Lucky... Pharmaceuticals!

To say that Rachel staggered out the door of Lucky's would be inaccurate, and thus would suggest that the speaker had succumbed to negative stereotypes of the psychiatric medication user. Her gait was actually steadier than the average Sprawner (without adjusting for the fact that she was 17 years younger than that hypothetical person.) The only macroscopic sign of stress was found in her head, which rotated in the horizontal plane too frequently and too rapidly to be seemly for a calm, upstanding citizen with nothing in particular on her mind.

Rachel proceeded down the sidewalk, her viewpoint roving as she scanned for a refuge. Suddenly, she ducked into a shallow recess, seemingly a side entrance to the commercial garage just upstreet. It was disused, for the door had been painted shut using the same ugly dark green color as the surrounding walls.

She had been looking for such a place to take her Claritize. Opening her purse, she clawed with her left nails through the bag and through the other superfluous papers to get to the vial.

To open the childproof container was a two-handed job. As she twisted the lid, the clangorous mechanical harrrr-Umph! of an engine starting up shook the door. Rachel almost dropped the capsule, but recovered and popped it into her mouth and shepherded it quickly down with her tongue.

HARRRR-UMMPHHH!! racketed the engine again, and this time Rachel could swear that flecks of the paint were dislodged from where they had been sealing the door. Our heroine elected to stay back in the doorway in case this apparently monstrous vehicle should emerge patrolling the street for her. She tried to look inconspicuous, yet at the same time not as though she were trying to hide.

The next sounds from the garage provided almost comic relief from what seemed to be the snorts, coughs and grating wheezes of the death throes of a mammoth mining dump truck. Loud but tinny and tinselly music started playing as she heard the garage door open. Feeling she had already deduced what was coming, she felt anticipatory embarrassment even though (hopefully) no one would ever know of the apparently benign nature of what had panicked her.

After 42 seconds, she had her confirmation. A cream-colored ice cream truck, festooned with brown ice-cream sandwiches, red popsicles and tan drumsticks paraded down the street, playing “Come Together,” a nonsense pop hit of the moment.

Rachel soberly evaluated her sense of relief. Yes, it was not a police vehicle, nor a black sedan bristling with antennae. But if they were monitoring her, they would be silly to sit in something obvious like that-and conversely, it would be smart to do it from something silly. Short of a four-wheeled hot dog, what could be sillier than an ice cream truck?

The driver was the usual phlegmatic-turbaned-ice-cream-truck-male-hominid. Rachel looked hard to see if the passenger seat was occupied, and it did not seem to be. However, the vehicle was traveling fast, as though trying to get to quickly to a place where there were more juveniles on the street than the current zero in the central business district. Thus, her observation was fleeting, robbing her of confidence in what she saw. She told herself that the mere fact it was an ice cream truck behaving as such a truck should when observed half a block from its garage was reassurance enough, but her mind would not stop speculating.

Perhaps there was someone slouched down in the front seat, or even a midget, standing on the floor mat and peeping through the bottom of the window.

Her intellect knew that these ideas were so far-fetched that she might as well worry about a cometary collision causing the end of all hominid life on Semiramide. Unfortunately, her intellect’s voice had no power to soothe the panic, panic that she knew could consume her like a forest firestorm devouring a drought-withered stick and leaving a mere cinder waving in the furnace-like breeze. Extinguishing such potent sparks was the job of “Clara Tize,” as Rachel in her gratitude and dependency had personified her “med.” Unfortunately, in the current case, Clara had arrived on the scene almost an hour too late to prevent the flare-up now beginning to toast some of Rachel’s outlying limbic neurons. Hopefully, her appearance was still soon enough to divert the blaze from the densest stands of fuel.

Rachel consciously and intentionally took a deep breath from her diaphragm, stepped out of her niche and turned down the street in the opposite direction to the one taken by the truck. The medication had not yet kicked in, and against her will, her mind replayed the traumatic meeting with Major Munir: “You're an observer... well, observe then!”

“So, that's what they want me to do!” she thought. Rachel realized she had observed enough for the nonce. She would use her day off to research and deduce, not passively observe.

Like many Assreper’s in dead-end, low paying jobs, Rachel's previous career had been student. At the Sprawn City University of Technology (SCUT), she graduated in library science. This would finally serve her in good stead. She was already very familiar with the Associated Republic State Archives (ARSA), and thus to that dusty and dysphoric grey monolith she prepared to repair.

Unfortunately, the journey to ARSA required a bus, given the now-42-degree heat and the nine-kilometer distance. Rachel hated taking the bus for many reasons, including her fear of renavirus infection and her recently-minted concern that she was under surveillance. Gritting her teeth under her carefully-adjusted mask, she boarded the Sprawn City Associated Transit (SCAT) #2 and looked for a seat that had the ideal balance of being both near the back and far from all other passengers. Looking towards the rear, she found such a situation in a place at the left end of the bench that took up the back end of the passenger area.

The jolting journey was only one-quarter over when all of Rachel's senses went on alert again. Her chosen seat gave her a clear view of a male hominid surreptitiously boarding through the back door.

Shorts... Red and yellow flowers... bare skinny chest... Oh no, it can't be!...

It was no better the second time-this same hominid who had brushed her as she left the Major’s building again revolted her with his partial nudity. She atheistically prayed that he would not sit near her. He did not, but did the next worst thing: he sat directly in Rachel's line of vision, pivoting as soon as he was out of the short stairwell to sink down into the seat next to the door. She looked away, first to the front of the bus, and offered another hopeless prayer that he would disembark very soon.

In the short time between the next 2 stops, her feeling subtly changed. The mere presence of the male hominid bothered her in a more tolerable way. Before the first stop, his existence in the bus seared her brain like a screaming trumpet into a migraine headache. Now, a Harmon mute had been applied-his presence was still sharp and buzzy, but only marginally inflammatory.

Subtle, but there was no doubt... Claritize effect.

She continued to monitor the red-and-yellow-flower-partially-clad-hominid, but from a different attitude. If he was monitoring her, so what? She could use it against him, (or them, if there was more than one enemy or potential enemy.) And if he was not, and the whole thing was the stuff of a form-fruste of paranoia, so much the better, as if her paranoid ideations turned out to be unfounded, she would feel relaxed on or off Claritize. As though to prove this potential relaxation to herself and anyone who happened to notice, she closed her eyes, no longer worried about missing her stop, which was still four miles ahead. When she opened her eyes, the hominid was gone.

She felt slightly logy, an effect she was familiar with from the other times she had fallen asleep while on Claritize, but the upside was that she was still relaxed, calm even though she was not sure where she was.

“ARSA!!” the driver bellowed.

Once again, Rachel’s subjective time sense had been proven to be quite objective. She looked up and out of the bus window to shake off her mental cobwebs. Sure enough, there was the forbidding mass of ARSA, a dark institutional-grey pile of glass and masonry directly abutting both sides of the street, leaving room for only the narrowest of sidewalks. The impression was of buildings so bulging with books and documents that the roofs were forced to expand upwards to reach their six or eight story heights and the facades given no choice but to creep to their overshadowing position.

Why such proliferation of archives and records, to the point where even the most avid bibliophiles and strongest defiers of time’s fell hand might cry “enough!”? In terms of comparative planetary techno-history, Froward and Horn (211117) have offered an explanation which most subsequent authors agree is correct in its broad outlines, although admittedly somewhat heuristic in its details. The authors point out that Semiramide’s planetary bugaboos were the relentless epidemics, which had been literally plaguing its sapients for over a century. The reasons the planet was more severely affected than comparable worlds remain controversial, even with the analytic advantage provided by a cross-planetary system perspective. In Rachel’s era of Semiradean history, such comparisons were not possible, as travel even to neighboring worlds in their own system remained completely in the realm of fiction. What is certain is that the pandemics had a severe inhibiting effect on the development of technologies that on other worlds were able to run unfettered or even wild.

Around the time the first pandemic was terrorizing Rachel’s planet, almost a century before her birth, Semiramide was embarking on a “normal” technological development for a technological-manipulative subclass of rational sapients. This included an embryonic aerial-oriented technological environment. The unfortunate coincidence of the first great epidemic with the initiation of rapid air travel between the ocean planet's scattered archipelagos and small continents meant that particular technology was nipped in the bud, while the severity and contagiousness of the disease soured the entire species on ever again engaging in such efficient ways to spread infection widely and rapidly.

Numerous technohistorical studies have been performed in attempts to “tease out” factors related to the pattern of technological development of a particular culture or on a particular world. In a meta-analysis of a multitude of such studies which compared various psychosocial, psychological, environmental, cultural and genetic variables’ effects on the rate and quality of technological development, ₹ and Ÿ° of the PSO J318.5−22 Orphan Planetary Academy for Nocturnal Technohistory (OPANT) listed aviation and interplanetary ambitions as among the factors which had the most dramatically salutary effects in terms of the rapid development of mini- and super-computers. In the case of Semiramide, the lack of compelling motivation to miniaturize electronic brains so that they could fly or be flown meant that a non-biological brain large enough to serve as a librarian would be almost the size of the library it served. This was not an attractive option, as the libraries of the Ass. Rep. were already big enough. For example, the eight-story buildings of ARSA alone took up nine city blocks.

On recognizing this unglamorous pile, Rachel rose quickly from her bus seat, and with minimal stagger despite the continuing effects of Claritize, disembarked to start workin’ the voluminous stacks.