BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  To find an office location they had gone back through occupancy permits and subtracted tenants who had been in place for more than a year. They searched the “for lease” ads for offices within the target area. They focused on those that had the greatest degree of privacy, with no shared facilities.

  The list was not that long. They had fairly quickly come up with nineteen possible locations. They expected to have the exact location within three days. And with the CCTV facial-recognition software focusing on Hyatts, they expected to have the hotel pinned within a day or two.

  Which was amazing work and really almost as amazing as the fact that AmericaStrong—a division of Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation—and the ETA had already narrowed the BZRK cell’s location down to one address.

  Just one.

  Around the corner from the house on Fifth Street SE, what looked exactly like a Washington, DC, police SWAT team had assembled. This excited only mild interest from passersby—it was hardly the first time they’d seen a SWAT team. Even the passing patrol cops shrugged it off.

  “What’s that?” This from the kid—everyone called him the kid. Not The Kid, like it was some kind of cool nickname, just the kid. So he had taken it as his nom de guerre, his alias. Except he called himself Billy the Kid, because why not? Maybe Billy the Kid wasn’t clinically crazy, but he was crazy. Not insane: but crazy.

  Billy’s real name was André. His mother had been Guatemalan. His father had been African American. The result of this interesting DNA mash-up was a boy of only medium height, with dark skin, a flat nose and lush, long, almost girlish—in fact, no almost about it—straight black hair. The combination worked perfectly to make him feel excluded from both the African American and the Hispanic communities of Washington, DC.

  André had interested, observant eyes. Nothing scary, there, just a birdlike quickness. His two front teeth stuck out a bit, which gave him a sweet childlike look and were the only physical feature he shared in common with the real Billy the Kid.

  No one called him Billy the Kid. He had not found a way to mention that he shared buck teeth with the famous gunman.

  Andronikos didn’t call him Billy, either. Andronikos hated people looking over his shoulder as he cooked. Which is the last data point about Andronikos, other than the fact that as the front door was beaten in with a battering ram, and the back door was kicked in, and black-suited “SWAT cops” came rushing into the room yelling, “Police, down, down, down!” Andronikos reached for a butcher’s cleaver and was shot in the chest, head, neck, again in the chest, and again in the head.

  The hole in his neck sprayed like a fire hose.

  Billy the Kid didn’t so much drop to the floor as find himself knocked to the ground. Andronikos’s hand dragged the couscous pot down with him, although he was dead before he hit the floor.

  The couscous—little pearls of wheat, along with boiling hot water—sloshed onto Billy as he fell and Billy screamed because the heat was instantaneous and the “cop” waited until Billy was on the floor trying desperately to crab walk backward away from the couscous and the blood and now the blood-red couscous and BAM! BAM!

  The cop was shooting again.

  At him? At him? At a thirteen-year-old kid?

  A bullet grazed his side.

  From the other room, continuous gunfire. Like a jackhammer. A wall of noise. Screams. Shouting and BAMBAMBAMBAM!

  The cop stepped in the red couscous and slipped. He fell to one knee.

  Billy grabbed the pot. It was a heavy iron pot, but the weight was nothing to him because adrenaline and fear and the crying need for survival make the heaviest pot weightless.

  He swung that pot and hit the cop’s helmet.

  The cop slipped a little more.

  The hand that held the gun, that hand, he had landed on that elbow and that made it hard to shoot and his body armor made him awkward and he slipped again; suddenly it was all Call of Duty to Billy. He slammed the pot down with all his strength on the gun hand.

  The gun fell from the cop’s nerveless grip.

  BAMBAMBAMBAM!

  They were still shooting in the other room. And screaming. Someone actually yelled, “What the fuck?” Except that the f-bomb ended abruptly in gunfire.

  Not real cops, Billy realized through the blood-mad rage that was falling over him, and he grabbed the gun and had to use both hands to get a grip on it and pointed it at the visor of the stunned man and the “cop” knew he was done for and he raised his visor so that Billy saw his face and it was a middle-aged man, a little pudgy, with a silly mustache and he was starting to say something when Billy pulled the trigger and a big hole peppered with powder burns appeared in the upper lip of the cop, taking out one side of his mustache.

  Billy was up and running for the back door but bullets were flying like crazy there, so he pivoted, saw the massacre in the main room, and somehow lost all conscious thought.

  The original, historical Billy the Kid was a good shot. His namesake was better. Billy could aim and he could shoot. His skills had been honed in hundreds of hours of first-person shooter games: Call of Duty, XCom, Rage, Battlefield. So he knew to be quick but not rushed. He knew that accurate was better than fast. He knew not to aim for the bodies covered in Kevlar, but to aim for the face. The visors would provide only limited protection.

  He did not waste ammunition.

  BAM! and the gun kicked in his hand and a cop fell and BAM! and another visor shattered and the cop dropped to his knees and his gloved hand pawed the air and Billy ignored him because he was nothing but a computer graphic and a kill and he was done and there should be a ka-ching! a point on the screen.

  There was no screen. Part of him understood that because no game had yet managed to create the smell of blood, lots and lots of blood, which had a sort of salty, briny smell and an unctuousness about it, not to mention the smell of bowels loosening and bladders emptying and, of course, gunpowder smoke.

  The cops, well, they couldn’t call for backup because of course they were not cops at all but AFGC thugs masquerading as ETA agents, and there weren’t all that many of those to call on. Not yet.

  Ten of them had burst through the doors.

  Five were still alive. But one of those had been wounded by “friendly fire,” and was pumping his life out through a hole in his thigh.

  BZRK Washington was dead. All dead. It was down to Billy and four fake cops who all aimed their weapons at him.

  He dived around the corner.

  Two of the cops chased him. It was a mistake on their part because damn, this is part of every first-person shooter game ever, as they rushed he popped out and BAM! and a split second later, BAM! and that was two plexi visors with neat little holes and blood gushing out beneath.

  With that Billy turned finally and ran. Out the back door.

  He climbed, scrabbled, rolled over the wooden fence into the backyard of whoever the hell lived back there. The back door was locked but not so locked that a nine-millimeter round through the door handle and a hard kick wouldn’t open it.

  Through a strange, unoccupied home with a startled kitty on the back of the couch. Out onto Sixth street.

  He stood there, panting. They weren’t pursuing him. No one was after him. He was covered in blood. There were no sirens. People figured it was the cops, so what are you going to do, call the cops and tell them cops are shooting up a house?

  He couldn’t go anywhere covered in blood. So he jogged on nervous energy to Independence Avenue, which, if you follow it far enough, will take you all the way down to the Capitol and beyond to the Mall and the Washington Monument and all of that. Except Billy didn’t go that way. He turned left and trotted back to Fifth Street SE and saw the very official-looking SWAT van and trotted on to the house, and came in through the shattered front door and saw one of the fake cops weeping and shot him in the spine where he had no body armor and another turned and opened fire, very undisciplined, and shot the wall and the clock and Billy put one right in his t
hroat.

  One more came rushing down the stairs yelling, “Aaaarrrgh!” to keep his courage up and Billy couldn’t see his visor so he shot him in the knee and finished him off when the cop tumbled down the landing.

  That last one was a shock. He had thought he only had two left. What was the count? Was there anyone else?

  Billy climbed the stairs. The grazing bullet wound in his side was burning like fire.

  He found the last AmericaStrong fake cop behind one of the beds in a bedroom. The man had removed his helmet. He had lost his gun in the madness. Defenseless.

  The man was young. He had very, very pale skin. He had very, very large brown eyes. He stared at Billy the Kid. He was shaking.

  “Don’t,” the man said.

  “You started it,” Billy said.

  “I’m sorry about …about . . .” the man said, and waved in the direction of downstairs.

  Billy thought he seemed okay. “You smell,” Billy said.

  “I pooped.” The man laughed. It was a short, sharp sound.

  Billy’s sights were leveled at the man’s face.

  “Who did this?” Billy asked.

  The man shrugged, but he couldn’t hold it together well enough to lie. “I’m just, look, I used to work for AmericaStrong, now I’m ETA.”

  “ETA? Estimated Time of Arrival?”

  “Emerging Technologies Agency,” the man said weakly, as though he didn’t expect to be believed. Or that he would be alive another thirty seconds. “My name is Joey. Joey Lamb. I …I didn’t …I don’t … Don’t shoot me, kid.”

  “Billy. Billy the Kid.”

  “Okay.”

  “Look, it’s game over, right? I won. So just, I don’t know, run away.”

  Joey Lamb stood shakily. He had pooped all right.

  “Okay, now, just leave,” Billy said. “And don’t call anyone. And don’t come back.”

  Joey ran. Billy heard him clatter through the house. He heard the front door slam back on its hinges.

  Billy went downstairs. He went through the pockets of his friends, harvesting credit cards and driver’s licenses. He piled the laptops and the cell phones together and placed them all in a plastic trash bag.

  Then he found some clean clothing, laid it out in the blessedly blood-free bathroom, and took a shower. It took a long time for the water to run clean.

  Burnofsky stood up, heard his bones creak and his knees snap. Old age was coming on fast. But it wouldn’t be old age that killed him. He walked from his office out into the main lab floor. It occupied three entire floors of the Armstrong Building. It was a huge space, very white with pink accents, designed to be functional but also pleasant and innocuous. Like everything the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation did in secret, it was designed to look as if it could not possibly conceal anything dark or sinister.

  The lights were bright but soft. The walls bore huge plasma screens showing pastoral scenes, like slow-changing murals, a mountain stream would slowly give way to a strand of unpopulated beach, which in turn might, after an hour or so, switch to a field of flowers waving in the breeze.

  The murals followed the time of day. As the sun would set outside, so the sun would set over mountain and beach and field. When full night fell the screens would light up with time-lapse pictures of crazily zooming car lights crossing the Golden Gate bridge, or shots of the aurora borealis, or moonlight on a river.

  It was really quite a lovely place to work while designing the end of the human race as it had heretofore been.

  Structural integrity required the floors to have some strength, so gazing up Burnofsky looked through a loose-woven web of white tiled catwalks with pink railings and the occasional green contrast. This allowed some of the larger pieces of equipment to rise through the floors, but also created smaller, more intimate spaces.

  “Dr Burnofsky.” It was Mamadou Attah. Dr Mamadou Attah, formerly of the Ivory Coast, later of Oxford and MIT, briefly a resident of Grand Rapids Michigan’s Applegate Psychiatric Hospital, and now one of Burnofsky’s hardest-working—and giddily happy—subordinates.

  “Yes, Dr Attah?”

  “We did it, we sure got that extruder calibrated!”

  “Good,” he said.

  She flashed him a huge grin. She was short and broad and, despite being brilliant, had a distinct tendency to go around giggling under her breath. She had been wired and indoctrinated, of course, all as a means of dealing with what had been crippling depression.

  No more depression in her future. No more mental hospitals. Although she sometimes irritated nonwired staff to the point of rage, she was an excellent scientist and utterly devoted.

  She stood waiting like an expectant dog, evidently not entirely satisfied by his wan, “Oh, good.” So he added a, “Fantastic work, Doctor. You’re the best.”

  She grinned, made a pistol finger, and said, “No, sir, Dr B., you’re the best!”

  He walked across the spotless white tile floor past white-coated scientists and pink-coated staff, a shambling, reedy, runny-eyed, corduroy-clad wreck of a human being. The door to his private lab was protected by a keypad and fingerprint ID. He punched in the number sequence and pressed his thumb against the touchscreen. Inside was a very different space. Here the equipment was whatever putty or gray color it had been when first acquired. There were no plasma screens showing bucolic loveliness. The ceiling seemed particularly low. A Costco-size box of Little Debbie Devil Cremes spilled across his desk.

  He pulled the bottle of bourbon from his desk, poured a tumbler full, and gulped it.

  Back in the fabulous main lab the work of AFGC’s nanotech division went on feverishly. The piece of equipment that Dr Attah had been so proud of fixing was part of the SRN production line.

  Self-replicating nanobot. SRN. But he along with everyone else involved in the project had taken to calling them “hydras,” after the mythological beast that just kept sprouting new heads any time you chopped one off: in effect, a self-replicating monster.

  The first large-scale field test of the hydras was scheduled to occur in just a few weeks.

  Twelve hundred hydras would be released in a high-crime neighborhood in the Bronx. The test would be whether the hydras would propagate, locate hosts, and avoid detection. If they performed as expected, the neighborhood would experience a sudden drop in crime rate as thousands of residents were crudely rewired for diminished aggression.

  A smaller test, just two hundred hydras bearing special radioactive tracking signatures, were to be released on the subway. They would be able to follow the spread. And these nanobots had a particular function: to do something the first generation of nanobots couldn’t even begin to pull off: the implantation of an image. Actually creating a memory.

  And yet, despite those specialized abilities, the hydras were poor relations to regular nanobots. They were crude, rough, and slow. The self-replicating process meant using whatever materials could be found at hand: one form or another of living tissue.

  The regular nanobots were made of sophisticated alloys, ceramics and textiles. They were the Ferraris of the nanotech world. These new tiny monsters were scarecrows by contrast.

  Each hydra was serviced by dozens of much smaller micromachines, nicknamed MiniMites. These were very simple, very, very small devices whose sole purpose was to strip-mine living things for their useful minerals. They were tiny refineries, eating flesh and defecating iron, zinc, copper, calcium, magnesium, chromium, and the rest.

  In the event that anything went wrong with the tests, the mayor of New York City, the governor of New York, and, if it came to that, the president of the United States should be under sufficient control to head off an effective investigation, let alone countermeasures.

  Of course the whole thing had to be carefully managed. A fair amount of a human body could be consumed and turned into raw material without harming the host—most people had more than enough fat, extra bone, dead skin, resident bacteria, the contents of stomachs and intestines, and
whatever brain cells were being liquefied. But uncontrolled, well, the process could be harmful. Even fatal.

  To say nothing of what would happen if the MiniMites began to adapt and to chew away at buildings and bridges and so on.

  But there were fail-safes and cutoffs and so on for all of that.

  Foolproof stuff. And the hydras were being designed to reproduce only so many generations before dying off, and to consume only so much living tissue. The goal, after all, was to rewire the human race, not to obliterate it.

  That was the plan.

  That was not, however, Burnofsky’s plan.

  Burnofsky carried his drink to his workstation. There he had a monitor attached to a scanning electron microscope. He pressed a remote control in his pocket and the surveillance camera on the wall switched seamlessly to file video. He doubted the Twins would understand what he was doing, but there was no point taking chances: they would see only what he wanted them to see.

  On the monitor Burnofsky saw nanobots. They were rather different from the ones being so carefully created in the main lab. Burnofsky smiled to see them. Busy little creatures. Hydras busy doing what SRNs did: self-replicating.

  But there were a number of differences between these and the hydras beyond his lab door. Some of those differences were visible, most not.

  Funny, Burnofsky thought, gazing with pride at his creations, that people talk about the gray goo scenario, and in truth the hydras in the main lab were basically gray.

  But these were not.

  These nanobots were blue. The exact blue of his daughter’s eyes.

  For Immediate Release

  Public Affairs Office/University of Texas, Austin

  The entire University of Texas family is saddened by the loss of Professor Edwin H. Grossman. Dr Grossman apparently leapt to his death from the top of the University of Texas tower. In recent months Dr Grossman had been under great strain. Students reported that his usual lectures on nanotechnology had taken on a paranoid character, with Dr Grossman falsely claiming that nanotechnology was already being deployed in a bid by unnamed forces to effectively reprogram the human race.