BZRK: Apocalypse

by Michael Grant

  And this was Plath—Sadie—who had refused when she had the chance to kill the Armstrong Twins.

  She had left for Île Sainte-Marie feeling betrayed that she’d been trapped into BZRK. Feeling sickened by the violence and by what she had seen and done down in the meat. Now she was ready to launch an actual attack. To kill. To kill innocent people. Why? Was it just because Lear had told her to?

  What had changed?

  The benign explanation was that she had learned and matured and come to grips with grim necessity. The less benign explanation was that she had become hardened and had lost her soul.

  But she feared the truth was a third possibility: that she had been wired.

  How and by whom? The obvious suspect was Keats. After all, he had a biot in her brain, ostensibly protecting her from a blown aneurysm.

  But why would Keats wire her? Orders from Lear? Or had he gone over to the other side? Both seemed absurd. Keats would not blindly take orders. And he would never join the people who had put his brother Alex in a mental institution.

  Unless he had decided that BZRK was to blame. And wasn’t that a plausible conclusion? Wasn’t BZRK responsible, in a way?

  She ran down the list of other people who might have done it. Maybe one of the McLure Security guys. Maybe one of the house servants who washed sheets and delivered food. Or maybe someone had gone to work in her brain as soon as she got back to New York. But that would mean whoever was doing it had had very little time. Which in turn meant that someone was very, very good at the job.

  Someone.

  But the obvious suspect?

  She was circling the globe, around the eye that twitched beneath her, making all the minute adjustments that eyes must do. She skimmed the edge of her iris-serried ranks of gristly muscle fiber waiting to react to light, opening and closing the dark, deep hole of her pupil.

  Down and around, beneath the permanent retraction point of the eyelid, so that her “sky” was now an eternal mucous membrane. Her biot skated on, slowed slightly by the claustrophobically low roof. With absolutely no ambient light, she had illumination switched on—glowing nodes built out of the DNA of exotic deep-ocean creatures. She was in the land of muscle bundles now, massive cables seemingly fused into the melting ice of the eyeball and ascending into the dark.

  And onward, farther around the globe—and now, at last, like Yggdrasil, the tree that supported the world in Norse mythology, the optic nerve rose into view.

  Suddenly the world shifted wildly beneath her. Muscles jerked crazily. In the real world, the light had snapped on.

  She sat up.

  Keats looked at her, saw her surprise, and said, “Sorry, did I startle you?”

  “No, no,” she lied. “I just … there was a Post-it note.… Never mind.” She could see it lying on the floor of the bright hallway. “Are you coming to bed?”

  “Was kind of hoping to,” he said, not wolfishly, more just a tired boy.

  Plath pulled the blanket back to bare the sheets for him. He nodded at the open space, smiled at it as if it was an old friend. He stripped off his clothes while she lay back and closed her eyes, hoping he would get the message.

  She tried to calm her breathing. Keats was in her brain; he would know from the pulse of blood through the aneurysm whether she was perturbed.

  Keats was warm beside her. He leaned over to give her the lightest of kisses. Just a brush of lips and a whispered, “Good night.”

  But to her surprise Plath found herself wanting more. She pushed her fingers through his hair and pulled him close and kissed him back. In the dark, even as she crawled toward her own optic nerve, his lips were just his lips and not a parchment landscape.

  He responded.

  P2 began the ascent—direction was all very subjective in the meat—began climbing that tree.

  He was still holding back, not quite sure whether this kiss was a prelude or just a very nice good-night. She pushed her tongue into his mouth, and now he must feel the way her pulse raced.

  Up the nerve, up to the impassable membrane that guarded the brain itself. Her brain. She reared up on her four anterior legs and used the sharp pincers on her front legs to slice as small a hole as possible through the membrane. A watery liquid oozed outward.

  She checked herself, inspected as well as she could her biot legs, looking for pollen, bacteria, fungus—all the things which can be so deadly if carried into the brain. She found what looked like a half-dozen tennis balls on her left rear leg and knocked them loose. Bacteria, and very much alive: one was splitting as she watched.

  Keats was kissing her now, everywhere. He was no longer responding to her, but moving ahead, taking charge, setting the pace, and for once Plath let him, willingly surrendering, needing to surrender.

  Her brain floated like a giant sponge, a sponge crisscrossed with throbbing arteries and veins like the tangle of rivers and tributaries in a delta. The fluid made movement slower than it was in an air environment, and her biot claws had to grab on so as not to float away.

  He was inside her. His biot. Down here in these endless folds of pink flesh. At least she hoped he was, hoped he was not on her other eye spying, or worse, far worse, somewhere deeper still, laying wire.

  Let it not be him. Not him. That was a betrayal she could not survive.

  The tissue that was the ground could appear to be a wall, a floor, or a ceiling, depending on your perspective. The biot world was one where gravity was almost irrelevant, certainly in this liquid environment.

  She was aiming for the hippocampus, a deep structure, an ancient part of the evolving brain. It was the router of the mind. If someone was wiring her, that’s where they would likely start. The implanted brain-mapping imagery was a guide, though an imperfect one because no two brains were identical, and where she might expect to find a figurative gully could be a plunging valley.

  In the real world her body was responding almost on its own, as though it was not connected to her, not connected to the brain upon which she now walked, the brain that was the processor of every contact between his tongue and her flesh.

  Madness. She laughed. He stopped.

  “No, no, no, don’t stop,” she said.

  “You were giggling.”

  “Shhhh,” she said, and pushed his head back to where it had been.

  Toward the hippocampus, but with a stop on the way. She crept her biot forward slowly, slowly, dousing her illuminators one by one, just enough to feel her way forward to—

  Light out. In the darkness of her own brain she saw his biot’s light. There was his biot, not moving, just standing on the bulging basketwork he had so painstakingly constructed in order to save her life. The work had been started by her father; almost completed now by her lover.

  His biot was not wiring her. It was not him.

  Far away and as close as the artery that pounded beneath her feet, she felt him, felt his banked power, knew he was close to losing control, and liked that idea a great deal.

  She sent her biot forward toward the hippocampus, turning lights back on as she moved away from Keats’s biot.

  She tripped over it before she saw it. One leg scraped across something that did not feel like flesh, something hard and sharp.

  Wire.

  Did Keats feel the sudden chill that went through her? He did not slow or falter. But now her mind was reeling, no longer vague and disconnected from her body and its reactions.

  She had been wired.

  Wait, was that a glimmer of light?

  She killed her own biot’s light once more and stared hard into the visual field in her brain. Into the visual field that showed her brain to her brain.

  There! For just a second. Less than a second. A glimmer of light.

  “Bastard,” she muttered.

  Keats did not hear her, he was beyond that.

  The light had come from behind a pulsing vein. There was no innocent excuse. There were no light-emitting life-forms down here.

  The fear rose
in Plath now, competing with simmering rage. It began as a dull electrical charge in the base of her spine and fanned out from there to become nausea in her stomach and a tightened chest that felt too small to contain her air-starved lungs and pounding heart.

  Who was on the other side of that vein, that vein the circumference of a subway tunnel? Who and what was back there?

  Bastard, bastard, bastard, she raged, but silently.

  Plath stifled her fear, and her biot plunged after the retreating nanobot. She noted that she had decided now that it was an Armstrong nanobot, not a BZRK biot, not Keats, not anyone from her side. Because that—

  Wait. When had she acquired this readiness to believe the best of BZRK? Was that a naturally occurring thought? Or was it part of the wiring? Was that what this foe was doing right now, right now practically under her nose—finding ways to dampen her suspicion?

  Again, a glimmer! It was moving away, but it evidently needed light. So did Plath, so any hope of concealment was forgotten now, any hesitation set aside with the decision to chase.

  She saw him! Or at least an impression of something moving. She was gaining on him. Gaining! Which most likely meant it was a nanobot. That at least would be a relief.

  Please, God, if there is a God down here in the meat, let it be the enemy, the true enemy.

  Suddenly the light ahead dimmed as if it had dropped into a crevasse. She charged ahead, caught up in the chase, adrenaline flooding her system with urgency, breathing hard in her bed, trying to remain perfectly still so as not to wake Keats.

  Her biot raced; she saw the dip ahead and killed her illumination, rendering herself almost invisible while using the enemy’s light as a beacon.

  She looked down, and there it was, waiting for her.

  It was no nanobot.

  She grabbed Keats’s head in her hands and held it still, just inches away from her, stared into his eyes, pleading and said, “Noah, help me. Help me, Noah.”

  “My Stockholm lair. Yeah. Lair. Because the supervillain needs a lair, yeah?”

  It was a nice hotel suite, a very nice hotel suite at the Stockholm Grand. Nice view out over the very civilized waterfront with bright-lit ferries and stately buildings. Multiple bedrooms, understated taupes and beiges and earth tones.

  “It’s not all that …” Bug Man started to say before stopping himself.

  “Not so lairlike?” Lystra asked, and laughed. “Well, I have a much better lair somewhere else. Far to the south, you might say. You’ll like it … if I let you come with me.”

  Bug Man stood as awkwardly as one might expect a young man to stand when threatened with death.

  Lystra laughed again and waved him to a seat. He sat on leather. It made a squeaking sound that might almost have been a fart.

  “That was … um …,” he said.

  “Did you just fart in my presence?” She was pretending to look fierce. But Bug Man had seen her true ferocity, and this wasn’t it. He relaxed a very little bit.

  Lystra went to a sideboard and poured an amber liquid into two heavy crystal glasses. She handed one to Bug Man.

  He sniffed and recoiled.

  “It’s Balcones True Blue. Lovely whiskey, that. Made with Hopi blue corn.” She took a single cube of ice with a pair of silver tongs, carried it to him, and dropped it in his glass. “You taste it now. Then you keep drinking as the cube melts, which lowers the proof. The flavor evolves. Each sip will be subtly different.”

  Bug Man took a sip. It was fire in liquid form, and he started coughing, which made her laugh. It was a cruel laugh, and there, again, a glimpse of the harsh bone beneath soft flesh.

  “My father used to let me drink whiskey with him,” Lystra said. She sat down opposite Bug Man. He glanced at her bare legs. She noticed.

  “You miss your little love slave?” she asked.

  “Jessica? You know about … that?”

  “Yes, of course. You’re a rapist, Bug Man.”

  He flushed. “No, I’m not. I never forced her to do anything.”

  She leaned toward him, elbows on knees, drink cradled in both hands. “You programmed her. You took away her free will. You replaced it with your own. You enslaved her. And when you have sex with someone in that condition, it’s rape.”

  He shook his head and took a drink just so he’d have an excuse not to meet her gaze.

  “Rapist. Murderer. Terrorist. That’s you, Bug, by the standards of the wide world, yeah.”

  Bug Man frowned. No, that wasn’t right. “I’m … no. No way. I’m a gamer. I’m just playing.”

  “Buggy, Buggy, Buggy.” She patted his knee, and he felt his flesh creep. “If you were charged in a court of law, you’d be looking at life without parole in New York. In Texas, hell, they’d execute you, yeah. Electric chair in Texas? Let me Google that.” She pulled out her phone and opened the browser.

  Bug Man let loose a weird giggle, and then was appalled by the sound he’d made.

  “You’re a very bad person. In this world. In this real world the way it is. You’re a monster. Don’t you know that? Damn! I was wrong.” She held up her phone for him to see. “Lethal injection in Texas. The needle. That’s such a weak way to die.”

  “I don’t know what you want,” Bug Man pleaded.

  She didn’t answer directly. Then she said, “Drink,” and he drank. Then she said, “You didn’t listen closely enough. I said ‘In this world. In this real world the way it is.’ But this isn’t the only way the world could be. Is it?”

  The whiskey had started a fire in his throat. And now a dangerous warmth spread from his stomach outward. He flicked his eyes up at her. She wasn’t stronger than him. She wasn’t armed. He could probably smash this heavy glass against the side of her head. Push her out of the window. It was, what, six floors down to the pavement? What did he have to lose if what she said about him was true?

  “I sent a text just now,” Lystra said.

  “So what?”

  “So … wait. Ticktock. Ticktock, yeah.” She smiled. It was almost playful. “Ticky tocky.”

  “Lady, I think I’ve had it with your shi—” His mouth still moved, but no sound came out. Because just then a window opened in his brain.

  “Mmmm,” Lystra said, savoring it.

  A second window opened in his brain. A second little TV screen with nothing in view but something that might just be an insect’s leg.

  “Is the third one up yet?”

  A third window. This one showed all too clearly the shape he’d come to know as prey and fear as predator. A biot.

  “You ever hear the phrase ‘dead man’s switch’?”

  He had. But he felt as if he couldn’t open his mouth. Fear seeped into his blood with icy fingers that outraced the warm glow of alcohol.

  “A dead man’s switch. They use it on subways and things like that,” she explained. “If the subway conductor dies, see, he lets go of the switch and the train automatically stops, yeah. Yeah. That’s me now. I’m your own personal dead man’s switch. Because if my heart stops beating, guess what?”

  When he didn’t answer, she bared her teeth, and once again, that skeletal presence seemed to burn through her flesh. “If I die, little Bug Man, all three of your biots … oh, and they are yours now … die as well.” She put a fist over her heart, opened it, closed it, opened it, in a mockery of sinus rhythm.

  “What do you want?” he screamed, losing the last of his self-control. Then, weeping, softly repeated, “What do you want? What do you want?”

  “I’m going to create a new world,” she said, sitting back, dreamy now, her eyes gazing toward the French doors and the city beyond. “A whole new world. I am its god. But it’s a lonely thing, being god; you could ask the real God, if he existed. He’d tell you. He created the world, and then, he was all alone with no one to talk to. He needed friends. But!” She held up a cautionary finger. “He needed friends who understood who they were, and who he was, and who held the lightning bolts, and who was there to co
wer and serve. He needed the love that only comes from those who are afraid. Love me, your god, or burn in hell. I’m offering the same deal as Jehovah.”

  “You’re fucking crazy.”

  He flinched, expecting her to reveal that awful presence again, but instead she laughed a genuine, happy laugh. “Crazy? Nah. I’m BZRK.”

  THIRTEEN

  Keats pulled away from her. “What’s the matter?”

  “Wire, Noah. Wire in my brain.”

  It took him a few seconds to make sense of things. “You’re down in the meat?”

  She nodded—distracted, scared. She pushed him off her and jumped from the bed. She grabbed at clothing. “I knew something … I just … Something was weird, so I looked.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask me to help?” But even as the words were out of his mouth, he knew the answer. “You thought it was me.”

  Plath didn’t answer, her attention was elsewhere. The biot—if it was a biot, how could it be?—had disappeared, and its light along with it. Plath swung her biot left, right, shining her illumination around in the brain fluid.

  Then she saw it: a fountain. Instead of water it sprayed red blood cells, the flattened lozenges that were never supposed to fly loose in the cranial fluid. The artery lay like some massive fire hose, coiled across the surface of the brain. It pulsed obscenely with every beat of her racing heart and the blood cells twirled as they flew, then arced away, scattering through the liquid.

  The enemy was cutting into her artery.

  “No!” she cried.

  “What?” Keats demanded.

  “He’s cut an artery!”

  “Where? Where?” Keats grabbed her shoulders, shaking her, forcing her to pay attention and answer.

  “Hippocampus,” she said, and Keats sent his biot racing to her.

  In Plath’s mind she saw the three open windows. Nothing but glass in one. A bleary view from Anya’s half-closed eye of the other side of Anya’s bed, empty—a slit of light coming from the bathroom. And in the final window that deadly fountain.