Authors: Ferrett Steinmetz
But it also created unearthly beauty, for those with the eyes to see.
Paul snap-pointed at Valentine. “Ready, player one?”
She dropped the quarter into the
Pac-Man
machine. A jaunty eight-bit tune rang out. Paul glanced at the cash-pallet at the back of the garage, his insurance in case Aliyah showed up, then pushed all that out of his head.
He picked up the pen and drew boxes on the legal pad.
Do magic
, Valentine had told him, back when she’d taught him to make Flex.
’Mancy isn’t rituals, Paul. It’s love. When you started, I’ll bet dimes to dollars you didn’t fire up ’mancy to do anything. You just… did it. And the ’mancy flowed from that love
.
Paul started making paperwork.
He started where he always did, sketching out the Universal Unified Form – the single form so comprehensive, it contained every single thing you could ever request, file, or catalogue. It existed only in his daydreams, but Paul’s magic allowed him to open windows into his reveries and haul things back through.
He wrote the opening fields, same as always:
First Name. Middle Name. Last Name. Sex. Date of Birth…
The tray of hematite rattled on the table, sending smoky green dust puffing into the air. The alembics rattled, their spiraled tubes swaying between them. Valentine played
Pac-Man
, glancing over at Paul between levels.
When Paul finished the basic fields, he drew the first thing that came to mind: a Psychological Assessment Report, adding fields for Test Administrator, Referral Question, Behavioral Observations – and the fields filled up with words…
Aliyah’s mother has stated she has no friends and never initiates social interactions with other children, preferring to play alone on her handheld video game or sit quietly by herself. Her teachers confirmed this behavior, noting that Aliyah’s classmates rarely approach her due to her aloof or aggressive reactions to their overtures…
The alembics vibrated, ascending in tempo until they shattered.
K-Dash and Quaysean ducked, looking fearful but not backing away. Paul touched his temple, pulled a shard out, blotted the blood away with a handkerchief.
“That’s gonna make the brew harder, working without glassware.” Valentine shook the glass from her hair, not looking away from her freshly cracked screen lest she lost her perfect score. “Everything copacetic, Paul?”
“You just concentrate on keeping Aliyah out.” He bridged away from the psychological areas of the Universal Unified Form, shifting to another style of medical paperwork: emergency-room admissions.
The legal paper expanded to fill the desk, swelling as Paul added checkboxes, cross-references, signature fields, Paul’s neat handwriting condensing into crisp Times New Roman font. The form overflowed the desk’s edges in a vellum waterfall, crumpling as it unfolded across the concrete floor.
Paul kept writing, making space for the lists of prescription drug allergies once the patient checked in, the standard tests run upon fresh admissions, the work release forms for someone injured on the job…
“Pac-Man just went off the maze, Paul,” Valentine said warily. “He’s travelling through a hospital. Is that where he should be?”
“Yes,” Paul confirmed. Pac-Man was their canary in a coal mine, telling them when the ’mancy got too dangerous. The raw ’mancy Paul summoned changed the odds, causing fantastic coincidences to happen around him. If the local odds got
too
wild, Paul couldn’t rein in the magic enough to stuff it inside the hematite… and once you had wild magic ricocheting around, then Very Bad Things happened.
They’d once used a Bingo machine to calibrate the ’mancy-level, but Valentine said playing games gave more accurate readings. Any given
Pac-Man
game was confined to a single blue maze, with the monsters chasing Pac-Man in preordained patterns… but add in a dose of ’mancy to create bizarre glitches, and Pac-Man went on some very unusual trips. If Pac-Man died on his new adventures, then it was time to shut things down.
The frightening thing, Paul thought, was that after only two years of being a ’mancer, all this seemed
normal
.
The forms bunched up, folding as Paul’s ’mancy ebbed. Paul had to focus. It was good to focus. It was
fun
to think about all the forms involved in the emergency room, not about his daughter who might teleport in at any moment to dispense mayhem….
Paul wrote in slots for the insurance preauthorization forms, the billing codes for each prescribed treatment, the maintenance records in the anesthesia machines, and there entangled in the forms was Samuel Patziki, now having his fingers sewn back on after a terrible accident at the garage he’d been working at.
Paul thumbed through the paperwork like a priest fingering his rosary. He pulled forms out of midair to list Samuel Patziki’s impending medical expenses, compared them to Samuel’s current income. Samuel Patziki had taken quite a pay cut, according to the IRS records, working a $22,000-a-year job to make the payments on his $47,256 mortgage at 8% interest.
“Pac-Man’s in a shitty suburb now, Paul,” Valentine said, looking worried. “Cracked streets. Not a lot of outs. Bankruptcy-ghosts are closing in on him from every direction…”
Paul flowed upstream, checking who Samuel Patziki’s insurance holder was: Samaritan Mutual. Paul winced; he’d worked for them, once. Samaritan was the cheapest insurance provider, preying on the poor with the cheapest rates and even cheaper payouts. A few calculations revealed Samuel Patziki would pay $24,794 after Samaritan’s claims were in.
That wouldn’t do.
“Paul, what are you...”
Paper geysered out of the desk. K-Dash and Quaysean drew their guns, unsure where to shoot. Streamers of forms caught on the steel beams in the ceiling, filling the garage bays in gouts of documentation that shoved them against the lockers. Paul flipped through the paper,
swimming
through it, sorting through every possible combination of chargemaster prices, hunting for the cheapest available costs for poor Samuel Patziki.
“Paul, this is fucking
crazy
!” Valentine cried. “Pac-Man’s chasing a hundred different fruits through a maze, and if he eats the wrong one he’ll die! I can barely keep him alive! You need to–”
“I need to
help
,” Paul muttered, recombining every line item until he found the right cost: $1,396 in bills to Samuel Patziki. Not free, but as cheap as humanly possible given Samuel’s cut-rate Samaritan Mutual policy.
The paperwork crackled with green energy, sizzling like a summer lightning storm. Quaysean and K-Dash flattened themselves against the wall, waist deep in crackling paper files, not quite sure if the crumpled documents were safe to touch.
“Don’t move,” Valentine warned them, wading through the paper. She grabbed a fistful of paperwork in her hand; it struggled in her grasp, like an origami animal struggling to escape.
She squeezed the magic out of it, a dribbling stream of liquefied sunshine, until it landed skittering on the hematite.
“Dammit, Paul.” She hugged another armful of glowing paper to her chest. The paper dissolved into ash after the ’mancy left dribbled into the tray, leaving Valentine’s arms covered in ink smudges. “I don’t know if Oscar gave us enough hematite to store this much ’mancy. Did you have to go all sorcerer’s apprentice on me here?”
“Don’t…” Paul pleaded.
Doing ’mancy had consequences; the universe wanted to balance out the unnaturally beneficial bizarreness with malicious coincidence. Paul needed to redirect this accumulated bad luck elsewhere, pushing the flux where he wanted it.
Under normal circumstances, an experienced ’mancer like Paul could hold the bad luck at bay for a day or two until he could find somewhere safe to bleed it off. Yet this flux crushed him like a garbage compactor. Paul felt the flux’s pressure pressing in –
with the Flex comes the flux
, as the old saying went – probing for worst-case scenarios it needed to create
now
, an ear-popping pressure like an incoming hurricane.
Aliyah
, it whispered.
Aliyah could show up
.
He closed his eyes, letting the thought float away. If he focused on his daughter, then some crazy chain of worst-case scenarios would bring Aliyah here, and for all the wrong reasons…
“You can’t take these risks, Paul,” Valentine chided him. “What if the cops had busted us in the middle of this brew? We’d be fucked.”
The cops
.
He’d braced himself against thoughts of Aliyah, but hearing about the cops was like telling Paul not to think about a purple elephant. The flux latched onto that thought, surfed through it; Paul felt that pressure flow out of him, a tide of misfortune racing westwards.
“Did you hear me, Paul?” Valentine repeated. “You can’t back up a dump truck of ’mancy and unload it wherever you damn well please. Not with Aliyah sniffing around. And if you won’t–”
She finally noticed the stunned expression on Paul’s face, then dropped the paperwork. She balled her fists against her hips.
“…You just shit the bed, didn’t you?” she asked.
By way of reply, they heard the
whup-whup-whup
of incoming police choppers.
“
I
thought you had
, you know, kind of an
in
with the cops!” Valentine hissed. “Wasn’t someone supposed to call you if the King snitched on us?”
Paul held up his dead phone’s cracked screen. “It shattered when the alembics broke.”
How the hell had the King found them?
She flung up her hands. “Oh, that’s great. Just
great
. I thought you’d mastered your flux, and here we are with the po-po about to kick down our door–”
“–if you hadn’t interrupted me in mid-brew, I would have kept it under control!”
K-Dash cleared his throat politely. Quaysean glanced over towards the garage door, where the sound of the choppers beat louder against the plywood nailed over the windows.
Paul headbobbed an apology at Valentine. “…hug it out later?” he offered.
“Hug it out.” She shot Paul a pair of jaunty fingerguns by way of forgiveness. Then she scooped up armfuls of paper and squeezed, raining gouts of magic down onto the hematite. Paul mashed the gritty green flecks and sunny ’mancy together, squeezing until they condensed into clear white crystals:
Flex. The most dangerous drug in the world. Magic a non-’mancer could use. Worth millions.
More than enough to repay Oscar for this hematite.
But by then, the choppers whirred overhead.
“Now what?” Valentine asked, her fingers curling around the Xbox controller she always kept at her waist. Oscar’s meth labs had come pre-installed with secret exits, but they’d switched to a distant locale to try to avoid the King – which meant all this place came equipped with was obscurity. “Should I jack a car, go all
Grand Theft Auto
?”
“Civilians get hurt when you do that.” Valentine’s videogame magic was brutally effective at causing mayhem – her channeling a first-person shooter could slaughter any police force – yet Paul refused to hurt cops for doing their job. “Besides,” he continued, looking longingly at the pallet of money, “we’d still leave evidence behind.”
“So… we ask them to leave nicely?”
“You’re damn straight we do.” He grabbed a legal pad, rested it on a teetering stack of cash, and began scribbling.
Leasing agreements blossomed out from under his pen. Paul picked a name at random: Lemuel Galuschak. He inserted a birth certificate into the state records office in Menands, New York, then backfilled in several faked grade school records as Lemuel grew up in, let’s say, the 1950s – Paul gave Lemuel unexceptional grades, preferring to have Lemuel be on the varsity sports team–
Sirens wailed, joining the chopper noise. Valentine made a circling motion with her finger. “Speed it up, Paul.”
“Fine, fine.” Paul blazed through, giving Lemuel Galuschak a spotty employment record until a fake uncle in Europe left him $75,000. That’d hold up to a cursory analysis, at least. Then Paul tracked down the building’s owner, filled out forms showing Galuschak had purchased the building in an auction two months ago, for–
Oh, goddammit. He didn’t have time to negotiate. Paul grabbed a thick stack of bills, $50,000 in cash. As he riffled through the stack, each bill evaporated into confetti snippets of shredded mortgage contracts.
That was $50,000 more than he wanted to spend, but the alternative was to have $50,000 worth of bad luck crash down now. Too much, with the cops setting up shop outside the door.
“There,” he said, panting as he finalized the permits to store volatile chemicals. “We now own this garage. Or at least Lemuel Galuschak does, a sixty seven year-old man with a heart condition.”
Valentine gave an exasperated gesture that encompassed the room, which consisted of ashen concrete, a desk, and a set of lockers – lockers lit up by flickering purple from the lights of the police cars outside leaking through the cracks in the boarded-up windows. “And when the cops bust through the doors, we tell them… what? Lemuel says it’s
totes cool
to set up a magical meth lab in his empty auto repair shop?”
“Can you make it
not
empty? Can you make it look like we’ve actually set up shop in here?”
“…for Flex?”
“No,” Paul said. “To repair cars.”
“How do you propose I do that?”
“Don’t ask me – you’re the videogame queen. Isn’t there some videogame-style way to populate this garage with fresh equipment?”
“Jesus Christ, Paul.” The police cars screeched around the rear entrance, cutting off escape. “You come up with half a plan, then expect me to pull a miracle out of my ass?”
“…can’t you?”
“Of
course
I can, but you shouldn’t
expect
that!” Valentine clicked an imaginary mouse, and the police lights’ flickering whirl halted. Quaysean and K-Dash stood petrified, literally petrified, their hands paused halfway towards reaching for their guns. Everything stood frozen in time.
A glowing white grid superimposed itself over the walls and floor, highlighting each individual square foot.
“First, we give it a fresh set of paint,” Valentine muttered, selecting the walls so they pulsed gray. She flicked her fingers. Blocks of different colors appeared before her, a dollar cost floating below each shade: a palette.
She frowned, waving through various selections, until she settled upon a plain brick-red that cost $500. Valentine selected it; the flyspecked calendar vanished with a cash-register
ka-ching!
, to be replaced by a beautiful dry coat of paint covering all the walls.
“This is the only part of
The Sims
anyone gives a crap about,” she squeed. “Buying crazy shit for your house!”
She pulled up a furniture menu, selected a countertop with a cash register, spun it into the corner. She scrolled through several categories until she found “Auto Repair,” and began merrily dropping all sorts of repair equipment into the shop: spare tires, the car hoists, wheel aligners, engine analyzers….
Paul drew Valentine’s attention to the depleting pallet of cash, which dwindled as she finalized each item. “Would you mind not buying
all
the top-tier equipment?” Paul asked.
“You’ve seen my Hot Topic frenzies, Paul,” she shot back. “You should know better than to hand a shopping spree to a girl like me.” But she guiltily highlighted the
Pac-Man
machine and the OfficeMax desk, sold them back with another happy register
ka
-
ching
! They popped out of existence. The tray of Flex resting on the desk clattered to the floor.
Paul sighed; if only Valentine could envision the proper videogame justification, she could have frozen time and teleported them all into another state. But Valentine’s ability to bend physics stemmed directly from her intense vision of how videogame rules should apply to the world; Valentine couldn’t teleport without a Portal Gun any more than Paul could conjure up free money.
Valentine finished up by purchasing a rusted Saturn and maneuvering it up onto the hoists. She squinted, double-checking her work, then purchased a large oil-stained tarp to drop over the much smaller pallet of cash.
Paul calculated; about $150,000 remained. Fine. The Flex was worth millions, it could pay off Oscar with money to spare…
With a satisfied nod, Valentine clicked an “Exit Build Mode” button. Quaysean and K-Dash’s hands finished the grab for their guns; they whipped them out, then pointed them in confusion at a drum of antifreeze that hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“What – what happened?” K-Dash asked, his voice cracking.
“Whoo, now
that’s
a world of explanation we don’t have time for,” Valentine allowed, shoving them backwards towards the lockers. “Now be quiet while I make you look like mechanics.”
“
What
?” Quaysean asked, “
How
?”
“Gonna reskin you,” Valentine said, as calmly as if she’d told them she was going to get them a Coke. She snapped her fingers; two locker doors flew open, revealing blank TV static buzzing inside. She shoved the two boys inside.
They went in as two skinny Latinos with gun tattoos laced up their whipcord-muscled arms; they emerged as plump, bucktoothed white boys clad in mechanics’ outfits. They looked in bewilderment at their bodies, spreading their now oil-grimed fingers before their faces.
Valentine patted them on the shoulders. “Just a character swap,” she assured them. “You’re still you underneath.”
The cops smashed the boarded-over windows in, fired nerve-gas grenades through blindly.
“You work for Mr Galuschak.” She coughed as the metal canisters bounced off the walls, spraying green gas everywhere. “Do
not
fight back. Act like confused mechanics.”
She ducked into the locker herself, emerging as a lean black man clutching a wrench – and immediately vomited.
Paul held his breath, eyes watering, shoveling the Flex into a large plastic cooler. The fact that the cops had fired nerve gas without warning was a hopeful sign: that had been the NYPD ’Mancy Task Force’s default strategy two years ago, signaling they still followed standard operating procedure. This meant Lenny Pirrazzini was heading up the attack – and while Lenny was dedicated to stomping out ’mancers, he had all the creativity of a brick.
Which meant Paul’s plan might actually work.
Valentine-as-black-mechanic lurched over as Paul began to retch. The cops bellowed orders to
come out with your hands up
, not quite daring to charge headfirst into a ’mancer’s lair.
Valentine shoved the Flex-cooler into the bottom of an auto-parts toolchest, then asked, “So what’s Galuschak look like?”
“I dunno. Old and ethnic.” She shoved him into the blackness. Paul felt the cold electron flow of being converted into reticulated splines, a process more disturbing than he could convey. His flesh was translated into essential mathematic formulas, recalculated.
He stumbled out of the locker, examining his hands to see what they looked like; they were wrinkled, liver-spotted. A walrus mustache tickled his lips. His watering eyes viewed the billowing gas through a curtain of overlong white eyebrows.
Ugly, but it hid his artificial foot and missing toes.
Paul’s lungs ached. The garage door vibrated from the thump of shaped charges affixed to the hinges. He grabbed an imaginary pen, created driver’s licenses for everyone, placed ID cards in everyone’s pockets.
Lungs burning, he inhaled, and barfed all over his feet.
He’d only breathed in SMASH-grade nerve gas once before, and never wanted to again. The government had designed this anti-’mancer teargas to cause instantaneous headaches and vomiting – enough to jangle any ’mancer’s concentration.
Paul fell to his knees.
The door blew open. Cops poured in, wearing gasmasks –
What if we’d worn gas masks ourselves?
What would they do if we’d adapted to their old tactics?
Paul thought woozily, despairing at Lenny’s total lack of strategic forethought.
The cops took no chances: they zip-tied the four of them, ankles and wrists, hauled them outside. The two choppers swooped around overhead, focusing spotlights on them, their rotors’ air wash dispersing the gas.
The cops deposited them before a skinny Italian man in black armor who loomed over them, hands on hips. He smirked, wrinkling a wispy pube-stache that any man with a scrap of sense would have shaved off – but Lenny Pirrazzini was as overconfident about his marginal looks as he was everything else in life.
“Four ’mancers,” he preened. “We got
four
of these fuckers. SMASH has been riding my ass for two years ’cause we hadn’t caught a one – but now four, in the basket!”
One of the cops looked at Paul – who was, to all appearances, an elderly heart patient. “Uh, Lieutenant….”
“I’m gonna shove this right down their damn throat,” Lenny continued, licking his lips. “Call ’em up every damn day and say, ‘Hey, you remember that time I rounded up four ’mancers in one shot? Without a scrap of your fuckin’ Unimancy to assist us? Maybe you guys could learn from us…’”
“Sir!” the cop interrupted, extracting the driver’s license from Paul’s pocket. “I don’t think – I don’t think these are ’mancers.”
Lenny blinked, an oddly squirrel-like action. “Of
course
they’re ’mancers. We got a call from the King of New York. The King is Midas, ’cause his information is
golden
.”
Paul shivered: it
was
the King who’d turned them in. Somehow. “With all due respect, sir,” said the cop, “The – the ‘King’ is an anonymous informant. And I think – I think he gave us the wrong address…”
Lenny looked at the fully-stocked garage, the four mechanics, the total absence of anything resembling a Flex lab. He frowned in confusion. Paul almost felt sorry for him; Lenny hadn’t had much success since he’d been promoted to second-in-command of the NYPD Task Force.
“I’m just–” Paul said, then coughed when he realized he still spoke in his own voice. Fortunately, the projectile vomiting had roughened his usual tones, so Paul adopted a fake German accent. “I’m chust a mechanic. I bought ze shop two months ago…”
That was all Paul could get out before he dry-heaved again.
He hoped Lenny would buy it. Lenny
had
to. Paul’s head spun like a Tilt-a-Whirl, making it impossible to summon more ’mancy. If Lenny decided to haul them all in for questioning, Paul’s fake ID would hold up, but the hastily assembled driver’s licenses he’d given to Valentine, K-Dash, and Quaysean would fall apart once they got booked.
But Paul knew that Lenny
hated
looking bad in front of other people.
Lenny stomped into the auto repair shop to investigate. Puzzled, he kicked one of the hoist’s steel beams experimentally, then looked around for evidence of Flex-making equipment. There was none; Valentine had sold it all off.
A smarter man would have scoured the garage, knowing ’mancy could do bizarre things – and would have discovered the cooler full of Flex and the $150,000 in the lockers in short order. But Paul knew that Lenny, sweating, must have been thinking of the press that would come down upon him for a false bust, the potential lawsuits over assaulting a small businessman over an anonymous tip.