BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  Plath’s biots waited as Keats’s army emerged.

  He wanted to ask her whether any hydras had come this way, but he wasn’t all the way back yet, words still …Instead, one of his biots made a gesture, sweeping a claw around the crater.

  “Three came back this way,” Plath said up in the macro. “I got them. Take the goggles off, Keats. Do you hear me?”

  Still Keats didn’t speak, but a hand went up to his head and peeled them off.

  His eyes moved slowly to focus on her. Then he looked down at his hand, where the goggles lay. She took them from him and he did not protest.

  Wilkes pointed a finger at Keats, looked at Plath, and in a voice that was half awed, half laughing, said, “Your boyfriend here is a son of a bitch down in the meat. I mean, damn!” She nodded her head fast, “Oh yeah, honey, game. Game! He got them all, I maybe got a dozen; he didn’t leave me any, he got them all.”

  “Nonsense,” Burnofsky said. But his voice lacked any confidence. He was going through the motions, trying not to sound defeated.

  “The replicants are easy to kill,” Plath said. “They aren’t controlled, they’re just programmed, and they can’t defend themselves. Even the factory models were helpless without a twitcher.”

  She looked from the stunned Keats to the feral Wilkes; from Nijinsky to Burnofsky. “Your big secret weapon can be killed, Burnofsky.”

  “Once they’re in their millions you’ll never stop them! You won’t even find them until it’s too late!”

  Plath stood up. Her joints cracked from the tension. “Jin, what are we doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that call. From the office building. You know who it is, or at least who it probably is.”

  “It’s probably a big building. It’s getting light out….”

  Plath stared at him. Was he looking for an excuse to do nothing?

  She looked around the gloomy church. In the far corner sat Vincent with Anya. Vincent actually seemed to return her gaze, almost as if he knew her.

  She reached and touched Keats’s cheek. He looked up at her, but he did not speak. He was shattered, for now at least. He had not lost any biots, but he had just played and won a game no human should have been able to play. He and Vincent, both lost for different reasons in the same war, both, she hoped, coming home again.

  She looked at Nijinsky, who had not been the same since arriving in Washington. He refused to meet her gaze.

  Three broken men. And Billy, who was holding the tail of his shirt to the small hole in his face.

  Burnofsky’s phone rang again, again the same number. Someone was desperate.

  “We have to go after Bug Man,” Plath said. “It’s why we came here.”

  “Enough for now,” Nijinsky said. “I’ll update Lear. He’ll—”

  “I’m curious about something, Jin,” Plath said.

  “Yes?”

  “Earlier, when we were going after the hydras, before Keats just… well, did whatever he just did. Wilkes jumped in with her biots, you didn’t. Why?”

  “I would have.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Are you calling me a coward? I set off a bomb, Plath. I just killed a bunch of men tonight. Are you calling me a coward? I’m not the one who didn’t have the courage to take out the Armstrong Twins!”

  Plath recoiled. There it was, out in the open.

  Nijinsky was shrill, over-the-top outraged. Too much to be real. “The only reason this whole thing isn’t over is because you didn’t step up when you had the chance, Plath!”

  “Oh, tensions mount,” Burnofsky taunted.

  To Plath’s surprise, Wilkes spoke up. “Because she’s a normal kid, Jin, and normal people don’t like killing. How did you like it?”

  Nijinsky blinked. “She can’t just call me a coward,” he said weakly.

  “I’m not doing that,” Plath said. “I’m saying why didn’t you volunteer to throw your biots into it? Because I have an idea why.”

  Nijinsky swallowed. He was breathing heavily. He started to say something but stopped.

  “I think you couldn’t do anything, Jin, because it would mean revealing where your biots were,” Plath said.

  Wilkes was looking hard at Nijinsky. “Where were they?” she asked. When he failed to answer, she turned to Plath. “Where were they?”

  “Where they still are. In me,” Plath said. “Wiring me.”

  Keats was remembering a scene from one of the Bourne movies, Jason Bourne so far down underwater that it seemed impossible that he would ever reach the surface. That’s how he felt, but instead of water it was blood and skin and he had to claw his way back to daylight.

  He’d done that, actually, yeah. His biots and the nanobots were all up and out but his mind was not yet breathing fresh air. He wondered in some abstract way if he had done permanent damage to his brain. It was confusing. It was mad. It was impossible. The human brain created only one person, one self, and yet somehow he was no longer singular but multiple. Multiple Noah Cottons had played the game and hunted the hydras.

  Now he needed to fold all of that back into a single person again, reassemble himself from component bits. Multiple personalities? Was that it? No, multiple functionalities.

  Then—and goddamn, there should have been some kind of cool sound effect for it—suddenly all the parts snapped back together and he said, “Ah!” really loud.

  Then, “Ah-ah-ah, oh, hell, ah-ah!”

  He jerked up from his seat and hugged himself with his arms, paced three steps left, sudden turn, three steps back, rubbing his head hard making an even bigger mess of his hair.

  Every eye was on him. And now he was self-conscious and feeling as if he’d been very inappropriate. He was embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” he said. Then, seeing that they were still staring, he added, “Kind of a rush. Hah! Kind of bloody amazing.”

  “Are you all right?” Wilkes asked, less mocking than usual.

  “Aside from being taken apart like I was made out of Lego and then put back together? I think I’m all right.” Then, sensing that he’d missed something, he said, “What?”

  “We were just discussing why Nijinsky didn’t want to bring out his biots,” Wilkes said with a significant look at Plath.

  Keats’s memory provided the last minutes of conversation. His face darkened. “You wired Plath?”

  “I’m in charge while Vin—”

  Keats hit him, a looping, somewhat inaccurate right that caught Nijinsky on the jaw, snapped his head back and elicited a loud, “Ow! What the hell?”

  “I think our boy here may not have all his Legos back in place just yet,” Wilkes said.

  “You wired one of us?” Keats yelled, ignoring Wilkes. “You wired Plath? To do what? What did you do to her?”

  He was advancing with unmistakable menace on Nijinsky. Nijinsky stood his ground until Keats was almost nose to nose.

  Nijinsky didn’t answer. So Plath did. “He’s been ensuring my loyalty. Isn’t that it, Jin?”

  “Nothing that wasn’t already there,” Nijinsky said. “I …strengthened your existing attachments. You would have felt it all eventually. We don’t have time for eventually.”

  “Attachments?” Keats whispered menacingly. “To?”

  Nijinsky’s recovered, belligerent look said it all.

  “You bastard,” Keats said. “You made her care for me.”

  It was Burnofsky who said, “Soldiers don’t fight for king and country. They fight for each other. They fight for the poor deluded, trapped bastard in the next foxhole.”

  Nijinsky didn’t argue. He just said, “Vincent was out. Lear laid it on me to be the right man. He laid it on me.”

  “Vincent swore to me he would never wire me or any of us,” Plath said. “He said if we ever discovered it, it would destroy our trust in him and he’d be worth nothing as a leader after that.”

  Nijinsky moved back a step, almost like he’d been shoved.

 
; “And you know what, Jin? He was right.”

  “Yeah, well I’m what you’ve got for a leader,” Nijinsky snapped. “I may not be the right person, but I’m it.”

  “Nah, I don’t think so,” Wilkes said. “I don’t think so. I like you, Jin, but dude, I’m not taking orders from you anymore.”

  There followed a long silence. Finally, almost sobbing with something that seemed strangely like relief, like a massive weight had been lifted from his shoulders, Nijinsky said, “Yeah? Well, who else then?”

  Wilkes jerked her thumb. “The rich bitch, here.”

  Plath felt the blood drain from her face. “What?”

  Keats said, “She’s right, Sadie. You know she’s right.”

  “You’re a better twitcher than I am,” Plath pleaded.

  “Yeah. But I saw the way you handled Thrum and Jellicoe. I saw how you called out Caligula. I also, by the way, saw you slip a note to Stern. You have the money; you have your own private army. More important, you’re a natural. Like I am down in the meat you are up in the macro. Until Vincent gets all the way back to us, you’re it.”

  “Yeah, what pretty boy blue eyes said,” Wilkes said.

  “But I’m too young for this,” Plath pleaded.

  “So was Alexander the Great.” To everyone’s surprise, this came from Anya, who had walked Vincent over to join them. Vincent was calm and quiet, but he was still not with them. “So was Joan of Arc.”

  “David killed Goliath and cut off his head when he was just a kid,” Wilkes said. “What? Why the looks? I’ve read the Bible. It’s mostly slaying and screwing.”

  Plath felt like someone was squeezing her heart inside her chest.

  Nijinsky breathed in like he was taking his first breath in five minutes. “Huh,” he said. And then, a smile spread across his face, showing perfect teeth, and he laughed. “Lear was right. I’m the wrong person.”

  “What’s your vote, Burnofsky?” Wilkes asked him. “Who worries you more? Handsome Jin or Freckles McMoneybags here?”

  Burnofsky said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, Sadie, but you’re it,” Keats said.

  Was there a part of Plath that was flattered? Yes. Was there a larger part that was horrified? That, too.

  “Okay,” Plath said. “Until Vincent is back. Only until then. And I hope that’s soon.”

  “Yes,” Nijinsky said, but not in a resentful way. He looked too relieved. He was having a hard time not jumping up and down. He was like a condemned man who just got the right telephone call from the governor.

  “Okay, then, two things,” Plath said. “First, Anya, are you with us? Not as a prisoner or whatever, but as one of us?”

  “I’m with Vincent,” she said. “Which means I am with you, too.”

  Plath nodded. “Billy? We can get you away from all this to somewhere safe. I can arrange that.”

  Billy shook his head. “No, ma’am. I’m good. I can help.”

  “Okay then,” Plath said. “We’re going to hold on to Burnofsky, and we’re going to turn him. We’re going to take Bug Man and do the same. And then we’re going to unwire the president and stop the Twins and . . .” She stopped herself there.

  Wilkes laughed her heh-heh-heh laugh. “She was going to say, ‘and save the world.’”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The sun was up, and Bug Man was scared.

  He had tried seven times to call Burnofsky.

  Then he had called Jindal. He hadn’t told Jindal anything, just

  that he had to talk to the Twins. Jindal said they were traveling and unreachable. He insisted on knowing what was going on. “Burnofsky never showed up,” Bug Man said. No other detail, just that. That was enough. Jindal told him to hold while he tried to call Burnofsky, and then texted Burnofsky when he got no answer. Then Jindal tried to use the phone locator app. It showed Burnofsky’s GPS had been turned off.

  “Where are you?” Jindal asked Bug Man. He was sounding desperate, and part of Bug Man thought, Welcome to my world.

  “I’m at the office,” Bug Man said.

  “Then you have to …I . . .” Jindal said. “Okay, keep working on the president. Just, you know, keep working.”

  Bug Man tried not to reveal his relief. “Are you ordering me to keep working on POTUS, because it looks like you’re in charge, Jindal.” “Yes. Yes, just keep doing that.”

  Bug Man hung up the phone, his mind racing. Okay, so, he was doing what Jindal ordered him to do. That was his defense: Burnofsky had gone off on some epic drunk or whatever, so Bug Man had called Jindal, and at that point, it was all on Jindal.

  Maybe Burnofsky was dead. That would leave the Twins even more dependent on Bug Man. That was a happy thought.

  Out in the hallway he heard something. He strained to hear, then relaxed. A vacuum cleaner. Just the cleaning crew. He made sure the door lock was set.

  Okay. Back to the game. That would get his mind straight.

  He settled into the twitcher chair.

  The vacuum cleaner was closer. Someone was slipping a key into the lock! Bug Man bolted from the chair and raced to the door just as it opened.

  He pushed against the door but the damned vacuum cleaner blocked it. Behind the vacuum cleaner was a girl who looked too young to be working a cleaning crew. She had a weird tattoo under her eye. She also had headphones in and was obviously listening to loud music as she vacuumed and didn’t even notice Bug Man as he blocked the door until her vacuum cleaner banged into his foot.

  Then she looked up and seemed puzzled.

  “Go away,” Bug Man said, not quite yelling but speaking loudly enough for her to hear over her music.

  The cleaning woman sighed and removed one earbud. “Qué?” “Don’t come in here,” Bug Man said.

  The cleaning woman turned off her vacuum cleaner. It was suddenly quiet. “Tengo que limpiar aquí. I am …I am must cleaning.”

  “No, you don’t,” Bug Man said. “No, um, no necessitatay. Whatever. No.”

  “Is my tío, my, in English my sister? No, no, my uncle! Is my uncle his job. He be anger me.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about your uncle being anger you!” Bug Man yelled. He reached through the gap and tried to push her vacuum away. Her hand shot out and caught him around the wrist.

  “Please no break el aspiradora!” Wilkes said, and was incredibly pleased with herself for dredging up the Spanish word for vacuum cleaner. Who knew ninth-grade Spanish would be useful someday?

  “I’m not going to break anything,” Bug Man said heatedly. “Unless you keep from closing this damn door.”

  “Chinga tu madre!” Wilkes snapped, and gave him the finger.

  He closed the door. He locked it. And for good measure he manhandled a large potted fern over to block it.

  Then he sat down at his twitcher station, breathed deep, and never even considered that three biots— two of Vincent’s originals and one new fourth-generation version—were racing from his wrist up his forearm.

  Nijinsky was left behind with Billy and Burnofsky.

  “What do you think, kid?” Nijinsky asked him. “We don’t have time to build you a biot right now, but we happen to have a whole bunch of unused nanobots. Want to see the inside of a degenerate murderer’s brain?”

  Billy picked up the goggles and the glove.

  “The first thing you need if you’re wiring someone is a plan,” Nijinsky said. He poured himself a short shot from the vodka bottle. “A plan?”

  “Yeah,” Nijinsky said, and threw the shot down his throat. “What

  is it we want to do to Mr Burnofsky here? We want him to change his mind. We want him to change sides. We want betrayal from Mr Burnofsky.”

  Billy shrugged.

  “We have here a drug addict, a drunk. Hates himself, you know. Isn’t that right, Burnofsky?”

  “You’re too weak to lead but tough enough to take on a helpless

  old man,” Burnofsky said.

  Nijinsky nodded. “Yeah, that’s about rig
ht. I would never have had

  the strength to murder my own daughter on orders from some freaks.

  Yeah, that’s strength, right? And then rather than own what you’ve done

  and who you are, you decide it’s time to kill everyone in the world.” Nijinsky touched a finger to Burnofsky’s eye. Billy gasped as

  through nanobot eyes he saw his first biot. Nijinsky translated into

  biot was not nearly as handsome.

  “Ever hear of the nucleus accumbens, Billy?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well, some people call it the pleasure center. That’s a bit simplis

  tic, but it’s not far wrong.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So, here’s my idea,” Nijinsky said. “We reverse things. See, now

  every time he thinks about what he did, he feels self-loathing. He

  hates himself for it. So he self-medicates and then he turns it all outward into hatred. So we change that.”

  Nijinsky leaned close to Burnofsky and said, “What do you think

  of that?”

  Burnofsky said, “Complicated. You have to locate the memory.

  Then you have to do what? Connect it to all my better angels? Or just

  burn the memory out?”

  “Yeah, I could do that, thanks to my spiffy new four point oh. But

  Plath nearly fried herself playing with acid down inside Vincent. So I

  think I’ll stick to good old-fashioned wire.”

  “Maybe you could make me queer,” Burnofsky spat. Nijinsky shook his head. “We’re not recruiting. No, I think I have

  a simpler approach: I think I’ll find that memory, the one that tortures you so badly, and I’m going to wire it to your accumbens.” Burnofsky had nothing to say.

  “So you’ll remember it, you’ll remember killing her. And when

  you do, you’ll experience deep, intense pleasure.”

  “No.” Burnofsky shook his head.

  “The emotional need for drugs will diminish, you won’t be selfmedicating anymore. You won’t need to. The rewiring will alter your entire motivational structure. That murder will become your greatest

  source of joy.

  “No,” Burnofsky said. He shook his head violently. “No. No!” “Kind of interesting, isn’t it?” Nijinsky said. “Grey McLure