Billy was absorbed in a video game. Vincent was there, staring, almost forgotten by Keats.
Keats sat before the television, watching through his two eyes, and seeing the windows in his head, watching from other eyes. “It’s all one. But who?”
The voice when it spoke surprised him. What the voice said was chilling.
“Lear,” Vincent said.
Keats turned to look at him. He was still showing nothing, Vincent. A blank expression, sad eyes. Only his brow seemed to speak of any emotion; if tension can be called an emotion.
“Lear?” Keats said. “Not the Armstrong mystery weapon?”
“Games,” Vincent said, as though that word should mean everything and the saying of it had exhausted him.
Keats couldn’t quite think of what to say. On the one hand, this was Vincent. On the other hand, this was mad Vincent. Shattered Vincent.
Seventy percent Vincent.
“You want anything to eat?” Keats asked. “I was thinking of ordering Chinese.”
“Did Lear just see it?” Vincent mused, ignoring Keats. “Or has he known all along? Should I ask him?” There was something almost like a smile on Vincent’s lips. “There will be more.”
Keats might have pursued it, but a few thousand feet away, his much smaller self saw that the moment was fast approaching. He readied himself to confront the lion in his den.
With Nijinsky dead, Burnofsky was off his leash. He had no way of knowing this—not yet—but there was no longer a biot in his head. Or to be more accurate, there was still a biot attached to his optic nerve, but no one was peering through those biot eyes any longer. The biot had no real brain of its own, nor did it have instincts. It continued to live, but only to live. Immobile.
Burnofsky had a Post-it note. He wrote on it: Floor 34. Viral research.
He held this note up in front of his eyes. Held it there for far longer than it should take to read it. But he guessed that whoever was running the biot in his head—and he believed it was Nijinsky—would not be focused on his every moment.
He was careful in the way he did this because Burnofsky knew perfectly well that his lab was under surveillance. He had come to accept that fact. Privacy was dead, anyway, particularly if you worked for the Armstrongs. But he knew the camera locations and angles. Sometimes he forgot—he had a worrying sense that his little self-inflicted wound of the other day might have been observed.
Well, the Twins had seen worse, hadn’t they? They’d seen him puking his guts out. He was morally certain that they’d been watching one dark night months earlier, back before he’d been wired, when he had sat for twenty minutes with a loaded pistol in his hand trying to get up the nerve to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger.
So what was a little cigarette burn, eh? Better than the opium pipe, right? Better than the vodka bottle. He wasn’t drinking now, not that he’d made some lifelong decision to quit; he just wasn’t drinking right now. Or snorting coke. Or smoking opium.
No, he was all cleaned up. He laid the Post-it note down in the ashtray in front of him, shielding it with his body from the hidden camera. Then he began to light a cigarette and in the process burned the note to ashes.
He drew in the smoke of his cigarette and wondered if he would get to the end of it without burning himself.
The burning was—
“Shit,” he muttered. Nijinsky would think it was a reference to a computer virus. He wouldn’t understand that Floor 34 was a crash program involving actual viruses. Biological viruses.
Burnofsky had only stumbled upon the information by chance. He was hiring a new engineer and happened to speak to one of the people in human resources, who smiled, told him he had plenty of available engineers, and thank God at least Burnofsky wasn’t looking for a virologist.
Virologist. A scientist specializing in viruses, of course. And why was anyone at Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation working on biologicals of any kind?
It had to be Floor 34. Burnofsky knew most of what AFGC was into, he should have known about a biological nano program of any sort. Were they working on their own version of biots? Were they preparing to toss his nanobots aside? The possibility worried Burnofsky a bit.
As always when he was anxious, his thoughts went to opium, and then to his work, and then to Carla. And from there to the Great Forbidden Memory.
Burnofsky knew exactly what they had done to his brain. He knew. He was a scientist; he had wired many a person, done to others what had now been done unto him. He knew that tiny wires in his brain had been used to create shortcuts—sending thoughts around the usual circuitous neural pathways to hook into the most intense sensations.
In other words, he knew that Nijinsky had connected memories of his daughter’s death to pleasure centers. He knew Nijinsky had made his greatest guilt into a sick and disturbing fantasy. He knew that. He could picture the wire in his own brain. He could imagine just how Nijinsky had done it.
But that changed nothing. It did not stop the physical reaction when he thought of that most awful of days.
I killed her.
And I’m thrilled.
At first he had thought of using his own nanobots to go in and rewire himself. But of course Nijinksy would see him. Burnofsky could take Nijinsky’s biot—Burnofsky wasn’t quite Bug Man or Vincent when it came to nano warfare, but he was confident that he could outfight Nijinsky.
But somehow … No.
Somehow the will to fight back always seemed to dissipate.
Was this still more wiring? Probably. If so, it was effective. He would form the desire, formulate a plan, start to get his resources in order, and then, then, then something.… It would all just leak away.
The answer was no. He would not finish this cigarette by putting it out in the ashtray.
He took one long, final pull on the cigarette butt—it was down to the last inch—lifted his shirt, and stabbed it into his stomach.
The pain was staggering. The smell of burned flesh was like opium, somehow, a narcotic that turned the pain into a dream, a swirling unreality.
And most of all, it took his mind off Carla. Because despite all of Nijinsky’s careful work, Burnofsky felt that if he had to endure that horror-excitement one more time, he would find his gun and finally do it.
The HNDS—hover-capable nanobot deployment system—or “Hounds” were roughly triangular in shape and no bigger than a paper airplane.
The original drone architecture was under development for the U.S. military and the CIA. Stealthy, relatively quiet, wonderfully maneuverable, their only real drawback was that their range was limited to twenty miles. The military wanted a seventy-five-mile range, and the CIA weren’t interested unless they could be flown at distances up to five hundred miles.
So the drones—once designated the hover-capable surveillance system (HOSS)—had been repurposed. Twenty miles might not quite be the thing for the soldiers or the spies, but it was perfectly adequate for use in massed preprogrammed attack by nanobots.
The Hounds came for Mr. Stern as he was picking up his morning bagel at Montague Street Bagels in Brooklyn. It was a short walk from his home, and the McLure Security car and driver would be waiting across the street.
There were twenty thousand self-replicating nanobots aboard the Hound piloted remotely by a tech in the bowels of the Tulip. The Twins watched on their eternal monitor. The nanobots themselves were of course not twitcher run. They had been programmed by the Twins via the app. These nanobots had been given a simple set of instructions: to multiply as soon as they encountered a source of carbon. To continue to do so for exactly forty minutes. Then to commit mechanical suicide and stop.
As Stern was crossing the sidewalk the Hound swept down Henry Street before executing a sharp right onto Montague.
Stern bit into his bagel. The cream cheese oozed from the sides and he licked a dollop before it could fall away.
And then he heard something strange. Like a ceiling fan, but with blades goi
ng very fast. He even felt the downdraft and looked up to see its source. The Hound was just six feet over his head.
The nanobots fell in a cloud, like dust.
Stern ran to the car, still clutching the bagel. The driver saw him, started to jump out to open the door for him, then saw the urgency on Stern’s face, so just released the lock and started the engine.
Stern reached the door just as he began to feel a burning sensation on his scalp.
He piled into the car and yelled, “Some kind of drone!”
The driver turned around and blanched visibly. “Jesus, boss! Your head!”
Stern reached past the driver and yanked down the visor mirror. In the narrow rectangle he saw that his scalp was red with blood.
“Drive!” Stern shouted. “To McLure Labs!”
“What’s happening?” the driver cried.
Stern tried to answer, but at that moment the nanobots had chewed through his cheek and were tearing into his molars, and the sound that came out of the security man was not decipherable as anything but a cry of agony.
The driver yanked the car into traffic, leaned on the horn, and forced his way past a parked UPS truck.
SEVENTEEN
Caligula found himself almost nervous. How strange. Plath was just a girl, after all.
He remembered the first time he had really met her, in a small but vicious battle at the Tulip. He’d liked her. He’d thought he saw some inner strength in her, but it had never occurred to him that she would end up running the New York cell of BZRK. Vincent had seemed bulletproof—an odd concept for Caligula to think of. But Vincent really had seemed indestructible.
For a while after Nijinsky’s fall from grace Caligula thought Lear might place the burden of leadership on him. But no. Of course not. Caligula had his purpose in life, and it was not shepherding a gaggle of kids. He was useful to Lear, but only as a killer. And less and less useful at that. Lear had found other ways.
Nijinsky, poor bastard. A clean bullet would have done the job. No need for what he endured. No need for that cruelty.
He wondered what Plath would ask of him. Would she ask for his help in bringing Burnofsky in so that he could be infested with a new biot?
He hoped she would not ask him about Lear.
But of course she asked about Lear.
“It seems absurd to call each other Caligula and Plath,” Plath said.
Plath had picked the meeting place, and she was waiting for him when he arrived. It was public but not: a dark booth in a dark bar. It was against the law for her even to be sitting here across from him. But there was a law for regular minors and then there was a very different law for minors who could hand a fistful of hundred-dollar bills to a concerned bartender.
It amused Caligula that she had even found this place. It was classically male, a dive bar in a pricey Manhattan neighborhood. An easy walk from the safe house, which showed caution. After all, Sadie McLure had changed her hair, but she could still be recognized if a paparazzo spotted her. She had minimized the odds of that. Smart girl.
He took in the surroundings as he did every few minutes, checking for changes in personnel, in position and posture. There were a couple of hipsters at the bar imagining themselves as latter-day Kerouacs. A tired-looking woman who was almost certainly a hooker. Three loud businessmen saying things like, “So I told him, ‘That is not something I’m comfortable with.’ I mean, maybe he doesn’t give a shit, but I do.” After a few more drinks they’d be complaining about their wives and their kids.
But that’s not who Caligula watched out of the corner of his eye. It was a woman, thirty-five maybe, in an inexpensive business suit with slacks, sensible shoes, and khaki raincoat. She had brown hair cut short, but not so short as to be fashionable. She ordered something he didn’t overhear but that caused the bartender to look wary. It came clear and fizzy in a tall glass: sparkling water.
If she wasn’t some kind of cop, she was doing a very good impression of one. She confirmed the impression by avoiding looking at Caligula. It was a fact of life that any normal person would look at him.
Had it come to this? Were even the cops on the trail? It was one thing being shadowed by Armstrong people and by Plath’s security people. It was a different matter entirely when secrecy was so compromised that FBI or intelligence or even NYPD were watching.
Things were coming to an end. One way or the other. But wasn’t that what Lear wanted?
“It does seem ridiculous,” Caligula allowed.
“Call me Sadie.”
“Call me Caligula.”
That earned him a wintry smile.
He did not lean toward her. He had not shaken her extended hand—she would understand why. Caligula might be a part of BZRK in his own way, but you simply did not trust people armed with biots. A fleeting touch was all it took to send the tiny little beasties toward his brain.
He was nursing a beer in a tall, sweating mug. He casually dragged the mug across the table, left to right, leaving a trail of water behind. A barrier to the tiny bugs.
“I never thanked you. For that first time.” Plath nodded at him, a regal move that seemed natural for her. “You saved our lives.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. And waited.
“I need you,” she said.
“For?”
“Lear wants the computer servers in the Tulip destroyed.”
“They’ll have backups.”
She shook her head. “We don’t think so. They’re so paranoid they keep several systems cut off from one another. We’ve had access to many of their networks, but some of their computers are entirely unreachable from the outside. No Internet links at all. No phone lines. They might as well be something out of the 1980s.”
He nodded, accepting this as a likely fact. “It’s a large building. They are well guarded. This is not a movie; I could not do it alone, or do it even with your people.”
“How could you do it?”
“By destroying the entire building.”
She stared at him. He watched her eyes. Interesting. Her pupils had expanded. A pleasure reaction. But then her eyes had narrowed, and she had drawn away. Of course: she was conflicted.
“Destroying …”
“There will be natural gas pipelines in the basement. If you were to fill some of the sublevels with that gas and ignite a spark, it would very likely collapse the entire structure.”
“Like …”
“Like what, Sadie?” He knew like what. He had a pretty good idea what was being done to her. He could guess Lear’s direction. But he wanted Sadie to say it.
“Like the World Trade Center. Like 9/11.”
“Yes,” Caligula said. “We could obliterate the building itself. It would kill everyone inside. Which is what you would want, Sadie. You would want all the scientists in there to die. It would set back nanobot technology several years at least. It would be the practical end of Armstrong Fancy Gifts. By the time they recovered, someone else would have developed the same capacity. Someone perhaps a bit less … visionary?”
There was a TV on over the bar. It showed what every screen in the world was showing: the Nobel madness. Cut to the American president’s suicide. Back to the Nobel madness. Cut to the Brazilian president.
Plath was shaking her head. “No.”
“If you destroy the servers and let the scientists walk away—”
“It’s not just scientists in that building. There are regular people. Clerks and janitors and people who just answer the phones.” She was pleading with him to find a different answer.
“It would be mass murder. It would make you one of the greatest terrorists in history.” He watched her eyes. She was repelled. She was sickened. But she was not surprised. So that idea had definitely already occurred to her.
And she did not get up and walk away.
Jesus Christ, Caligula thought, this is the new way, the new reality. Sixteen-year-old girls could be made into terrorists. They could be wired for mass
murder.
Plath, for her part, could see it in her imagination. She could see that phallic monstrosity of a building collapsing into the fire that raged at its base.
My God, she thought, it could be done.
“We can’t do that,” she said. To emphasize her point, she reached most of the way across the table and pounded it with her index finger. “There have to be limits. There’s a line.”
“Do there? Is there?”
The table was lacquered wood. To Keats’s biot eyes, it was a bit like an aerial map of someplace like Afghanistan. There were steep, deep valleys below formed by the grain of the wood. But filling in those valleys was the smooth lacquer finish. The result was a feeling like skimming along over mountains, flying at the height of the peaks.
The great problem with biots moving over large distances—distances measured in centimeters or meters rather than millimeters—was finding your way. A biot’s view of the macro world was fuzzy and distorted.
Caligula felt safe on his side of the table. There were two feet separating his arm, resting on the edge of the table, from Plath’s arm on the opposite side. A long run for a biot, and worse, a hard target to keep track of. Then there was the wall of water left by Caligula’s deliberate dragging of his beer.
But Plath, too, had been playing games with the tabletop. Seemingly fidgeting pensively, Plath had picked up the saltshaker, picked at some dried-on food, then put it down on the table.
She put it down toward the far left end of Caligula’s water obstacle.
From the point of view of Keat’s biot the saltshaker was the Tower of Babel and the Empire State Building all rolled into one. He saw it as a distant shape, a feature of the landscape like some impossibly symmetrical mountain.
He saw it from there. But he also saw it through the tap he’d placed on Plath’s eye using his other biot. One of Plath’s own biots was standing beside him there. Plath made her biot tap Keats’s creature and make a gesture meant to convey going around the saltshaker. Biots could not speak to each other, so this was a primitive but effective way to convey basic signals.
BZRK: Apocalypse Page 14