Bzrk (10 page)

Sadie squinted against the harsh light.

“Vincent?” she asked. The voice didn’t sound quite right to be him. But neither was it Renfield. It sounded female, but low enough maybe to be a boy.

“I’m going to ask you to disrobe. And to place all of your clothing in the wall slot on your right. Then we will ask you to stand still while we run a series of scans.”

“Vincent already checked me out. He put a biot on me,” Sadie said.

“He also withdrew that biot, and it’s been several days.”

The voice was irritatingly reasonable. She kind of hated it. She shrugged and took off her scarf, coat, and boots. She pushed them through the slot.

“How far are we going here, disembodied voice?”

“Everything, please.”

“I’d better not find pictures on the Internet, disembodied voice,” Sadie muttered.

“You may call me Ophelia,” the voice said.

“You’re a girl?”

“I am,” Ophelia answered. “I’ll turn the voice masking off.” Then she said, “Is that better?”

The voice was no longer impersonal. It was definitely female. “Yes, actually. I’m not modest, but the light in here is very unflattering.”

“I’m beginning the scans now,” Ophelia said. “You’ll see different colors of light. You’ll hear various sounds, some a bit loud. Just stand where you are.”

“Okay, Ophelia.”

It lasted longer than she expected. Long enough to become boring. And long enough for her to become resentful.

The thing with Sadie was that even though she was no sort of snob, not arrogant toward other people, she had lived a life with very little discomfort. What unpleasantness she’d had to endure had been of a medical nature—the diagnosis and early attempts at treatment for her aneurysm—which just doubled her impatience now. Because everything about this felt medical in a sort of alien-abduction way.

Finally the white light returned. She flinched.

“Sorry, I should have brought the lights up slowly.”

“What now?”

A door opened. A young woman stepped in. She was in her early twenties. She had black hair, long, but drawn back into an interesting knot before continuing on down her back. Her skin was dark but not from the African sun. She wore what looked like a very tiny sapphire brooch between her eyes, not a piercing but an appliqué. She had pretty eyes, but otherwise she was plain. She was carrying a handled shopping bag. She held it out to Sadie.

“Your clothing. Be careful, some of it may be hot. I microwaved it. You can get dressed now.”

Ophelia. Sadie recognized the name from somewhere. Something fictional. Classical, not modern. It was just out of her grasp but she’d Google it later.

“Microwaved?”

“Microwaves aren’t as much use against biots, like those I know you’re familiar with. But nanobots contain tiny amounts of metal, and that makes them vulnerable to a good, old-fashioned microwave oven.”

Sadie began pulling on her clothing. “Nanobots?”

Ophelia smiled. That made her prettier. It was one of those “light up the room” smiles. Sadie wished she could do that. “I’ve been given the job of prepping you. So I’ll answer everything. Except of course about anything personal.”

“Shakespeare. That’s where Ophelia comes from.” Sadie squirmed into her bra.

“Yes.” Ophelia nodded. “From
Hamlet
. His crazy girlfriend.” The smile went away. “I’m sorry about your father and brother.”

“Yep,” Sadie said curtly. Enough condolences.

“Nanobots,” Ophelia said. “There are two branches of nanotechnology: the biological and the mechanical. Coffee?”

Sadie was dressed. “I guess a Scotch would be out of the question?”

A different smile appeared, not the room-lighting one, a more quizzical, challenging one. Ophelia could do a lot with a smile.

“Sorry. Yeah. I’m under age,” Sadie admitted.

Again a new smile, this one sad, worried. “There are no children or adults with us. But I don’t think we have any Scotch.”

Sadie said, “It was my dad’s thing. Scotch. He said it helped him to stop thinking at the end of the day. Once I came into his libratory— that was his made-up name for it because it was books and a microscope and …” She stopped talking.

Right into it; she had walked into remembering and feeling, and the goddamned tears were coming.
Do not remember all of that,
she told herself. Do not remember Dad in his ridiculous libratory, kicked back in his ancient leather chair with his feet up and a crystal tumbler in his hand, frowning up at his dusty old chalkboard covered in incomprehensible scribbles.

She would interrupt his concentration. To play the piano, which was also in the libratory. Or to show him a drawing. Or just to stand there because if she did, he would grab her and there would be a mock-ferocious struggle and she would end up letting him hug her.

Splattered into the concrete at the stadium. Burned in a greasy fire. And Stone with him. Her decent, funny, gentle brother.

“Coffee would be good,” Sadie said.

Ophelia led the way to a kitchen. It was clearly a kitchen without a housewife or househusband. It was the kitchen of indifferent individuals who parked their tea or cookies or chips here or there. The coffee machine had a full pot, but no one had scrubbed that glass pot out probably since the day it was first purchased.

They sat at a round table. Sadie took her coffee black. Ophelia with milk and sugar. The mugs were anonymous. The coffee was bitter.

“It’s called a
bindi
,” Ophelia said. “The thing you’re staring at.”

“Okay,” Sadie said. No point denying that she had been staring at the jewels that sparkled from Ophelia’s forehead. “From India, right?”

“Yes. It’s somewhere between a tradition and a fashion statement. It was a gift.”

“It’s very pretty.”

Ophelia didn’t seem convinced that Sadie was being sincere. “So. You know about biots. You know that Grey McLure created that technology. And he gave us access to it.”

“Why?”

“Because we need it,” Ophelia said. “There was a long history between your dad and a … well, between Grey McLure and the Armstrong Twins.”

Sip. “I’ve heard of them. There’s something wrong with them, right?”

“Clean so far.” This was Renfield, coming in, pulling a chair out, and sitting a couple of feet back from the two females.

Ophelia’s smile this time was pained, and a little embarrassed. “Renfield has two biots on you.”

When he had blindfolded her. Of course.

“You’ve had biots aboard before,” Renfield said. “One of them dropped a Teflon fiber on your cochlea.” He shrugged. “It wouldn’t cause any problems, but I’ll remove it, anyway.”

Sadie had grown accustomed to knowing that microscopic quasi-spiders were traveling around and through her body. Her father’s biots, and most recently the medicos. But it was unpleasant thinking of this boy’s eyes and ears strolling around inside her brain. The irritation was lessened somewhat by the fact that he had a bit of booger clinging precariously to one nostril. It gave Sadie an advantage over the cocky Eurotrash.

“The scans would have shown nanobots on your skin,” Ophelia said. “But they can quite easily hide inside you. For that we need to take a closer look.”

“Or not. If they’re hiding out,” Renfield said. Then he did a very strange thing. He quickly pinched off the hanging booger.

Sadie stared at him. He looked past her.

Guilty.

“You can see what I see,” Sadie said. She stood up, suddenly furious. “I was focusing on your nose, and you saw it.”

“A biot can sink a probe into the optic nerve, or even into the visual cortex,” Ophelia said. “It’s hit-and-miss. Sometimes you get a pretty complete picture. Sometimes—”

Sadie slammed her good hand down on the tabletop. It made a loud noise and caused her coffee to jump. Then she stabbed a finger at Renfield’s smug face and said, “Get out of my head.”

“You don’t give me—”

“Do you like the feel of hot coffee on your—”

“Calm!” Ophelia cried. “Calm. Calm. Renfield? Stay out of her senses. That’s not necessary to your job.”

Two things were instantly clear: there was rank with these people, and Ophelia, as soft-spoken as she was, outranked Renfield.

And Renfield was conceiving a powerful dislike of Sadie. That, too, was clear.

“What else can he do in my head? Can he read my memories?”

“No,” Ophelia said, still in her calm, calm, calm voice. “We can’t really read memories. But we can locate them. It’s like … Well, think of it like this: we can find it the way you can search a book for a particular word. But we can’t then read the whole book. We can find the location of an idea. Then, we can spin a wire and just lay it on the surface, or we can belay off a pin that’s jabbed into the brain, or we can plant a transponder.”

“And what does that do?” Sadie demanded, glaring at Renfield.

“Wire or transponder, it connects two different memories or thoughts. It connects them in ways that the mind had not previously done. For example, we could locate your memories of a favorite pet. A cat, maybe. And we could link that memory to something you feared or hated.”

Renfield smoothed his hair back with his hand. “And every time you think,
kitty, kitty
, you also think,
fear, fear
.”

“Enough of those connections and you can alter the way a person thinks. You can create false fears. You can rewrite memories. You can create love or hate.”

Sadie, still refusing to sit down, said, “My father never would have done any of that. That’s obscene.”

“This isn’t McLure Industries,” Renfield said. “Your father gave us the tech. He didn’t run the show.”

“Who does?”

“Lear.”

“Who the hell is Lear?”

This now was the most subtle of Ophelia’s many smiles. This one was made of respect and fear and submission. “Lear is Lear. And that’s all any of us will ever know.”

(ARTIFACT)

Statement of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.

We are not evil men.

We do not desire power. We do not desire the subjugation of others. Our goal is freedom for the human race.

How many starve as we turn away? How many die from preventable diseases as we ignore them? How many of our fellow human beings languish in political prisons, or the prison of their own addictions? How many are without hope, when we might give them hope?

We are a freak of nature: two men joined together by an accident of nature in our mother’s womb. Our brains are individual but interconnected. We cannot be separated without one of us dying.

And isn’t that how all mankind should be? Shouldn’t we all survive only so long as others do? Shouldn’t we all be part of one great human race without hatreds, without wars, without cruelty?

We are never lonely because we are we, and not just I. Many look at us with pity or with horror. Believe us when we say that we feel the same for all of you, trapped in your eternal loneliness.

For all of human history humans have been given the opportunity to love one another. And for the most part we have failed. But this need no longer be the case. Technology offers us a way out of harsh, cold, hostile separation.

I hear you thinking, “But that is the human condition.”

But why should we not seek to better the human condition? Have we not from time immemorial turned to technology to give ourselves powers that we did not naturally possess? Did we not use fire to stay warm and cook our food? Did we not use the electric light to banish the night? Did we not take to the air in balloons and airplanes and jets and thence to space itself in rockets?

Now we have the technology to banish not only the literal night, but the long, dark night of the human soul. With nanobots we can connect all people, everywhere, into one great race: the human race. No longer will some go hungry while others get fat. No longer will we turn a blind eye to cruelty, because we will feel all cruelties as our own.

Only ignorance stands between us and our goal of uniting the human race into something so much more profound than a mere social network. We can create a nexus of the entire human race.

We have in our hands the beginnings of true utopia.

Some will choose the path of evil and resist this glorious future.

We will mourn them.

Charles and Benjamin Armstrong