BZRK Reloaded (6 page)

It was really quite a lovely place to work while designing the end
of the human race as it had heretofore been.
Structural integrity required the floors to have some strength, so
gazing up Burnofsky looked through a loose-woven web of white tiled
catwalks with pink railings and the occasional green contrast. This
allowed some of the larger pieces of equipment to rise through the
floors, but also created smaller, more intimate spaces.
“Dr Burnofsky.” It was Mamadou Attah. Dr Mamadou Attah,
formerly of the Ivory Coast, later of Oxford and MIT, briefly a resident of Grand Rapids Michigan’s Applegate Psychiatric Hospital, and
now one of Burnofsky’s hardest-working—and giddily happy—subordinates.
“Yes, Dr Attah?”
“We did it, we sure got that extruder calibrated!”
“Good,” he said.
She flashed him a huge grin. She was short and broad and, despite
being brilliant, had a distinct tendency to go around giggling under
her breath. She had been wired and indoctrinated, of course, all as a
means of dealing with what had been crippling depression.
No more depression in her future. No more mental hospitals.
Although she sometimes irritated nonwired staff to the point of rage,
she was an excellent scientist and utterly devoted.
She stood waiting like an expectant dog, evidently not entirely
satisfied by his wan, “Oh, good.” So he added a, “Fantastic work, Doctor. You’re the best.”
She grinned, made a pistol finger, and said, “No, sir, Dr B., you’re
the best!”
He walked across the spotless white tile floor past white-coated
scientists and pink-coated staff, a shambling, reedy, runny-eyed, corduroy-clad wreck of a human being. The door to his private lab was
protected by a keypad and fingerprint ID. He punched in the number
sequence and pressed his thumb against the touchscreen.
Inside was a very different space. Here the equipment was whatever putty or gray color it had been when first acquired. There were
no plasma screens showing bucolic loveliness. The ceiling seemed
particularly low. A Costco-size box of Little Debbie Devil Cremes
spilled across his desk.
He pulled the bottle of bourbon from his desk, poured a tumbler
full, and gulped it.
Back in the fabulous main lab the work of AFGC’s nanotech division went on feverishly. The piece of equipment that Dr Attah had
been so proud of fixing was part of the SRN production line.
Self-replicating nanobot. SRN. But he along with everyone else
involved in the project had taken to calling them “hydras,” after the
mythological beast that just kept sprouting new heads any time you
chopped one off: in effect, a self-replicating monster.
The first large-scale field test of the hydras was scheduled to
occur in just a few weeks.
Twelve hundred hydras would be released in a high-crime neighborhood in the Bronx. The test would be whether the hydras would
propagate, locate hosts, and avoid detection. If they performed as
expected, the neighborhood would experience a sudden drop in
crime rate as thousands of residents were crudely rewired for diminished aggression.
A smaller test, just two hundred hydras bearing special radioactive tracking signatures, were to be released on the subway. They
would be able to follow the spread. And these nanobots had a particular function: to do something the first generation of nanobots
couldn’t even begin to pull off: the implantation of an image. Actually
creating a memory.
And yet, despite those specialized abilities, the hydras were poor
relations to regular nanobots. They were crude, rough, and slow. The
self-replicating process meant using whatever materials could be
found at hand: one form or another of living tissue.
The regular nanobots were made of sophisticated alloys, ceramics and textiles. They were the Ferraris of the nanotech world. These
new tiny monsters were scarecrows by contrast.
Each hydra was serviced by dozens of much smaller micromachines, nicknamed MiniMites. These were very simple, very, very
small devices whose sole purpose was to strip-mine living things for
their useful minerals. They were tiny refineries, eating flesh and defecating iron, zinc, copper, calcium, magnesium, chromium, and the
rest.
In the event that anything went wrong with the tests, the mayor
of New York City, the governor of New York, and, if it came to that,
the president of the United States should be under sufficient control
to head off an effective investigation, let alone countermeasures.
Of course the whole thing had to be carefully managed. A fair
amount of a human body could be consumed and turned into raw
material without harming the host—most people had more than
enough fat, extra bone, dead skin, resident bacteria, the contents of
stomachs and intestines, and whatever brain cells were being liquefied. But uncontrolled, well, the process could be harmful. Even
fatal.
To say nothing of what would happen if the MiniMites began to
adapt and to chew away at buildings and bridges and so on.
But there were fail-safes and cutoffs and so on for all of that.
Foolproof stuff. And the hydras were being designed to reproduce only so many generations before dying off, and to consume only
so much living tissue. The goal, after all, was to rewire the human
race, not to obliterate it.
That was the plan.
That was not, however, Burnofsky’s plan.
Burnofsky carried his drink to his workstation. There he had
a monitor attached to a scanning electron microscope. He pressed
a remote control in his pocket and the surveillance camera on
the wall switched seamlessly to file video. He doubted the Twins
would understand what he was doing, but there was no point taking
chances: they would see only what he wanted them to see.
On the monitor Burnofsky saw nanobots. They were rather
different from the ones being so carefully created in the main lab.
Burnofsky smiled to see them. Busy little creatures. Hydras busy
doing what SRNs did: self-replicating.
But there were a number of differences between these and the
hydras beyond his lab door. Some of those differences were visible,
most not.
Funny, Burnofsky thought, gazing with pride at his creations,
that people talk about the gray goo scenario, and in truth the hydras
in the main lab were basically gray.
But these were not.
These nanobots were blue. The exact blue of his daughter’s eyes.

The law firm sent a limo for Plath, but not to the BZRK safe house.
The limo picked Plath and Keats up at the address she’d given them:
outside the Andaz Hotel on Fifth Avenue.

Plath had not been staying at the Andaz, and a cursory investigation would reveal that fact, but it was at least plausible that she
might have been there. The McLure Company maintained a suite
year-round for visiting dignitaries.

Plausible.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had the use of a posh suite at a
hotel?” Keats muttered as the town car inched its way uptown. “Why
are we staying at that miserable shit hole when we could be frolicking
on clean sheets?”
“Frolicking? I seem to recall offering to frolic with you. I was
going to frolic your brains out.” She was determined to keep the mood
light. Wave upon wave of sadness and fear had crashed on her since
that terrible day when her father and brother had been murdered.
More would come.
Too much.
She couldn’t break. Maybe the day would come when she broke,
but not yet. So she smiled and so did Keats. It felt like the first genuine
smile for either in quite a while.
“Sorry, had to save your life first,” Keats said. “Duty before booty.”
“You shouldn’t always be the good boy, Keats,” she teased. “Don’t
you know that messed-up girls like me prefer bad boys?”
“You are toying with me.”
“I used to break my toys,” she said.
“Is that a warning?”
“I wouldn’t break you. I might bruise you a little . . .”
“Okay, that’s quite enough.”
“Might bend you. There could be some chafing . . .”
Keats grinned, unable to manage a stern expression. “Now you’re
going past toying to torturing.”
“Yes, I am.”
“It’s cruel.”
“Mmm. I’m trying not to be the goody goody.”
“No one thinks you’re the goody goody,” he said.
“You sure?” she asked, her tone rueful. “Jin needs me, even Lear
needs me, if there really is a Lear, but I failed them, didn’t I?”
Keats glanced at the driver. He didn’t seem to be listening, and
they were talking in whispers. Keats leaned closer. “Listen to me,
Plath—”
“It’s Sadie on this trip,” she interrupted. “The lawyer and the others know me by my real name. So just for this trip, let’s not play crazy
little BZRK games. Let’s act like real, normal people.”
“Sadie,” he said, trying it out. Liking it. Feeling flattered by the
right to use it. “Do you want to know my real name?”
“Keats will do. I like it, actually. It suits you. You could totally be
a poet.”
Veer away from tragedy, back onto safe ground.
We take the names of madmen because madness is our fate. But
Keats, the real one, the poet, hadn’t really been mad, just depressed
and addicted.
Plath, on the other hand: head in a gas oven while her children
played in the next room.
Veer away from that, too.
“I know nothing about poetry,” Keats said.
Plath said nothing for a while, watching the street go by, wondering whether Caligula had them in view. Wondering whether AFGC
also had them in view. The reading of a will is not a very private matter, private in terms of the actual reading, perhaps, but not in terms of
who knows it’s happening.
“This could be dangerous,” she said.
“Maybe,” he agreed. “Do you know how to do this? I mean, this
whole reading of the will. There’s a lot of money involved, right?”
She nodded. “Money. And power.”
“And you’re okay with all that, not nervous?”
“I’m nervous,” she admitted. “But I know what to say. I know
what I want, and I know how my dad set things up. But that doesn’t
mean they’ll go along with it. In fact, I’d be surprised if they did.”
“So I guess we’re talking hundreds, even thousands of dollars,
eh?” he asked, deadpan.
“Something like that,” she said.
And for a while she didn’t think of Keats but of her father. Grey
McLure always said he was a three-star scientist with five-star luck.
But that wasn’t true. He’d been unlucky enough to lose his wife, and
die alongside his son. Not lucky, but smart, and far-seeing. He had
laid in contingencies she had thought ridiculous and irrelevant when
he told her of them.
“Don’t forget,” he had told her. “Alice in Wonderland. The You
Bullshit Bank. Your mother’s birthday.”
“Whatever,” she had replied, attention focused on thumbing a
text message to some friend. The memory, like so many memories of
him, came with a twinge of regret that she had not, somehow, cherished him more, him and Stone, both.
Three more blocks passed in starts and stops and her nerves were
getting to her now. Small talk and banter, don’t think about it, any of
it, just let it happen.
“You are a great kisser,” she said suddenly through her knuckles,
choosing not to meet his gaze.
“Am I?”
“Don’t fish for compliments. A poet would never do that.”
“You’re worried,” he said. “You’re being nice to me because you
think we’re about to be killed.”
“A little bit, yes,” she admitted. “But also, you’re just a really good
kisser. And you know what I like, Keats?”
“What?”
“Your chest. I like your chest. It’s very hard.”
“Okay, really, that’s quite enough,” he scolded. “We’re in a limo,
possibly going into danger, and you’re playing the tease.”
“I like your chest,” she repeated. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Unh?” he said, not feeling quite in control of this conversation.
“Are your nipples sensitive?”
“I sort of hate you right now,” he said, shaking his head and trying unsuccessfully not to grin.
Teasing was safe. Maybe it was foreplay leading to love, but it
didn’t have to be. Keep it all superficial. Make it about bodies and
pleasure. The world had it all backward: it wasn’t sex that was dangerous, it was love. She’d lost people she loved. It was love that brought
unendurable pain.
“Death or madness, right?” She said with what she hoped was a
brave, devil-may-care attitude. “There’s no reason not to have whatever fun we can. You’re insane for a long time and dead forever.”
“We’re here,” the driver called back.
The car pulled to a stop beside a food stand. The driver hopped
out and came around to open the passenger door. Keats had already
started to open the door and now felt foolish.
The law firm’s building was on a corner. There was a revolving
door and flanking it regular glass doors. Security—McLure men—
waited. They wore dark suits and had Bluetooth earpieces. They wore
sunglasses even though it was cloudy. They screamed “security.”
The AmericaStrong thugs were less obvious. They had been nicknamed TFD—Tourists from Denver—for favoring chinos and down
parkas, for dressing out of a Land’s End catalog. The McLure men
wanted to look like security; the AmericaStrong people did not.
Four McLure security.
Six TFDs.
And all alone, a man in a long, faded black duster over even more
faded lilac and leaf-green velvet. A jaunty top hat that matched his
blazer.
Plath watched with eyes that had now seen violence and knew it
when it threatened. She gritted her teeth, not so much afraid now as
angry. There was a fine line between those two, fear and rage.
“Sadie, get back in the car,” Keats said.
But she didn’t. She watched, one hand on the car door, watched
with eyes that now saw so much more than they ever had before. Was
that what violence and fear did? Did they give you new eyes?
It all happened without any obvious action. Somehow, in some
way that seemed to take place at the subliminal level, the McLure
security spotted the TFDs as threats.
And somehow, those same McLure men recognized the man in
the faded velvet, not as an individual, they didn’t know him, no, but
they knew what he was.
And so did the TFDs.
His name, at least the name he used, was Caligula.
Plath knew he would have been the one to kill Ophelia. He would
also be the one to kill her, if she ever threatened BZRK. She had seen
him in action and could entertain no fantasies about surviving if he
came for her.
Invisible lines connected McLure men and Caligula. Invisible,
intangible calculations were made. Some scent in the air, maybe,
some inaudible whisper in the ears.
The TFDs walked on by.
And Plath—Sadie McLure—walked with Keats past the McLure
men, all of them smiling, a tense, alert welcome, and accepted the
door held open for her.
“You okay?” Plath asked Keats.
“Just relieved not to have wet myself,” he said. “That won’t be the
end of it. They’ll be waiting when we come back out.”
But Plath doubted that.
Keats’s hand closed around hers. She could picture what was happening at the nano level: skin like fallen leaves, fingerprints like the
plowed furrows of some arid farm, sweat beads popped by the contact, mingling.
It was an absurd romantic illusion to imagine that they could
avoid death so long as they held on to each other. But Plath, carrying
the name of a poet, had a right to a small measure of illusion.