Simple Compounds

Concerning "Love"

C8H11NO2 + C10H12N2O + C43H66N12O12S2

dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. 

Scientifically speaking, the formula for love. I brushed my fingers over the seemingly random sprawl of numbers and letters carved in to my arm. With every touch, the pain sprung free again. 

"Beckett!" I felt someone nudge the back of my swivel chair. I almost instantly knew that it was my heartless supervisor. He was the quintessential high-school senior when it came to torturing newcomers. It was only my first week on the job, and he would never let me forget.

"Lookit you!" He chimed, slapping the back of my head. "Sitting at the big-boy desk."

I knew better than to justify that with a response. I spun my chair away from him and pretended to busy myself with work.

"Congratulation on getting assigned that Edison girl." he taunted to my silent figure. "S'a big responsibility, keeping all of our bets n' such."

My permanent distribution assignment came in that morning. I was only to administer the drug to the families of the Rosario and Lirio districts. The Rosario district was infamous for one person, apparently. Her name was Tara-Jerry Edison. I couldn't understand why everyone was so fascinated with her, but then I was informed, under duress. Rumor had it that her intake needed to be doubled so many times, she actually started to show some of the negative repercussions. She constantly toed a fine line between going completely berserk from just a little too much dope, or having no reaction at all to too little. Bets up here were placed on which way she would sway, or how much or how little would sway her. If she even took one step out of the line, it was said that she could make the balance of civil society collapse. A ridiculous thought, no matter how factual it could have been. 

When I registered to work at the East Coast Welfare Center, I knew that one of the guidelines was being able to go off the dope during work hours. Whether I liked it or not, it was the closest escape I could find. I soon found out that the "insiders" (a very basic term for a decently complicated position) were the only ones allowed to sway away, with some strict limits. We're here to get paid, not to get laid.

"Don't listen to them, babe." I heard my co-worker, Crystal, chuckle. She was a curvy, muscly black woman with insane dreadlocks and had a reputation for sucker-punching every man who looked at her funny. She ruffled my hair and sneered as my supervisor backed away. "I'm on top of her."

"You wish." I retorted. Crystal was the single most butch lesbian in the Welfare Center. Any man who hit on her had to be blind to this stupidly obvious fact. She was also the only one in the group who tolerated me. I tolerated her, to a point. But I knew she would never rush to my aid without some reason.

"I do." She chuckled. "And you don't?" She asked for at least the fifth time today.

"I don't swing that way." I answered, once again.

  "Then you have no business with this job." She jested. "Hell, I have no business in this job. I have a masters in chemical engineering and they made me a glorified meth cook."  

"Eh." I muttered, looking back at her. "What is anyone around here going to do with an Asian History major?" 

"Classic racism." Crystal scoffed. 

"Asian History, Crystal..." I corrected, pushing my glasses up my nose. 

In a world where love was administered through the power of prescription, infatuation was country-wide. Love was uniformly arranged, and only available to give to whatever demon spawn of the capitalist monolith is trending. It's a boy-band, more often than not. And why not? They're easy to manufacture. Talent isn't needed. Just fire up a camera and shoot them looking pretty, dope up the public, add water and stir. It was the classic bread-and-circus treatment. The hard part is getting whoever is the center of attention to become propaganda for this abstract concept we call "the law". It's easily solved with a pearl-handled revolver to their heads, or so I hypothesized.

But Tara-Jerry was their, well, our form of reality TV, and it had the perfect setting. An androgynous jewel like Tara-Jerry would be bound to break a few hearts if given the opportunity. She wasn't conventionally pretty, like the icons that would be seen and adored. She was the absolute of beauty for the few of us that preferred those who were taboo. She always parted her luscious platinum-blonde hair a bit off-center, and always let a segment fall from behind her ear, where it would otherwise be neatly tucked. She could pass as a handsome man with a smirk, accentuating her defined cheekbones. You could blink and suddenly see a pretty woman, fluttering her almond-shaped nomad eyes. The dope had little to no effect on her, no matter what quantity. She followed the way of the law begrudgingly, as if she was afraid of the alternative.

But she never came out of her house. Round-the-clock video surveillance and tracking chips implanted in every citizen made her easy to locate, but she never moved very far. She rarely ever stepped out into the view of the public surveillance. Perhaps that was for the best, as the men employed here treated her like nothing more than a lab rat. Well, somewhere between a lab rat and a racing horse. 

"I've been curious." Crystal interrupted my thoughts. "What would she be like if we cut her off entirely?"

There it was. Her ulterior motivation. In the short span of time that I knew Crystal, I figured out that she did not care a bit about being where she was. She leaned on the back of my chair. "Would her amount of crazy fucktouple or would she, paradoxically, start following the gradient?"

I was going to answer, but I bit my tongue at the last second. The cart with the day's shipment of dope approached my cubicle. 

"Because I really want to know, Emile." She said, sounding like she was borderline threatening me. "And I'd know what's best. I have a good six months on you, kid."

The cart rolled over to me and I pulled off the two enormous boxes. It was an assembly-line at the plant, my stop being the very last. One was for Rosario and the other for Lirio. I pulled out each individual canister. They were shaped like sealed coffee cans and had the surnames of families on them. The canisters were full of common household staples like sugar or salt, flour, simple medicines like aspirin or pain-killers, water bottles and baby formula. But they were mixed together with the powdered love. It was like free welfare for the public. They only think they're receiving care packages in this time of fictitious war. We kill two birds with one stone by tricking them in to thinking that we're looking out for them while poisoning them. I pretended to busy myself with counting the canisters, while Crystal pawed around in the Rosario box, looking for the one marked Edison.

"Here it is!" I heard her blurt out. "It's pretty heavy for one person. She definitely doesn't need this much..."

I snatched it back and held on to it tightly. "Crystal!" I said, firmly. "You aren't even supposed to be here!"

I tossed the canister under my desk to keep it out of Crystal's reach. She mumbled profanities under her breath as she hobbled out of the room in disappointment. 

"Beckett!" I heard my last name yelled out for the second time that day. "You need to get those canisters out to their families as soon as humanly possible!"

I rolled my eyes, thinking about how Crystal's brown-nosing ate up all my time. I hurriedly started loading each canister back in the boxes and sealed them with the bright red "approved" tape. I didn't even have a chance to inspect them. I just had to send them out and hope for the best.