"No!" said Sharon, a little more nervously than she'd intended. "I'm switching to regular cigarettes. I can live on those, I don't need yours!"
"You do. Without them, you'll go to pieces."
"Listen to me, you BASTARD!" Sharon cried suddenly. "I want you to leave me alone, I want you to stop phoning me...I want...I want..."
"You want...our cigarettes?"
Sharon began to cry as she realised just how desperate she was for them. "Yes...but I can't afford that..."
"Sorry. It's that or nothing." With that, the man put the phone down. Sharon slumped back on the sofa, sobbing quietly to herself. The noise of the front door closing made her jump to her feet and rush to embrace Jim.
"Did you get them?!?!" she asked frantically. "Please, please give them to me!!"
Jim held up a carton of Marlboros. "Are these enough?"
"Yes, yes!" Sharon snatched the carton, and frantically tore the wrapper away, eagerly removing a pack and taking a cigarette. Putting it into her mouth, she picked up her lighter in her trembling hands and flicked it, bringing the flame to the tip of the cigarette. An impossibly long drag followed. Sharon blew a thick cloud of smoke towards the ceiling, and moaned with pleasure.
"Will those replace the Streetwalkers, do you think?" asked Jim.
Sharon took another drag as she turned to face her boyfriend. "Ohh...yes...I think so. But I think I'll have to have them more often, they're not as strong as those were." She took Jim's hand and sat down on the sofa with him.
"I'm sorry." she said. "I must seem so selfish...but I just know I can't not smoke anymore, the cravings are too powerful..."
Jim lent forward and kissed Sharon in one of the rare moments that the cigarette wasn't between her lips. "Don't worry...it'll be alright. While I was out, I stopped off at that experimental lab a few blocks away, the top secret one I told you about? They've got a new process that they want to test on someone, they think it can completely suppress a smoker's addiction in one treatment."
Sharon stared at her cigarette and frowned. "I...I like smoking. I know that if I was a normal smoker, I'd still get cravings, but I just don't like the Streetwalker cravings...I want to be a smoker, but I don't want it to run my life."
Jim considered. He didn't want Sharon to carry on smoking, but he could see that it meant a lot to her. "Well...why don't you have this treatment, and then just take up regular cigarettes again?" he suggested, hoping that once her addiction had been suppressed, she wouldn't go back to them.
Sharon thought about it. "Alright. What do I have to do?"
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Later that afternoon, Jim took Sharon along to the lab. He introduced her to Doctor Alyssa Felton, a young scientist in her early thirties, who had pioneered this new procedure.
"What we'll do, Sharon, is we'll get you to stand in this chamber and smoke your cigarette. We'll pump in a new gas we've developed, and as that interacts with the smoke and your body, you should start to feel less of a need to smoke. Alright?"
Sharon was still a little hesitant, but co-operated. "When do we do it?" she asked, before taking another satisfying drag on her cigarette.
Alyssa smiled. "No time like the present. You can and stand in the chamber, and we'll get things rolling."
"Alright." said Sharon. She smiled at Jim and opened the chamber door. As she got inside, Alyssa had one of her assistants lock it, so that no gas could escape.
"I'm ready." said Sharon over the intercom.
"Alright...we're introducing the gas...now." Alyssa flicked a switch, and the colourless, odourless gas began to filter into the chamber where Sharon was smoking.
"How soon will we know whether or not it's working?" asked Jim.
"It should be less than a minute." said Alyssa. "If you look at this respiratorygram, you can see the smoke in her lungs there, and our gas beginning to interact with it."
A screen showed an image of Sharon's lungs as the gas entered.
Sun Dec 05 14:51:37 2004