Bzrk (11 page)

(ARTIFACT)

KING LEAR

Dost thou know me, fellow?

KENT

No, sir; but you have that in your countenance

Which I would fain call master.

KING LEAR

What’s that?

KENT

Authority.

King Lear, William Shakespeare

TEN

Vincent contemplated the China Bone and watched—from the Asian grocery across the street—as Karl Burnofsky shuffled inside.

Burnofsky was flanked, at a discreet distance, by two TFDs—Tourists from Denver. Two of the usual AmericaStrong security men from Armstrong Fancy Gifts. One was a woman, actually, but that was beside the point.

The Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation might be run by a mad, twisted creature, but its outward face was relentlessly low-key. Their AmericaStrong men didn’t walk around trying to look like Secret Service or extras from a Hollywood muscle flick. They dressed in L.L. Bean and Land’s End. They wore pima-cotton polo shirts and down jackets. So that in New York City they always looked like those most invisible and easily forgotten of creatures: tourists.

TFDs—Tourists from Denver.

Burnofsky went inside to find that elevator. The two TFDs stayed outside, waiting and chatting and stamping their feet against the cold until a car drove up to offer them warmth and shelter.

The China Bone: no sign, of course, discreet, always discreet. It had been here in Chinatown since 1880, though within Chinatown it had moved maybe a half dozen times. The people who needed to find it, found it. In the old days it had been just the better class of opium smokers. All Chinese at first, largely sailors. Then some of the artsier, more adventurous Victorian-age white men.

The China Bone had grown more refined and exclusive by the 1920s. It expanded from opium and marijuana during Prohibition to include alcohol as well. The style, as Vincent had once seen through the right eye of a waiter, was very upscale. Think Ritz-Carlton for wealthy drug addicts; that was the modern China Bone. A little too gilt and plush for Vincent’s austere taste, but he supposed if you were going to be an opium addict—and Burnofsky certainly wasn’t about to stop—this was the place to indulge.

Vincent had caught a glimpse of Burnofsky then, through the waiter’s eye, as the brilliant drunk and addict—and God knew what else—slid into one of the many alcoves, there to await the pipe.

It had been fascinating to Vincent. Burnofsky was a genius. Not the sort of man one thought of wasting hours in drug-induced fever dreams. And inevitably perhaps Vincent wondered whether the drug could give him what he had never experienced: pleasure.

Vincent had come no closer to Burnofsky then. And he had very nearly lost his biot when the waiter decided on a sudden trip to Mexico with some friends.

The disadvantage of the biot: unlike the nanobot, the biot had to be retrieved.

Vincent paid for the organic Thai rub and the green chilis he’d picked up. A few spicy things, not so that he would enjoy the food he made, but so that he could at least acknowledge it.

Something.

He’d been twelve when he was diagnosed with the anhedonia. Anhedonia commonly had a psychiatric cause, usually drugs. So they thought then, anyway, and so his mortified parents had assumed. Little Michael using so many drugs he’d lost the capacity for pleasure, oh my God, what have we done to cause this?

It was a long two years of virtual house arrest before they got around to taking a look at possible
physical
causes. Then they found the lesions on his nucleus accumbens as well as the inadequate production of dopamine.

Vincent stepped out of the direct neon and fluorescent glare and into the cold night, holding his little plastic bag. He had happened across the shop while trailing Burnofsky many months ago. He’d continued to shop here; it was a very well-appointed store. But he had also become fascinated by the China Bone, by what it represented: a need for pleasure so terrible it drove people to self-destruction.

His actual mission was at a hotel bar just a block away. That’s where he would find the woman.

Anya Violet. Not her birth name. She had been born Anya Ulyanov. Russian. When her father had moved the family from Samara to New York, he’d changed the surname to something a wee bit less … problematic. Ulyanov had been the original surname of Lenin. A lot of weight to carry around, that name. So. Bye-bye Ulyanov, hello Violet, which at first had been pronounced Wee-o-lett. Now Violet. Like violent without the “n.”

Anya’s mother had always liked the flowers. Violets.

Dr. Anya Violet, current employment in a secret section of McLure Industries. Even her friends and family didn’t know that her work was with biots. Vincent did only because BZRK had long had full access to McLure’s secure computers.

Who the hell was Lear that he’d been able to get such total support from Grey McLure? And how many times had Vincent asked himself that question? And how many times had he stopped himself from pursuing it, because while Lear might be anyone and had become a nearly mythical creature, Caligula was very real, and Vincent had a definite impression that if he ever did penetrate Lear’s secret, Caligula would stab, shoot, garrote, drown, or otherwise end Vincent’s life.

That was Caligula’s … contribution … to the cause.

Vincent thought of the note he had appended to his report. “I am not Scipio.”

Scipio was the Roman general who had finally destroyed Carthage.

Would Lear accept this push back? Would he or she allow Vincent to refuse Carthage commands in the future? Or would Lear know that in the end Vincent would do what Lear needed him to do?

Tonight would be the third time Vincent accidentally ran into Anya at this bar. Anya lived nearby. Vincent didn’t, but he had an apartment a block away that looked exactly as if he lived in it. In case.

The hotel was not fashionable. It was dark and smelled like soy sauce and peanut oil. The bar was even darker, but it smelled of beer and fried wontons. There were just four small tables and an equal number of stools at the bar, and no one was there but Anya.

Vincent saw her before she saw him. He noted with quiet satisfaction that she had dressed for the occasion. This was their first planned meeting. Well, the first that Anya knew to be planned. A date. Previously she’d worn the comfortable work-casual clothing she wore in her lab. Previously she’d come here for her after-shift drink precisely because there was zero chance of being hit on and she could just have a fruity drink or two and chill, relax, mellow, slough off the brain-draining activity that defined her work.

That had changed when she met Vincent. For one thing Vincent was an attractive younger man. Anya was ten years older than Vincent. Anya was lovely. Tall, with near-perfect legs and just a little poochy-pooch at her waist that hardly anyone would notice, and her skin still looked very good, and so did her reddish-brown—do they call that auburn?—hair.

A good face. A face with character, which in this case meant that she had the echo of eastern invasions from the steppes.

And Vincent. Ah, once he confessed to the whole anhedonia thing there wasn’t a woman worth her tight skirt and her generous display of cleavage and the expensive scent steaming from her neck who wasn’t interested.

Unable to experience pleasure.

We’ll see about that.

That’s what they thought. And he would find a way to explain that he still knew how to
give
pleasure. That was game, set, and match, as one might say if one were talking about tennis.

Anya’s working theory was that Vincent had probably dated nothing but bimbos his own age or younger. All very pretty, no doubt, but what did a girl that age really know?

“Vincent!” Anya said, lighting up, swiveling on her stool so that he would catch just a bit more inner thigh than was strictly necessary. Kiss kiss, cheek cheek, all very New York. But Vincent slid back just a bit slower than he might and let his cheek linger a little too long, and yeah, she responded.

He drew back at last, and now in addition to seeing her flushed face he saw through two sets of biot sensors.

V1 was headed toward the eye, running through a deep valley filled with tumbled crystalline boulders of makeup. Expensive makeup—finer grained—had a tendency to stick to biot legs, a bit like mud.

V3 confronted a landscape Vincent could not at first make sense of. He was on a long, gently curved plain of dimpled, spongy flesh. But in the distance, perhaps half a centimeter mack, was a huge pillar as big around as a redwood tree. It was vertical to the fleshy plain. V3 was sideways, which meant that actually the thick pillar was roughly horizontal.

Vincent’s actual eyes, the big, brown, real ones, flicked toward Anya’s ear. Of course: an earring. Maybe white gold or platinum. Through the eyes of the biot it looked flaked and corrugated, like an old muzzle-loading cannon. And when the biot got closer, Vincent had a view of the hole, the puncture through which the metal passed.

In the macro Vincent saw the diamond that hung below the lobe. He’d never seen a diamond from biot level. It might be interesting. But this wasn’t a sightseeing trip.

One in the eye, one in the ear.

“I just stopped off to get a few things,” Vincent said, holding up the bag as proof. “I was early. But I didn’t want to be rude and show up early.”

Maybe he could have just trusted her. Maybe he could have told her what he needed. Maybe he could have brought her into BZRK. That had been his original plan, to recruit her, to have a back door into the McLure labs.

But he couldn’t afford a maybe anymore. He needed a yes. He needed what she could give to the cause, and he needed it immediately.

Ticktock. It was all a matter of necessity, and didn’t necessity justify everything?

“It would have been okay. I was early, too.”

They shared a conspiratorial “we like each other” smile. Vincent assumed she was planning on sleeping with him. He certainly hoped so: he needed time to do his work.

He needed time with Anya. And, too, there was attraction. Vincent was anhedonic; he wasn’t asexual. Need was one thing, the pleasure one took from satisfying a need was a different matter.

Damnit. She’d been swimming. Or maybe just showering. Either way, V3, in her ear, had just run smack up against a wall of water. Probably no more than a few milliliters, but it was held in place by surface tension, so rather than forming a lake he could run across, it was more like a giant water balloon he would have to swim through.

Unless he broke the surface tension. In which case V3 would go for a sort of flume ride, probably into the outer ear. But also possibly into a hastily raised napkin and from there to a lap or the bar counter.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” Vincent said to the bartender.

Anya put her hand on his arm and laughed. “No, no, this is awful, really. No self-respecting man should drink this. Too sweet.” She was so confident in interrupting. He noticed. Older woman, accomplished woman, advanced degrees and a responsible position.

“We’ll have two shots of vodka, very cold, neat,” Anya said. She winked. “My Russian blood, you know.”

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” Vincent flirted.

“If that’s what it takes,” Anya said, voice husky as Vincent sent V1 gingerly through the mascara line, stepping over what looked like a recently deceased demodex, interesting, onto the eye, and down below the lower lid.

He withdrew V3 from the ear. Vincent had been caught in a folded napkin once before. It was hell trying to find your way out. Vincent could probably find his way out of a larynx quicker than he could a napkin.

They did their shots.

An hour and ten minutes later they were in Anya’s apartment.

Some time later still she had fallen asleep in his arms.

Vincent was by that point fairly convinced that Anya was clean of nanobots.

And he’d already begun to use V1 and V3 with reinforcement from V2—still recovering from two legs breaks on its earlier mission— to stretch the neuronic fibers from her pleasure centers to her images of him. She may only like him now. Or maybe not even that. But over the next few hours, while she slept and he did not, her affection for him would grow. Soon the mere thought of him would release endorphins into her bloodstream. And her natural caution and reserve would be degraded. She would like him; she would trust him.

Vincent vowed that he would remove it all once he had what he needed. That, he told himself, was the difference between BZRK and the Armstrong Twins. Vincent did only what he had to do. He would minimize the betrayal. As much as he could.

“Because we’re the good guys,” he whispered to himself even as, unasked for, the memories of murder in a small restaurant in London bubbled to the surface of his mind.

Burnofsky didn’t have the kind of money or juice (or entourage) that the music producer (who shall remain nameless), or the overexposed industrialist (who shall, likewise, remain nameless) had, so he didn’t get one of the larger, deeper alcoves at the China Bone.