BZRK: Apocalypse

by Michael Grant

  “So what do we do now?” Keats asked. He had the sense that this might be the last time they could speak freely. There was a single weary McLure security guy outside on the street, gun out of view but not out of reach, but no one was watching or listening in the restaurant and the clatter of cutlery on pottery and china would have obscured their words in any case.

  “Back to New York,” she said with a shrug.

  “And then?”

  “Then we do whatever Lear tells us to do.” It sounded bitter. It was.

  Keats tore at a piece of bread then used it to sop up some gravy. “That’s not proper, is it? Proper table manners, I mean.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I care about,” Plath said. “Table manners.” She offered him a smile and put her hand on his.

  “It doesn’t make sense, that’s the thing,” Keats said.

  “Manners?”

  “Blowing up the boat.”

  One of Plath’s continuing joys in her relationship with Keats came from the fact that in just about every case where she wondered if he was understanding things, he was. He might look a bit like the naïve dreamboat guy, but those too-blue eyes and sensuous mouth were deceptive. There was a sharp, observant brain there as well.

  When am I going to stop underestimating you, Noah? She asked herself this silently, and in her mind he was firmly Noah still, not Keats. Keats was work. Noah was … well, what? Love?

  He loved her. Did she love him?

  Was it a class thing? The fact that she came from money and his family had never risen to middle class? Was she really that shallow? She wouldn’t have thought so, would have angrily denied it. But at the same time, coming into her inheritance had without doubt added just a bit of swagger to her worldview.

  She was rich. Very rich. He was very much not. Was that why she still held something back from him? That would be shameful. Or was it simply that she had seen him in ways no young woman is meant to see a young man? She knew too much and had memories that were far too vivid and intrusive. She knew what his lips looked like in the micro-subjective.

  She knew that down there, where distances were measured in microns, those full lips were crusted parchment. She knew that his fingertips looked like arid, plowed fields. She knew that his tongue was serried ranks of pink hoods, and that trapped between the rows were bright false-color bacteria.

  She knew that living things crawled in his eyelashes, tiny things, unless you were down in the meat and saw them m-sub. Then they didn’t look so small. M-sub fleas looked like spiky, punk versions of the armored oliphaunts from the Lord of the Rings movies, except that they could jump a thousand times their own height.

  She knew, above all, that all the intelligence and charm and wit, all of his readiness to commit, all the love he was so ready to express, was nothing but minute electrical charges firing along neurons in the wet folds of his brain.

  She had not just seen these things on an image captured from a scanning electron microscope. She had been there in her biots. She had seen them all with biot eyes that were as real to her as her own.

  Even now she knew that Noah was seeing the same with her. One of his biots was in her brain right now. All three of hers—P1, P2, P3—were in the vial she wore on a chain around her neck for safekeeping, but she was still seeing through their eyes, seeing a long, rainbow-hued glass wall. Three distinct windows were open inside her visual field. And if they ever began to go dark … then would come the madness she defied by taking the name Plath.

  Down in the meat.

  Once you had gone down in the meat, the images could not simply be set aside and ignored. And after memories came imagination, so that she would picture things she had not seen through biot eyes as they would look at m-sub.

  She would see the micro detail of his lips and her own; she would see the rough furrows of his fingertips as they brushed her nipples; and she could imagine the billion tail-whipping sperm cells as he ejaculated.

  It was all, at the very least, distracting. Though somehow it never seemed to distract him—

  Keats waved his hand up and down in front of her face.

  “Sorry,” Plath said, and snapped back to reality. “I was considering. The boat. Yeah, it was both crude and ineffectual.”

  “Armstrong wouldn’t come at us that way,” he said. “If they knew where we were, they’d deploy nanobots. There have been servants in and out of the house, we had a doctor in when I got food poisoning; there were opportunities for infestation.”

  “Or they could have targeted some of Stern’s people and bounced the nanobots to us from them. I mean, if you know where two members of BZRK are, you try to wire them, you don’t try to kill them.” She glanced over her shoulder upon saying the word BZRK, pronounced with vowels intact: “Berserk.”

  Keats nodded, tore off another piece of bread, sopped up more gravy, and popped it in his mouth. Plath could imagine the scene down at the m-sub. The teeth would be impossibly huge, scaly not smooth, massive mountainous gray boulders dropping from the sky and rising from below to crush and—

  I have to stop this. I have to get control of my thoughts.

  Too easy to let that consciousness of another universe take over her mind. Too easy to go from distraction to revulsion. She had to be able to be with another human being without always picturing that other, stranger reality.

  “Maybe it was something totally different,” Noah suggested. “Maybe there was a fuel leak on the boat. Maybe we’re just overreacting.”

  “Maybe,” Plath said. “But our time in the Garden of Eden had to end eventually. We had to go back. We’re supposed to be running things.”

  Keats met her gaze and shook his head slowly. “No, not we. You, Sadie.” Then with a wry smile he corrected himself. “You, Plath.”

  She could have said that they were partners. She could have said that obviously he was as important as she was.

  But she had not told him about the message from Lear telling her to get back in the game. The message she had ignored for days.

  She wondered if she should tell him now.

  But instead she copied him and mopped up some gravy. She didn’t have time to worry about tending to Keats’s ego. Her mind was filling with the implications of the suspicion that they were being shepherded.

  Driven.

  Manipulated.

  · · ·

  Anthony Elder, who had once used the name Bug Man, was shopping for onions at Tesco. Not just onions, there were other things on the list, too. But it was onions that somehow irritated him.

  Nutella

  Beans

  Bread

  Pasta (store brand, nothing fancy)

  Mushrooms (fresh, button, 1/2 pound)

  Cheerios

  2 oranges

  3 onions (the white kind)

  Three onions. The white kind.

  This was his life. Again. His mother was already on him about going back to school. To school!

  “You don’t want to go on neglecting your education, Anthony. That’s most likely why you were let go.”

  Let go.

  Well, no, Mum, I wasn’t exactly let go. I ran for my life—flew for it, actually, all the way back to England—after my mistakes caused the American president to blow her brains out in front of the whole world. It wasn’t because I couldn’t conjugate French verbs or recall the date of the Battle of Hastings.

  He didn’t say that to his mother, of course.

  He walked down the cereal aisle searching for Cheerios, maneuvering around a woman who was pushing both a baby buggy and a shopping cart. He found the cereal, puzzled for a moment over what size box he should be getting. His mother would chide him no matter what he chose.

  Small, then. Easier to carry home. Less chance of catching some smart remarks from passing thugs.

  He’d been on top of the world. Now he was self-conscious about being seen by others his age, struggling with plastic bags of pasta and Nutella and onions. The white kind.

  A
pretty girl coming toward him looked right through him as if he was invisible.

  He’d had the most beautiful girl in the world. Jessica. She’d been a slave to him. A slave. The memories made him ache inside. He would never get within conversational range of a girl like that again.

  Top of the world, that’s where he’d been. But all that was gone now. All that gone and now he was invisible to women and girls. He was a moderately attractive black teenage boy with no obvious signs of wealth or future prospects. Why would they look at him?

  He rounded a corner, walked glumly past aisles of this and that, entirely forgetting the pasta, ignoring the plastic-wrapped slabs of meat to one side, heading to onions.

  He felt rather than saw that something had changed.

  Instinct. Some sense that was not quite sight—sound, smell, or touch. The certainty that he was being watched. Without turning to look he knew he was being followed. His speed was being matched.

  He walked slower, stopped, pretended to admire the lamb; but the presence did not pass him by.

  He moved suddenly toward the produce department, walking too fast, and he felt his pursuer keep pace.

  Well.

  Well. Ah. So. So was it cops or killers?

  His heart was heavy in his chest. His feet dragged a bit, just the toes scraping on the tile. Shit, he’d just started to think maybe he was out of it, that maybe the Armstrongs would let him go. He’d given them a lot of good work, after all.

  If not some hitman for the Armstrongs, was it police? Or even MI5?

  He stopped in front of a bin of oranges and rested his hand on one, just feeling it. He liked oranges. Was this the last one he would see for a long while? Or the last one ever?

  He turned, resigned, not seeing the point really in continuing to pretend. And there was his pursuer.

  Now surely that was not a cop or MI5.

  The man was well dressed, almost like a banker. Far too elegant looking to be a cop. He was a black man, tall, thin, with glasses, and when he met Anthony’s eyes he smiled. Like an old friend. At first Bug Man felt himself relaxing, but no, no, that was a bad idea. A smile meant nothing.

  “You want something?” Bug Man asked. His voice was ragged. Maybe the expensive suit hadn’t noticed.

  “Anthony Elder?”

  He nodded. What would be the point in lying?

  What about running? He could surely outrun this man.

  “Are you here to kill me?”

  The man was not surprised by the question. “Not at this time.” He smiled. “But you will be taken for questioning by this time tomorrow.”

  “Haven’t done anything.”

  “Oh, come now, you know better than that. People of our particular skin tone don’t need to be guilty of anything to be questioned by the police, now, do we?”

  Bug Man moved a step sideways, edging along the oranges. He spotted the onions. The white ones.

  “Met police will pick you up tomorrow, but of course it’s not really for themselves. They’ll turn you over to the Security Service, to MI5, for questioning.”

  The man moved closer so he could speak more quietly. He smelled of sandalwood and spearmint. Bug Man liked the cologne, didn’t like the man belonging to it. He had a ridiculous urge to ask him whether it was available for sale here at Tesco.

  “They will detain you on a secret warrant, and in all likelihood you will be given a chance to plead guilty so as to avoid a public trial. They’ll put out a statement accusing you of something like embezzlement. Something safe for public consumption. They’ll promise to let you out in a few years, and they would, really they would. Except that you’ll have been gutted by some hardened lifer in your cell long before that. They’ll make sure of that. If they don’t, their cousins will—the Americans.”

  Bug Man licked his lips. This was a threat, but not just a threat. This was the beginning of an offer.

  “Whatever they want, the Twins, whatever they want, I’m still the best; I’m still fucking Bug Man.”

  “The Twins?” The man made a crestfallen face, an act, a little show that he was putting on. Bug Man wanted to punch him. “Oh, yes, the Twins. Well, Anthony, this is not really about them. I’m not able to tell you anything, really, but I can tell you that I don’t work for the Twins.”

  Bug Man took a breath. He’d forgotten to do that. “Who are you, then?”

  “My name is George. George William Frederick.”

  He said it as if it should mean something to Bug Man. And it did ping some distant, dusty strand of memory. But nothing meaningful. It was a name out of a different time, Bug Man felt.

  “You slept through history, didn’t you?” George William Frederick said. “That’s a shame. History is everything important, really. In any case, I’m here because the surveillance team that has been on you for every minute of the last month is outside, in the parking lot, drinking coffee in paper cups and eating HobNobs, confident that you will soon emerge with your groceries. They’ll follow you home, as per their orders, log your movements, and go off shift at eight p.m. They won’t bother with physical surveillance after that; they’ll be watching on the cameras they have in your home. Yes. So, as it happens, this would actually be an opportune time for you to follow me, out of the back of the store, to a waiting car.”

  Bug Man immediately ran through some of the more embarrassing things that would have been observed by cameras in his home. But he was mostly over the concept of privacy. The Twins had had cameras on him from the start of his employment by them.

  “And then?” Bug Man asked.

  George-With-Three-Names shrugged. “All I can tell you is that an Armstrong hit team is also looking for the right moment to shoot you, and tomorrow MI5 will bundle you off to prison where they or the Americans will do for you, and the third alternative, the one I’m offering you, is preferable.”

  Bug Man knew the man was speaking the truth. Or at least believed himself to be telling the truth.

  George-With-Three-Names. George William Frederick. The penny dropped.

  George III.

  The mad king.

  “You’re BZRK.”

  “Think what you like,” George said with a self-satisfied smile. “I’m your way out.”

  “You are going to kill me.” Bug Man was proud that he managed to get the words out with only a minor tremor in his voice.

  George tapped his waist. There was something there that was no belt buckle. “If that were my instruction, you’d never know about it. By the way, you’re not Roman Catholic, are you?”

  “What? Church of England, I guess. But—”

  “Good.”

  Bug Man let it go. The point was, this wasn’t an assassination. “Will I have time to say good-bye to my mother?”

  George shook his head.

  “Good,” Bug Man said. He nodded, smiled for himself alone, and thought, Okay then: back in the game.

  [ARTIFACT]

  An exchange of texts

  Plath: Back in NYC. What is our mission?

  Lear: Destroy AFGC.

  Plath: What does that mean?

  Lear: Find and kill the Twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated.

  Plath: I’m to do this with 7 people?

  Lear: You had your vacation. Besides there is an 8th.

  Plath: Caligula?

  Lear: I’ve always found him very useful.

  [Long pause]

  Lear: Time is short, Plath.

  Plath: Short why?

  Lear: AFGC very close to developing remote biot killer. Nature unspecified. Days not weeks until it is weaponized. You must strike before then. Ticktock. Death or madness.

  ELAPSED TIME

  The Gateway Hotel could not be repaired or rebuilt. The blowtorch heat of the burning LNG carrier ship had burned everything capable of burning. Natural gas burns at temperatures ranging from 3,000 to 3,6000 degrees Fahrenheit, and that’s enough to inciner
ate furniture, carpet, and paint. It’s also enough to melt glass and soften structural steel. A human body is a marshmallow.

  The Gateway was a black, bent, crumpled horror that reminded some observers of a very old woman, bent by arthritis, in the act of falling to her knees.

  Buildings on either side had burned as well. Buildings farther back in Kowloon, where the gas had rolled through the streets before catching fire, were burned. Some had exploded, simply popped open like rotting fruit. Kowloon Park was a field of ash.

  The Chinese government had not been able to conceal the extent of the disaster. It was visible from satellites and from the decks of passing ferries and cruise ships. This was Hong Kong, not some provincial outpost. The whole world passed through Hong Kong.

  The government had kept a faithful account of the dead and presumed dead. Now over a thousand. The “presumed dead” included those so badly burned that no more than a few bones with the marrow boiled away had survived and could not be identified.

  Divers were still pulling bodies out of the blistered and twisted hulk of the liquid natural gas carrier—the ship dubbed the Doll Ship—that lay at the bottom of Hong Kong harbor. The Chinese government was nowhere near as forthcoming on this part. The official story was that it had been simple error on the part of the ship’s captain. He was dead: he wasn’t going to argue.

  No one spoke openly of the bodies of children found blown apart. No one spoke of the fact that one of the ship’s spheres, and possibly a second one as well (it was hard to tell), had never contained LNG but had instead been something very much like a human zoo.

  Crewmen who had managed to jump ship were picked up and spirited away to a camp in far-off Qinghai Province. A small number of British Royal Marines were held there as well. And twenty-four civilians, neither crew nor soldiers—inmates on the Doll Ship—were being held at a small local hospital that had been taken over by the Ministry of State Security. The MSS had drafted a dozen radiologists, neurosurgeons, and pathologists, snatched them up from cities all over China and bundled them off to Qinghai.