Wilkes sighed theatrically and picked up the brick.
“Go ahead! Beat me! Show me your moral superiority; show me what you’re fighting for.”
Wilkes hesitated.
Nijinsky, his voice straining to remain calm, said, “He doesn’t know who you are, Wilkes. Or Keats. Doesn’t know Billy, I’m guessing. He’s bluffing. Pretending to know more than he does.”
“I know what they are,” Burnofsky shot back. “The losers. The damaged. The victims. Life’s little rejects, all except Sadie McLure of course, no, she’s the rich daughter of privilege out for revenge.” He shook his head. “Every war in history was fought by the cannon fodder. All for the benefit of someone who stayed safe and above it all. They get you into the fight with high-flown rhetoric, and then they blood you, don’t they? They make sure you’ve seen a friend’s blood and drawn blood from an enemy. You’re pushed into their fight but now you’ve lost people, so now it’s personal. Now it’s too late to get out because you’ve done things …unimaginable things.”
Nijinsky jerked almost violently.
Burnofsky didn’t seem to notice. He was on a roll. “You’ve been hurt, so now, by God, it’s your fight. Yours. Oldest game in history: idealists and patriots turned into vengeful killers. Somewhere, Lear is laughing.”
As if on cue a terrible moan came from Vincent, whom Anya had drawn away into a far corner of the church. It was a moan that rose higher and higher before suddenly falling off a cliff and tumbling down in manic laughter.
“Your friend’s meds are wearing off,” Burnofsky said.
Keats picked up the vodka bottle and held it close to Burnofsky’s ruined mouth. As if he was going to pour. A ragged need transformed Burnofsky’s face.
“I believe your meds are wearing off as well,” Keats said, and set the bottle back down again.
Minako McGrath had screamed.
She had not fainted, but as she screamed something had hit her in
the back of her head, and that buckled her knees.
No one had warned her, no one had told her that the fanciful,
mythological painting on the ceiling of the dome was of a real person.
People.
It had simply been too much. She was not so delicate as all that, she had seen many people with deformities and she had never felt anything but compassion for them. And maybe, no certainly, she would come to feel that same compassion for these unfortunates. Except that these were no helpless beggars. These were the Great Souls, the ringmasters of this floating asylum, the bastards who had
kidnapped her.
She lay in her quarters. There was a bruise on the back of her
head. Someone had brought her here, someone had smeared antibiotic ointment on the back of her head, matting her hair.
She sat up. The headache was an explosion in her skull. There was singing, loud and not very good.
One mind.
Two great guides. No more war.
No more hate. It’s never too late.
Minako did not recognize the tune. She stood up and fought down a wave of nausea that almost did make her faint.
She went to the door. It was locked. She could see out into the sphere, but the door was locked. The railings were crowded with singing, banner-waving people. Through the gaps she could see that the floor of the sphere was crowded with ecstatically happy celebrants. It was all like some weird melding of rock concert, celebrity red carpet, and political rally.
The monsters were still in the elevator cage, which had come to rest just a few feet above the crowd. People reached out to touch them, tried to push their fingers through the wire. Like teenage fans with a pop star.
The song went on and on, and Minako had the distinct impression that it had been going on this way for quite some time. The sphere throbbed with it.
Finally the recorded music played a rousing finale, and the singing devolved into yells and cries and shouts of “Charles! Benjamin!” and “Benjaminia welcomes you!”
We love you!
Sustainable happiness!
Charles waved his arm expansively, soaking it all up. Benjamin was less obviously pleased. His face had endured some damage and his expression was more a scowl than a smile.
It mattered not to the admiring fanatics.
Benjamin! Our wonderful Benjamin!
Our prince!
Our guide!
Minako felt a very different sense of sickness, not nausea but terror. A chant was building, all the voices together, an inexorable rhythm.
Ben-ja-min!
Ben-ja-min!
Charles was pointing to his brother, a ringleader, cheering on the cheerers. He was deliberately drawing attention to his twin. And it seemed to be working, a little at least. The scowling Benjamin waved his arm before letting it drop to his side.
But then his eye drilled straight into Minako. He could see her. She recoiled from that terrible stare.
Only then did Benjamin smile.
Minako fell back, out of sight, and sat on her bed. This was all a nightmare. A nightmare. It couldn’t be real.
She was shaking. The sheer malevolence in that single eye.
They were going to hurt her.
The chant had changed now.
We are everyone! We are everyone! We’ll be everywhere! We’ll be everywhere!
Three men appeared at the door to Minako’s quarters. They were crewmen, not inhabitants of Benjaminia. One was the young Asian from the beach, KimKim, the one who had wanted to abuse her. But he was not leering now; he was standing very stiff and proper. The second man was older and she had never seen him before. She knew the third one was an officer; he had epaulettes on his shirt.
“You’re coming with us,” the officer said brusquely. He had an accent she couldn’t place.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
Minako backed into her room, as if that would stop them.
The officer said, “If you fight it will be worse.”
Until that instant she had not been sure she would fight. She had no weapons. She wasn’t going to win. Nor would she even manage to hurt them. But she would fight.
The two sailors stepped into the room and Minako threw the useless pamphlets at them. They reached for her and she kicked and scratched and none of it had any effect but to make her ever more enraged, enraged by her own impotence and weakness.
The younger one soon had her around the waist and threw her onto the ground. Once again a roll of duct tape was produced and wound quickly around her ankles and wrists.
“You’re all crazy! You’re all crazy!” Minako cried at the top of her lungs. “This is a madhouse!”
They tried to tape her mouth, but the older one dropped the tape and it rolled out of the door and bounced over the short lip of the catwalk to fall out of view.
“Idiot,” the officer said. “Just grab her.”
The two sailors hefted her up onto their shoulders. She kicked and squirmed and smashed her head against the young one’s temple. She contracted her stomach muscles and made them both stumble as they carried her out onto the catwalk.
For a terrible moment she thought they meant to throw her over the side. Maybe that would be better. At least then it would be over quickly.
Did they mean to hand her over to the chanting mob? They had caught sight of her, the others standing on the catwalks, and soon a new chant began.
Join us! Join us!
They weren’t angry words, but the chant grew ever more intense. From encouraging to angry to hateful.
Join us!
It was a curse.
Join us!
It was a threat.
They hustled her down the stairs and through the now-enraged crowd. People spit on her. Someone punched her, then others. Her shirt was ripped. Someone pounded her calf repeatedly.
“You’re all crazy! You’re all crazy!” she screamed.
Someone in the crowd punched her in the mouth and various voices y
elled, “Shut her up, shut her up, join us, join us!”
The officer and the two sailors were now having a hard time getting through the mob. KimKim slipped and Minako fell hard to the floor, crashing on her neck. A kick caught her shoulder. Feet were stomping all around her.
KimKim bent over her, shielding her with his body. He was scared, she could see it.
“You’re all crazy!” Minako screamed, on automatic now, as caught up in the madness of the moment as the fanatics around her.
“My friends!” a huge voice bellowed.
“It’s Mr Charles!” some cried out. “The Great Souls!”
The amplified voice repeated, “My friends! My friends! Calm yourselves! Calm yourselves!”
The kicks and punches lessened and the legs receded around Minako. But she did not stop screaming, “You’re all crazy!”
The sailors manhandled her up off the floor and half carried, half dragged her to the elevator lift. She saw the legs, the two and the one, and suddenly she was deposited at their feet, at the feet of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.
Charles’s voice boomed again as the lift began to rise. “My friends, do not hate this girl. She is simply unenlightened, as are too many in this sad world. But never fear! Our time is coming. The future belongs to us!”
Cheers rose like a tide all around her, and yet still she screamed, “You’re all crazy!”
Benjamin’s foot moved. The toe of his shoe was against her side. He pressed his weight down and ground the skin of her waist against the metal.
Minako heard Charles say, “We don’t have a twitcher aboard, brother.”
“So much the better,” Benjamin said. “The old ways, then. The old ways.”
“Where the hell is Burnofsky?” Bug Man asked Jessica. Back in the hotel room in Crystal City. Back to just the two of them, claustrophobic, the walls closing in again.
Go limp. The president was doing whatever she was doing. Writing her crazy eulogy.
Bug Man was doing nothing.
Jessica was watching Evil Dead 2 on the TV. That kind of thing had never been her taste back in the old days. That kind of thing was Bug Man’s taste.
“I don’t know who Burnofsky is, baby,” Jessica said. “Do you want to have sex?”
“For God’s sake no!” Bug Man said, exasperated. “Jesus Christ, why would you think that? That’s not the answer to everything. That’s not—”
He was arguing with himself.
He was arguing with what he had done to her.
She turned her still-amazing eyes, those incredible hazel eyes that looked so alien in her African face, on him, all liquid willingness to please, and he wanted to punch her. Honest to God, he wanted to punch her in the face and see whether she responded with a bland, programmed response.
He could. He could punch her and she would ask him if he was tense, if he needed something to relax him, a massage perhaps, or a blow job.
Where the hell was Burnofsky? Bug Man had checked the flight and the traffic. There was no way it could take Burnofsky this long to get from National Airport to Crystal City. He could walk it in less time.
Go limp.
It was ridiculous! He had his nanobots all up in the brain of the single most powerful person on Earth, and he was sitting here doing nothing nothing nothing, waiting for some old burn-out junkie to show up. Go to the office and watch passively, as he had earlier, or sit here and cycle through the movies and TV shows.
This was not the game.
The game was going on without him.
Anthony Elder had a sudden, unbidden memory of himself in London. Of his life changing when he found a mate from school who had a high-speed Internet connection.
Anthony had practically moved into Mike’s home. They had played Batman Begins and Call of Duty 2, mostly. But the friendship began to wane when it became obvious that Anthony’s skills far exceeded Mike’s. Mike was not a talented gamer, and Anthony—who had adopted the online name Bug Man—was not just a good player, he was one of the best.
Tensions had come to blows and Anthony had come out on the losing end. It finished his friendship with Mike and forced him offline.
He might as well have been a junkie: he needed the game that badly. He sought out other kids at his school to replace Mike, but Anthony was not very good at making friends. He was arrogant and unwilling to hide it. He didn’t do particularly well in his classes, but no one believed it was from lack of ability.
Anthony just didn’t care.
He thought of the time between falling out with Mike and before the blessed day when his mother could finally manage a fast Internet connection as a sort of time of emptiness, of longing. Without the game—some game, any game—Bug Man was just Anthony.
He had Burnofsky’s number. He dialed it. It rang through to voice mail.
No game was anywhere near as good as twitching. He was a twitcher. He needed it. He needed to be down in the meat.
He glared at Jessica, just sitting there, looking beautiful, gazing out of the window at the lights of the city, sighing occasionally, bored but obedient.
It struck him then what he had done. “I hacked my own game,” he said. Jessica was like any game where you knew all the shortcuts, where you had all the hacks. The game lost any value.
He had a portable twitching controller.
He had nanobots of course.
“Come here, Jessica. I just need to poke you in the eye.”
FIFTEEN
African beaches. Or was it Costa Rica they had talked about? Africa, yeah, that was it. She would get Keats and they would drive away. Stern would meet them. Then, somehow, African beaches. Bodyguards. And a message would be sent to the Armstrong Twins: We are out of this war of yours.
We are civilians now.
Leave us alone.
Nijinksy shone a flashlight down the dark hole beneath the altar.
“It was a bootlegger’s hideout,” Nijinsky said, cutting off her fantasy. He led Plath and Anya down a surprisingly well-built set of concrete steps. After some searching they found a wall switch, and Nijinsky flicked the light on.
It couldn’t quite be called a cave, it was more just an underground pit dug out of the clay soil. Dirt walls, dirt roof held up by a latticework of recently added four-by-four and two-by-four beams.
The floor was covered by interlocking steel mats. A big rock protruded, and the steel flooring went around it. The entire space was large enough that it had to extend beneath several adjacent lots.
There were dusty, dried-out casks, the big ones you might see at a traditional winery, against one wall. Farther on the lighting improved dramatically, and the metal flooring had been covered by a thick blue plastic tarp.
It was in this section, an area that smelled less of mold and must, more of fresh-dug dirt, that the lab equipment was set up.
“A lab in this hole in the ground?” This from Anya, who stepped gingerly onto the tarp and went from one hulking piece of equipment to the next, marking them off a mental checklist, powering each one up, checking read-out panels.
Keats was upstairs with Wilkes and Billy, checking locks on the back door and the small window, barricading with the pews and assorted scrap lumber. All the way down in the sub-basement Plath could hear the dull impact of a hammer driving nails to strengthen defenses.
Burnofsky’s words were still buzzing in her brain.
It was true, wasn’t it? She had been suckered. She’d been tricked into this. She was a rich girl on a revenge high, but led into it by the eternally unseen Lear. Who else had sent Vincent to recruit her?
Who was Lear, exactly? And who the hell did he, she, or it think he, she, or it was to do this to her?
You’ve been hurt so now, by God, it’s your fight. Yours. Oldest game in history: idealists and patriots turned into vengeful killers. Somewhere, Lear is laughing.
“Very well done,” Anya said, giving her verdict on the underground lab.
Nijinsky nodded. “Good. Then we may
as well get started. Assuming you’re ready, Dr Violet.”
Anya Violet turned soulful eyes on Plath. “Is she ready?”
Plath blinked and brought herself out of her dark reverie. “Ready for what?”
Nijinsky stood with his back to the lab. He faced her in what was almost certainly a calculatedly frank and honest way. She could have sworn he was striking a pose, and he knew how to do that. But it wasn’t working.
“There’s some new technology,” Nijinsky said.
Anya snorted.
“We have something very special we need you to do.”
“What’s with the royal we, Jin?” she demanded.
“The what?”
“We. Who is we? You and Dr Violet?”
“We,” he said, sounding a little exasperated. “We. BZRK.”
She stared at him, searching his eyes. They were anything but inscrutable, that old cliché. Nijinsky did not hide his feelings well. He knew he was asking something he had no right to ask; he knew he was leading her into danger.
“What is it you have planned for me?” she asked.
“There’s a new version of the biot. Version four. It has a number of improvements,” Nijinsky said, almost as if he was trying to sell her a new car.
She stared at him. “What?”
“We think …I think …No, we think . . .”
“Oh, man,” Plath said.
“With the version four we think you can pull off a deep wire. On Vincent. That maybe you can bring him back.”
Nijinsky and Anya watched her, very different expressions on their faces, waiting. Nijinsky waiting to offer up some compelling argument, but his attention elsewhere all the while, like he was watching a movie in his head. Anya with a sadness that went deep.
“You want me to take on another biot?” Plath asked dully. “Each new biot …I mean, what happens when . . .” She felt a chasm opening up beneath her. They were going to make her just like Vincent. Each new biot was a risk. Each new biot was another opportunity to draw the “insane” card from the deck.
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