BZRK Reloaded (21 page)

“Don’t do this,” Keats said.
“I have to try to—”
“Like hell you do.”
Plath felt like the basement was out of air. She clenched a fist until

Sadie. I see it in your eyes, you want out.”
“I want us both out,” she said in a near whisper.
She had turned away. He didn’t want to talk to her neck. He took

her shoulders and turned her around. It was not roughly done, but it
was more definite than Keats had been before. He wasn’t asking her
to face him, he was demanding.

“Yes, together,” she said, shaking off his grip but facing him
nonetheless.
“But you said—”
“Don’t fucking tell me what I said!” Her head jerked forward with
the force of it, making him back up. “I was making sense. I was being
mature. I was trying not to hurt you or hurt me.”
“And now, what? Now you don’t care?”
“Listen to me, Noah,” and all at once it wasn’t Keats, it was Noah.
She repeated the name, defiant. “Listen to me, Noah. If this works, if
we save Vincent, we may be able to save your brother. And someday
we may be able to save each other.”
“Don’t do this for me or for my brother,” he pleaded. “Don’t. You
can get out. You can escape. This doesn’t have to be your life.”
She took his face in her hands.
He closed his eyes.
It was not a kiss as prelude to desire. It was a kiss that sealed fates.

The new version-four biot—biot 4.0—moved more slowly with its
internal bladder filled with acid. It was also carrying a separate
bladder full of acid, just a sort of plastic trash bag really. It moved
slowly back along the tortuous path it had followed earlier. Across
the frozen lake of the eye with its below-the-surface rivers of swollen
capillaries.

Follow the long curve, down beneath the eyelid, a long walk it
was, it felt like a mile. Around and around until the muscles, like
bridge cables, merged into the slickery ice surface now more pink
than white.

The muscles twitched. Vincent’s eyes, well, he didn’t sleep much,
which all by itself made him twitchy. More so when he was strapped
down. They had cut down on his meds to let him react more normally. At the moment, to react normally meant to laugh softly, madly,
to himself, to occasionally bark like a seal, and other times simply
to roll his eyes up as far as they would go. It felt to Sadie like he was
trying to turn his eyes all the way around and look back at his brain.
Which given what he knew made a certain amount of sense.

Plath’s biot could not make out human speech very well, less well
when she was down in the meat. She heard what she knew to be a
voice, a soft, soothing voice, Anya no doubt, but it was like hearing a
truck rumble by on the street outside.

A routine move (God, how had she come to think of this as
routine?) down the optic nerve. The nerve cells were jittery, firing
gigabytes of optical data beneath her biot feet. She hesitated, looked
down with her biot eyes, and saw the cell beneath one foot begin to
divide. It was surprisingly sudden in the final phase, looking like
invisible hands were ripping soft bread dough in half. She almost
laughed at how much it looked like something she’d seen in high
school biology.

Her own nerves were stretched to breaking point. It had been one
thing to feel brave alone with Keats. He brought out the tough girl in
her, made her feel strong, like she had when she was with her brother.
In fact, now it seemed as if the two were similar, though she’d never
made the connection before. Noah and Stone McLure. She had, of
course, loved her brother. And though she had tried to resist it, she
loved Noah—she was pretty sure of that—though in a very different
way.

The optic nerve was a long cable but so thick at this point that
she could barely see the curve. The only light came from two illuminating pods that cast the faintest of greenish light—enough to allow
her compound insect eyes to see motion, but barely enough to let her
humanlike eyes interpret artificially enhanced color.

The optic nerve goes deep into the brain. The brain tissue presses
in close all around, but not so close that a biot couldn’t crawl along
beneath a weird, sparking sky of brain cells that warped in long, sensuous waves.

Suddenly she saw something she had not seen on previous trips.
Her first impression was of maggots.
It looked like a corpse, roadkill, but completely covered in maggots the size of kittens. They seethed over it—white, gelatinous things
with neither head nor eyes nor any other recognizable feature.
Lymphocytes. The defenders of Vincent’s body and blood. White
blood cells.
It was his biot. His dead biot. The lymphocytes were consuming
it, eating it, slowly wedging legs away from body, slowly absorbing its
crushed and extruded insides.
“What can you see?” Keats asked, as Sadie drew in her breath.
“His biot,” she said.
“What?” Wilkes asked. She had checked on Vincent, tightened
his restraints, then come back, unable to be alone with him.
“His …It’s his biot. The reapers have it.”
That was the term of art in BZRK: reapers. The slow-moving
but deadly lymphocytes—they came in different shapes, colors, and
sizes—were reminders that bodies have their own defenses. They
were here cleaning up the mess, disposing of one of millions of invaders. Mindless. Relentless.
“Why the hell would his dead biot be in here?” Plath demanded.
“I brought it to him after we retrieved it from the president. I carried it out. It seemed the right thing to do,” Nijinsky said. “You give
the dead child back to his parent.”
The lymphocytes had dislodged one of the legs. Its pointed claw
stuck up in the air, waving slowly back and forth like some desperate
flag of surrenderas the cells ate at it like it was a drumstick.
She raced back to the safety of her previous path, sick to her stomach. Her real stomach. Her biot had no stomach.
Don’t fear the reapers,—a song went through her head.
Through the eyes of her old series-three biot Plath saw the approach
of her new, sleeker, more capable biot, making its way laboriously, hauling the sac of acid like some foul egg nestled between its hind legs. She
felt the twin shudder of recognition as her two biots saw each other and
saw the eyes that were so like her own and yet so different.
There is no explaining a biot face. There is no way to paint a fair
picture of that awful melding of soulless insect with eyes that look
like smeared, crushed-grape versions of human eyes, which somehow
convey the image of the face from which they are derived.
The biot 4.0, the new kid, drew up alongside where the older biot
was keeping station at the exact location, the very spot they meant to
destroy.
The end of a long needle protruded from the brain beneath their
feet. The needle was shoved almost all the way down. The biot had
one claw gripping it. It looked like a murder scene.
The acid sack, the festering off-white egg filled with a burning
yolk, was dragged into position. Plath had been instructed to poke a
small hole in it. To let the acid ooze out, and to flow the acid down the
needle, down into the sparking brain cells, burning as it went.
“I’m there,” she reported.
“Okay,” Nijinsky said. He had a phone line open to Dr Violet,
upstairs with Vincent. “Dr Violet. We’re about to do it. Observe carefully.”
A small tinny voice came through the iPhone’s speaker. “What
do you expect? To see him suddenly well? To leap up and cry, ‘Huzzah?’ It won’t be so easy.”
Nijinsky didn’t answer, just pressed his lips tightly, took a deep
breath, and said, “Do it, Plath.”
She maneuvered the sac directly against the pin. With one clawed
hand she tore a small—it seemed only an inch or so, m-sub—hole. At
first the liquid would not come. She used a second leg to press gently
on the sac. A droplet formed. It would be invisibly small to anything
but a very good microscope up in the world.
The droplet hung, golden in the artificially colored world of her
biots’ vision.
Then it dropped.
The destruction was immediate. Between her front legs, just
below her sleek insect head, the brain cells burst open like a stopmotion depiction of fruit rotting.
The cells popped. There was no sound, but they popped. Burst,
spilled the goo inside, as the acid attacked in detail. She could see
mitochondria squirming as though they were tiny insects.
Fumes rose from the melting flesh. She had no ability to smell, and
her hearing was not attuned to the hissing sound. She could only see it.
“It just burned a few cells,” she reported.
“Push the pin to one side, see if you can open a tunnel,” Nijinsky
advised.
She did, pushing the pin as far as she could, leaning her tiny
weight into it. The flesh resisted as though fearing what was to come.
A small hole was opened. The problem seemed to be that the acid’s
droplets were too large to fit into the narrow tunnel. Her second droplet melted just a few cells, which now congealed, like cooling lava.
“It isn’t working. I can’t get it to work.”
“Use a second pin. Widen the hole.”
“I’m making a mess.” She looked at him, pleading, weak, wanting
to get out, turn it off, walk away.
“Plath,” Nijinsky said.
She pulled out a second pin and slid it down precisely beside the
first. Now she was hit with a second wave of memories. Not all of it
was games.
Vincent, spanked by his father for cursing.
Vincent, a baby, so tiny those little hands reaching for his mother’s breast, vision all skewed with lurid flares and colors that looked
like something from damaged film stock.
“There’s other stuff, other memories. His mother—”
“Do it, Plath, dammit, we are out of time,” Nijinsky said in a terse,
angry voice that was his version of yelling.
With her biots working together she wedged the pins apart, and
yes, now she had a hole opened into the depths of his brain. With a
third limb she reached to widen the tear in the sac.
“Aaahhh!” She swore and jumped halfway out of her chair. “It
broke, it broke, it broke!”
The sac had simply disappeared like a balloon that’s been popped.
Acid flowed everywhere. Droplets splashed and burned in the cerebral spinal fluid, like the flowering of anti-aircraft fire in some old
World War II movie. Some of it sank into the brain, burning, exploding cells, obliterating all it touched.
And some of it splashed onto her biot body, eating with insane
intensity at her middle leg’s shoulder joint, causing that leg to flail
wildly as if it had caught fire.
The new biot could feel pain.
“AaaaaAAAHHH!” she cried.
“Goddammit, get her out of there!” Keats yelled.
Some, maybe even most of the liquid flowed into the hole. Plath
gritted her teeth and kept the pins apart even as she watched one of
her claws melt and curl up like a burning scrap of paper.
“Jesus, it’s everywhere!”
“Are you hurt?” Nijinsky demanded.
“Yes, I’m hurt!”
The acid had splashed across both biots, she now saw. A tiny
droplet was burning neatly through the carapace of the series three.
From the hole in Vincent’s brain rose a boiling mix of acid and
melted flesh. It burned the brain cells and blew apart capillaries and
frothed heavily like some awful parody of an undersea volcano.
“Dr Violet?” Nijinsky asked tersely.
“Nothing,” she answered promptly.
“It hurts like hell,” Plath yelled.
“It’s just in your head,” Nijinsky said.
“Of course it’s in her head,” Keats snapped. “Pain always is. Get
her out of there!” When Nijinsky didn’t react immediately, Keats
yelled, “Sadie! Get out of there.”
“It’s starting to melt the pins,” Plath reported, “And I am out of
there, have to back away, Jesus!”
“Stay close enough to see,” Nijinsky ordered.
“Fuck you, Jin,” Keats snapped. “Sadie: get out.”
Plath motored both biots backward. She turned them to look
one at the other, seeing through both sets of eyes at once. A leg fell,
burned away, from her older biot.
The pain was intense but not worsening. Not like life-threatening
pain. But pain, definitely pain.
She had pulled back a few meters m-sub.
The hole in Vincent’s brain was bubbling still, but like a dying
fire. Whether the acid had maintained strength down to the target
zone she couldn’t guess. But it had devastated an area that seemed at
that scale as large as a small backyard.
The first lymphocytes were oozing along, heading toward damage. The earliest to reach the damaged area were burned by the acid
and burst open like water balloons filled with oatmeal.
“I can’t reach the pins to pull them out,” Plath said. “The acid is
eating at them, but they’re still there.”
“Okay, okay,” Nijinsky said at last. “Withdraw.”

Faint dawn was illuminating the stained-glass panels in the shallow
dome atop the Stone Church one at a time. Anya had seen enough now
to be sure that they did, indeed, illustrate the Ten Commandments.

Thou shalt not.
Thou shalt not lie, steal, covet, commit adultery, kill. The numbers were off a bit: Anya had learned her commandments in the
Russian Orthodox church her grandfather attended. She had never
been a believer, but she loved the old man, a disillusioned communist
who nevertheless had remained a devout believer.
How has that worked out for you, Jehovah, the commandments
and all?
Anya Violet touched Vincent’s face. He had become very still. His
eyes were focused, no longer darting around. Focused with terrible
intensity. But not on her. She felt invisible.
He was looking at something. Seeing something.
Nijinsky emerged from the hole beneath the altar. He crouched
beside Anya. “Dr Violet. What are you seeing?”
“I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“What are you seeing?” Nijinsky pressed.
“He’s …he’s not moving. Not moving at all. He’s breathing. But
his eyes, they are not moving. Not at all. His hands aren’t moving, his
arms are just hanging.”
Nijinsky looked at Vincent. Vincent showed no sign of awareness. He was utterly still. Then, slowly, like a toppling redwood tree,
he fell backward on the pew, then slid to the floor.
Nijinsky and Anya leapt. She touched his face. Nijinsky took his
pulse.
“He’s alive,” Nijinsky said. “He’s alive.”
“He’s catatonic. What have you done to him?”
Nijinsky slid a hand under Vincent’s head and raised him up.
Vincent’s eyes never moved. No change of focus.
Nijinksy slapped his face, not hard.
Anya drew back, but she did not object. Instead she said,
“Harder.”
Nijinsky delivered a stinging slap.
Nothing. Not a flinch. Not a blink.
“Again,” she said, and somehow now she was in charge, delivering orders.
Nijinsky took a deep breath. This time no open-handed slap. He
delivered a short but very sharp closed fist punch to the side of Vincent’s head.
Nothing.
Both of them drew back, staring in horror at those blank, empty
eyes.
Then Nijinsky saw something that made him gasp.
But what he saw was not in the room.
Perched at the back of his own eyeball, one of his own biots gazed
passively at Vincent’s still, inactive biot.
“What is it?” Anya demanded.
“Just . . .” And he didn’t say what it was, because he didn’t know, all
he knew was that the flesh on his arms rose in goose bumps because
for the first time, Vincent’s biot had stirred.
Nijinsky felt a chill. He could barely breathe.
“What is it?” Anya demanded.
Vincent’s biot turned eerily Vincent-like eyes on Nijinsky’s own
biot. Then, while the real, macro Vincent stared blankly, catatonic,
seeing nothing, his biot walked uncertainly to Nijinsky’s creature and
extended a claw to touch.
“Anya,” Nijinsky said, his tone awestruck. “He’s …He’s aware.”