BZRK Reloaded (20 page)

Here is what Plath knew about Vincent after what felt like a lifetime sticking pins in his brain: that he was anhedonic; that he once
stuck a pencil into a boy’s arm when the boy called him a wuss and
shoved him from his place in the elementary school lunch line; that
he didn’t understand why people liked animals; that he experienced
drunkenness in an extraordinarily self-aware way; that he had been
slapped by his mother for failing to appreciate the cake she made for
his eleventh birthday and then had watched helpless and lost as she
broke down crying.

She knew that he once became furious watching a film in school
about atrocities in the Congo and vowed to kill the bastards responsible. He was suspended for three days for inappropriate language.

She had a soda with a bendy straw within reach at her side.
“We’re all tired,” Wilkes snapped. Wilkes had taken over for
Nijinsky. He had gone with Anya to observe Vincent, the actual physical Vincent, upstairs in the church. “Ophelia’s dead tired.”
That hadn’t made any sense, but it caused Plath to fall silent.
After a while Plath began to confuse Vincent’s memories with
her own. Was it Vincent or her who had ridden the pony? Was it her
or was it Vincent who had gotten poison ivy? Was it Vincent or her
who had recruited Nijinsky?
First bloody nose.
First bath as a baby.
First time he had slid his hand up a girl’s leg.
First time tumbling out of his crib.
First time eating popcorn.
Then, suddenly, she was seeing herself through Vincent’s eyes.
He had found her attractive. In the macro she blushed. He had first
met her when she was in a bathtub.
She saw Kerouac, Keats’s brother, as he was in Vincent’s memory. He wasn’t much like Keats. He was more athletic, not larger but
muscular, tough. His eyes did not have Keats’s tenderness. She would
never have wanted to run away with Kerouac.
She had never pictured Kerouac smiling, somehow, laughing,
but Kerouac had enjoyed life. He was telling Vincent a story about
teaching his little brother to play goalkeeper. And laughing. And Vincent had wondered what it was like to take vicarious pleasure from
another person.
Suddenly Plath saw images that could only be digital. There were
stunted game creatures with swords.
And then, a thrilling ride through a bizarre alien landscape.
Digging into a sort of Lego-like world.
Passing through magical doors.
Games. Games, a dizzying array of them. Game controllers,
touch screens, racing and leaping and …not joy, not for Michael Ford
who would later be called Vincent. But a suspension of the strangeness that was always with him. And a rush. Very much a rush.
There were people—just names on a leaderboard, but with
humans behind them—and Vincent knew them, knew their strengths
and weaknesses, and they knew him.
He was somewhere rather than nowhere.
And he was someone. MikeF31415.
“Wilkes,” Plath said. “Google MikeF31415.”
“Why?”
Plath didn’t answer, but she heard the distant sound of fingers on
a touchscreen.
“There’s a lot of hits,” Wilkes said. “Game sites.”
“I’ve seen that handle before.” This from Billy the Kid, who had
crept downstairs after being ignored by the others. He was looking
over Wilkes’s shoulder. He sounded respectful. “Whoa. Whoa.” Pause,
then, and in a deeper register, “Whoa, this dude is good. I mean, way
good. Respect.”
Games and more games. This tiny corner of Vincent’s brain was
a library of games. And with them came feeling. Not pleasure, but not
numbness, either. Michael Ford AKA Vincent had found something
he cared about.
And then, there it was: Bug Man’s nanobots.
They were racing toward Vincent’s biots, their center wheels
down for speed. The exploding head logo that marked all of Bug
Man’s nanobots was seen in flashes.
The sight sent chills through Plath. She froze in place, pushing
the probe ever so gently to the left, to the right, back, center again.
She saw the ripped off legs of Vincent’s biot spinning away in the
cerebrospinal fluid.
Worse, far worse, she felt Vincent’s fear.
“Unh!” she said.
“What?” Wilkes. Bored, but hearing the change in her voice.
“Get Jin,” Plath said. “Get him now.”

The twitcher station on the Doll Ship was as complete and up-todate as the ones back at the Armstrong Building, and better than the
one Bug Man had in Washington.

In addition, there was a portable model to be used as backup. The
controls for the portable unit were less sophisticated, and the visual
feedback in particular was less efficient.

Charles would get one, Benjamin the other. Charles knew Benjamin would end up with the better equipment—that was the problem
in dealing with an irrational, emotional person: they could simply dig
in their heels and outlast you.

Making a virtue of necessity, Charles said, “Take the more comfortable equipment, Benjamin.”
Benjamin did not demur.
They did not need Minako to be present in the room with them.
In fact, Charles would have preferred she not be, but here again Benjamin had his way.
So Minako had been immobilized in a metal chair with handcuffs.
“Don’t hurt me,” she said in her charmingly accented English.
“We are not sadists,” Charles said, sounding wounded. “This is
not some horror movie. We are going to help you.”
“Just let me go. Please. Please, I want to go back home.”
Charles was fitting the equipment to his head. It took two hands,
which meant he and Benjamin had to cooperate, though Ling was
there to help, and they’d been given the services of the crewman
named KimKim.
“Fasten it around the back, KimKim, if you would, please,”
Charles said. “Yes, it can go tighter.”
It was extremely uncomfortable, the two of them wearing the helmets—neither could go all the way on, obviously, so contacts were
imperfect. The lighter portable model fit better, offsetting some of the
advantage Benjamin had.
And why am I thinking in terms of advantage? Charles wondered. This isn’t a competition.
Of course they must look grotesque to both KimKim and the girl.
As always, Ling remained silent.
“We are not going to hurt you, Minako; we are helping you,”
Charles said. “You have lived your entire life alone, whether you recognized it or not …Yes, now get the first syringe, KimKim. We need
to link to the nanobots. This is exciting, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Benjamin said curtly.
“I’m sorry,” Minako cried. “Whatever I did, I’m sorry, please let
me go.”
Charles’s bifocal vision—his depth perception—dropped out.
This was a common experience. The center eye, the shared eye, could
link either to him or to Benjamin. It was always obvious to whom the
third eye was linked at any moment, because when it was active it
provided depth of field otherwise lacking.
KimKim lifted the syringe from its stainless steel cradle. “I don’t
know how to give anyone a shot,” he said nervously. Then added,
“Sir.” Then amended, “Sirs.”
“It’s not really a needle,” Charles explained. “There’s no sharp
tip, you see. You just need to place it very close to Minako’s eye and
squeeze the plunger very carefully.”
“You cannot do this,” said Minako. “Please. Please, please.”
“Young lady, there is nothing to be afraid of,” Charles said, working on his best friendly voice.
“Who’s to stop us?” Benjamin snapped.
“You should understand that we are doing this to make you
happy, Minako. Think of it …think of it as if there was a disease in
your brain and we are going to cure you. When we are done you will
feel happier. You’ll find that you—”
“I see!” Benjamin cried. “I can see through their eyes! I’m seeing
through the nanobot eyes! Hah!”
KimKim carefully placed the tip of the needle—it might not be
sharp, but it certainly looked like a needle—as close as he could to
Minako’s eyelid. She squeezed her eyes shut and yelled, “Someone
help me! Help!”
KimKim pulled back. “If you don’t sit still I’m going to poke you!”
“I can see through all their sensors, oh, oh!” Benjamin said. “I see
all the other, all my …all the nanobots, we’re all jumbled together, oh!”
KimKim used two fingers to pry Minako’s eyelid open and
quickly pushed the plunger.
“Ah!” Benjamin cried. “Like a roller coaster.”
“Now me, now me, the second syringe!” Charles ordered. “In the
other eye!”
KimKim raced for the second syringe and now Minako was sobbing on the edge of hysteria. She started babbling numbers. “One,
two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen.”
“What is she doing?” Charles demanded, distractedly.
“Prime numbers, you dolt,” Benjamin snarled.
“Nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine, thirty-one.”
Charles tried to ignore his brother’s condescension—Benjamin
had always been better at math—and focused instead on the virtual
control panel that appeared in the screen the helmet projected—lopsidedly—onto his eye. His fingers twitched in the gloves. The interface
was a virtual touchscreen. He searched for the button labeled, Register.
He pushed it by barely moving his index finger. A second prompt
opened up. Did he want to register nanobot package six? Yes, he did.
And then, “Ah!”
It was startling, though he’d seen it many times on video. All at
once he was looking through six sets of sensors. It was hard to make
sense of what he was seeing. A tangle of mechanical legs and sensor
arrays and immobile wheels. The nanobots were not neatly stacked
but rather tangled in a ball.
KimKim hit the plunger and the nanobots all exploded down a
steel pipe and landed in a spare splash of liquid in Minako’s eye.
“Thirty-seven, forty-one, forty-three, forty-seven!”
The visuals were too much, too overwhelming, too many eyes
looking in too many directions. What was it Bug Man did when he
had too many nanobots to control individually? Platooning. And
there was the prompt in the form of a question: Platoon?
Charles said, “Yes,” then realized this was not a voice-activated
control. He drew a finger around the six nanobot avatars and touched
the Platoon? prompt.
The nanobots moved automatically into a formation, two lines
of three.
Sudden darkness.
Charles awkwardly shifted the helmet to see out into the world.
He looked at Minako. KimKim had let go of her eyelid. She was
squeezing her eyes tight shut again, still rattling off prime numbers.
He felt a moment of pity for her fear.
But pity was weak tea compared to the fascination of feeling
himself actually down—physically in—a place he’d only seen secondhand. He pulled the eyepiece back into alignment.
There was no sense of touch. He poked a leg at the eye surface
beneath him. All six of his nanobots did the same. No sensation. But
the visuals were amazingly convincing. He was there, actually there!
He had much to learn, and Charles knew he would never be Bug
Man or Burnofsky. But oh, Lord, it was amazing.
Then with a flick of a finger he sent his six nanobots racing. The
center wheels dropped into place, the legs spread out like a canoe’s
outriggers.
And zoom!
Zoom!
The speed was breathtaking. Charles had never even walked
quickly, let alone run, let alone this wild motorcycle speed.
“Min,” Charles said. “Call to the galley and order us some coffee
and sandwiches. We’ll be here for some time.”

Can a damaged mind be cured?
Can a damaged mind be cured by subtraction?
Can the thing, the one thing, that sent you over the edge merely

Is it like writing a book, where the author can simply highlight a
scene and hit the Delete button and change the course of the story?
Is it all just a data file? Is that all the human mind is: a sort of computer made of meat? Highlight folder: Delete. Empty trash. All gone.
All better now.
Shane Hwang, who called himself Nijinsky, considered these
philosophical questions and badly, badly wanted not to make a decision.
“There’s cutting,” he said to Plath, who was still in her easy chair
but not looking at all easy. “And there’s burning with acid.”
“Jesus,” Plath said. “I . . .” She stood up. She paced away, looking
strangely tall beneath the low dirt ceiling, turned, and came back. “I
think it’s as close as he ever came to some kind of …not joy, that’s not
the right word. Gaming, I mean, it’s as close as he came to feeling like
he belonged.”
Nijinsky noticed that Keats stood awkwardly, wanting to make
some physical contact with Plath, not doing it for fear of …something.
“He’s upstairs growling like a dog,” Wilkes said in a grating voice.
“We have to try something, right?”
“We might be cutting his soul out,” Plath said, twisting her fingers together.
Wilkes made a rude sound. But she didn’t argue, she couldn’t.
Instead she pushed a thumbnail into the flesh of her arm. Hard.
Speaking of crazy people, Nijinsky thought mordantly.
Like any of them were normal. Keats and Plath might have come
in normal, but they wouldn’t stay that way. Wilkes had always been a
little nuts. And maybe he himself had been normal, or something like
it, once upon a time.
What did you think this was? Nijinsky asked himself. Did you
think this was a romance novel? It’s war.
What did you think you would become when you got into this?
Did you think you were a hero? You pushed the green button, Shane.
You didn’t see the results, but you know what happened. You know
that those men were killed.
They were there to kill us, all of us. Kill or be killed.
“What would Vincent want?” Keats asked, speaking for the first
time.
“To be making the decision himself, not leaving it up to all of
us,” Nijinsky snapped, drawn out of his circular contemplation. Interrupted in the act of chasing his own tail.
“And what would his second choice be?” Keats asked, looking
Nijinsky in the eye, very steady.
Nijinsky resented it. “What would your brother want?” he shot
back. “If we were talking about operating on—”
“He’d want me to make the call,” Keats said. “If he couldn’t do it
himself, he’d want me to do it. I don’t know Vincent very well, but my
guess is he’d want you to decide, Jin. He’d want you to try and rescue
him from where he is.”
“Like I failed to do when it mattered,” Nijinsky said. “When Bug
Man had him. Rescue him now like I didn’t do then.”
There was a long silence.
“Yeah,” Keats said finally. Because someone needed to.
The strange thing was, Nijinsky was relieved at the answer. He
had needed his guilt recognized.
Wasn’t that what they were fighting for? The right to feel every
jolt of pain life had to give? The right to suffer? To not be sustainably
happy?
“I’m not the right person to lead this,” Nijinsky said to three blank
faces. “Unfortunately none of you are, either. So, I’m it.” He nodded
and felt his chin quiver and decided it didn’t really matter if they
saw that. “Send your model four out to take on a load of sulfuric,”
Nijinsky said to Plath. To Wilkes, he said, “Go make sure Dr Violet
is with Vincent. Have her prepare the acid for Plath. Then stay there
with him, report to me.”
Wilkes ran off immediately, leaving Plath and Keats with Nijinsky.
After a while Nijinsky realized the awkwardness was all about
him. He excused himself.
But he went only as far as the stairs, waited there out of sight,
listening. Because that’s what the right person would do. Because the
right person would want to know what Plath and Keats said to each
other.
He overheard.