Pia nodded. “I believe it is a liquified natural gas carrier.”
The admiral opened his briefcase, an ancient leather object with far too many buckles. He pulled out a pad and began tapping away. “Yes,” he muttered.
“Yes what?”
He held up a finger to silence her. Tapped some more. Swiped. Frowned. “Interesting. As luck would have it, there’s an LNG carrier on a course that would have brought it past Okinawa at roughly the right time.”
Pia’s heart leapt. “Where’s it heading?”
“Practically to our table.”
He went back to his pad. “But there is no way to have Albion intercept this ship…. It’s the SS Gemini, that’s the registered name.”
Their eyes met. “Gemini,” Pia said. “The twins.”
“We don’t want some sort of fight with a dangerous LNG carrier inside Hong Kong harbor. They are floating bombs, really, if mishandled.”
“But you said your ship can’t intercept them.”
“No, but the Albion’s helicopters certainly can. I’ll fly out as soon as I’ve taken care of a few things here.” Then, innocently, “I don’t suppose you’d want to come with?”
“It would take more than one aging admiral to stop me,” she said.
SIXTEEN
It was too intimate. Plath was inside Vincent’s brain. She was touching his memories. She was seeing things he would never have shown her. Things no one would ever voluntarily show another person.
Plath lay back on a dusty IKEA Poang chair. She wore sweater and jeans. No shoes, but two pairs of socks so her feet wouldn’t get cold. It was chilly down in the sub-basement.
She lay back, eyes closed but not asleep. Sometimes she would gasp or suck air like a person surfacing after a deep dive. Sometimes her fists would clench on the paint-spattered blond-wood arms of the chair, only to be released by conscious effort.
She was aware that Nijinsky, leaning against the side of the biot hatchery, did not want her to narrate. He didn’t want the details of what was in his friend’s head.
The new biot—the very first of the four series—was accompanied by one of her older biots. The difference in main visuals—what she saw through her biots’ eyes—was noticeable, though still grainy and distorted.
The bigger difference was the input from sticking pins into the brain matter beneath her feet.
Normally a biot either wiring or pinning a brain could bring up a sort of sketch of the reaction it was causing. Stick a pin in a particular neuron bundle associated with a particular memory and you’d get an idea of what you were pinning, but only an idea, a hint. You got a sort of scratchy, jumpy snatch of video or more likely nothing more detailed than a vague feeling.
You didn’t get the equivalent of HD quality.
This input was HD and 3D, too.
Plath had done some wiring before. She’d done some practice work, and she had been inside the twisted brains of the Armstrong Twins.
This …Oh, boy, this was different.
“I can’t see this . . .” she said. “I can’t be looking at this.”
“You need to know enough to help.” Nijinsky said, his voice flat.
“I don’t need to …I’m not even sure if what I’m seeing is real or memories of imagination, of things that never really happened.”
Nijinsky didn’t answer.
“I’m not a voyeur,” Plath said.
Oh, but she was. Unwilling, maybe, but she was a voyeur all right, a Peeping Tom, a creep looking through the curtains, a pervert with a buttonhole camera.
Stab a pin. Vincent is hearing a blues song. I worked five long years for one woman, and she had the nerve to kick me out.
Stab a pin. A beach. He’s a small child and has to pee. “Just go in the water, Michael,” a voice tells him. But it’s too cold.
Vincent’s real name is Michael. Plath had not known that. But it seems right.
Stab a pin. “Don’t you like that?”
“Like?” Vincent answers. “It doesn’t hurt.”
There’s a girl laughing. She’s four years old, just like little Michael. He doesn’t understand the sound she’s making. He feels shame.
And now a scene that makes Plath extremely uncomfortable. Nothing wrong just nothing a stranger should see. She moves on.
Look out, the Christmas tree is falling over!
A long wind-swept beach. It’s not at all like the South African beach she’s been seeing in her own mind’s eye. This is black seaweed and twisted driftwood on white sand under a dark sky.
A cigarette. Vincent says, “I don’t see the point.”
“Tripped on a root, fell down, cut the hell out of my knee,” Vincent says.
“Sine, cosine, tangent,” he says.
“I don’t need it,” he says. “I see it in other people, and it makes me curious. I wonder what it would be like. But I don’t think I need it.”
Plath said, “Jin.”
“Yes.”
“He can’t feel pleasure, can he?”
The three-second delay in his answer was the answer. “He has anhedonia. He doesn’t experience pleasure. Not in the usual sense.”
Plath tried to remember if she had ever seen Vincent smile. Even now he was Vincent to her, not Michael. Vincent he had to remain.
“I’m not some kind of psychiatrist, here,” she said plaintively. Nijinsky had moved out of her view. Anya Violet was there. Was that jealousy in her eyes? “I don’t know what any of this means. All I know how to do is scramble someone’s brain, I don’t know what to do to help him.”
Nijinsky didn’t answer. She waited …and nothing. Because he had nothing. Because this was desperation time, and no one really knew how to help Vincent.
The best they had come up with was finding a way to excise the memory of the fatal battle. Somewhere among billions and billions of cells in Vincent’s brain there were memories of the dead biot. Memories of defeat.
If you take a brain and flatten it out, it makes a surface about the size of two pages of a newspaper. That was then crumpled up and shoved into a fluid-filled sac, which is in turn squeezed into the cranium. In the m-sub even a square inch is a large area. She was doing the equivalent of walking around on a football field in which someone had buried a single Easter egg.
She was poking that field blindly with a stick, hoping to find the egg.
Nijinsky’s phone rang. “Yeah.”
A plant he had once grown from an avocado pit. Dead on return from a family vacation. Sadness. He could feel that.
Getting a flu shot as an adult. He likes the prick of pain.
“Okay,” Nijinsky said and clicked off. “Wilkes says Vincent is reacting, his eyes and mouth are moving. Like …Never mind, keep going.”
Plath had not wanted to be in the same room as Vincent. Somehow that would have made it worse.
In a gloomy classroom, the desk all the way to the left, a spitball hits the side of his head.
Bong hit, lungs hurting, coughs and can’t stop. Someone laughs. He feels strange.
Anya Violet wearing nothing but red panties walking toward him on bare feet. He’s intensely aroused. It’s almost painful.
“That’s recent,” she whispered, embarrassed to be seeing this. But yes, now she’s a voyeur, because she wonders, fleetingly, if this is how Keats sees her, how he feels when he looks at her.
They could find out. Somewhere far from here. The beach, the mythical, not-real beach. And what would that be, she asks herself, a date? A really long date? She who refused to consider falling in love was now seeing herself in hiding with Keats? For the rest of their lives?
Her biots, which had been traversing millimeters between probes, now barely moved. Would more recent memories be in closer proximity?
She placed a marker exactly on the spot she had stuck. Now she began probing in a circle around the spot.
A boat? A ferry. A ferry moving through dense fog. “Michael Ford. Don’t turn around.”
&nb
sp; Plath froze.
Vincent, resting elbows on a chilly steel railing. His skin was clammy from the fog, his hair felt limp. There was a girl wearing a biking outfit seated to the right, far enough away not to overhear anything. The girl had cast one or two impassive-but-interested looks at Vincent.
He had looked at her when she bent over to retie her shoe. Desire. He could feel desire. He wanted while nevertheless knowing he would gain no real enjoyment.
He could want.
But he was here for a purpose and the bike girl with the long legs was not the point.
He felt someone approaching. He guessed this was it.
A whispered voice. “Michael Ford.” Not a question, a statement. “Don’t turn around.” An order. Obedience was assumed.
Curiosity. Vincent felt curiosity, too. His other emotions were intact. Only this one thing was missing: joy. He could fear, he could care, he could loathe.
Could he love?
Plath opened her eyes, and Anya was staring at her. Her dark eyes were wet with need.
Vincent listened, tried to analyze the voice he was hearing. Male or female? It was subtly masked by electronics.
Vincent’s mind searching for clues. Was the figure in the fog tall or short? Fat or thin? White, black, Asian . . .
“Who are you?” Vincent asks.
“Lear,” the unidentifiable voice says.
“The mad king betrayed by his children.”
“‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport.’” It was obviously a quote from something. Plath didn’t recognize it.
“You’re fighting them?” Vincent asks.
“Who, the gods?”
“The Twins. Nexus and the Armstrongs,” Vincent said. “The whole mess.”
“What is it you really want to know, Michael? This once you ask a question. After that, you take orders. One question.”
Vincent waits. He knows the question, but he isn’t sure it’s what he should ask. He’s not sure Lear won’t hear the question and simply walk away.
He doesn’t want Lear to walk away. He realizes it. He wants this. Vincent wants this …purpose.
“Are you good or evil?” Vincent asks.
“We, Michael. All of us. We,” Lear corrects him. “We, Michael, are good and evil. But we are less evil than them.”
Vincent hears this and—
“Goddamn it!” Plath cried. The memory ends there. She pushes the pin slightly deeper and finds only an unrelated memory of a funeral for a neighbor’s cat with a very young Vincent solemn in attendance.
“What?” Nijinsky asks.
She can’t tell him. Lear’s identity is sacred, defended by Caligula. She can’t even admit she came close.
Vincent had gone looking for it. Vincent had wanted in. He had chosen this path. Did that make him better than Plath? Or had he always been a bit too close to crazy?
“That’s enough,” Plath said. “I’m pulling out.”
She sent her biots toward the exit, toward the long walk through Vincent’s brain to the optic nerve.
“No. There’s no time for that, Plath. Stay in there,” Nijinsky orders. “Biots in place. Take a break. Have a sandwich. Play some music. Whatever. Then get back to it.”
Farid learned a number of useful facts after being shot in the mouth.
Fact One: Even with lidocaine being injected into your cheek, sewing up a bullet hole hurts.
Fact Two: Even with novocaine, grinding a shattered molar down to a stump for a temporary crown hurts.
Fact Three: His father was nominally in charge of the embassy, but when the attaché for cultural exchanges—in reality the Washington station chief for Lebanese intelligence—gave him an order relating to security, it was obeyed.
By the time Farid got back, exhausted and rattled, to his bedroom at the embassy, his laptop was gone. They’d taken his phone while he was still at the hospital.
The TV news was all about the bookstore massacre wherein— according to reports—an unidentified suspect falsely claiming to be a federal agent went on a shooting spree, severely injuring a Washington, DC police officer, and killing three others.
“You are going home,” his father informed Farid.
“Father, you don’t understand what . . .” Farid has started to say. But how was he going to explain any of it? Confess to being a hacker? He would never get access to another computer.
“I understand that you were almost killed by some madwoman! This country is crazy. You are going home!” His father had hugged him so hard it hurt. Then he had drawn back almost as if to slap Farid. Then he had burst into tears.
Fact Four: he was going home.
Fact Five: he would not be the person deciding the fate of the American president, others would. They would know he was off the grid, and they would know he was being sent home. If there was one thing he was sure of, it was that what he had learned would not simply disappear.
“I feel funny, Anthony.”
“Do you?” He had goggles on that covered his eyes and half his forehead. His hands were in thick gloves. A tangle of wires ran from a strap around the back of his head down to what looked like an old Xbox. More wires ran from the gloves to the box.
“I feel . . .” She bit her lip.
“Tell me what you feel, baby.”
He had six of his nanobots in her brain. The wire was everywhere
in the hippocampus and in the nucleus accumbens. It had become overgrown, like a cable laid through a jungle. The wire was still bright where it showed, but much of it was completely obscured. Lymphocytes had swarmed as they usually did, but they had failed to either absorb or rip open the wire and now only a few sniffed around the alien intrusion.
A much bigger problem was the brain cells themselves. They came in various shapes and sizes, none as large as a nanobot’s sensor array, but some like stretched octopi, others like cross sections of kitchen sponge, or lichen. All, of course, had been artificially colored by the software, creating weird tableaus of broccoli green, and a sort of pulsating maroon, and a vivid blue unlike anything in nature. The corpses of lymphocytes were painted pearly white by the software, like cow skulls in the desert in an old cowboy movie.
Like vines the cells grew over the wire and encrusted the pins that stuck up like so many arrows shot into pulpy soil. It was like discovering the ruins of a long-abandoned factory deep in a jungle.
The nanobots had to move hand over hand, so to speak, pincer claw over pincer claw, perhaps, in the environment of gently circulating cerebral-spinal fluid. Losing your grip could mean floating away. It was a bit like an astronaut working in zero G.
Two claws to grip, two claws to rip.
Six nanobots. Six sets of visuals, front and back, twelve screens in his goggles. Bug Man controlled it all, all at the same time. It was nowhere near as cool as battle, but it was enough for now, because he was doing something new. He was unwiring a brain.
The pincers yanked at pins, some of which slid out easily, others of which could not be budged unless he used two or three nanobots at once.
The pins came out, though, one way or the other. And as they came free, trailing a few scattered cells, the nanobots shoved them into their back-mounted quivers.
The wire was simply ripped up, like pulling up a half-buried garden hose. Rip and tear, rip and tear, and oh, that definitely brought the white cells pulsing and oozing. But what to do with the wire? It was spooled out from within the nanobot when it was laid, but there was no procedure for retrieving it.
So Bug Man set two of his nanobots to the job of collecting the used wire, spooling it, stacking it in a central location, a deep fold where the cerebral–spinal fluid current wouldn’t carry it off.
“I feel,” Jessica said. “Do . . .”
“What? What do you want to ask me?”
“Do you want sex?” It was a plaintive voice. A confused voice. “No, babe. Not now. Maybe later,” Bug Man said.
“Those go
ggles scare me. You look like a monster.”
He hesitated then. The nanobots all froze in place. What if she utterly rejected him? What if she was disgusted by him? What if she said, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’ve been with you. You!”
You toad.
You nobody.
He sucked in a deep breath. It wouldn’t be like that. Probably. But anyway, it didn’t matter anymore, because he was doing it, and whatever happened happened. This was the game, for now.
“Can we go out now? I want to go out,” Jessica said.
“What if I don’t want to go out?” Bug Man asked as he ripped up a long strand of wire that pulled a few cells loose as it came up.
Jessica hesitated. The hesitation went on for quite a while.
“What if I say no, we can’t go out, Jessica?” He was pulling an encrusted wire, like a robin pulling an earthworm from the dirt.
“I want to go out,” she said.
Bug Man pulled off the goggles and set them aside. He took off the gloves.
He stood up and said, “Okay then. Yeah, let’s go out.”
SEVENTEEN
Here is what Plath knew about Vincent after what felt like a lifetime sticking pins in his brain: that he was anhedonic; that he once stuck a pencil into a boy’s arm when the boy called him a wuss and shoved him from his place in the elementary school lunch line; that he didn’t understand why people liked animals; that he experienced drunkenness in an extraordinarily self-aware way; that he had been slapped by his mother for failing to appreciate the cake she made for his eleventh birthday and then had watched helpless and lost as she broke down crying.
Plath knew about the mild allergy to cashews and mangoes. She knew that the combination to his locker in tenth grade was 11-41-23. She knew that he once became furious watching a film in school about atrocities in the Congo and vowed to kill the bastards responsible. He was suspended for three days for inappropriate language.
Once she had touched the spot where he first experienced the nano world. But the memory did not lead her anywhere. “I’m tired,” she said. She had eyeshades on. She had her feet up. She had a soda with a bendy straw within reach at her side. “We’re all tired,” Wilkes snapped. Wilkes had taken over for
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