Bzrk (18 page)

The toast popped up.

On the screen a man ran trailing fire and smoke, tripped and fell, and died.

“If you’re having toast, I’ll put some in.”

Bug Man sipped his coffee.

He had beaten Vincent. Yeah, he owned that.

Next time he’d finish it.

He took his sweetened coffee back to his room, sent Jessica packing, and despite the caffeine, fell asleep.

Bug Man woke suddenly, knowing he was not alone.

Four men stood around his bed. They were strong men, all dressed in casual clothing, innocuous pinks and tans and teals.

“What?” He sat up but only made it part of the way before powerful hands grabbed his biceps and his ankles. They flipped him over onto his belly.

“What the hell?” he cried.

“No one’s home,” one of the men said. “Yell all you like.”

A phone was thrust into his face. A video image appeared. To his horror it was the faces of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.

“Anthony,” Charles said in a calm, measured voice. “We are not about ego. We are about peace and unity, bringing all humans together, so that all men are brothers and husbands, all women sisters and wives.”

“Listen, I’m sorry about—”

But the video was still running. It wasn’t live; it was recorded. It was a message.

A sentence.

“Your pride cost us a victory in that battle, Anthony. Your
pride
.”

“Let me go!”

“We love you, Anthony,” Benjamin said.

They held him, one set of powerful hands for each limb, but then the man holding his left ankle must have managed to have a hand free, mustn’t he? Because that man had a club in his hand. Bug Man could see it, glancing frantically down over his shoulder, a thick, round, polished, dark piece of wood.

“But punishment is demanded in this case,” Benjamin continued.

“However much we regret it.”

“What the hell?” Bug Man cried, and the club smashed down on the back of his thighs.

The pain was incredible. Unimaginable.

“We do love you, Anthony.”

And a second blow landed. He cried out in agony and fear.

And a third blow and every muscle in his body was twanging tight as he screamed into his pillow and one of the men holding his arms bent low, brought his ugly yellowed eyes close to Bug Man’s tear-streaming, strained face, and said, “That was from the bosses. But we lost good men last night, you little Limey piece of shit. So this last one’s from us.”

The club came down hard and for a moment Bug Man’s brain just shut down.

He felt their hands release.

He heard them leave the room and close his door.

SEVENTEEN

Plath did not dream of the night’s violence. She dreamed about her brother. In her dream he had grown up. He had a family. Two little girls and Sadie—not Plath, Sadie—was coming over for dinner, and it was all strangely televisionish, not real. The girls were perfectly pretty. Eating a cereal in a bright box: Kellogg’s Nanobots.

At first that didn’t seem strange to dream-Sadie as she walked through the scene.

The kitchen was middle American, with a refrigerator covered in children’s drawings and pictures and report cards with
Straight A’s!
Yay!
written in red pen.

It was nothing like the home Stone would probably have had. In the dream he had a more prosaic life than he’d have had if he had lived and taken over McLure Industries.

The cereal was coming out of the box now, crawling in a swarm toward the little girls’ bowls, refilling as they spooned up the crunchy nuggets.

“I didn’t feel a thing,” Stone said.

“You must have been afraid,” dream-Sadie argued.

And behind him, back where Stone couldn’t see but Sadie could, the nanobots were crawling up over the little girls’ white arms and over their colorful dresses and up their necks and all the while the girls smiled.

“Bang and it was over,” Stone said, nodding like it was true and like he remembered it and like there was nothing at all strange about his commenting on the circumstances of his own death.

The cereal nanobots were disappearing into little pink ears and noses and eyes.

She woke up.

A knock at the door.

Someone in her bed, a chest her head lay upon. She yanked back.

“I’ll get it,” Keats said. He worked his arm, the one she’d been sleeping on, like it was numb, which it probably was. He opened the door.

It was Ophelia. If she was surprised to find them both in the same room, she didn’t show it. She had two Starbucks, two bottles of water, and a brown bag with some kind of pastry, all in one of those corrugated carriers.

“Need you both in about twenty minutes,” Ophelia announced. She even had a smile that said, “That’s an order, not a request.”

In the bag they found muffins. One looked like blueberry, the other might have been raspberry.

“I’ll take the blueberry,” Plath said. The cups were both lattes. They drained the water bottles, sipped the coffee, and wolfed down the muffins, no time for talk.

Keats reached over and brushed a crumb from Plath’s mouth.

“Probably shouldn’t …” Plath said. She meant that they probably shouldn’t do that. The touching thing that was the prelude to more. That’s what the smart part of her was saying, while a completely different part of her was wondering why he hadn’t touched her in the night as they lay side by side.

Keats looked up sharply. He nodded once, a regretful expression. Then, “What do you think is on for this morning?”

“Something disturbing,” Plath said.

Keats smiled. “Thanks for taking care of me last night.”

“I thought it was the other way around.”

Keats shook his head and looked down at the floor. “I was a mess.”

Plath said, “Yeah, you’re right. Me? I was fine.”

A small laugh. “I wish I didn’t have to call you Plath. I don’t want to think of you as a poet who gassed herself.”

She was so close to telling him. Sadie. That’s my name. But with an effort she stopped herself. “They want us close. But they don’t ever want us to forget.”

Ophelia showed them to a room they had not seen before. It was up a ridiculously narrow interior staircase. It was like a shabby parody of the lab from McLure. Someone had hammered together a plywood table shoved against narrow, greasy windows that let in the gray gloom of New York. On the table a couple of mismatched microscopes, something that looked like a very expensive Crock-Pot, a small stainless-steel freezer.

But the focal point of the room was a massive piece of glowing, white machinery with which Plath was all too familiar.

“Is that an MRI machine?”

Ophelia nodded. “With some very customized add-ons. Yes. I’m told it’s worth about five million dollars. So don’t put your coffee cups on it.”

It was a bizarre anomaly. It was possible to accept the junky attic lab or the massive, humming hulk of technology, but the two didn’t seem as if they should share the same reality.

“We usually take more time with training,” Ophelia said. “But time is short. The enemy is planning a major strike. It’s a winning move if they pull it off. So we have to stop them.”

“What is the plan?” Keats asked.

“United Nations General Assembly. Most of the world’s heads of state—our President Morales, your Prime Minister Bowen, Keats. AFGC is going to try to place nanobots in them and others. China. Japan. India. Maybe more.”

Keats shot a look at Plath.

“AFGC. What is that, anyway?” Plath asked.

“The Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.”

“That doesn’t sound like an evil organization setting out to dominate the world,” Plath said.

“That’s the idea,” Ophelia said. “If you try telling someone the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation is taking over the world, they’ll think you’re crazy.”

“Would they be wrong?” Keats muttered under his breath.

Ophelia leaned close to him. She had a smile for this occasion, too, and it was solid steel. “It’s good to have a sense of humor, Keats. But don’t be flip. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a game.”

“No, miss,” he said, because Ophelia suddenly seemed much older than he.

Ophelia tapped an oblong plastic case on the cluttered table. “Your babies are in here. They’re warming to room temperature. When I open this box, they’ll see light, which means you’ll see through their eyes.”

Both Sadie and Keats looked nervously at the box.

“Each of you has two biots. Each of those biots has two types of eye. A compound insect eye that is very good at detecting motion, and a quasi-human eye that is somewhat better at color and definition. But the human brain is not well suited for making sense of these disparate visuals. So each of you has been altered.”

“Say what?” Keats snapped.

“When we sent our biots in, we brought a package of altered stem cells and planted them in your visual cortexes. It’s not strictly necessary—a biot runner can see without them—but they’ll see the actual, not the enhanced, visuals. See, down at the nano level there’s no real color. Pigmentation is too spread out, not sufficiently concentrated to be seen. So with bare visual you’ll see shapes and edges, but all gray scale. With enhanced visual you get color as well.”

“Do we want to see what’s down there in color?” Plath asked.

“In a battle it’s very, very helpful.”

“I guess we’ll just move right past the fact that you have no right to be planting anything in our brains,” Plath snapped.

“Yes, we will,” Ophelia said. “We don’t have a lot of time. So let’s get to it, shall we? We’re going to activate one biot for each of you, and then place them. Down in the meat, as we say. I’ll have one of my own biots accompany yours, Keats. A guide.”

“Wait. What? Now?” Keats asked.

“Plath, you have the simpler task. Yours is a simple tour. But our friend Keats here is needed to take on an important job almost immediately.”

“Important job? What job?” Keats demanded, as Plath tried to avoid feeling like she was being slighted.

“Plath,” Ophelia said. “I have three biots working at the site of your aneurysm. The Teflon weave was dangerously weakened by multiple traumas last night. I’m like the boy in the story, the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. I’m holding it together, but I have other duties. And we need someone who can remain close to you.”

Plath hated the look of shocked concern on Keats’s face. It looked a lot like pity.

“And Wilkes will walk you through your own tour, Plath,” Ophelia said. “If she ever gets here.”

“I’m here.” Wilkes climbed out from a dark corner, rubbed sleep from her eyes, did a simultaneous smile and yawn, stretched and said, “Just have to pee first.” They heard her clattering down the stairs.

“Now listen to me, both of you,” Ophelia said, leaning in to them, clasping her hands like she was considering a prayer. “You’re going into a very, very strange world. What you see can be quite disturbing.”

“I’m already disturbed,” Plath said. “I can feel that … that thing … in my head again.” Then seeing that Keats had misinterpreted her, she snapped, “No, not the damned aneurysm. The biot. Mine. My biot.”

As though Plath had said nothing, Ophelia continued. “We all have this view of ourselves as a body and a mind. We think of our mind as a sort of thing outside ourselves, like a soul, a sort of essence of us. What it is, is a computer made out of synapses. A staggeringly sophisticated computer, but still in the end just a few pounds of slimy pink-and-gray tissue kept alive by oxygen and nitrogen carried there by superhighways of pumping blood.”

“You don’t believe in a soul?” Keats asked.

“I believe science is in this hand,” she held out her right, palm up, “and religion is in this hand.” She held out her left, but curled it to conceal the palm.

“I’ve seen too many MRIs of my brain to doubt that it’s just an organ,” Plath said.

“The greater surprise is the rest of the body,” Ophelia said. “We think of it as a body. A singular thing. Skin over organs and bones, but all of it
ours
. Human.” She shook her head slowly, dark brown eyes glowing. “We are not
all
human. We are closer to being an ecosystem. Like the rain forest. We are the home to thousands of life-forms. They live in us and on us. Like jaguars and frogs in the rain forest. In the human ecosystem there are viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites.

“And we, even our human parts, the things that are us, often appear as if they are separate living things: and they are. Each blood cell is alive, independent of the rest of the ecosystem, at least somewhat. You’ll understand when you see a cell splitting right beneath your feet. Or someday if you end up in an artery, God forbid, when you see antibodies—they’ll look no bigger than pieces of gravel to you—flying to attach to a bacteria.”

“Lovely,” Keats said.

“Actually, it is lovely. Your body is under constant attack from microscopic enemies, and your—”

“Tell them about the mites,” Wilkes said. They hadn’t heard her come back in. To Plath and Keats, in a conspiratorial tone, she said, “Ophelia loves the cells. Loves her some enzymes. But that’s not what will give you nightmares.”

Wilkes sat on the table of the MRI machine and crossed her legs. This would have afforded an uncomfortable view but for the fact that beneath her skirt Wilkes had on bright green tights. “Yeah, see, you don’t go down into the blood highway unless you have screwed up bad. If you do, say to escape from nanobots, find yourself a teeny, tiny capillary to drill in, because a vein or an artery? That’s like diving into a crazy rockslide or something. That’s an avalanche, there. And who knows when or if you get back out. But. But that’s not the daily meat.”

“She’s right,” Ophelia said. “We spend our time in eyes and ears, in the brain itself. In order to reach those targets we travel through hair, across faces, eyebrows, and eyelashes. And along the way—”

“It’s like crossing a desert drawn by Dr. Seuss or Salvador Dalí,” Wilkes interrupted. “Wrinkles and crevices and hairs the size of trees.”

“And parasites. The two you’ll encounter with some frequency are mites—dust mites and demodex. Dust mites are about the size of your biots, but taller. They’ll look quite large to you in m-sub. Micro-subjective. Demodex are smaller. They’ll look like alligators crawling.”

“Jesus. Are they dangerous?” Keats asked.

“Naw,” Wilkes said, and waved that suggestion off. “They eat dead skin cells. They aren’t lions. Or tigers. Or bears. Oh, my. Pretty fucking creepy, though.” The fact seemed to delight her.

“The thing you need to understand is that you are visiting what might as well be an alien planet.” Ophelia tried out an encouraging smile. It didn’t work. So she sighed. “Plath, you and Wilkes will go walkies around Keats’s face and eye, and maybe the ear.”