Billy was past hesitation. Without needing to be told, he slipped the goggles into place.
He snapped the pipette with his teeth, spit out the end, and held it so the open end was against his ungloved palm.
Two dozen nanobots slid onto his hand.
The goggles lit up with screens. Twenty-four separate visuals. It was a magnificent jumble of imagery. Mostly what he saw was nanobots—nanobots looking at nanobots—the whole tumbling melee of spidery legs and spinning central wheels and seeking metallic eyes.
And he saw, for the first time, the world of the meat. The nanobots lay, stood, staggered around in what seemed like a deep ditch. Like a ditch where leaves had fallen and collected on the ground without any trees nearby.
Crossing the ditch were smaller cuts in the “ground,” the smaller lines of his palm. The ditch, wasn’t that what they called a lifeline or something? Wasn’t there something about your lifeline, long or short? Stupid, but it was weird being down there.
And the funny thing was that with the goggles on, it was almost impossible to think of himself as anywhere other than down there. That reality immediately took precedence over the macro world. Burnofsky was all but forgotten.
Superimposed over the various visual fields was a menu, glowing radioactive orange.
One choice was 1x1.
Another was Platoon.
Replay.
And one labeled SRN Rep.
Billy said, “One by one probably means play them individually. Okay, and Platoon …” He twitched a finger, the button showed a flare, and suddenly all twenty-four visual fields began to align, all looking in the same direction like a well-disciplined army on parade. There were secondary options—he could choose how many platoons of what number. There were subroutines being suggested.
“What does SRN Rep”mean?” Billy asked.
“Ah,” Burnofsky said dreamily, “That’s the best part. It means replicate. But I doubt you’re up for that.”
And here’s the thing: Billy knew Burnofsky was provoking him. He knew the man wanted him to push SRN Rep.
He just didn’t know why. Billy the Kid, who was always being underestimated, assumed the old dude wanted to see him humiliate himself. Like he couldn’t handle whatever replicate meant.
He did not guess that the old man had just decided to obliterate all life on the planet.
“Probably shouldn’t …,” Burnofsky said, letting it hang there.
Billy pressed SRN Rep.
To escape the Crystal City Hyatt was not easy. Bug Man was not there alone. AmericaStrong security occupied the rooms on either side. AmericaStrong agents regularly rotated in and out of the lobby, keeping an unobtrusive but constant watch on who came and went. Bug Man was a big asset to the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.
They had of course bugged his room. And he had, of course, found those bugs, disabled all but one and looped that last bug into a program that simply replayed audio from TV shows.
Jessica had dressed up and looked stunning. Bug Man …Well, he had done what he could. He was never going to be George Clooney, or who was that other dude all the girls liked?
“Let’s go see some sights,” Bug Man said. He took her hand. She looked at his hand holding hers and frowned as if she was trying to remember something.
“Things are going to be a bit strange,” he said. “For a while, at least.”
“Strange?” She didn’t know what he meant, but she was unsettled.
Suddenly he felt doubt. He had almost convinced himself that nothing would change. She would still adore him, but maybe be just a bit less servile. A bit more honest.
Instead she was looking at him as if he presented a baffling mystery.
What am I doing with him?
“That’s okay, that’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” He was doing what he hadn’t had to do since about three days into wiring Jessica: he was placating.
And his nanobots were still inside her. If things got too weird . . .
He had long since planned a way to evade the watchful eyes of the AmericaStrong watchdogs. He knew where the passage was to the room-service elevators. It went down to the kitchen and beneath that to the laundry.
Ten minutes later he was outside, holding Jessica’s hand, wishing he had a warmer coat. It was a short walk to the Marriott, where they could get a cab without being spotted.
Bug Man felt wild. Like a kid skipping out on school. He felt free. Even the cold wind accentuated his sense of having escaped something. And if Jessica’s hand was a little less confident in his, well, that was all right too, because he would win her over. He would make her …no, scratch that …he would convince her to love him.
And the next time when she made love to him it would be real.
Minako lay in her bunk, staring up at the wire mesh overhead, and at the shoes of the man up there. The monster …It was what she had to call them, no compassion anymore, they were the monster! The monster had made her feel awful things.
One minute she had been terrified and the next she had begun laughing hysterically and the next she was crying, sobbing, tears running unchecked down the side of her face and into her ears.
The monster’s faces had laughed and sneered, and the smiling one had congratulated the other one on discovering this wonderful new game.
How many squares were formed by the wire mesh floor above her? Count and multiply. One, two, three, four, five, six. She counted to fifty, noted that the fifty-first square had a little smudge of green paint; that would make it easier for her to go back if she lost count.
Fifty-two, fifty-three . . . At some point they had reached her motor controls and had made her right leg twitch painfully.
“Look! Look at that!” Charles had exulted.
“Hah!” Benjamin had said. “Do it again!”
So Minako had sat there spasming, her leg squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing, a human puppet.
“Imagine what else we could do,” Benjamin said in a voice that made Minako’s flesh creep.
“Alas, we must return to the more important business of helping this girl to let go of her fear. She is in need of our help, yes?”
Benjamin didn’t answer. But the wild jerking stopped, and a while later the confused memories began to play out again.
There were one hundred and seventy-eight squares in the mesh along the longer axis. Now to count to shorter axis. One, two, three . . .
She had suddenly remembered her father, as a huge, moon-size face looking down at her in her crib. There was a mobile of blue-andgold birds beside him. She had not understood his words. She didn’t yet understand any words.
She had found herself scrubbing her hands in the bathroom sink while her mother called to her to hurry up. In those days the OCD had been all about hand washing. That symptom had lessened, thankfully, but had been replaced by counting.
She saw disjointed, irrelevant visual memories—sand, a leaf, the bars on her playpen, her best friend from fourth grade, Akiye.
She heard audio memories, like a corrupted download that skipped from snatches of conversation to the sound of the wind to a barking dog to something that scraped to something else that pulsed.
A heart. Not hers, but so close. Her mother’s heart, as she had heard it in her mother’s womb.
They were opening her up like a book and reading her. Not that they understood, not that they saw in detail, for their comments were more general.
“That seemed sad,” Benjamin would say, and his brother would say, “Mine felt angry.”
They were leeches attached to her emotions, feeling what she felt in some way that was both distant and intimate, like being groped by someone wearing thick gloves.
And then—
“Gah.” said Benjamin. “The little pig has wet herself.”
She had felt the truth of it. She had wanted to start crying, but she had never really stopped.
“Disgusting. I can’t go on, not until she’s cleaned up. KimKim ta
ke her back to her lodge,” Charles had said.
“I need a rest anyway,” Benjamin agreed. “Min! I’ll have a cocktail. I’ve earned it, eh?”
KimKim had hauled Minako, shamed and defiled, back to the lodge. “Take a shower. Change clothes,” he’d said harshly.
And now she lay counting the squares in the mesh and hoping against hope that when she multiplied the two sides she would get a lovely, beautiful number.
TWENTY
They danced.
Anthony Elder and Jessica …He had forgotten her last name.
How had he forgotten her last name?
They danced in a club where two hundred dollars and a plausible fake ID did the trick. There were advantages to being the AFGC
golden boy.
They danced on a parquet floor crowded with twentysomething
white guys in suits, their ties loosened and sweat matting their conservatively cut hair. They danced amid women in sexy-mannish
business suits who wore moderate, serious-lawyer heels and threw
their hair around a lot.
The music was pretty weak, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
They were dancing, a dude and his girl. His girl who blew away every
other female in the room.
That last part, the part about walking around with a stunning
beauty, he’d almost become used to that. The looks. From the guys,
from the women, the looks that said, Man, you are so not in that girl’s league. But now it was different. He was still not in her league, but
now she was free, and every moment she spent with him . . . “Having fun?” he yelled into her ear, straining to be heard over
the music.
“Uh-huh.”
“Really?”
He heard the insecurity in his own voice. He sounded needy.
Then she smiled, and it was a different smile. No one else would
notice, but he did. She was flushed with pleasure. Her eyes, her amazing eyes, were bright, and they watched him.
Gratitude. That’s what he felt. How strange. Gratitude. Like he
wanted to thank God up in heaven.
It was real. That was the thing: it was real.
The dream came back to her as she danced.
Buried up to her neck.
Napalm in her veins.
She hummed along with the music, which was really all beat
and not much melody. She looked past Anthony. There was a muscular man, black, maybe twenty-five, a gym rat, biceps stretching his leather jacket. He was checking her out. Nothing new there, they all did, but this one, this man, had something different happening. His gaze was professionally observant. He wasn’t just looking at her face, her breasts, her legs, although he was certainly doing that. He was watching more closely. Sober. Thoughtful.
Suspicious. That’s what he was: suspicious. When he glanced at Anthony, there was shrewd suspicion there.
So Jessica watched him back. It became a mutual thing. And then he did something casual but deliberate. He twisted on his barstool and let his jacket fall open. He had a holster and a gun on his hip, not showy, professional.
He was a cop. Some kind of cop anyway.
Jessica disengaged from Anthony.
He turned when he saw her walking away. He followed her as she walked—not sure why, not sure what she was planning—to the muscular man in the leather jacket.
“Hi,” Jessica said.
“Hey,” Anthony said. “Get back here.”
The man said, “Hello.” To Jessica, not to Anthony.
“Jessica, get your ass back out there with me,” Anthony snapped. “I brought you here because you begged me.”
“I like the name Jessica,” the man said.
“Yeah, well, she belongs to me,” Anthony said, and grabbed her arm.
The napalm in her veins caught fire. Suddenly it was as if all of her was burning, burning away the soil that held her trapped. She spun and delivered a stinging backhand to Anthony’s face.
The big man moved with trained speed. He stepped between them, said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s take it easy, right?”
Anthony, though, was not prepared to take it easy. “Fuck off, she’s mine.”
And that’s when Jessica lost it completely. What happened next she would never be able to recall in detail. All she remembered was fists and kicks and screams of rage, and all of it coming from her.
Somehow she ended up out on the street in the cold night air. The man set her down, held her out at arm’s length, and said, “Okay now, relax, ma’am.”
The “ma’am” was as much a giveaway as the gun. Regular people did not call teenage girls “ma’am,” that was cop-speak.
“Take it easy, he’s gone,” the man said. “You’re safe.”
The rage was cooling, but the memory of that sudden explosion filled Jessica with a different warmth. She was sweating and shivering all at once. “Who are you?”
And out came the badge. “Agent DeShawn Franklin, Secret Service.”
She was nonplussed. “Secret Service. Then …You know? About Anthony?”
“Is that your boyfriend in there?”
“He’s not …He’s my …I . . .”
“Take a breath. It’s okay. You’re safe. What is it you think I know?” He made a wry but wary grin. “Look, if you’re holding drugs, that’s not my thing to worry about. Secret Service, not DEA.”
“You take care of the president.”
“That’s one of the things we do, ma’am. Jessica. You want to tell me something, I can see that.”
“Anthony,” she began, then glanced over her shoulder as if expecting him to be behind her. He was nowhere to be seen. “Anthony, I think he did something to me. And I think he’s doing it to the president, too.”
“Plath,” Keats said.
“Sadie. Sadie and Noah. Let’s try that.”
“Sadie.”
They had found a place: the stunted bell tower. The stairs leading up were narrow and rickety, and they’d had to bow their heads and press steadying hands against the wall as they climbed up. But at the top there was still a bell, an actual, old-fashioned bell maybe a foot across at the base. It had not been rung in a very longtime , and spiders had taken it over as an arachnid condo.
The space around the bell was cramped but swept relatively clean by breezes blowing through the low, open windows. They could at least stand upright, and a series of tiny horizontal ventilation slats gave them a sort of film noir view of the world outside.
It was cold. They could each see the other’s breath. A small slice of the brilliantly lit Capitol Dome was visible, but it looked cold, too. “You know what I wish?” Noah asked. “I wished I smoked cigarettes. It would be lovely to stand up here and sort of contemplatively smoke a cigarette.”
“Contemplatively?” “Of course I imagine a cancerous lung must be a hell of a thing to see down in the nano.”
“All things considered I’m not so worried about cancer.”
“ No?”
“Normal people are worried about cancer.”
“And that’s not us?”
She forced a short laugh, wanting to acknowledge the weak attempt at humor. “Do you think either of us ever was? Normal?”
“I was,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me about normal.”
“What me? Well, Miss McLure . . .”
“Ms,” she corrected.
“Really? All right then, Ms McLure. Here’s my normal. Up early. It’s cold in the flat because the radiator in my room doesn’t work very well, and if I want to be warm then my mum’s room has to be the Sahara.”
“Can’t you get it fixed?”
“Well, yes, normally I’d ring for the butler—”
“Don’t start,” she snapped.
“Why are you so touchy about being rich?”
“Because I want to be loved fo
r myself.” She said it lightly, a tossoff, as a joke.
“I didn’t think you wanted to be loved at all,” he said.
“Ah. Well, there’s a difference between wanting to be in love and wanting to be loved.” She shivered. “I’m freezing.”
“Shall we go down?”
She shot him a look from beneath lowered eyelids. “How do you not recognize a cue to offer me some warmth?”
He put his arm around her.
“Still cold,” she said.
He took her in his arms. She put her arms around his waist and pressed against him, the side of her face flattened against his chest. She breathed deeply. She felt her breasts flattening against his abdomen.
He was breathing in her hair.
“So it’s cold in your room,” she prompted.
“Sorry?”
“You were telling me about normal.”
“Was I? Sorry, I was busy thinking about football. Desperately thinking about football. Remembering all the details of a particular match . . .”
“Mmm,” she said. “You like sports?”
“Yes. I find sport to be an excellent distraction.”
“From?”
But she had lost interest in banter, really, and he didn’t bother to answer. Instead he ran his fingers through her hair and pulled her close for a kiss.
Her heart wasn’t in it. She was distracted.
“What?” he asked.
“Keats …Noah …Those beaches we were talking about. What if it was possible? I mean, what if I had a way to—”
A scream.
Keats and Plath froze. “That’s not Vincent,” she said.
“Billy!”
They bolted for the stairs.
Billy saw the palm of his own hand as an unworldly terrain, gently rolling hills crossed by an irrational crosshatch of ditches, some shallow enough that his nanobots could step over them easily, others deep enough to hide a nanobot from view.
He experimented by closing his hand slowly. The land curved up around his nanobots. It lifted him at the same time as it began to shut out the strong light. Fingers …They looked so huge! Like someone had made sausages the size of Metro trains. They were even segmented like a train, each section of finger like a car. They came together as they closed, blocking light, creating deep canyons in the sky. The surface was again covered in slashes, left right, diagonal, in every direction. It looked like some arcane script, like writing in a language he could never hope to understand.
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