The October Amaryllis: Everything Has a Cost

Chapter 8 - May 18th, 2220 11:12 A.M.

Ever since I was a kid, I feared anything related to arachnids; spiders, scorpions, you name it. I’m also deathly afraid of earwigs and silverfish. Now, why exactly am I telling you all of this out of nowhere? Well… let’s just say the girl at the front desk had an augmentation that gave her eight arms or rather legs. She was basically Doctor Octopus.

“Spider!” I yelled out, nearly fainting from shock.

Why did it have to be spiders? Spiders are an abomination created by nature.

“What’s the matter, lad? Never seen a spider cyborg before?” she asked in amusement.

“Actually, no,” I replied, nearly shaking. The color of her spider arms reminded me of a specific incident that happened in 2013; I came home from school and found a wolf spider in my bathroom sink. I poked it repeatedly until it finally bit me. You might ask me why I did something so bloody stupid. I was trying to get it to run away, but it just sat there unmoving. It was telling me, “No, you move, asshole!”

“My name’s Margot, but all my friends call me Widow, my father Herbert runs this place. In his spare time, he creates inventions though a bit like Daedalus. He created my arms!” she said excitedly, waving around all eight of her uh… appendages?

“Forgive me for asking, but why do you have so many arms?” I asked, confused. I couldn’t imagine ever needing over four arms. I say that because, with four arms, you could battle yourself in a video game. I’d love to fight against myself in Smash Ultimate. I’m boss with Meta Knight.

“It helps me do more orders at once; it’s pretty cool being able to work four times faster,” she said, lifting eight bottles of medicine at once to demonstrate.

“Pretty cool, I’ll admit. Listen, um, I need to get something for my dad. He has stomach cancer,” I said, nearly choking at the end. I take far longer to move on from trauma than most people, I would say.

“Oh, how unfortunate… Well, would you like the Intertiza or the Ombirone?” she asked, pulling out the bottles with her first two appendages.

“What’s the difference?” I asked, confused.

“You want me to be honest with you?” she asked, whispering as she leaned in.

“Yeah?” I replied, confused.

“The truth is I have absolutely no clue,” she said, shaking her head.

Oh, great…

That was when her father literally popped out of the ground like a kernel of popcorn.

“How did you get here?!” I asked, feeling like I just had a hallucination.

“I took the underground elevator. Come on, Margot, you can’t just tell people you don’t know the difference between medicines; that can kill them,” he said, shaking his head in disappointment.

“I’ve only been here for a week,” she said, annoyed.

“Yes, I suppose I overreacted a bit,” he said, frowning before turning to face me.

“The truth is the only difference between the medicines is the company that made them. Wolfram makes the first, and the second is made by Gamma, same dose same everything. It does what it’s supposed to do, which is cure cancer,” he explained.

Oh, so like how fifty different companies sell the exact same Advil?

“So you just drink it like a regular pill?” I asked curiously.

“Not quite. See, with these two companies, they put around five-hundred nanobots inside a water-soluble gel capsule. Once it dissolves, the nanobots will escape and do their work by destroying the cancerous cells. They stay in the body for around forty years before breaking. Do you see them?” he asked, pulling a single blue capsule out of the bottle.

“I see nothing,” I replied, confused.

“Exactly! You’re not supposed to see anything but the pill. Pretty genius, huh?” he asked excitedly.

“Quite…” I replied in awe.

“Have a good day, friend,” Widow said as she gave me a bottle of the Intertiza.

I felt so happy on my way out that I felt like crying; there are moments in my life where there is so much beauty around me that I simply feel overwhelmed. It’s like my body can’t contain all the joy and has to release it through my tear ducts for fear that it might explode otherwise. It’s a feeling of finally being able to escape everything that had previously weighed me down. And trust me, there is nothing greater than the sense of freedom after being trapped.

I did it; I can finally have my dad back…