Bzrk (19 page)

“I’m tired of ears,” Wilkes pouted.

“Keats, you and I will do a little of that, and then we’ll go all the way in.”

Plath said, “I don’t understand why I can’t be the one to take care of my own brain. Why is it everyone else’s job? Why does he have to do it?”

“Plath, think about it. If the aneurysm ever does rupture, as your brain is dying and you’re wracked with migraines, hallucinating in all probability, who is going to run your biots in to fix the leak?” She leaned forward and took Plath’s hand in hers, held it until Plath had forced herself to relax into the touch. “You’re important to us. You have resources we will need, when you’re able to access them. And this boy … this young man … is going to keep you alive.”

EIGHTEEN

Plath placed her finger in the open flower of the crèche.

It was the hand of God descending from the sky. Huge. Like someone stabbing a pink blimp into the pinkish soil of the culture medium.

She saw her finger, both small and large, both a part of her hand and a giant pillar disappearing up into the sky.

Both were in her head.

She gasped.

“Now make your biot move toward it,” Wilkes said.

“How?”

They sat in chairs next to each other. Two rickety chairs placed side by side but pointing in opposite directions so that Plath was face-to-face with Wilkes.

A similar setup on the other side of the MRI machine. Plath could see Keats’s eyes. Her destination. Insane.

“Think it,” Wilkes said with a shrug.

She thought it. And yes, she could see the dimpled spongy surface of the medium flowing by beneath her as she ran. Hah-hah! It worked.

“You have six legs,” Wilkes said. “Plus two arms.”

“Uh-huh.” Plath wasn’t really listening. She was focusing on the sheer speed with which that window inside her brain was moving toward the finger. Zoom.

She saw the swirls of fingerprint now. An object the size of a skyscraper, but curved, and covered in amazing whorls that soared up and away into the sky. It looked strangely like some stucco walls that are finished with a toothed trowel.

But as she ran—as her biot ran—the giant became even more detailed, and close up the fingerprints began to look like farmland seen from an airplane, the prints like furrowed fields but where each row stood five or six feet high. And there, strangely atop the rows rather than down inside, were what might be holes drilled at regular distances.

The flesh became less smooth and now seemed more like a desert of dry, baked earth.

Anxiety hit her in a wave. She was meant to climb up onto that alien surface. Her finger twitched, scooted wildly across the surface, almost riding over the biot.

“Aaaah!” Plath cried.

“Don’t worry, you can’t crush it. Too small. You know how hard it is to squash a flea?”

“It’s … It’s leaking! My … the … my finger!”

And indeed from the holes a glistening liquid began to seep. A liquid that sat atop but did not soften the baked soil terrain. Little droplets that just sort of stayed there.

“Sweat. You’re jumpy so your skin starts to sweat.”

Plath stopped. The curve of the fingertip made what had seemed like a vertical pillar into a descending roof of dried, tilled soil now intermittently oozing small droplets of liquid. The drops should fall like rain, but they didn’t. It clung to the cracked, furrowed surface.

“Freaky, huh?” Wilkes asked with a smirk.

“I’m supposed to get up there?”

“Yep. Jump. You can jump probably ten times your own body length. You jump up and grab on. Don’t worry about gravity. Gravity is nothing to the likes of us!”

Plath held her breath, trying to calm her heart. She closed her eyes—her macro eyes—and leapt.

The biot twisted expertly in midair and landed upside down. Her legs gripped, and she hung there like a fly on the ceiling; but it was no longer a ceiling, it was a vast farm field spread out before her. Vertical and horizontal had lost their usual definite meanings.

“Hah!” Plath cried.

“Yeah, hah!” Wilkes agreed. “Definitely: hah.”

“I’m on my own finger.”

“Heh-heh-heh,” Wilkes cackled. “Better than “’shrooms.”

Plath wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but she was feeling the rush of this adventure now. She was freaking Spider-Man.

“Now what?” Plath asked.

“Now you stay put in the nano, and you go over and poke your boyfriend in the eye in the macro.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Plath said automatically.

“That’s good, because what you’ll see of him will probably deep-freeze your girl parts. If you know what I mean.”

Wilkes was a strange girl, with her creepy, eye-dripping tattoo and her clothing that somehow split the difference between dominatrix and thrift-shop emo. But Wilkes was her Yoda on this trip, so Plath was inclined to be tolerant.

Plath focused on the task of walking toward Keats. The boy’s face had an expression of mixed amazement and fear that was probably a pretty close facsimile of her own.

They met at the foot of the MRI. Ophelia stood beside him. Her smile now was all about mystery and memory. She was remembering when she’d done this same thing, felt these same trembling fears.

“You first, Keats,” Ophelia ordered. “You just put the tip of your finger as close to the eyeball as you can get without touching it. Then you hop off.”

Keats’s finger trembled close to Plath’s eye. She couldn’t help herself blinking as he touched her.

“Ahh!” he cried, and jerked back.

“Eyeballs!” Wilkes said, and laughed her heh-heh-heh laugh. “They’re a trip.”

Plath’s turn. She tried to touch his eye. She saw the vast white orb beneath her, like she was in orbit on an alien farm planet above an Earth of red-rivered ice and a distant …

She jumped.

But the eyeball, that sky-filling planet, drew suddenly away.

“Sorry!” Keats said.

There was nothing beneath Plath’s biot feet. She was falling.

“Don’t move, moron!” Wilkes yelled at Keats.

Plath fell, twisting. The “ground” zoomed past below her. Like she was flying a supersonic jet just inches off the ground. She saw no detail, not at this speed, not twisting madly like this.

Sick fear welled up in her.

“Grab anything you can grab!” Wilkes shouted. “Shit!”

The ground was falling away, like she’d been flying low over a mesa and had the ground suddenly dip.

Then she saw something gigantic on the horizon. It appeared first as a sort of ridgeline, a swelling rise stabbed with leafless tree trunks, each traumatized by something that had chopped it crudely off. Like someone had clear-cut a sparse forest of redwood trees.

Then she was flying over those trees and seeing a huge chasm, like the Grand Canyon opening beneath/beside her biot as it fell. And within that terrifying dark canyon stood massive slabs of grainy, pearlescent—

“I’m passing his mouth!” Plath cried out.

Then she hit something she hadn’t even seen coming. An amazingly tall tree that sprouted from the flaked-flesh landscape below, rose high in the air, then veered away toward what was either down or ahead.

The biot bounced away from this tree and now was falling through a forest of them, impossibly long palm trunks. One rushed up toward her and she twisted, extended her six legs, hit it—with strangely little impact—and grabbed on tight.

In the macro she panted, almost doubled over from the nauseating sensation of falling miles through the air.

“I’m in … like trees.”

“Short stubby trees or great big long ones?”

“Really long ones!” She was shouting for no reason. Wilkes and Keats and Ophelia were all standing right there. “They look pink.”

“That’s color enhancement. If you think about it, you can actually change the color.” Wilkes laughed her heh-heh-heh and added, “Of course maybe that’s another time. Let’s just get you back where you belong.”

“I’m holding on to the tree. It looks like dead leaves down there on the ground.”

“Dead skin cells. Some folks think they look like fallen leaves. Other people think they look like shredded cardboard. Anyway, doesn’t matter. You’re down in your boyfriend’s stupid pseudo-beard. No offense, Keats.”

Keats reflexively stroked the sparse hair on his chin.

“It’s dark!” Plath yelled. “Stop that,” she snapped at Keats.

“Okay, well, this is unexpected,” Wilkes said. “We’re going to need to get some coffee or tea or whatever.”

“Coffee?”

“Yeah, honey, you got a long walk ahead of you. Up the chin, around the mouth, bypass the nostrils—you do not want to go in there—and meet me up by the eye. As slow as you’ll be, probably half an hour before we even get to go eye-skating.”

Wilkes waited, grinning. When Plath just stared blankly, she said, “Eye-skating. Ice-skating. Right?” Then she sighed. “We’re BZRK, it doesn’t mean we have to have no sense of humor.”

So they sipped coffee.

And Keats and Ophelia had some, too.

And from time to time Keats would stare at Plath as if she was a monster. He was inside her. Ophelia had led him through her eye and into her brain.

From time to time Plath would look at Keats, needing reassurance that he was actually, still, a human being.

At one point Wilkes grabbed a powerful magnifying glass and scanned Keats’s face. The light she used was like a break in clouds that lets streaming sunlight through. “There you are. Either you or a wandering mite. No, it’s you. You’re just under his left eye.”

Plath had been told about the demodex. Warned about the demodex. But still she screamed.

Like some awful crocodile mated with a dinosaur. It was smaller than she was, but not small enough. It was long, tapered from the front where its six legs stuck out, stubby, more like paddles than legs.

Plath stopped breathing.

Then breathed again, too hard, too fast. The demodex was moving. A tiny insect mouth seemed to be questing toward her.

She reared back.

“Are you sure it won’t … It’s like …” She didn’t say what it was like. Because it was not like anything she had ever seen or experienced. A living thing, its deformed baby legs motoring slowly and inefficiently. It was chewing a fallen leaf. No, a dead skin cell. Eating it contentedly.

And yet it was impossible not to imagine it as a predator. A reptile, a monster from another planet.

It was too small to see with a human eye. Too small even for a magnifying glass, smaller than a dust mite, smaller than her biot.

But size alone did not reassure. A wild boar is small, a mad dog is small.

“Aww, isn’t he cute?”

She heard Wilkes’s voice and realized that somehow she was seeing what Plath was seeing. Which could only mean …

Plath’s biot eyes looked up and saw a creature far more terrifying than the demodex.

It towered over the skin-eating monster. Spiky antenna from a smooth, green head. A long, narrow body with three tall legs on each side. The head was topped by a pair of compound eyes that wrapped down the side of the head like Princess Leia’s buns.

Where the mouth should be was a sort of proboscis, a tube, hollow and with something viscous dripping from the end, like mucus from a cold sufferer.

It had arms like a mantis. Dangerous and powerful. They ended in small asymmetric claws that had one short and one long pincer.

But it was the eyes …

The human eyes, smeared across that insect face, staring soulless from beneath the compound insect eyes. That was what finally obliterated Plath’s careful self-control and let her scream.

And scream.

And there, suddenly, a hand on her shoulder, Nijinsky standing behind her.

Nijinsky looked at Wilkes. “Is she seeing you?”

Wilkes nodded.

“You should have warned her.”

“Is that what my biot looks like?” Plath gasped. “Does it … does it have my eyes?”

Wilkes grinned. “Beware, Plath,” she said, mocking, and not in the jokey way she’d been before, but with an edge of aggression and anger. “It’s a weird world down there in the meat. And the weirdest thing of all is us.”

“It wasn’t me,” Burnofsky said, first thing, first words out of his mouth when he next saw Bug Man. He grabbed the kid and pulled him into a side room, out of sight, out of sound, and looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t like you, Anthony, but it wasn’t me.”

He smelled of booze. His pupils were the size of pinheads. So drunk
and
high. Nasty old geezer.