Spectral Evidence

“Well, sure.” Murmuring: “But, see…I’ve slept with most of them already.”

—

Back at Gilmore Petty’s West End screw-pad, to which Rice had had a copied key since she was around fifteen, Horatia watched with studied I’m-so-not-impressed ‘tude as Rice cooked her up a quick batch of home-made MDMA. An hour later, she was explaining her thesis research to Rice at top speed and volume, gesticulating like she was on crack; a half-hour after that, Rice had her bent over the breakfast buffet, her tongue in Horatia’s ear, three soaked fingers and an equally-wet thumb urging her girlie parts towards full, fist-ready dilation.

Why would she have even taken that first hit? on some level, Rice supposed, Horatia probably thought she was immune—that she could defeat simple chemistry through sheer Nietzschean will-to-power. The basic fact was, really smart people could sometimes do the dumbest shit imaginable; Rice herself was living proof of that truism. For most of her sexually-mature life, Rice had taken deliberate pride in cultivating a policy of enthusiastic polymorphous perversity—live life to its most lurid extremes was her motto, paraphrasing Rimbaud (or possibly Verlaine). In her time she’d seduced teachers, friends’ parents and parents’ friends, the occasional pet; she’d inserted any object inside her which would fit, plus many which really didn’t (though she’d certainly had fun trying to make them). Hell, she’d spent the better part of Prom Night sucking off her best-friend-who-was-a-boy’s same-sex date in the faculty lounge girls’ washroom, while simultaneously taping the whole encounter for later YouTube distribution on camera-phone. If it was doable at all, she’d pretty much already done it.

But even in a short life of complex thrills, sex with Horatia had to qualify as a serious career high. Cold and efficient to near-Spockian degrees under almost every other circumstance, Horatia had no moral hangups, a vivid carnal imagination (Rice suspected she’d attended the School of Porn for some time now, functional virgin or not), double-jointed thumbs, and seldom remembered to wear underpants. Considering her entire modus vivendi revolved around a constant diet of hypertension and overwork, it probably shouldn’t have been any sort of surprise that with the proper encouragement she could—and did—go off like a string of firecrackers.

They spent the next day in bed after a pleasantly exhausting night out of it, in various other locations (and positions). Rice lounged back and watched Horatia elaborate on the experiment that’d consumed her life up to this point, eventually breaking in to clarify—

“So you’re working on, like…human flesh spackle.”

Horatia, flushing: “I most certainly am not.”

Rice really had to laugh, long and loud. “Aw, c’mon! You know you are, man—that’s exactly what it is, and that’s totally fine; very…chick-friendly. Very marketable.”

“It’s a damn cellular matrix force-growth reagent in a collagen unguent base, you whore.”

“Comes in a jar? Goes on with a spreader?”

“…I hate you.”

Ah, but that didn’t last too long.

—

Just supposed to be a simple hook-up, a trick, like everything—or everyone—else Rice did. But she found herself taking Horatia’s numbers anyhow, and actually using them; indisputably, there was something about finally having another high-three-digit IQ case on speed-dial. Besides which, Horatia had…qualities, and those qualities were already starting to grow on Rice like sympathetic mold. Rice soon got used to having her around in the background while she ran through her normal daily grind of low-level super-villainy-so much so, after a lamentably short while, it almost seemed like she couldn’t function optimally without Horatia. Which was…

(creepy)

…evolution, maybe. Like calling to like. And likin’ it.

By the end of February, Rice had bought Horatia in on the bottom floor of an only half-built, all-but-discontinued condo out near the old abandoned sugar factory on Lakeshore, and put up for a bunch of shiny new lab equipment on top of it. A few weeks later, she let her dorm roommates kick her out at last, and moved in too. By April, when her Dad wanted to know just where the fuck her perfect GPA had gone and just what the fuck those $40,000 worth of unspecified expenses on his Visa bill were, she told him to go screw himself and he told her—fucking finally—that she was officially cut off. Annoying, but not unexpected.

After all, it wasn’t like she didn’t have a viable back-up plan.

—

But: “Listen,” said Horatia, with surprising patience, “I am not going to let you boil the greatest potential discovery of the 21st century down for parts and sell it as a recreational drug, just because we have bills to pay. I’m just not, Clarice.”

“Rice, please. ‘Clarice’ is Doctor Lecter’s long-distance crush.”

Horatia rolled her eyes. “Why would you want everybody to think your parents named you after a staple foodstuff?”

“Why would your parents really-for-truly name you anything that reduces down to ‘ho’? ‘Cause that kinda had to suck, back in school, right?”

“Moving on…”

It was April 22, Earth Day. Good time of the year for moral debates, but Horatia’s position on this one would’ve rung a whole lot stronger had she not just been turned down for a follow-up grant to her now-exhausted Lasky Award funds—as Rice well knew, having overheard at least one half of the entire shrieking phone call which preceded this particular plot twist.

As far as Rice could make out, the Lasky Foundation’s main objections had seemed to be A) but what are we supposed to do with something that keeps functionally dead rats alive indefinitely, yet unable to breed? (“Sell it to rich people who think they’re too important to die at a ridiculously inflated price, you morons!” Horatia had screamed. “Then use half the initial profit to mass-produce it, give it out gratis to everybody else, and freeze Earth’s population explosion!”) Which then led directly into B) shut the fuck up, you freak.

“You do get how you just kinda shot your credibility wad there, right?” Rice had asked, helpfully, after Horatia threw the phone across the room. “I mean, fighting Death-the-archetype mano a mano for the salvation of the world is…pretty cool, but to the corporate mindset? Counter-productive, to say the least. They want mortality left in the equation, man. Makes it a whole lot easier to sell people shit they don’t really need, when they’re scared.”

“I took the same Intro to Microeconomics requirement you did, thank you very much.”

“Okay, sure. But were you actually paying attention? or were you maybe just working on Reagent Draft one under the table, while making fun of the prof ’s heinous nose hair?”