BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  AFGC still made fancy gifts at factories in China, Malaysia, and Turkey. They still owned and operated the ubiquitous gift stores seen in every American airport and in European and Japanese train stations. But gifts had long since ceased to be their main focus.

  Weapons technology, surveillance, and communications technology, and above all, nanotechnology, now occupied the denizens of the Tulip and most of the sixty-two floors below. The gift stores were run out of an office park in Naperville, Illinois. In the Tulip they had bigger fish to fry.

  Burnofsky had called ahead to Jindal so he could get the Twins up and alert. Jindal met him outside the private elevator, down on sixty-two.

  “What is it?” Jindal asked, suppressing a yawn but intensely concerned despite his sleepiness.

  “Why don’t I just tell the story once?” Burnofsky said and pushed past Jindal to the elevator. It was a short ride.

  “What in hell?” Benjamin asked the moment Burnofsky appeared.

  The Armstrong Twins wore a robe, dark red silk, specially tailored for them, of course: Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s did not carry clothing in their size or shape.

  Their legs, all three of them, were bare. Their feet—only the two useful ones—were in shearling-lined slippers, the third, deformed and three-quarter-size, was bare.

  “Difficult news,” Burnofsky said.

  “Well, spit it out, it’s the middle of the night!” Charles snapped.

  Burnofsky tapped his pad for a few seconds, and the touch screen embedded in the twins’ massive desk lit up.

  It was the video from Bug Man’s feed. Like all nanobot video, it failed to achieve the high standards of Hollywood; it was grainy, jerky gray scale one moment and awash in unnatural computer-enhanced colors the next. This video was worse still because it was the result of tapping directly into the president’s optic nerve, pulling up the raw feed, so to speak, of rods and cones, uninterpreted by the visual cortex.

  There was no sound, just a series of jerky images—a window, a wall, Monte Morales, a rumpled bed, the floor, Monte Morales again, a shower knob, a shoulder, an eye, a stream of water and then . . . “Jesus!” It was Jindal. “Did she …Is that . . .”

  It was fascinating to watch the reactions of the Twins. Charles’s eye stared hard—at the screen, at Burnofsky, at the screen. His mouth was a straight line, set, twitching in growing fury.

  Benjamin seemed almost distracted. He looked left and right. His mouth—well, it was hard, really, to judge his face fairly; it had been bashed and battered by the bottom of a glass bottle. There was a tooth missing altogether and another one chipped. Benjamin’s eye was a clenched purple fist with the pupil barely showing. He looked like someone who had been on the losing end of a bar fight.

  Within the raw liver that was Benjamin’s eye socket, the cruel eye seemed far less interested than it should.

  The third eye, the one between the usual two, seemed to agree with Charles that this was important. It focused its soulless stare on the video.

  The file ended.

  “It will be covered up,” Charles said. He tugged at the collar of his bathrobe and, as well as he could, tugged the belt tighter. “Bug Man must be replaced at once. And punished. Punished most severely. It’s that woman he has with him. She distracts him. Take her from him, get rid of her. Kill her in front of him! Bug Man will refocus. A beating for him, yes, a severe lesson, yes, that’s it, a beating! And kill his woman.”

  “I disagree,” Burnofsky said as blandly as he could.

  Oh, Bug Man would owe him. He wished he had video of Charles planning Bug Man’s humiliation and Jessica’s murder. Anthony Elder, that snotty little black British prodigy who called himself Bug Man, would kiss Burnofsky’s ass for this.

  Burnofsky would own Bug Man.

  “I don’t care about Bug Man,” Benjamin snarled. “It wasn’t Bug Man. It was her. Her!”

  Burnofsky at first assumed he was talking about Bug Man’s girl, Jessica. But no …of course not.

  “I want her hurt.” Benjamin touched his damaged mouth. Then he clenched his fist. “Damaged in some permanent way, something she can never overcome, something that will make her remaining life a horror. Not death, no, we still need her to get at her father’s secrets, but pain, such pain and despair, yes.”

  Not poor, dumb, absurdly beautiful Jessica. Oh, no. Benjamin was thinking of Sadie McLure.

  Burnofsky suppressed a sneer. Benjamin was losing his mind. The experience with Sadie McLure had unhinged him. He’d always been the more volatile of the twins, but now? He was still “wired”— that was part of the problem. Burnofsky had volunteered to go in and pull those pins and wires, remove them before they became a settled feature of Benjamin’s brain, undo, insofar as anyone could, the damage done by Sadie McLure’s biots. But Benjamin couldn’t tolerate the idea of someone else inside his brain.

  Irony, that.

  And Charles? Well, just what the hell did you do if you were a conjoined twin and the other half of you went mad?

  “She was inside my brain, sticking pins in my brain, making me an animal!” Benjamin bellowed.

  “Brother . . .” But Charles’s voice wheezed out. Benjamin had taken control of their lungs.

  “Something with acid,” Benjamin said, his voice suddenly silky. “Acid. Or something taken off. Cut something off her. Cut off her nose or her hands.” He chopped at the air with his hand. It was more than just a gesture of emphasis, he was using his hand as an imaginary meat cleaver.

  Charles waited for an opening to speak. They each had a mouth of their own and a throat, but the lungs were shared property, and it could be difficult for one to make himself heard if the other was bellowing.

  “Brother,” Charles began. “Let’s focus on this crisis. The next thing we need to consider is—”

  “Next? Next? Next she suffers and I see it happen. I revel in it. I see it happen and I laugh at her. I stand over her and look down at her as she cries and begs and as the hope dies in her eyes.That’s next.”

  He was shaking his fist now, a comic-book villain. But crying from his eye at the same time, a furious, frustrated, hurt child.

  The “her” in question was a sixteen-year-old girl, Sadie McLure, although now it seemed she used the nom de guerre Plath. So melodramatic, the BZRKers—such romantics.

  Sixteen. The same age as Burnofsky’s own daughter, Carla.

  Former daughter? No, death didn’t make you former, it just made you dead.

  Charles and Benjamin had been much more calm when they’d ordered Carla’s death. They had been regretful. Charles had actually touched Burnofsky, put a ham-size hand on Burnofsky’s back as he ordered the death of his only child.

  Solicitous.

  Considerate.

  She has betrayed us, Karl. She’s sold us out. You know how she would end up if we left her alone to leave us and join BZRK. Madness. Would you want that for your little girl?

  Burnofsky drew a shaky breath. They might at least offer him a drink; of course, the Twins were a bit distracted. Benjamin was still ranting, and Charles was growing increasingly impatient with it.

  “I was raped by her!” Benjamin bellowed. “Violated!”

  Plath had managed to infiltrate Benjamin’s brain with her biots. Burnofsky knew she was new at the business of nano warfare, but she had improvised, the clever, clever girl. Given the time frame she could have had only minimal training in the sophisticated business of subtly rewiring a human brain. And she’d been in a hurry and under pressure, so she had simply stabbed pins and run wire almost randomly.

  She had made scrambled eggs of Benjamin’s brain.

  That was some of her father’s intelligence in evidence. She was smarter than the brother who had died. He wondered if they had killed the wrong McLure child. Stone was a stolid, dutiful type, his sister on the other hand . . .

  The result of Sadie’s wiring had been severe mental disruption. Benjamin had screeched and babbled and generally made a fool of
himself, straining the physical barrier that connected his own head to Charles’s—very painful—and caused the unfortunate incident of the glass bottle, the results of which were still so obvious on Benjamin’s face.

  The membrane, the flesh, whatever the word was for the living intersection between Charles and Benjamin, had been strained and torn. The central eye, that eerie, third eyeball that sometimes joined with Charles and other times with Benjamin, and at still other times seemed to decide its own focus, was red-rimmed, the lower lid crusted with blood that still seeped from a deep bruise.

  At the end Plath had let Benjamin live when she might well have killed him. Burnofsky wondered whether at this moment Charles thought that was a good thing or not. How many times must one or the other of the Twins have pondered the question of what happened if one of them died?

  Their heads were melded. Some areas of their brains were directly connected. They shared a neck, albeit a neck with two sets of vocal cords. They had two hearts—one apiece—and had a sort of two-lobed stomach that fed out through a single alimentary tract.

  Each had an arm. Each had a leg. And there was the third leg as well, a leg that dragged like so much dead weight. As a consequence they moved with extreme difficulty and usually chose to get around in a motorized cart or wheeled office chair customized to fit their double width.

  Charles tried again. “We have important matters to discuss, Benjamin. We are on the cusp of completing Phase Three of our plan, brother, don’t you grasp that? Don’t you see how far we have come? But we must deal with this crisis. Bug Man’s incompetence may upset everything!”

  “It wasn’t you,” Benjamin snapped. “It wasn’t you. It was me. It was me she humiliated.”

  “Look, we’ll deal with the girl when we get an opportunity,” Charles soothed. “Of course you feel violated. Of course you’re angry. But—”

  It was part of the strangeness of dealing with the Twins that when they spoke to each other they could not look at each other. They had never made direct eye contact in their lives.

  “You think I’m being irrational,” Benjamin said, sounding rational for the first time in several minutes. “But you don’t understand. This cannot be tolerated. If we can be humiliated this way, then we will lose credibility with our own people. Do you think our twitchers aren’t talking about it?” He stabbed a finger in Burnofsky’s direction. “Do you think Karl isn’t smirking?”

  In fact, Karl Burnofsky was smirking, but he hid it well. His sagging, whiskered face and rheumy blue eyes did not appear to reflect any pleasure.

  It occurred to him that this was his opportunity to speak. He said, “Perhaps a vacation. Some time off. We have come a long way. You’re both tired. Deservedly so, the weariness of a long battle.”

  Charles shot a sharp, suspicious look at Burnofsky. “Are you out of your mind? This thing with Bug Man and the president, for God’s sake, target number one, the purpose for which we lost so many good people. The woman has to give Rios the go-ahead.”

  “She did,” Burnofsky said. “The initial go-ahead, anyway. I can show you the video. She finished cleaning up the blood and went to her pad, pulled up the ETA mission, and approved it. Rios has long since started planning counterattacks on BZRK. The president has scheduled a meeting with him to discuss raiding McLure, blocking their accounts, arresting individuals on suspicion of terrorism. I am confident she will give him free rein; Bug Man has succeeded in that. And gentlemen, wasn’t that our goal?” Burnofsky puffed out his cheeks in a sort of world-weary gesture. “Bug Man screwed up, but—and it’s a very big but—he did accomplish the goal. We own the president, and we control ETA, the agency that will deal with any nanotechnology information.”

  “Damn, Karl, you might have told us,” Charles chided, but he was too happy to be genuinely angry.

  “This thing with Monte Morales, it’s a blip,” Burnofsky said. “It’s a bump in the road. And you’re …tired.” He tried to send a meaningful look to Charles without it being intercepted by Benjamin, but of course that was a physical impossibility.

  What he wanted to say was, Look, your twin is losing it. If he goes, you go. Get him out of here. Get him some rest.

  “I can handle Bug Man,” Burnofsky said. “Jindal will be here running the daily operation. I can go to Washington and supervise the wiring of the president personally. If I do have to take it over, I can do it without relying on signal repeaters. Meanwhile, Rios is moving immediately against BZRK in DC and New York. BZRK will be effectively taken out, in this country at least. We’ve been probed by Anonymous, but we’re confident they’ve been shut out. We have substantial control of the FBI, we have some assets in the Secret Service. Our overseas targets are being well managed. So…honestly? Now’s a good time for a break.”

  Charles looked hard at Burnofsky, reading his thoughts. Charles knew his brother’s stability was tenuous at best.

  “You’ll go to Washington yourself?” Charles asked, seeming oddly deflated. “You’ll take charge?”

  “I will go. I will oversee the wiring. I’ll touch base with Rios. And I’ll deal with Bug Man.”

  Benjamin frowned. Then his eye brightened, and the third eye seemed to join in sympathy. “The Doll Ship.”

  “It’s in the Pacific. Somewhere near Japan, heading toward Hong Kong to pick up a very nice haul of Korean refugees, and one moderately good twitcher,” Jindal reported. He had deemed it a safe moment to speak up. Jindal was a true believer, a Nexus Humanus cultist, wired and, in the favorite Nexus Humanus phrase, “Sustainably happy.”

  A sucker, in Burnofsky’s view. A fool. A middle manager with delusions of importance.

  The mention of the Doll Ship soothed some of the anxiety from Benjamin’s face. Charles, too, softened a bit.

  “The Doll Ship,” Benjamin said, and his bruised mouth smiled.

  Sick bastards, both of you, Burnofsky thought. Sick, sad, screwedup freaks. It would be good to get them out of the way for a few days.

  He had work to do.

  THREE

  “Rrrraaaaarrrrrgh!”

  Vincent bellowed like a beast.

  Like a lion at feeding time.

  Plath put her hands over her ears.

  “Rrrraaaaarrrrrgh!”

  The sound was muffled, but the doors and walls of the safe house

  were flimsy and sound carried, especially at night. Plath was due to start receiving her inheritance: at the very least, she decided, she could pay for a better safe house.

  She took her shower. It was an awful little bathroom; no one ever cleaned up, and the mildew was eating the tile grout.

  She could imagine it at the nano level. That was the start of the madness, the thing that softened you up and prepared you to lose it entirely. Like Vincent. Like Ophelia, probably, poor girl, wherever she was. Like Keats’s brother, Kerouac. It began with that terrible parallel view. Down there. Down where human eyes were only supposed to squint through a microscope’s lens, not walk among the alien flora and fauna.

  Mildew. The bacteria on her own hands. The colored footballs of pollen. The mites. The soap and pounding hot water slicking it away, but not all, never all. The beasties were with us always.

  I don’t want to end up like Vincent.

  Keats’s biots were inside her head. So was one of her own. He was repairing her aneurysm, and she had one biot on board, as the jaunty semi-nautical phrase went, and another in a petri dish soaking up nutrients

  She could have gone off to find Keats’s biots, down there, down in the meat. Her biot—P2 as it happened—was resting comfortably on the back side of her left eyeball. Occasionally she would move her biot as a dutiful lymphocyte came oozing along to clean up whatever this alien monstrosity was.

  Had she wanted to, she could have had her own biot help Keats. But a biot face …Well, it was bad enough to know precisely, exactly, what vermin crawled the surface of Keats’s skin. She didn’t need to see the bizarro-world distortion that was his biot’s face.
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  She liked his face quite a lot. The too-blue eyes had at first seemed almost feminine, but a gentle face did not signal weakness, at least not in Keats.

  As for his mouth, well, she had always liked that, the quirky little dip in the middle made him look wryly amused. How would he look when he was where Vincent was now?

  Not madness. Not that. Death is better.

  A lousy, filthy, depressing, badly lit bathroom. But a good water heater at least.

  She closed her eyes and aimed them up into the spray. Take that, my demodex. Hah, I bet a few of you lost your grips and are now sliding down my cheeks. Hah! How will you like it if you go swirling down the drain?

  Soap, soap, soap, everywhere. Shampoo and soap and Purell. No one showers like a twitcher, she thought, and realized that was an aphorism that very few people would understand.

  A voice made her jump.

  “Showering off the shame?”

  Wilkes. She was using the toilet.

  Definitely: when she got her inheritance, it would be time to generously agree to pay for a higher-class rental somewhere. Anywhere. Just because they were crazy didn’t mean they had to live like animals.

  “Oh, that’s a loooong silence,” Wilkes said. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “Not your business, Wilkes,” Plath snapped.

  Wilkes had an odd laugh. Heh-heh-heh. “That’s confirmation. I can’t believe after all the looks and the Bella Swan lip biting—and poor Keats awkwardly adjusting his jeans any time he sees you bend over—that nothing happened. Jeez, Plath, what are you holding out for?”

  Suddenly, the shower curtain was pulled back and there stood Wilkes in a faded High School Musical T-shirt. Her spiky hair was less spiky, her strange tattoos almost green in the light of the cheap fluorescent bulb.

  “You have a nice body,” Wilkes said. “He’s going to like that. You know, if you ever actually …Turn around, let’s see the butt.”

  “Wilkes, I say this with affection: drop dead.” Plath pulled the shower curtain closed again and heard Wilkes’s laugh. Heh-heh-heh.