BZRK Reloaded (24 page)

“I want a goddamned cigarette! I’m the goddamned president of
the goddamned United States, and I want a goddamned cigarette!”
“Yes, Madam President. I think one of the Secret Service agents .
. .” She let herself out.
The president went back to reading a report on her pad, an endless, dire report on the rash of bizarre terrorist or suspected terrorist
incidents.
The plane crash in Jets stadium.
The bombing and shootout at the United Nations.
The murder of the sole surviving suspect from that bombing—
she had been identified, finally. A good girl, of course weren’t they
all, from a good Indian American home in Connecticut. Someone
had gotten into her secure hospital room, incapacitated the FBI agent
in the room with her and pumped liquified white phosphorous into
her brain. By the time anyone had discovered her, she had a meatless,
empty skull sitting atop her shoulders.
A massacre in a house right on Capitol Hill.
Worst of all, for the moment at least, Washington, DC police were
all over the massacre in the bookstore. The FBI had tried hard to federalize it and been told in no uncertain terms to drop dead. A cop had
been shot. No way the PD didn’t investigate.
And what they were turning up was Rios’s ETA. Evidence was
mounting that the witnesses had been right: the lead shooter had ID’d
herself as ETA and she was, in fact, ETA.
The president had scheduled a meeting with Rios. She liked him.
She liked him a great deal, although she seemed to remember that
at first she hadn’t. He’d grown on her, then. Lately she had come to
think he reminded her of an early political mentor, Senator Reynolds,
a man of unshakable integrity.
Not that Rios looked or sounded or acted anything like the senator. Just …well, there was some connection there . . .
But now she and her administration were about to be jammed up
over Rios’s disaster of an agency.
“And that’s why I need a cigarette,” she snarled.
Gastrell reappeared. She held a single cigarette in her hand, and
a green Bic lighter. She placed them on the desk in front of the president, every fiber of her being radiating disapproval.
“You’re too much a Puritan, Ginny. Live a little. I’m going to.
What do you think: How soon after the memorial service can I start
dating?”
“Have you finalized your eulogy?”
“I’ve finalized everything. Final.” She lit the cigarette and inhaled
deeply. “Oh, sweet home.” She looked at the chief of staff and said,
“Let me have women about me that are fat / Sleek-headed women and
such as sleep a-nights. Yond Gastrell has a lean and hungry look. / She
thinks too much. Such women are dangerous.”
It was a speech from Shakespeare. From the play Julius Caesar.
“Madam President,” Gastrell said, choking down her anger. “I
have to tell you something. You may get a question about it.”
A deep inhalation. The president blew a smoke ring and laughed
at it. “What now, Ginny? What now?”
“There’s a video. It just showed up and it already has two hundred
thousand views. It will hit ten times that within twenty-four hours.”
“An especially cute kitty?”
“It’s a fake, of course, but it’s very well done. It appears to be video
of you. No, not actually of you. Video as if someone had a camera
mounted …actually …Let me show you.”
The chief of staff leaned in with her own pad, turned it to landscape and tapped the screen.
Rough, jerky, maddeningly low-quality video showed various
scenes, all apparently within the White House private quarters.
“So?”
“Wait.”
Suddenly the picture changed and there was Monte Morales.
There he was lying on his back, chest bare, face contorted.
And there he was talking, though there was no audio.
And there he was with hands, feminine hands, on either side of
his head.
“Ah-ah-AHHH!” the president cried. She wanted to cover her
mouth but instead grabbed her own blouse as if roughing herself up.
Gastrell put a hand on the president’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, I
should have warned you. It’s despicable. Even by Internet standards
it’s vile.”
And now Monte was being dragged.
And now he was slipping below the water in the tub, and the
blood was a swirling smoke pattern around his head.
“Ah,” the president said. “Ah. Oh. Oh God.”
“We can try to get it taken down, but it’s already propagated
everywhere. Anonymous is claiming credit. They claim …well, it
doesn’t matter.”
The president’s fist clenched around the cigarette. It burned into
her palm and gave off the sickening barbecue smell of burning flesh.
“Are you all right, Madam President?”
“It’s a fake. It’s a fake.”
“Obviously. But it’s well done, as I said. The backgrounds look
very much like the actual bathroom. The Secret Service is analyzing
it, so it can be thoroughly debunked.”
“Debunked,” the president whispered.
“I wanted you to know.”
“Debunked.” She opened her hand and saw an angry oval burn in
her palm, right over her lifeline.
“Get out,” the president said.
“There’s the briefing on the Azerbaijan situation in twenty minutes.”
But the president wasn’t listening. She pushed abruptly away
from her desk and ran toward the private quarters.

KimKim, a second crewman, and a middle-aged woman from two
levels up came for Minako. Minako had seen the woman around.
She thought she might be Australian.

“I want out of here,” Minako said. “I want to go home. You people
have no right to keep me here! Let me go!”
“Oh, that’s silliness, dear. Everything is fine. Everything is wonderful. This is the most wonderful place in the world.”
“You’re brainwashed. You’re crazy!” How many times could she
say that? What was the point in yelling at crazy people?
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Kyla said. “I couldn’t be happier.”
“It’s what they’ve done to you,” Minako said, trying desperately to communicate, to make the woman understand. “You aren’t
thinking right. This place …those horrible men, those monsters!”
The slap came hard and fast. It was open palm and hit its intended
target perfectly. Minako’s cheek stung, and she was shocked into
silence.
“I’m sorry, sweetie, but you simply must not insult the Great
Souls. They know best. They’re geniuses, don’t you see that? You’re
too young to understand.”
“Enough, let’s go,” the second crewman said impatiently. “The
bosses said fetch her, so let’s fetch her and be done with it.”
“Absolutely!” Kyla said. “And quickly, too!”
The two crewmen each grabbed an arm.
“This one wants to hurt me, is that part of your madness, too?”
Minako demanded of Kyla.
“Nothing happens in Benjaminia or in Charlestown, either,
unless it is the will of the Great Souls,” Kyla said. “I wouldn’t worry.”
Back in the room. The same machine lay waiting. The monsters
had not yet returned.
“You can go,” KimKim informed Kyla.
“I’m sorry, but you don’t dismiss me,” Kyla said. “You’re just
crew. You aren’t even enlightened. You are not sustainably happy.”
“Whatever, just bug off,” the second crewman said.
“No!” Minako cried. “Don’t leave, they’ll do terrible things to me!
It’s a trick!”
“It is a bit of a trick,” the second crewman said with a sigh. His left
fist shot out, and Kyla’s head snapped back. She fell straight back onto
the deck, her head bouncing from the impact.
Minako yanked free of KimKim but didn’t make it far: he was
quick. His hand closed around her arm like a vice. And he said, “You
are not alone.”
Minako froze.
Then, in Japanese so flawless it could only have come from a native
speaker, he said, “My full name is Kenshin Sugita—KimKim is my
nickname. I work for the Naichō, the intelligence service of Japan.”
“But you tried . . .” she gasped.
“No. I knew they would never break the rules, the men are too
afraid. But it made them trust me.”
She looked at the second crewman, who shrugged and said, “Listen, I’ve only been on this floating hell for a couple of weeks. I needed
work. Bad. But enough is damned well enough. My name is Silver.
Formerly Gunnery Sergeant Silver. U.S. Marine Corps.”
“My father is …my father was a marine.”
“That’s why I’m going to get myself killed with this crazy Nip,
here,” Silver said. “And you should know better than to say anyone
was a marine, past tense. In or out of service, alive or dead: once a
marine, always a marine.”
Minako drew a shaky breath. “Semper fi?”
“Damn straight. Now, let’s get the hell off this boat.”
“How . . .” Minako began, faltering. Then she tried again. “How
old are you?”
KimKim looked at her like she might already be crazy. “I’m
twenty-nine.”
“As I recall, I’m forty-seven,” Silver said, puzzled.
Minako smiled her first smile since Okinawa. Twenty-nine and
forty-seven. Both were prime numbers.
Keats took the rickety steps two at a time, with Plath hot on his
heels. Burnofsky was still tied to the scaffold. Billy had a twitcher
headset on, a glove on one hand, the other hand clawing at his
face.
Billy shrieked. “They’re eating me!”
“What?” Keats shot a hard look at Burnofsky, but the old man
seemed to be almost dreamy, a slight smile on his bloodless lips, eyes
half closed.
Nijinsky and Wilkes came running.
Keats ripped the twitcher goggles off Billy’s head and settled
them onto his own.
Plath said, “It just looks that way, Billy, you’ve never been down
in the meat before.”
But while she was placating, Keats was seeing.
At least two dozen nanobots were busily scraping at Billy’s skin.
There was something like pinkish ash lumped here and there in piles.
And as he watched a stray dust mite came lumbering along, oblivious
to everything, nearly blind, a harmless but grotesque consumer of
sloughed skin cells.
The mite was about the size of the nanobots, a fat, swollen spiderlike creature with stubby legs. The nanobots ignored the mite as
they tunneled eagerly into epidermis. Then the mite blundered into
one of the nanobots and in an invisibly fast motion the nanobot cut
the mite into two pieces. Other nanobots rushed to help, and the
mite spasmed as it died.
The nanobots ate the pieces of the mite.
Other nanobots ate Billy’s skin.
They began to extrude a paste, and other biots rushed to that
paste and with a blur of tiny tools and jets of flame—
“They’re building more nanobots!” Keats said.
“What?” Nijinsky had come running from downstairs. He angrily
snatched the goggles from Keats. He looked. He pulled the glove from
Billy’s hand and slipped it on. Like he was the responsible professional
who would tell them all . . .
“Can’t be,” Nijinsky said.
“Oh, I think it can,” Burnofsky said.
Nijinsky took the goggles from his head and dropped them on
the floor. “Self-replication is biological, not mechanical,” he said,
repeating what he’d been told once, somewhere. “Those nanobots are
complex machines.”
“Indeed,” Burnofsky said. “And I appreciate the compliment.” He
turned to Plath “Of course, I was building on your father’s work—”
“His work wasn’t this,” Plath said. “He didn’t do research so he
could destroy, he—”
“He did it for the same reason we all do it. For ego. To say he’d
done it. To not only play God but to be God!” Burnofsky shouted.
“You spoiled little brat, you aren’t the pimple on her ass. If she was
alive, she’d—” Suddenly he seemed unable to catch his breath.
“Who? Who are you talking about?” Keats asked. “That daughter
you murdered?”
“Give me a fucking drink!” Burnofsky yelled, spittle flying.
“Tell me how to turn off those nanobots,” Nijinsky shot back.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” Burnofsky said. “I don’t think I’ll do
that. And we call them hydras. Cute, isn’t it?”
“It’s starting to hurt,” Billy said, almost like he didn’t want to
interrupt. A thin trickle of blood ran down his cheek.
“Stop them,” Nijinsky said. “You know what happens in this scenario. You can’t want that.”
“Give me a drink, pretty boy,” Burnofsky said. “Hold it to my lips
and pour.”
Nijinksy froze, indecisive.
“Jin, give him the drink,” Plath said.
Wilkes snatched the bottle, stuck the entire neck of it in Burnofsky’s mouth, and upended it. Burnofsky gagged and swallowed and
choked, but Wilkes kept the bottle elevated.
Finally she pulled it away. “Now talk. How do we stop it?”
Burnofsky coughed until the cough turned into a laugh. His voice
was a harsh rasp. “I never said I’d tell you anything.”
“You guys need to help me,” Billy said urgently.
“Hah,” Burnofsky said. “They need to incinerate you, kid. That’s
what they need to do.”
“What?” Billy asked, his voice quavering. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” Plath snapped.
“You’re going to do this to a child?” Nijinsky demanded.
“A child? A child, singular?”
“I don’t believe it,” Keats said, shaking his head. “No matter how
degenerate you are, no matter what you’ve done, you can’t sit here and
watch it happen.”
Burnofsky’s stare was from very far away. “Well, my little Limey
friend, it won’t be the first, will it? The first time, I saw it very close
and very personal. She looked at me…. She didn’t know …but she felt
it, inside her …She felt death, you know, she felt it, even though she
was young and what did she know about death? She looked at me and
said, Daddy …And she never called me Daddy that way before. Not
in a long time, not since she was a little girl . . .” He lost the thread for
a minute, then recovered, lifted his chin up off his chest. “I’m doing it
to them all, all the children. I’m doing it to the whole human race. All
of life. I’m cleaning this filthy planet. All of you,” Burnofsky said. “All
of everything. Welcome to the end of the world.”

“Give me that.” Keats took the nanobot controller from Billy.
“We don’t have the code,” Nijinsky pointed out.
“I’m not trying to stop the hydras, I’m going to kill them. I’m

Burnofsky snorted. “Try to run biots and nanobots simultaneously? I don’t think so.”
“Wilkes?” Keats said as he slid on the twitcher glove. “If he argues,
give him the brick again. Just don’t hit his right eye, I’m walking my
biot out that way.”
“This isn’t a fight against Bug Man,” Plath pointed out. “These
hydras are on automatic, right? Uncontrolled? I’m getting in on this,
too.”
Burnofsky said, “Don’t be stupid. By now there will be too many
for—”
WHACK!
Wilkes did not have to be prompted. The brick smacked
Burnofsky’s head with enough force to stun him into silence.
“You two are not playing hero by yourselves,” Wilkes said. “I’m
in, too.”
It was a strange battle muster. The forces were spread far and
wide, and yet, in the macro they were all within a three-foot radius.
Plath rallied all three of her biots, two fresh from their nutrient
baths and functioning normally. Keats withdrew his first biot from
Plath’s brain and his second from Burnofsky. He took chargeof the
nanobots Burnofsky had planted on Plath—these, at least, were controllable.
In Keats’s brain there was an explosion of awareness. He saw
through K1 and K2, his two biots. One raced across Burnofsky’s
eye. The other was racing to escape Plath’s brain. But at the same
moment all twelve visual inputs from the nanobots appeared in his
goggles.
He was seeing fourteen distinct visuals, the nanobot inputs unfamiliar, crude seeming, compared to the direct mind-to-mind control
of twitcher over biot.
Fourteen creatures under his control, on Plath, on Burnofsky, all
needing to be moved as quickly as possible to Billy’s cheek. It was
somewhere between deadly serious and absurd.
The problem was: it was impossible. Keats knew that, felt his
heart sinking as he realized that no one, not Bug Man, no not even
Vincent, could manage this army. He platooned the nanobots, but if
he was going to hunt down and kill every last hydra he would need to
control his nanobots individually.
Impossible. He took a step back and must have seemed about to
faint because Nijinsky caught him.
“Billy, haul that pew over here,” Nijinsky said. “I’ll do the transfer. First, I’ll touch Plath’s cheek to get the nanobots.”
“Yeah,” Keats said. Then, not meaning to say it out loud, “No
way.”
He could control the nanobots well enough to race toward the
massive finger that lightly touched Plath’s face. He could send them
scampering along the polish-tarred fingernail. And having done that,
he could march one biot down Plath’s optic nerve and another from
Burnofsky’s eye through the fringe of eyelash trees. But not all at once.
The hydras would continue to replicate. Every passing second
would mean more foes to be destroyed. And he would have to get
them all, every last one. Leave even a single hydra alive to start the
process all over again and Billy would be eaten alive.
Fail, let even one hydra survive, and they would have no choice
but to destroy Billy themselves—kill him and burn him to ashes.
Suddenly, in one of his far-too-numerous visuals, he saw the first
of Plath’s biots. It was hideous, a bug, an attenuated grasshopper, a
mite, a tiny monster that loomed six feet tall in the nano subjective.
Its face—an insect’s eyes joined by eyes that were an awful parody of
Plath’s own eyes. The effect was disturbing and haunting, as if the
face he loved had been skinned from her and then blowtorch-melted
onto a spider’s face.
“Is that you?” Plath asked him up in the world, but it felt somehow as if it was coming from the biot.
“I guess so,” he said.
“You’re better at this than I am,” she said. “I’ll follow you.”
“I’m coming in behind you two,” Wilkes said.
Keats started to say that no one was better at this, because no one
could possibly be good at this. But nevertheless he moved his two
biots and dozen nanobots forward.
Like cavalry and infantry, he thought. The nanobots would be the
foot soldiers, the pawns, he could lose them. The biots were more precious. They were the king on this chessboard: to lose one was to lose all.
A second Plath biot joined up, and a third, the new one. Keats
wondered about its capabilities.
“I may not be able to talk later,” Keats said. “I may …Anyway, I
know you don’t want to hear this, but I love you, Sadie.”
Burnofsky cleared his throat.
“I still have the brick,” Wilkes warned him. “So shut up and leave
Katniss and Peeta alone.”
Plath should have told him she loved him, too, but those would
have just been words. Instead she sent her biots racing forward after
his, determined that she would not let him lose this fight.
They reached a rushing, tumbling avalanche of red disks—the
blood flowing from the hole in Billy’s cheek. It was a surging flood
of licked red cough drops, rolling by like a rocky whitewater river.
In with the red disks were spongy white blood cells. And something
Keats had never seen before, a kind of thick spiderweb that threw
weak and inadequate ropes over the rushing platelets.
“Clotting factor,” Plath said. She was beside him on the pew. He
couldn’t see her with the goggles in place. He knew he could move his
leg slightly and make physical contact with her, and wanted to, but he
worried it might distract her.
They raced along beside the red, red avalanche of blood toward
the rim of the volcano that spewed this body-temperature lava.
Keats slowed the pace of his biots and saw that Plath was following suit. The nanobots kept on at full speed.
Ahead, a single blue hydra could be seen atop the crater’s rim,
gobbling up passing platelets.
“Mine,” he whispered to Plath.
The front of his first platoon of nanobots hit the single hydra. Six
nanobots tore into the hydra and ripped it apart. Hydra legs went flying through the air.
Easy. An easy kill.
“Come on,” Keats said and Plath heard him, of course, and followed him. Twelve nanobots and five biots powered over the crater
rim. They were staring down into a witch’s cauldron, a stew of blood
cells—red and white, plus clotting factor stretched like fishing nets
out from the sides of the hole. The cells spilled steadily over the side,
dragging clotting nets with them.
Hydras—an uncountable mass of them—were pushing down
through the blood cells, swallowing some, pushing others aside. You
couldn’t call it swimming, it looked much more like giant bugs digging their way into soggy gravel.
The main body of hydras was chewing through the deeper epidermal layers, tunneling sideways. They were tunneling beneath the
dead outer layer, down through spongy pinkish-gray meat.
Keats faced decision time sooner than he’d hoped. Two groups of
hydras heading in different directions. No more platooning. He had
to pursue in both directions. Six nanobots, one biot; to Plath, he said,
“Stay up there on the rim, catch anything that comes back out. When
Wilkes gets here, she comes in behind me.”
“I do. Care,” Plath said.
But Keats didn’t hear it. He let himself go and fell into the pictures in his head. The movements of his fingers would be sequential,
one then another, then another, but there was no way, no way in hell
to do it unless he lost himself.
Fourteen microscopic creatures to move in two radically different environments.
Don’t think.
K1 and six nanobots dove after the hydras heading down into the
blood.
K2 and six nanobots raced after the ones tunneling into the
subcutaneous fat of Billy’s face.
Keats heard nothing. He lost awareness of the room he was in.
Forgot Plath. Did not feel the hard pew under his thighs. Was not
thirsty or hungry. His heart did not beat, he did not breathe, not so
that he noticed, anyway.
Once before, when he had been tested, all the way back in London, he had gone away like this, lost himself in the game, felt nothing,
ceased to exist as a consciousness.
Within the red gravel a hydra leg. One of Keats’s nanobots clawed
it and reeled the hydra in. The others swarmed over the first and over
the shredded hydra using both as a ladder, fighting the surge and
pause, surge and pause of the red avalanche.
Seven different views of platelets and lymphocytes and clotting fibers. Seven sets of arms and legs, all swarming, all searching,
catching a second hydra, ripping it apart, another and stabbing it,
and another and another, catching up to a massed body of the replicated hydras, weak, shambling disjointed creatures built with only
one ability: to build more of themselves.
The hydras did not fight, they were not controlled, they were as
simple and mindless as mites, no one in charge; they were on automatic. They didn’t fight, they didn’t flee, they just gobbled up flesh
and shit out carbon while the MightyMites did their sub-visible work,
building more, ever more hydras.
Not Keats’s concern. Just kill them.
A millimeter and a world away K2 and six nanobots squeezed
through fat cells like partly deflated beach balls made of wax, all white
with clinging platelets and strands of unknown fibers. The hydras had
stopped tunneling and now were digging and consuming, creating a
sort of cavern in the skin as they entered a new replication cycle.
They were everywhere in the cavern, top, bottom, sides, all busy
and oblivious and Keats tore into them, slaughtering, dismembering.
It was like work in a meatpacker’s plant, assembly-line chopping and
hacking, killing as fast and efficiently as he could.
The bodies of massacred hydras clogged the cavern until his
nanobots were forced to dig through the debris of their bodies to
find more to kill. Lymphocytes were oozing into the chamber, adding
their slow-moving predation to the slaughter.
And then, a very different creature. Also blue, also a hydra, but
gleaming with sharp, distinct lines, with bristling weapons. But even
this, a first-generation hydra, a factory-made hydra not a cheap replicant, was uncontrolled. Mindless. programmed.
K1 yanked out two legs and left it crippled and helpless. The lymphocytes would finish the job.
Heedless, a mad rush now, just rush, all fourteen visuals at once,
and oh, God, it was good.
It was blankness. Emptiness and fulfillment. A wild beast, fourteen wild beats, chasing and killing and chasing and killing.