A Drinking Problem

She stared at the red liquid, careful sealed in a bottle that occupied the low table in the center of the room. Hunching over to get a closer view for a few minutes, then leaning back into the brown, fuzzy couch, then leaning in again.  It was a deep red, opaque in the clear bottle, close to what she'd seen once in blood-bags at the hospital when her father died.  It was flat, once single color, no floating, flowing bits to take away from the big, red homogeneous nature of it.  The stuff was more than the standard street version that got passed around in the upper-lower class.  That stuff didn't do squat, tasted terrible, and cost more than a years worth of water.

She glanced at the door, then at the wall clock, remembering she had until six in the afternoon before the other people got back, so about an hour before she had to do something with the bottle.  She knew what she could do with it, how to administer it, what the properties likely were, and where to go if there were some bad side effects, but she hadn't quite decided on if she wanted to use it yet.  It would likely clear up her acne, that was standard on most all of them.  There would likely be some meddling with her health, fixing some things that she didn't know she even had.  That might be worth it all in itself.  She could also end up with a tail, or show-wings, or even cat-eyes.  Those probably wouldn't be all that great to have.  People would start asking questions.  It wasn't really likely that there wouldn't be some sort of body mod in it, that was the latest fad these days.  Least current that she could really hope for would be a permanent hair color mod, and she could explain that away with hair dye.

She wasn't that scared of the downsides though, those would work themselves out, even if most of the people would be jealous for a long while afterwards.  Her real indecision lay in the fact that it would probably sell for a lot more than she would make in the next few years combined scavenging some of the abandoned towns.  To the right buyer it might even be worth enough to set her up on the track to a more middle-class area of a city.  Not this one, but maybe the next one over.  Too many people knew here here, and she would just be dragged back down to the lowest station of people if she stayed around.  People asking for favours she couldn't in good conscience deny, people stopping by to chat who just happened to eat a little more than she'd planned on offering.  Middle class people who would see the relations and snub her for her roots.  No, she might be able to get out of this life for the price of a bottle of nano-juice.  Maybe.  There was no guarantee.  It could be an off-brand or she could get ripped off by the buyer, or she might even get mugged before she got to finding a buyer.  As time went on, the less and less likely she was to get a good deal out of her find.  Really, the fact that it was sitting in a plastic bag lying under a bridge, just out there, led her to believe that it must not be top-class stuff.  It would almost certainly not be worth the risk to keep it long to sell it.  Probably.

Forty-five minutes until six.  She Was looking at it, pondering her future, thinking about what it might do, still on the cusp of a decision, as she had been for the past three hours since she had gotten back with it, stowed in her bag.  She was back early because of it.  That in itself was going to raise some eyebrows, and either they'd have something to find on her, or they'd find her with something new on her.  That was the choice, she thought.  Keep it and have it split up, or use it now.  For all her dreams of betterment, there really wasn't any chance that she'd be able to hide it from the rest of them.  People were nosy, and this was a cramped house.  The only reason people weren't there was they had to be doing something in order to have a chance of surviving, and there was nothing to do in the hose but sit and sleep and talk, and you could talk while you were scavenging.

She decided, or really she just acted on the conclusion she had made minutes after she had found the thing.  With a quick motion, she grabbed the top of the bottle and twisted.  A small crack, plastic snapping off, and the top opened revealing a thin metal tube covered by a clear plastic baggy.  She tore the baggy off, lifted the bottle to her lips and sipped from the tube.  It wasn't thick, a little bit more viscous than water, but not by much.  Once it started coming in, sliding down her throat, it wouldn't stop.  Slowly it sped up, a warm dribble turning into a full on stream.  The bottle emptied itself, red liquid crawling out of it into her mouth, then down her throat into her stomach.  It would take about half an hour to get fully absorbed.  She lay down on the couch.  It was done now, all that was left was the waiting.  Each time she looked over at the clock she swore it was slow, it had surely been more than two minutes between when she had checked last.

Finally it was quarter 'til, and the second stage of the juice transformation would start.  It set up relays as it spread through the circulatory system, marking out exactly what the body was, and exactly what it had to work with.  Now the relays activated and synced, miniature communication networks opened up, each little nanobot a worker and part of a larger, analytically whole that would direct the process.  It came on in a sensitivity that was almost like being tickled all over, but from the inside of the skin.  She twitched a bit, closed her eyes, and waited.  The tickling exacerbated, stretching deeper, turning more to an itch everywhere. She caught herself starting to scratch at her skin.  It probably wouldn't do anything to, but better safe than with an unplanned side-effect.  Just before the door opened, six o' eight, the itching subdued.  It was still there on some level, but it was just a kind of warmth at that point.  She didn't notice anything different.

"Ey, what's that ya got there Krissy?"

"Umm, what's it look like, Stan, jeeze."

"You found a nano-juice? out here?"

"Well, it was empty.  Cast off stuff.  Who would leave a full one out here, right?"

"You're right about that, pretty much all that's worth anything is the stuff to get recycled."

"Yeah, the are over near the Green bridge is pretty much picked clean.  I got a few things but I wasn't having any luck."

"Came back early then?"

"Yeah."

"River still running down in that part?"

"Not in this season, no rain up north for a while."

"Heard they got some a week back though."

"From Hungry Willy?"

"Mhmm."

"He's full of it, though."

"Not all the time."

"Only has a good eye for cards, everyone knows that."

"Well, yeah, but he was talkin' to me about that rain while we were playing cards, so maybe it translates."

"No way, Stan. You just wanna go fishin' real bad."

"Is it too much to ask?"

"With the way this place has been drying up? I'd say so.  You can't even really eat half the fish though."

"More like a quarter."

"Well, half of them set off the detector."

"A little bit of radiation never hurt anybody."

"Tell that to the Jones' Kid."

"Okay, but he had a condition before that."

"Mhmm."

"Anyway, I got this cool hubcap down south of the steeple."

"Show it to me later, I'm tired."

"But it's really cool Krissy, c'mon."

"I said later."

"But it's all swirly and junk, like a hypnosis wheel."

"...fine, but it had better be cool."

At this point she sat up to look at his "cool hubcap."  It wasn't the first time he'd found something that he thought was cool that just wasn't, but she would just keep getting bugged about it if she didn't look, and she could barely feel and warmth now at all.  The shock showed on her face when she noticed that instead of the normal Stan that she was used to seeing, she also somehow saw layers and layers of meat-stuff inside of Stan that undoubtedly was his brain and his lungs and his heart and his. . .she looked back up.

"I told you this thing was cool."

"Right, yeah, great, umm, hubcap, Stan.