Sazerac Cocktail

Iowa Hill: Episode Eight

Mark may be a blithering lunatic, Austin pointed out to himself, but seeing as Mark had also, following the Flux, masterminded the reactivation of the sea-gates that pumped out the storm surge, and saved the last hunk of old San Francisco, including Russian Hill, North Beach, Nob Hill and Pacific Heights, nobody else was likely to exactly see it that way. Unsurprisingly, following Mark’s opening address to the masses that made exactly zero sense to Austin, the crowds, as they used to say, went wild. And how. Funny how impressionable some of those button-downs can be when their granite counters are in danger. It was like Lord of the Flies meets Fight Club with a side of Mad Max in Thunderdome. Mark now had minions, and then some.

Following that constellation of events, if someone even breathed a sound of how fucked up Mark was, well there were consequences shall we say. In the chaos of the Change, who could prove how someone else had disappeared? It had become a city filled with accidents: boating accidents, tragic improbable falls, trampled by horses, drown diving into a shipwreck, riot, choked by a sex worker, death by BBQ coals, food poisoning, drunken stabbing in a nightclub, self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the back of the head, hypothermia.

Horses? Austin hadn’t seen an animal since F Day, unless you counted pigeons and cockroaches. Even the rats seemed to have abandoned ship. There’s nothing stranger than a city without rats. Maybe they all sprouted wings and flew away. Maybe somebody caught and ate them. One thing was for sure, Austin wasn’t going horseback riding anytime soon.

Anyway, Mark’s brilliant ideas got the pumps working, and that was all that people cared about. Most had no idea how that was actually achieved. When the time came to implement, there were plenty of volunteer candidates available for the task. It took its toll, but there were the hero types who basically foamed at the mouth to be everyone’s savior this week. I suppose if it had remained volunteer, it wouldn't have been so bad a plan necessarily. But of course, that was never going to be the way it happened. Human nature being what it is. 'Volunteer' is too loose a term.

They started with a few dozen helpers. Gamers and watchers who were already “jacked”. They had the hardware already wired in, pre-developed brain function, you see. A special set of talents and skills to reverse the flow of energy back into the system. They were rigged to the web in a room of the Tower where some Super Computers had survived by being offline at the time of the Flux. The brutes with no body mods went out in the storm and carried cable to the pumps. The volunteers got them started with their goddamn minds.

But, of course, it's not the kind of thing a living body can sustain forever. It wasn't long before the volunteers began to fail.

I can only imagine what kind of wear and tear on the synapses such an activity must take. Fry your goddamn brain, is what it does. After a while the volunteers weren't feeling so voluntary. They had to be coerced to continue. But even then, they started just dropping dead after a while.

So, Mark came up with a new plan. That's where Rimona came in.