The Flux Read Free

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