Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

Naan and Pita were once willing to invite almost anyone into their extensive international social sphere. But all of that changed the day they met Ranveer and agreed to a proposal too intriguing to decline.

—

Ranveer isn’t sure which of the twins he is looking at. They are both much more androgynous than they used to be—especially now that they have matching buzz cuts—and while they each have one half of a yin-yang symbol tattooed on the inside of their forearms, he cannot remember which twin has which half. It isn’t until he is far enough into the kitchen to discern the minor protrusions of two small breasts beneath an outfit he can only describe as charcoal-gray medical scrubs that he realizes he is being greeted by Naan.

Ranveer knows that, under the right circumstances, everyone has it within them to spiral. In his experience, acute internal distress is most commonly expressed through alcohol, drugs, food, or sex. But what he has witnessed in Naan and Pita is something new. The exclave that was once so full of family and life is now almost empty. The kitchen—once a visual and aromatic bouquet of ethnicity—now smells of nothing but disinfectant, and the only colors are the labels of empty liquid meal replacements. Now that PLC’s crypto business is maintained entirely by bots, walls that were once alive with mesmerizing data animations are now blank and tinted to keep the exclave dim and subdued. Naan is somehow pale in defiance of her Indian-Greek complexion, and her arms—everywhere but over her tattoo—are irritated from the adhesive of transdermal patches impregnated with payloads of sedatives and psychoactive compounds that keep her immersed in a state that she and her brother call “alternate reality.”

The PLC exclave was the first one to be commissioned with a basement. The underwater chamber has intricate structures designed to keep hundreds of graphene processors cool. Most computational tasks are sliced up, distributed across a global computing grid, executed in parallel, and the results assembled and delivered in milliseconds. But there are some tasks for which no amount of latency is acceptable: tasks that jack directly into the brain. While he has never been down there himself, he knows that the twins rarely emerge anymore—that they connect each other to catheters, entomb themselves inside sensory-deprivation pods, smooth down fresh derms, and pull electrode nets over their heads. But where they go as they neurologically defy their confines, nobody but the two of them knows.

“Where’s your brother?” Ranveer asks the girl.

Naan drains a bottle with a coral label and finds room for it on the counter. Traces of the viscous liquid remain in the corners of her mouth and make Ranveer think of a sad clown.

“In the—” She clears the gravel out of her throat and tries again. It’s obvious that she has not spoken in a very long time. “In the basement.”

“Do you have it?”

Naan opens a drawer in front of her, removes a small white portfolio, and offers it over the counter. Whenever Ranveer is baited into making a move, he instinctively reevaluates his surroundings. From where he stands in the kitchen, he can see through the airlock, and notes that the quadpad is empty. The walls are dim, but semitransparent, so Ranveer can see that they are alone. He already checked the corners for unobtrusive devices with cylinders protruding. And Naan only had a few minutes of warning that he was coming—just long enough to ascend back into consciousness—so it is unlikely that she would have had time to coordinate a trap. Ranveer finally decides that he is willing to go to the girl rather than insist that she bring the portfolio to him.

As he accepts the device, he can see the diamond-shaped impressions throughout Naan’s scalp from the electrode netting—the cross-hatched channels where the hair has stopped growing. He imagines the interface settling easily into its grooves. Like all addictions, her affliction must feel as though it has always belonged.

Ranveer places his case at his feet, releases the latch on the portfolio, and folds it open. At first, the silicone paper inside is gray, but a moment later, the e-ink manifests text. It only takes Ranveer a moment to see everything he needs to know.

He folds the portfolio closed, and the magnetic latch snaps.

“Did you read this?” he asks the girl.

“No.”

“How did you get it on here without reading it?”

“I decrypted it in memory, copied the contents of the buffer onto the device using a shielded cable, then overwrote the memory addresses with random noise.”

Ranveer peers into her wide amber eyes as she speaks and decides that he believes her. He nods and watches her long slender neck as she swallows, and he knows she has something more to say.

“What is it?” he prompts.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

She blinks several times before she is able to form the words. “Is it us?”

“That’s a pointless question, Naan.”

“Why?”

“Because if the answer were no, I would tell you no. And if the answer were yes, I would still tell you no.”

“Is it?”

“No.”

The response elicits a palpable reaction, but of what, Ranveer cannot tell.

“All of this,” Ranveer says, indicating the portfolio and everything it represents. He uses its spine to push a few empties out of the way and sets the device down on the counter. “It’s taken a heavy toll on you and your brother, hasn’t it?”

Naan blinks again, and Ranveer can see that her eyes are beginning to fill.

“We just want it all to be over,” the girl says. Where there was resignation in her voice before, there is now a feeble plea. “We just want things to go back to how they were.”

There are stools tucked beneath the counter, and Ranveer pulls one toward him. He picks his case up off the floor and places it squarely on the cushion, trips the latches, and opens the lid.

“I know,” he says reassuringly. “Everyone has a moment in their past that they