BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  At the nano level something the size of the world’s largest sequoia intersected the sweat drop, bursting its illusion of solidity. His fingerprint was turned toward her, a desiccated farmland of weirdly plowed furrows. It stabbed into the yielding flesh of her cheek, which bent the very fabric of the “ground” beneath her feet.

  She saw his face. Both versions. One with concerned blue eyes, a vertical worry line between his eyebrows, a mouth pursed in concentration.

  And the other version, a sky-filling enormity, a falling moon with distant smears of features, a towering volcano with twin calderas, two lakes so vast you could sail them, an elongated red spot to rival the one on Jupiter: his mouth.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem,” said the red spot. The wind from his mouth bent the reeds and ruffled the pollen grains.

  Plath noticed Billy standing to one side, staring. “You know about this?” she asked him.

  “The game? Biots and all? Sure I know.”

  “The children’s war,” Burnofsky said. “The game. Always the game.”

  In both the nano and the macro Plath saw Keats’s eyes widen. The huge sky-wide face turned away. “Shut it, old man. You work for the Armstrongs? Then this is your fault. Your doing. So if you want to smirk, you know what, maybe I can get past my usual reluctance to smack a helpless old man.”

  Burnofsky’s pale eyes rolled, but he fell silent.

  Plath continued all the while racing down the length of her cheek. “Put a finger near the scrape you said you saw.”

  Keats did. His finger touched her throat. It was further to the right than she’d expected, she must have come too close to her own lips. Now she corrected her course, barreling toward the finger pillar.

  She was away from the downy hairs now, upside down beneath her jaw in deep shadow cast by the harsh bare bulbs. Her neck was at right angles, but the curve was gentle and almost unnoticeable to her weightless biots. The tiny talons in her twelve legs easily gripped the dusty . . .

  And there it was.

  It lay on the surface of her skin. It was a gooey ball, almost like a wad of gum, or spit, a roughly spherical wad that adhered to her skin.

  She slowed to approach it cautiously. One biot to the right, one to the left, two visuals added to her own true eyes, each a picture formed in her visual cortex. The pictures didn’t so much overlap as coexist, separate but simultaneous, a large-screen macro and two picture-inpicture smaller visual fields.

  “I see it,” she said. “You can pull your finger away.”

  “What does it look like?” Keats asked.

  “Wow,” she said. “It’s …Okay, it looks about twenty feet in diameter m-sub.”

  “About as big as a grain of table salt,” Burnofsky said.

  “It’s…It’s nanobots. Like, a lot. Maybe ten or so. They’re all intertwined and covered in goo.”

  “Yeah. Goo,” Burnofsky said, and laughed.

  “Back away,” Keats said urgently.

  Plath shook her head. The movement twisted the ground beneath her. “They aren’t moving. Burnofsky doesn’t have a controller. They’re just stuck there.”

  It took them a few seconds to realize what had happened, and then Keats grinned at Plath. “You mean we just captured a dozen nanobots? I’ve got to believe that will be useful.”

  Nijinsky drove from New York down to DC. Down the Jersey Turnpike. Night traffic, cars zooming past the rented van, his eyes bleary, attention fading, eyes peeled for a Starbucks because he needed a serious jolt of caffeine.

  A triple cappuccino. Yeah. That would get him most of the way. He was fantasizing about it. Imagining the foam, the bitterness underneath it . . .

  There was a loud bang. Not the first, but still startling. The madman shackled in the backseat kicked at the seat and growled.

  Strange, Nijinsky thought mordantly. He would have pegged Vincent as a quiet sort of crazy. Not a kicker. Not a growler.

  Anya Violet was beside Vincent, occasionally laying a soothing hand on his arm, saying little.

  Wilkes rode shotgun. She seemed nervous.

  “I don’t like going through Maryland,” she muttered.

  “It’s not a very big state,” Nijinsky said.

  “Big enough,” Wilkes said. “This is where I come from. Where I had my …you know.”

  “Ah,” Nijinsky said. “I forgot it was in Maryland.”

  “What was in Maryland?” Anya asked.

  Nijinsky shot a look at her in the rearview mirror. “Not your concern, Doctor.”

  “Arson and attempted murder,” Wilkes said with relish. “Arson. True. Attempted murder? Not true. I had a sort of disagreement with the football team at my school.”

  “Disagreement?” Anya asked. She was bored, ready for a story.

  “They thought they could rape me and I couldn’t do anything because I was just the freaky chick and who would believe me? They were right that no one would believe me. But they overlooked the fact that I could set the bleachers in their gym on fire. And also their locker room.” She smiled a dangerous smile. “Yeah, that was our disagreement.”

  Anya asked from the dark backseat, “Did you get them?” There was a hard edge to her voice.

  “I wasn’t out to kill anyone. Like I said: the attempted murder charge on me is crap. Arson, sure. Molotov cocktails. You know … Hey, you would, right? Weren’t they a Russian invention? Then you probably know: you get wine bottles and fill them with gasoline and stuff a rag in.”

  No one said anything. So Wilkes added, “The trick is you have to break the bottle after you light the rag. That was the hard part, actually. It’s easy to get them burning, but it’s not like in the movies where stuff just blows up. They’ll just burn like a candle unless you throw them and smash them.”

  “Yeah,” Nijinsky said, because he couldn’t think of what else to say. He was fully awake now. That was good.

  “I kind of had to side-arm them up against the metal bleacher support poles. Easier in the locker room because they had barbells. Those broke the hell out of the bottles.”

  “Good for you” Anya said, garbling the r sound with her Russian accent. “Take back what is yours: pride.”

  Nijinsky glanced up in the rearview mirror and saw her smiling. Was he the only sane one in the van?

  “Anyway, I’m not popular in Glen Burnie, Maryland,” Wilkes said.

  Which was the point when Nijinsky’s phone lit up with the text from Keats and Plath. “Read this to me,” he told Wilkes, and handed her the phone. Then added, “Please.”

  “Have taken AFGC guy possible name Burnofsky. Instructions?”

  Wilkes read him the text and burst out again with her weird, hehheh-heh laugh. “Go Keats. Capturing some bad guys. I’d do Keats in a heartbeat. What about you, Jin? You hot for our English friend?”

  Nijinsky veered toward an exit that suddenly presented itself. They parked at the far, dark end of a Hardee’s parking lot. Nijinsky sent a text to Lear.

  “Can’t make that decision yourself, Jin?” Wilkes asked. He sent a text back to Keats. Hold him. Awaiting instructions.

  He decided against answering Wilkes’s barbed remark because he was asking himself the same thing. Would Vincent have handled that himself? Was this an example of Nijinsky being the wrong person?

  He glanced at the navigation system as Vincent once more yanked on his chains and said something like, “Hurrrr!” Forty minutes to go, and that was if there was no traffic.

  He was in a van with a crazy girl, a raving lunatic, and a woman who probably wanted to kill him. In the parking lot of a Hardees. In the middle of God knew where in the dark. Waiting for instructions from a man or woman or for all he knew computer program to tell him to live or die, kill or be killed.

  People were pulling into the drive-thru, getting burgers and fries and shakes. Normal people with normal lives. A family, two fathers and their two girls sat in a Subaru wagon, pointing at the neon menu, and Nijinsky thought for a
moment that in another universe that could be him.

  How in hell had he ended up here, doing this, with these people? He had wanted a little adventure, a sense of doing something mysterious and important. He wasn’t even a gamer; he had come to BZRK because of a chance meeting with Grey McLure at some stupid society party where Nijinsky had been invited as eye candy.

  Somehow he had fallen into conversation with McLure, and before he knew it he was telling McLure his life story.

  “You’re too smart to just walk around looking good in a tux,” McLure had said.

  “Maybe, sir, but that’s my skill set.” At the time he’d halfway thought McLure was hitting on him. He wouldn’t be the first straight guy to consider a little experimentation.

  But no, that wasn’t it. McLure had found something genuinely interesting in Shane Hwang, underwear model and party tux-wearer. Finally he’d asked McLure straight out why he was paying attention to him.

  McLure tilted his head, looked at him and said, “You have no family, you have no connections, really, you have no direction. You strike me as a gentle person, but not weak, very intelligent but unfocused.”

  Nijinsky had frowned. “Is this a job interview?”

  “I know someone who may need a young man like you, Mr Hwang. This person needs a sort of, well, I don’t quite know the word for it. He needs someone to be a right hand to a young man who is very talented and in a leadership position but is not good at handling people.”

  “Like a personal assistant?” The idea had disappointed him.

  “No. Like a brother in arms. Like a balance. Yin to his yang.”

  “It doesn’t sound like—”

  “Your life would be in danger. Your sanity would be at risk. You would see things, and do things …unimaginable to you now.” McLure had smiled. “You would have purpose. You would be doing very, very important work . . .”

  Nijinsky saw that the Subaru family had finally gotten their order straight. He sighed.

  The yin to his yang, or was it the other way around, he could never remember, was chained in the seat behind him. Kerouac was mad. Renfield was dead. Ophelia was dead. And unasked for, Nijinsky was in charge. He had never wanted it, not for so much as a millisecond. He’d been a good second in command to Vincent.

  But he had never—

  An app opened on his phone, unbidden.

  Suddenly he was looking at a night-vision shot of the common room in the New York safe house, taken from one of the security cameras.

  Men in Kevlar vests and helmets were in the room, swinging their weapons left, right, looking for opponents.

  “They’re hitting the New York safe house,” Nijinsky said, then regretted it because Wilkes was all over him in a flash, wanting to see.

  “Goddamn!” Wilkes said, twisting his hand so she could see the phone better. “They missed us by what, three hours?”

  “They’re going macro on us. They hit DC. Now they’re hitting us in New York.”

  Her chin was on his bicep as she looked in fascination at the gray-scale video. The cameras switched from room to room in steady rotation. There were armed men in every room now.

  “You’ve got to do it, Jin,” Wilkes said.

  Nijinsky said nothing. The phone trembled in his hand.

  “Jin, you have to do it. If you won’t do it I will.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Anya asked.

  “Blowing up the New York place.” Wilkes tried to sound casual, but Nijinsky could tell that even she, even hard little Wilkes was shaken by the idea.

  He punched in a twelve-character code to get access to the Kill button. It was a green button.

  Cheerful.

  “I have to check with Lear,” Nijinsky said.

  “There’s no time for that, Jin,” Wilkes snapped, her voice as ragged as his own. “It can take hours for Lear to respond. You know there’s instructions for all this. Everyone’s biots are outta there, we’re outta there, you know what we’re supposed to do.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “It’s what they did at the UN, what they did to their own people to hide evidence, and they burned Ophelia’s legs off!”

  “So we do what they do?” he demanded, wanting somehow to blame her.

  “There are fingerprints, hair samples, personal stuff, clues. Evidence. Whatever the hell. Jin. Jin!”

  “I’m the wrong person for this,” Nijinsky said quietly.

  “Give it to me,” Wilkes said. “If you don’t do it you’re putting all of us and our families at—” She stopped. Because Nijinsky’s thumb had pressed down on the button.

  The video feed went blank.

  They sat there, silent, until Nijinsky said, “Anya, would you mind driving for a while?”

  FOURTEEN

  The instant Nijinsky, Anya, Wilkes, and a heavily drugged Vincent arrived at the church, Nijinsky held up his phone for Keats and Plath to read a text. It was from Lear.

  Karl Burnofsky: inventor of the nanobot. Murdered daughter on orders of Twins. Hold at all cost. Kill before you allow escape.

  Keats read it twice just to be sure.

  Burnofsky saw all this. He sighed. “I assume that’s about me. Am I a dead man?”

  No one answered.

  “Anya, would you help Vincent to a room?” Nijinsky asked.

  There was something wrong with Nijinsky, it was obvious to anyone, something that was not just about a long drive on the turnpikes and freeways. He looked old. He looked as if he could be his own father. His voice was a whisper. He was carrying a paper bag from the liquor store where he had stopped off en route.

  Keats took the bag from an unprotesting Nijinsky and set it on one of the pews. He drew out a bottle of vodka. He crumpled the bag noisily, making sure to draw Burnofsky’s attention to the bottle.

  Burnofsky licked his lips, and for a few seconds an expression of terrible desire ruled his face.

  Keats saw and understood. He’d been right about Burnofsky. An addict.

  “So there he is in the flesh,” Burnofsky said, deliberately looking away from Keats and the bottle. “The great Vincent. Look what you fools have done to him.”

  “We didn’t start this,” Plath snapped.

  “Of course you started it, your half of it,” Burnofsky said. “We started our part, but no one made you take the other side. Did they? Your father was a friend of mine, you know.” He glanced at the bottle. “We used to drink together, Grey and I. He worked for me at one point. Did you know that? Used to enjoy a drink together.”

  Plath, despite herself, was drawn to listen. She was hungry for anything that made her father real again.

  “What a brilliant man, your dad. And a good father, too. Better than I was to my daughter.”

  “You have a daughter?” Plath asked, keeping her voice neutral. Information was power, and there was nothing to be gained by telling Burnofsky what they knew.

  “Had,” Burnofsky said. “Had. Had a daughter. Had. Just like you had a father and a brother. And of course your mother, oh God, I’d have traded my soul for her.” He smiled wistfully. “Beautiful woman. Nothing like you,” he added cruelly.

  Plath showed him nothing.

  Wilkes lifted a loose brick off the scaffold, stepped close, and calmly smashed it into Burnofsky’s mouth.

  Blood erupted from his lips and gums.

  She put the brick, smeared red, back in place just as it had been, as if it was an heirloom resting on the mantel.

  “Beat a helpless old man?” Burnofsky cried as he spit blood. “It’s like that is it? Fucking little bitch!”

  Wilkes made a “Who, me?” face.

  Plath waited for Nijinsky to call Wilkes out, to order her to stop. Nothing. So she said, “Maybe not, huh, Wilkes?”

  “She’s the nice one,” Wilkes said, helpfully pointing to Plath. “I’m the other one.”

  Billy the Kid watched it all from beneath lowered brows.

  “So who the hell are you?” Wilkes ask
ed Billy, not unfriendly, just sounding like Wilkes.

  “Billy.”

  She stuck out her hand to shake his. “Having fun so far?”

  “Burnofsky here’s got a nanobot controller in his bag,” Keats said. “We were just going to get it out. He placed a sort of pod of nanobots on Plath’s neck. Hard to count, but maybe a dozen.”

  Keats picked up the vodka bottle, twisted the lid off, and carried it to Burnofsky. He dragged an empty plastic paint bucket over and set the bottle on the can, just a few feet from the older man.

  “What are you doing?” Nijinsky asked dully.

  “He’s a drunk or a junkie or maybe both,” Keats said.

  “Fuck all of you, you deserve what’s coming,” Burnofsky said, and spit blood at Plath.

  “Oh, but we’ll be best of friends once we’re absorbed into the hive mind and spouting Nexus Humanus nonsense, won’t we?” This from Wilkes. Plath was surprised to see her take the lead. Nijinsky barely seemed to be in the room. “You’ll forgive us then, right? I think I’ll smack you again.”

  “Yes, what you have now is so much better, isn’t it?” Burnofsky snarled. “So much better. A hundred thousand years of violence, starvation, torture, betrayal, brutality, rape, and murder. So much to be admired in Homo sapiens, eh? Not an inch of this planet that hasn’t been drenched in blood.” As he spoke blood bubbled on his lips. “Yes, what a lovely world it is that brings you young thugs together to beat up an old man tied to a ladder. Yes, that’s worth fighting for, right?”

  “It works for me,” Wilkes said.

  “We’re fighting for the right to go on being human,” Nijinsky said quietly. “We’re fighting for freedom.” He frowned, as if he was hearing this for the first time and not sure if he found it convincing.

  Burnofsky barked a laugh and a piece of tooth went flying. “Of course you are. Freedom. The freedom to do what, exactly? Don’t worry, Mr Hwang, you’ll still be able to pleasure strangers in bathroom stalls after the great change.”

  Nijinsky went paler still. Plath carefully avoided making eye contact with him.

  “Shane Hwang,” Burnofsky said grandly. “Nijinsky. Of course we know who you are, you’re on posters all over Manhattan, although you do look different with clothing on. Your father disowned you after he found you bent over his kitchen counter …entertaining …the cable installer. Oh, we know all about you, Nijinsky. We could have taken you out at any time, but why bother, eh?”