“Never,” Sadie managed to whisper. Then finding her voice, she said with more force. “Never.”
Charles smiled. “Soon many of the world’s most powerful leaders will join our cause. Do you imagine that you will resist? No, no, little girl, we’ll manage to change the way you think about things.”
An almost imperceptible nod from Keats.
Deep inside Benjamin’s brain, P1 and P2 held their last pins.
Plath stabbed deep with the first pin.
Benjamin’s whole body shuddered. He cried out, “No, Charles! No! No! Stop it!”
Charles looked as if he’d been the one stabbed. His eye widened, and his brow shot up.
On the screen a biot was being dismembered.
Plath played out the last of her wire, ran with it and the final pin. Her biots leapt across wires already laid, and each time they did the new filament touched and signals flew and Benjamin cried out, “I’m pushing as hard as I can, as hard as I can, he’s still breathing!”
“Someone silence him!” Charles demanded. “Ms. Lebowski, you silence my brother!”
The wire played out. The spinnerets failed. Plath wrapped the frayed end around the final pin.
“Die old man! Die!” Benjamin raved.
And Plath sank the last pin.
Benjamin’s body arched in a seizure so powerful that his legs smashed the bottom of the desk. The screens went dark. His arm shot out into the air, hand clenched into a claw.
Plath heard the sound of bone cracking.
She pulled the pin out.
“We’re walking out of here,” she said.
Paul Johntz stepped behind her and pressed a gun muzzle against the top of her head. “He spazzes out again, you take a bullet.”
“I’m the one doing it,” Keats said. “Leave her alone.” It was heroic, but also unconvincing.
A gasping Benjamin wept with a child’s sobs.
Charles, aghast, stared in horror at Plath.
“Which is faster?” Plath asked. “The bullet? Or the biot?”
“Listen to me,” Charles grated. “Mr. Johntz, you are now head of AmericaStrong. Here is what you will do: order your men to arrest Ms. Lebowski. Then you will—”
Plath stabbed the pin into Benjamin’s brain and again came the seizure, choking off Charles’s speech as the shared face strained and the shared neck twisted and the single spine seemed almost to form a C.
Benjamin’s teeth cracked.
Sugar Lebowski said, “I can get you out of here. But it will cost you.”
“A million?” Plath asked.
“Twenty,” Sugar said. “I have kids. Disappearing isn’t cheap.”
“Done,” Plath said.
“No one is going anywhere,” Johntz snapped.
Keats kicked with his bound legs and all the force he could command. His feet hit Johntz’s ankle. The fall wasn’t immediate; the man took a stagger step to the side and Sugar Lebowski was up like a cat. She drew the belt from her skirt and whipped it around Johntz’s neck from behind, all the while yelling, “Everyone back, everyone back, stay out of it!” to the remaining TFDs.
But Johntz was too big to go down. He was straining to turn the pistol to point at Sugar, who grunted like an animal as she put all her slim weight into choking.
Keats levered himself up and hopped, splashing through blood, grabbed the TFD’s gun hand and twisted it to aim the muzzle at the man’s head.
For several terrible seconds they fought. Sugar slowly choking the strength out of her deputy, Keats twisting as he tried to stay on his feet. Then, a loud explosion.
Johntz had a quizzical look on three-quarters of his face, and a gaping hole for the rest. He dropped instantly.
The other TFDs had stood by, paralyzed, not knowing who was in charge. Army Pete said, “Damn.” He held his hands up in a “Not me” gesture and backed toward the door.
Keats held on to the pistol as the man fell.
Sugar Lebowski had part of Johntz’s brain in her blonde hair. She unwrapped her belt from the dead man’s neck and with shaking fingers threaded it back into her skirt.
“We need to get our bugs,” Keats said. The gun was still in his hand. It felt good, not bad in his grip. It felt like safety.
“It will take me ten minutes to get back out of them,” Plath said. “Do I leave them like that?”
“Like that” meant sweat pouring off the Twins, who were held in the grip of Benjamin’s seizure. No one could live for very long under that strain.
Plath was asking Keats if she should kill Benjamin Armstrong—and most likely his brother, too, because it was impossible to imagine how one could die and not the other.
“We’re not them,” Keats said. Then, doubting his own words, said, “Are we?”
Plath went to stand over the helpless monsters. Monsters? What other word could be used?
Monsters from birth. Feared and hated by all who saw them.
Feared and hated now by her, too, and for good reason.
The skin between the two faces, the place where the flesh had been glued together in the womb, was raw. The force of the seizure had nearly made Benjamin tear his head away from his brother.
She pulled the pin.
(ARTIFACT)
To: Lear
From: Nijinsky
Wilkes is alive and back with us.
Ophelia is alive despite the loss of both legs below the knee.
Keats and Plath are both well and performed magnificently.
Vincent is suffering from a deep depression following the loss of one biot. The second biot was badly injured but is recovering. Vincent is being cared for, outcome very uncertain.
We failed in our main objective.
We await instructions.
BZRK—A CHEAT SHEET.
The Sides:
BZRK: A secret organization, divided into numerous cells, devoted to stopping the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation and the Armstrong Twins. The name BZRK is derived from the word “berserk.” Twitchers (those running biots) for BZRK face the threat of madness on a daily basis. The organization’s name is about owning that madness.
Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation: Long ago it really was just about tchotchkes. But AFGC went into weapons research and from there into nanotechnology under the control of the Armstrong Twins. They still run thousands of airport gift shops, but their real interests lie else where.
Major Characters:
(But first, a word about the naming convention. Each member of BZRK takes a nom de guerre—rather like a screen name—generally in wry acknowledgment of his or her likely fate, or the name of someone mad or at least disturbed.)
Sadie McLure: She’s sixteen, a New Yorker, smart, prickly, and opinionated. A rich girl who has no interest in fashion or gossip or partying, Sadie is a serious, thoughtful person with some real bite. When she joins BZRK, she takes the nom de guerre of Plath.
Noah Cotton: He’s sixteen, a London boy. Noah is quiet and soft-spoken, an observer with a talent for thinking intuitively on multiple levels at once, which makes him invaluable to BZRK. His nom de guerre is Keats.
Michael Ford: An American known as Vincent (for Van Gogh), he’s in his twenties, highly intelligent, and ruthless when he needs to be, though he tries to hold on to a moral core. He suffers from anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure.
Shane Hwang: He’s Chinese-American, in his twenties, a professional model, and gay. If Vincent is the brain of the New York cell of BZRK, Nijinsky (Shane’s nom de guerre) is the heart. Unlike Vincent, Nijinsky is quite adept at seeking pleasure.
Bug Man: His real name is Anthony Elder, but no one calls him that. He’s fifteen, British, black, a gaming prodigy with a hardcore gamer’s complete indifference to anything outside the game. He is the dangerous prodigy on the Armstrong Fancy Gifts side of the war.
Karl Burnofsky: He’s middle-aged but looks older, a drunk and an opium addict who is the scientific genius behind the nanobot technology of the Ar
mstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.
Charles and Benjamin Armstrong: They are conjoined twins, American, middle-aged, power hungry, damaged, ruthless, brilliant, and unstable. Their terrifying deformity has locked them into a life of almost total isolation atop the skyscraper home of the AFGC.
Eva Drew: Known as Wilkes (from Annie Wilkes, of Stephen King’s Misery), she’s an American, seventeen, a runaway after she tried to burn her school down. She’s fearless and determined, ironic, vulnerable.
Ophelia: Her real name is not yet revealed. She’s in her twenties, from India, the calm center of the BZRK world, capable, quiet, a bit mysterious, absolutely devoted to the cause. If Nijinsky is the heart, Ophelia is the soul.
Lear: No one knows his or her name. No one has met Lear. No one has spoken with Lear. Lear is the mastermind of BZRK.
Caligula: The macro-world enforcer for Lear. Betray BZRK and you get a visit from Caligula. He’s middle-aged, presumably American, dapper, soft-spoken, a bit sardonic, and very dangerous.
The Technology:
Nanobots are the mechanical nano-scale robots created by Karl Burnofsky and used by Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation under the control of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong. They are machines just small enough to be invisible to unaided human vision.
Biots are the biological counterparts of nanobots, developed by Grey McLure, and were originally intended for medical uses. Biots are built of various bits of DNA taken from scorpions, spiders, and humans. A poorly understood psychic connection exists between a biot and the human whose DNA is in it. This allows humans to control biots, but it also means that a biot death can drive a human to madness.
The Battlefield:
From the macro to the nano. From the streets of New York down to the level of individual neurons inside a human brain, a war rages between AFGC and its agenda of uniting the human race in one happy hive mind and the members of BZRK, who choose freedom, even if the price is irreversible insanity.
Micheal Grant has spent much of his life on the move. Raised in a military family in the USA, he attended ten schools in five states, as well as three schools in France. Even as an adult he kept moving, and in fact he became a writer in part because it was one of the few jobs that wouldn’t tie him down. His dream is to spend a whole year circumnavigating the globe and visiting every continent. Even Antarctica. He lives in Marin Country, California, with his wife, Katherine Applegate, their two children, and far too many pets.
Bzrk Page 31
