They saw it and felt it at the same time. Saw Wilkes accidentally drop the dog’s collar. And felt in their biot legs the sudden lurch as the beast went tearing across the grass.
And then.
“Fuck!” Plath yelled, not because of anything up in the normal world.
A huge, armor-plated monster, as big as an elephant, had just dropped out of the sky.
“Jesus!” Keats echoed at the same instant.
It rested on four articulated legs although it may have had more. It was a dinosaur, a clanking science-fiction monster, a nightmare. The hind legs vibrated with pent-up energy.
It was narrow, as though it came presquashed. Like a football with most of the air let out. The body seemed made of armor plates with rapier-like hairs directed toward the rear. The head was the true nightmare: a helmet with two blank, science-fiction visor eyes that did not turn or look or even seem to notice the biots that must have been themselves no bigger than dogs to the towering, mighty, indestructible flea.
It was impossible to believe the sense of energy contained within that prehistoric monster. It made the biots vibrate.
It was, in every way, the physical embodiment of something evil.
“It won’t bother us,” Keats said. “Just … just … oh, my God!”
The German shepherd hurtled toward the clueless beagle.
The flea knelt down as if in some pagan prayer, until its mouthparts touched the dog’s flesh. And then, like bent, distorted scimitars, began sawing—not stabbing but sawing—into dog flesh.
“Don’t look at it,” Plath said, not following her own advice because the lovey-dovey act up in the macro could not be sustained while their biots were in the shadow of this grotesque, quivering thing.
“We need to be ready,” Keats said. “We’ll only have a few seconds.”
And then the blood began to flow. Tiny red cough drops oozed from the hole the flea had made. It was a slow geyser of red marbles, red Frisbees, red that should be a liquid but seemed more like wet gravel as the flea sucked it up, and it was almost impossible to look away or to prepare for the fact that—
Impact!
The German shepherd hit the beagle like a ton of bricks.
“Now, now, now!” Plath cried, and she would have been seen and heard by the TFDs except that they suddenly had a dog fight on their hands.
The German shepherd’s huge mouth clamped onto the rolling, howling, terrified beagle, and the flea was almost forgotten as the impact jolted the four biots.
“Go, go, go, go!” Plath said, and her two biots, with Keats’s right behind, raced toward the gumline, which had been a sort of ashen ridge just beyond the edge of the forest of fur and was now something apocalyptic. The black gums writhed madly, as if they were watching a magma field in a terrible earthquake.
And that ridge of flesh was now shoved into a whole hair planet, a writhing hallucination of close-packed hair and huge comets of saliva, and then, for no reason, the flea leapt! It flew up and out of sight with such incredible speed that it was if it had been shot out of a cannon.
“Jump!” Plath urged.
They jumped.
But to their shock, gravity wasn’t where they thought it would be. The German shepherd had rolled the beagle all the way over, and the biots were falling but the ground was rolling around them, a twisting madness of slobber and dog lips and hair, and suddenly they landed, grabbed desperately, falling through hair like skydiving without a parachute into the rain forest.
Wilkes was running to retrieve her dog.
The dogs separated for a split second and BAM!
The gunshot was loud, too loud for a public park, and the German shepherd squealed and stumbled and the beagle cowered and Wilkes screamed as a good dog owner would when someone’s just shot her dog.
“What did you do? What did you do?” she screamed, and rushed to the dying animal.
One of the TFDs pulled out a wallet, peeled off a couple of bills, and let them drop on the dead dog. Another gathered up the beagle, and all together they beat a hasty retreat.
It was not until then that Plath and Keats were sure they were on the right dog.
Like any two concerned passersby might, they trotted over to Wilkes even as they ran their biots fearfully into the beagle’s fur.
“You okay?” Keats asked Wilkes.
She held up two one-hundred-dollar bills. “I’m fine. But Hitler Hound here is looking a bit out of it.”
“Hitler Hound?” Keats asked.
Wilkes shrugged. “It seemed like a good name for him. I’m sorry for him, but damn, he was a crazy-ass dog. He tried to bite me. And C-notes are always welcome.”
Plath was disgusted. “Yeah, you can get something else tattooed.”
“Drop dead, sweetie,” Wilkes said with a derisive look. “I don’t happen to be a billionaire. And you two need to start walking toward the AFGC building. You don’t want to be out of range.”
They left Wilkes to deal with the dead animal and walked the block and a half to the Starbucks nearest the AFGC building.
“Do you see that?” Plath asked as they sat with lattes and muffins.
“What?”
“It’s a bite. Where the other dog … I think you’re too far away, I don’t see you, but it’s almost … awe-inspiring. The flesh, it’s like it was peeled back. Like the edge of a meteor crater or something. The hairs are all twisted. There are pools of spit, I guess that’s what it is. And things swimming in the spit. And the blood … it’s, I …”
She was looking straight at him, but beyond him, too, and he was likewise looking through her and seeing not the wound but what looked like a far-distant mountain that he hoped was the beagle’s nose.
“We probably shouldn’t be talking. It sounds crazy,” Keats said.
“This is New York. Crazy doesn’t draw much attention. I need to get away from the wound. They’ll dump disinfectant all over it.”
She sipped her coffee. “What if I can’t find you? It’s like looking for someone in a hundred acres of woods.”
“Just remember the hair points to the back end of the dog. We want the front.”
Keats sent one of his biots to thread its way, like a monkey going hand over hand, up through the flattened hair, up into the light.
Biots did not have long-distance vision. At least not what would pass for long distance in the macro. They could see distant patterns of light and dark and some limited color, but not the detail of a face.
What Keats could see from his fur-top perch was an endless, undulating sea of fur, each individual hair clearly visible within the immediate circle but with distance turning spiny, horizontal hairs into a smear of brown and white. Twisting his biot around, he could form the picture—through insect and humanoid eyes—of a promontory, a peninsula, that ended in a massive black rock the size of Mount Rushmore.
The nose.
Their target.
“I’m on the head,” Keats said across the table. “I can see the wound. It looks like something plowed through the fur. If you can see the wound, you’re not far from where I am. Just walk against the direction of the fur.”
He looked up, into what felt to him like the sky. What he saw was a pale green cloud, larger than any object he had ever seen in real life. And it seemed to wrap itself around the forest of fur, but in one place ceased to be green and became a brown color. It enveloped the entire horizon.
“I think we’re being carried by the black one. The black TFD in the green shirt,” Keats said. “I can’t really see. Just shapes and colors. It doesn’t make much sense.”
Sounds were too large somehow to make much sense of, either. Like earthquake rumblings, but too confused to decipher.
Then, a single sound, audible to both of them. Like a gong being struck way off in orbit.
“Elevator?” Plath wondered.
“Maybe.”
Far-off thunder that might have been voices. But the sound waves vibrating up from human throats wer
e too big to be decipherable by biots not specifically equipped.
“Your first biots are basic models,” Vincent had explained. “Fully capable in battle, fully capable for spinning wire. But there are tweaks and add-ons—both biological and technological—that come later. Each time we add a level of capability, we add a layer of complexity. At first, you want to keep it simple.”
And they’d been grateful for that, because “simple” was all the complexity they could handle.
And yet now they both really wished they had every conceivable upgrade.
They would have to operate on instinct. They would have to guess when some giant hand belonged to the Armstrong Twins.
If they guessed wrong, they could end up anywhere.
“How do we take our biots back?” Keats asked.
“You’re just thinking of this now?” Plath asked him as she swirled the cup to mix foam and coffee.
“If we can’t recover them …” It was a question.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“It’s too late to stop now.”
“Do you feel that? Vibration?”
“Maybe his tail is wagging,” Keats suggested.
“Do you really think we lose our sanity if …”
“I’ve seen it.”
“That’s a new shape,” Plath said.
“Yeah.”
“Is it him? Them?”
“Might just be a vet.” Keats closed his eyes, trying to focus. “I see fingers.”
“Someone is staring at us.”
It took Keats a moment to figure out what version of reality Plath was talking about. His eyes popped open. “Who?”
“Girl at the counter. Picking up a drink. The creepy one with the fake teeth. The one who looks like a shark,” Plath said.
“Just ignore her, she’s just—”
“No,” Plath said. Her eyes were narrowed. It was like a beam of energy connected her to the girl. “She’s texting someone. Let’s get out of here.”
Plath stood up, and Keats jumped to follow her.
Then the girl with the shark teeth turned toward them, too fast, too predatory. Too knowing.
Too determined.
She reached for Plath.
The girl, who called herself One-Up, just wanted to touch them.
TWENTY-FOUR
Wilkes was already arriving at the UN. She had a prepurchased ticket for the tour—good thing, there was a crowd waiting. Mostly they were school kids, a happily rambunctious bunch of middle schoolers from some school in Harlem that favored maroon uniforms. And there were tourists, and thankfully there was Ophelia.
“How did it go?”
“I made two hundred bucks,” Wilkes said. She tried to pull off a swagger, but it didn’t go anywhere.
“This is the last tour group before they shut the place down for security,” Ophelia. “You barely made it.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Wilkes said. “Vincent has it all planned out.”
“I have a lot of faith in Vincent,” Ophelia said. “But he’s not perfect.”
Wilkes laughed. “How come you never show anyone else but me this gloomy side of your personality?”
Ophelia didn’t answer, just made a slight harrumphing sound and then shared one of her resigned-looking smiles.
They moved through the main lobby like obedient tourist sheep, threading through an art display of children’s pictures of some terrible conflict. Wilkes hadn’t kept up on current terrible conflicts, having enough to keep her busy with her own. But the pictures were not encouraging. They did not exactly counter her sense of impending doom.
She looked up at soaring windows, at old Sputnik hanging there like a misplaced Christmas-tree ball. She had done a report on Sputnik. When was that? Fourth grade?
She saw a memory image of herself carrying her threefold cardboard display into class, setting it up, trying to act cool even then. But also feeling it would be nice if she got an A.
How had all that been just one life? How could she have ever been that little girl?
“You ever hit on Vincent?” Wilkes asked.
“I don’t hit on boys,” Ophelia said with an edge of disapproval.
At the security line they emptied their pockets into the tray and passed their purses through the scanner. Scanners did not detect the presence of biots.
The trick was to look entirely normal and average, something that was easier for Ophelia than Wilkes.
They saw the famous Chagall stained glass, a beautiful blue full of floating images of peace. Angels or whatever they were.
They saw the General Assembly room, a surprisingly intimate space, despite the fact that it was supposed to be a gathering place for the entire world. It reminded Wilkes of the planetarium her class had visited in what, eighth grade? Is that where she had let Arkady touch her boob?
And they followed meekly along when it was time to go downstairs to the bathrooms, the special UN post office, the café, and the gift shop.
They moved away from the group then. It was safe to do so now.
They sat together eating veggie burritos UN style—not very good, really—and drinking coffee and getting their nerve up.
The gift shop was just next door. It was not called Armstrong Fancy Gifts—unlike the ones in airports—it was just called the UN Gift Shop. Very imaginative. But it had the trademark AFGC products: supposedly homemade cookies in cellophane twists, the books selection that included a prominent display of the bestseller Nexus Humanus: The Next Step in Human Evolution, and the clever, throwaway handheld games that sold for three dollars and included accelerometers and multiplay and inline upgrades that made them the cheap impulse equivalent of expensive pads.
“So a lousy burrito is my final meal,” Wilkes said.
Ophelia looked at her, serious. They didn’t talk often, the two of them. Wilkes was more or less the diametric opposite of the graceful, reserved Ophelia.
“Are you afraid, Wilkes?”
“Hell yes, I’m afraid,” Wilkes said, talking around melted cheese and a dropped bean. “You know what’s weird, though. I’m afraid of never getting down in the meat again. That is weird, right?”
“You like it down there?”
“Better than up here sometimes,” Wilkes said. “Are we bonding like true BZRK sisters?”
Ophelia put her fork down and pushed her food away. “I don’t seem to have much appetite.”
“Hey, the condemned person is supposed to have a choice of meal. Right? Like guys on death row? They always order a steak.”
“I don’t think they grill steaks here.”
The light, that’s what was so desperate about the scene. The glaring fluorescent light that turned their flesh to some color between bathroom grout and paper pulp. And the wobbly round tables and the terminally bored cafeteria workers.
A hell of a place to get your nerve up for a suicide mission.
“I always wanted to go to one of those fancy steak places,” Wilkes said. “It’s not about loving the steak all that much. It’s just you see those places in movies, and you think, wow, that must be kind of cool—to be one of those people who don’t really give a damn about anything but a fat, juicy steak. Maybe a martini, even, you know. Or those other ones? I forget their name?”
“Margaritas?”
“No, I know margaritas,” Wilkes said, suddenly cranky.
Ophelia smiled tolerantly. “I don’t eat meat. But I would join you in a margarita.”
“You’re a vegetarian? I tried that for a while. It didn’t take. Is it a Hindu thing?”
Ophelia shrugged. “For some of us. For me it’s more of a health thing. Also my parents are vegetarians. I don’t want to disappoint them.”
“Me, I worry I’ll disappoint Vincent. That’s stupid, isn’t it? Why the hell should I care? He’s not offering me heaven and a bunch of hot guy virgins, or whatever. That’s what you guys get in heaven, right?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
>
“I would remember that. I’m Hindu: we just get reborn. Although I think I like your idea better.”
“A couple girls, too, maybe, just because life is short and try everything, right?”
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