BZRK Origins

by Michael Grant

  I saw through my biot’s eyes. But all I had seen so far was the glass and plastic of the crèche.

  “Intubate,” I told Prim.

  Prim was the only one with the medical background to perform the procedure. It’s the kind of thing done in emergency rooms all the time, but I was still nervous. It involves using a laryngoscope, a tool specifically designed to guide a plastic tube through the mouth, down the throat and trachea, to the top of the lungs.

  Birgid moved restlessly. Normally a person being intubated would be completely out, but that’s a riskier thing. We were not a hospital.

  “Relax, sweetheart. Relax, let it happen. You’ve had it done before. Just relax into it.”

  She calmed then, and I took her hand and squeezed it.

  We secured the tube and began the transfer of my biot to a long flexible probe. We pushed the probe down as far as we dared. An inch is a long way for a biot.

  “Can you see anything?” Donna asked me eagerly.

  “Just the plastic wall around me.” There wasn’t much of interest in that. I managed the short hop from probe to the tube wall. “Okay, I’m clear.”

  I kept my hold on Birgid’s hand as my intrepid biot began to walk toward the lung.

  Her breathing was slowed, but it was still a powerful breeze. The biot is low to the ground so doesn’t provide much wind resistance, but still I worried that I’d be picked up like a kitten in a tornado. The wind would be in my “face.” Then it would pause and change direction. I learned to hold on tight when the wind was against me, then race along with it at my back.

  I saw the opening ahead.

  The very first thing that came to mind was Willy Wonka. I was stepping out of what felt to me like a huge, long tunnel, into an eerie wonderland. We had no color capacity in those early days, so everything I saw was in shades of gray or sepia. But still …

  The cells were densely packed, both hairy cells—those with waving cilia like something you might see on a coral reef—and fat round secreting cells that oozed with mucus. There were strands of mucus stretched out like Silly String.

  Trapped in the mucus were all manner of exotic particles: dust, pollen, and yes, bacteria, no bigger to my biot eyes than tennis balls.

  It was stunning.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh … wow.” Not an original thing to say, but it was beyond words.

  Yet I could take thousands and thousands of words to describe the bizarre, disturbing trip I took down the endless black canyons of Birgid’s lungs. The trip from entry point to the tumor was no more than four centimeters, yet it took hours. There were many blind alleys. There was much reversing of course as Donna and Marty carefully mapped my progress. We had realized from the start that getting back out could be a problem. The lung is like a sponge, a mass of air sacs, each expanding and shrinking as breath came and went.

  But in truth I can barely summon up images of all the strange wonders. Because my memory is so filled with what happened next.

  I found the tumor.

  I felt it before I found it. I realize that sounds unscientific, there’s no explanation for the growing sense of menace that filled me with dread as I approached it.

  The first sign was a single tendril reaching down one of the vents. It was like a fat, black slug pulsating beneath my feet.

  I knew immediately what it was. I knew I had at last seen the enemy.

  I followed that tendril. It soon became more than a single tendril. It seemed to spread around all sides of the tunnel, as if I were walking into a snake pit. Soon I could no longer avoid stepping on it.

  I became aware then of the capillaries feeding blood to it, fresh, oxygenated blood, the Frisbee-shaped cells pushing their way through translucent tubes to feed the monster.

  For monster it was.

  I reached a place then where the air sac and tunnel architecture became disturbed and irregular. It looked as if some beast had torn at it. Mucus oozed over ripped edges.

  Individual cancer cells, oh, how innocuous they seemed, just lying there. They reminded me of the dried blowfish you find in a cheap seaside tourist shop. They looked almost like toys. Lymphocytes slithered slowly, launching pointless attacks on the loose cells, the cells that wanted to spread throughout the rest of Birgid’s lungs and body.

  As I watched I would see them sometimes rise on the eternal breeze, be blown a few feet (micrometers, in reality.) I saw a cell explode under pressure from a lymphocyte. But there were a million more.

  I traveled across the ravaged landscape and felt the pulse of a great artery shaking my biot legs, causing the pictures in my head to wobble.

  The tumor was wrapped around that artery, and now, suddenly, looking up through strangely open space, I saw it.

  “What do you see, Dr. McLure? What do you see?” Donna pressed.

  I had stopped narrating. I don’t know how long I was silent. They told me later it was minutes. It might have been hours for all I knew.

  “What do you see, Doctor?”

  I never answered. I couldn’t answer. I’m a scientist, not a philosopher. There are no words truly to describe what I saw there, looming above me, huge and implacable. Science does a poor job of conveying deep truths. Our vocabularies are dry and passionless.

  So I couldn’t answer, because only one word, one ancient and unscientific word could begin to describe the monster that was murdering my wife: evil.

  “Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.”

  That’s from Don Quixote, the mad knight-errant who mistook windmills for giants.

  I was a mad knight that day. I saw the giant and it was no windmill. I attacked it with tiny blades and droplets of acid and I carried the radioactive seeds and shoved them into the tumor.

  I watched cancer cells burn and die.

  Like Quixote, I attacked. But unlike the great poet knight, I was not mad. I could not deceive myself that I had won.

  My creation was small enough to reach the tumor, and too small to kill it. Maybe six months earlier. Maybe if I’d been quicker. Maybe if I’d insisted she go to the doctor months earlier.

  Maybe.

  A man can torture himself to madness with maybes.

  FIVE

  I had Birgid’s mother come to take care of her and the kids.

  I ran away. I flew to a beach in Mexico and drank tequila. I drank until I passed out. When I woke, I was back in my hotel. Someone had taken my clothes away, and almost the first thing I remembered, just as the blinding pain hit my head, was that I had soiled myself.

  A nurse appeared and mutely handed me a pair of vitamin pills and two ibuprofen. I gulped them down with two bottles of water.

  Then I fell back onto the bed.

  “Who are you?” I slurred.

  “Consuela,” she answered. She spoke good but heavily accented English, for which I was grateful. My head was in no shape to form Spanish words.

  “Who … Where did … Who sent you here?”

  She shrugged. “It was only an e-mail, through our Web site.”

  “But someone paid. Someone …”

  She shrugged. “I only know one name. Lear.”

  I tried to focus on her face, to see whether she was joking or hiding something, but her features would not come into focus. “Mr. Lear?”

  She shrugged again. “Mr. or Mrs., I do not know.”

  I slept then, and when I woke she was gone. The headache was somewhat less savage, though it lingered like a distant storm that might at any moment blow in my direction.

  There were fruit and water on the bedside table. And a typed note. We should talk. Lear.

  Even now I won’t speak of that meeting.

  But the next day I flew back to New York. In the meantime Birgid had taken a turn for the worse. She was sinking fast.

  “Where have you been?” Stone demanded. “You didn’t even answer your phone or anything.”

  “I had a last-minute, uh
, I had a chance to meet this engineer whom I thought of hiring. For, you know, what I’m trying to do for Mom.”

  I don’t know if Stone bought it. Maybe. He’s a trusting kid. But Sadie’s eyes just blazed with contempt. And then, worse by far, she began to look at me with pity.

  Birgid was in our bed, gasping for air through the oxygen mask. She saw me and reached out her hand to take mine.

  And I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t see my wife, my love. I could see only the tumor.

  I pretended to believe she wanted a glass of water and fetched it for her.

  I could have stroked her forehead. I could have pressed my cheek against hers. I could have put my arms around her. But Birgid was no longer Birgid, she had become the monster that filled my mind and dreams.

  Back in New York I realized I had come back within range and could once again see through my biot’s eyes. There was nothing to see, just the crèche where it lay.

  But I couldn’t turn off the pictures. I decided then and there to destroy the little beast. I wanted nothing more to do with the nano world.

  I would go on developing the technology, Lear had convinced me of that much at least. Lear had torn the mask off Armstrong Fancy Gifts and shown me clearly what my old friend Burnofsky was up to. But I never wanted to use that biot again. Not even to save Birgid.

  I couldn’t. As I said: I am not a brave man. The idea of it filled me with bone-rattling fear.

  I couldn’t.

  I called Donna at the lab to tell her to incinerate the thing.

  She picked up and all I heard was a long, awful moan of grief.

  “Mom isn’t breathing,” Sadie said.

  I hung up on Donna, shutting off her eerie keening, and called 911.

  Birgid died that night at the hospital.

  We were all with her at the end. Stone kissed her forehead and spilled his tears on her cheeks. Sadie, my tough little girl, sobbed and covered her face with her hands and kept saying, “Mommy, Mommy. I love you, Mommy.”

  I looked at the now lifeless body of my wife, my true love, the mother of my children, and all I could see was the tumor. I could imagine now in awful detail the blood cells motionless in suddenly stilled arteries. I could picture the lungs motionless for the first time since Birgid had taken her first breath as a baby.

  The tumor was getting nothing now.

  And all I could think was: die. Now at last, you fucking monster, die.

  Burnofsky came to the funeral. I avoided his gaze. He knew something had passed between us that could not now be overcome. He knew we had become enemies.

  He tried to speak to me. I looked through him.

  Donna did not attend. She was being treated for severe depression and psychosis following a suicide attempt. On top of Mitch’s suicide, it became painfully clear that we were linked inextricably with our biots. To lose a biot was to lose a part of ourselves. Had Donna been sane enough to follow my order, I, too, would have lost my mind.

  In some way that I never understood scientifically, when we create a biot we transfer some part of our soul into it. We make ourselves hostage to it.

  I found out later where we had gotten the tissue samples we used to create the first experimental biots. Most were from a small village in the Ivory Coast.

  All of those early biots had been destroyed.

  The village, thousands of miles away, had succumbed to what the doctors from Doctors Without Borders diagnosed as some form of mass hysteria. Within a few weeks—on days corresponding with the dates when we had destroyed the test biots—seven people in the village had lost their minds and either killed themselves or been killed in the act of committing atrocities.

  There was no escaping the biot effect. Distance was no defense. To lose a biot was to lose your mind.

  I would never be rid of it.

  No one who created a biot could ever be rid of it.

  My financial angel profited handsomely when one of our new generation drugs was approved by the FDA. I had money enough to buy back all shares of McLure Labs.

  I began to take the business more seriously, and began to groom Stone to take over some day. He was the oldest. He was the more studious. Sadie had never shown any interest in McLure Labs.

  We got along well, the three of us. I like to think I became a better father. Birgid’s death had placed the responsibility plainly on me. And each time I joked with Stone or teased Sadie, I knew that my own time might be short. I had to be a father while I could, because we had no way to know when my biot might die and take me down to the desperate place where Mitch and Donna had gone before.

  And if that wasn’t my end, well, I knew now that the eyes of the Armstrongs were on me. And I knew now what they were.

  Over the next few years I would hear from Lear from time to time. I would be sent bright young people. A strapping, fun-loving British soldier named Alex. A serious young man named Michael. And I would meet the man who even then in those early days answered only to the nom de guerre Caligula.

  Lear was forming a small army to counter the Armstrongs and Burnofsky. An army of those willing to risk madness to fight evil.

  I had been enlisted in that war. It was a war to save humanity itself from slavery. But for me it was above all a fight to save my children. I would do whatever I had to do to protect them, to keep them safe and apart.

  Because I never wanted them to have to hear the word BZRK.