herself awake and focused, she used amphetamines and dopamine reuptake inhibitors, and to try to keep herself coherent during press tours, she experimented with various types of mood stabilizers. Having formed several expensive pharmacological attachments, she began synthesizing her own cocktails and distributing them liberally throughout the company’s reporting structure to increase her team’s productivity. According to multiple depositions, she “strongly implied” that performance-enhancing drugs were not a choice, but a requirement.

When her most senior scientist went home after not sleeping for three days, took a shower, put on a clean Corpuscule-branded lab jacket, and hanged himself in his basement—and after the DEA raided all three of Corpuscule’s laboratories and found that they were deeper into narcotics at that point than they were into research—Amberley-Ash decided not to attend the board meeting in which it was well known she would be stripped of all remaining control of her company, and to skip the appointment her personal lawyer had arranged for her to surrender herself to federal authorities, and instead, while she still had a passport, to embezzle what was left of her sizable capital and use it to relocate.

There was something about the beautiful young woman that reminded Ranveer of Ophelia, Hamlet’s betrothed—her madness and self-destruction prompted by the tragic death of a parent. That night, while sitting out on Amberley-Ash’s balcony, he wondered if passion born of tragedy always revolved toward madness. Perhaps, but today Ranveer knows that the equation is much more complicated than that. He now understands that nothing of great consequence is achieved without some measure of madness, and that the acts throughout history with the most profound and lasting impacts on humanity are those that were initially indistinguishable from pure insanity.

—

Ranveer’s hands come out of his pockets and form a gesture of mock surrender. “I give up,” he tells her. “You win. I should have called. Now can I please come in?”

“I haven’t been sitting around waiting for you to call, you arrogant fuck.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is what you did to Henryk.”

“Henryk,” Ranveer repeats as if the word were unfamiliar. “What happened to Henryk?”

“Don’t stand there and fucking lie to me. I monitor the shadowphiles for leaked crime reports just like you. I know goddamn well Henryk didn’t die of an aortic aneurysm. Not only are you into some really fucked-up shit right now, but you’re obviously cleaning up after yourself. I’m honoring our agreement, but there’s no fucking way I’m ending up like Henryk.”

“Listen to me,” Ranveer says. “Henryk lived an unhealthy lifestyle.”

“Because he did business with you. I haven’t spent the last decade cooped up in this fucking aquarium trying to get sober and the last three years in teletherapy for two fucking hours a day just to get my throat slit now. There’s no way you’re getting in here.”

Ranveer is a