BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  “We …I …think you have the skills, Plath. The empathy. If she were …we’d have asked Ophelia,” Nijinsky said, obviously aware of the lameness of his plea.

  “Yeah, but she’s dead.”

  Nijinsky nodded. “Yes. She’s dead.”

  “Killed by us.”

  “The FBI had her,” Nijinsky argued.

  “Yes, the FBI. Our FBI. The guys who chase bank robbers and terrorists, except now, suddenly they’re the enemy.”

  “Listen to me,” Nijinsky said, stepping toward her. “I want you to listen to me, Plath—”

  “My fucking name is Sadie!” she screamed.

  There was a long, ringing silence. Anya Violet was looking at Nijinsky, watching to see how he responded.

  “Listen to me, Plath,” Nijinsky said with barely contained panic. “I heard what Burnofsky had to say. And some of it’s true. Yeah, you’re trapped. Yeah, it sucks. But we are still the good guys. It wasn’t us who killed your father. We loved your dad. This is your dad’s fight. Your dad helped to create this, this, this …BZRK.”

  Plath found she was having a hard time breathing.

  Nijinsky pressed his advantage. “Your dad bankrolled us. Your dad saw where it was going, saw what was happening. And they murdered him. Your brother, too.”

  “My afterthought brother,” Plath said bitterly. Then, “I miss them.”

  “Look, I’m not trying to play the saint here,” Nijinsky said, hands spread in supplication. Those hands were shaking. “You want to say there’re some shades of gray here? You want to say we’re not always ethical or whatever, yeah. Did we k—” And suddenly he couldn’t say it. A sob just choked him in midword. The next words had to be squeezed out. “We killed Ophelia, who was my friend, who I would have died for? Is that what you want to lay on me? Because I’ve had a long day, too.”

  Plath had seen Vincent stark, staring, twitchy, raving. This was almost as bad. Tears rolled down Nijinsky’s cheeks. He was falling apart.

  “Plath …Sadie …I don’t know …I just know we are …maybe not right, but more right than them. We have to be. That’s all I’ve got. We’re more right than them.” He shrugged helplessly. “We believe in freedom. And your dad believed in it.”

  Plath found her gaze drawn away from the desperate, sad Nijinsky to the seemingly eternally, organically sad Anya.

  Anya said, “I love Vincent. Maybe you can save him. I cannot, but maybe you can.”

  “He wired you,” Plath said, somewhere between scorn and pleading.

  Anya made a helpless gesture with her hands. “And your friend, Keats, did he wire you? He is in your head.”

  The idea shocked Plath. No way. No.

  Anya said, “Listen, I am not saying he did. I don’t think he did. But you care for him. Because you like his face. Because you think he is attractive or funny or smart …What is the difference?” She shook her head impatiently. “What is the difference?”

  “The difference is what this war is about,” Nijinsky said. He was reluctant, but he couldn’t stop himself; he couldn’t let it go by that there was some equivalency between genuine, real, honest emotions and the man-made results of nanobot or biot rewiring. “It’s about free will.”

  Plath made a sound of disbelief. “Maybe we should get off this philosophy because it’s going in circles. Just tell me why we are in such a hurry with Vincent.”

  “Because we are talking about taking on Bug Man inside his own brain. If we take him down and do it without the rest of Armstrong finding out …Their most trusted soldier would be ours. And we could wire …unwire …the president.”

  “You don’t think that you, me, Keats, Wilkes—the four of us together—could take on Bug Man?” Plath asked.

  “Put us on a number line,” Nijinsky said. “One to ten, in terms of skills as a twitcher. I’ll start with myself. I’m a three. Wilkes is no better, she’s brave, but she’s still a three. You, Plath? You’re an unknown. You haven’t really been tested. Keats has talent, and he may be as good as Bug Man some day. But Bug Man has the experience. You’re not getting the math right: Bug Man is the best. He’s a ten out of ten. If we all four go against him, all he has to do is make one kill against each of us.” He held up a single, manicured finger. “One kill and we’re done. That’s our weakness. All four of us at once? We’d be giving Bug Man a chance to wipe out our whole cell in a single fight.”

  “Even if I can somehow help Vincent,” Plath said, “what makes you think Vincent can beat Bug Man this time around?”

  “He will also have the new biot. Faster, stronger, better armed,” Anya said. “We’re going to grow one for him.”

  “Also, we have no choice,” Nijinsky said. “It’s Vincent or we lose.”

  Charles Armstrong had fought with Benjamin before.

  Age twelve. Living in their grandfather’s gloomy mansion. Up in

  the doll house.

  The mannequins all wore clothing of recent vintage, the current

  styles. All had eyes and mouths—the more abstract mannequins with

  mere suggestions of faces were not for Charles and Benjamin. No,

  their mannequins were people with personalities and opinions. And

  hair.

  Ludamilla, one of their grandfather’s maids, dressed the mannequins. The outfits came from buyers at Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s.

  The mannequins themselves cam from mannequin supply companies.

  On the occasion of their twelfth birthday they were presented

  with a particularly attractive mannequin pair, both females, one with

  a wig of long, stiff, honey-colored hair. The other, identical except for

  the wig, which was pert, dark, and short. The boys named these new

  creatures Jessie and Betty.

  Jessie and Betty were made part of the schoolroom tableau, along with the teacher, Mrs. Munson, and the four students in desks, Tina,

  Tony, Terrell, and Ty.

  Jessie and Betty were to be the school nurse and the new music

  teacher.

  Betty, the dark-haired one, was the music teacher. She had a saxophone draped over one shoulder. Her eyes were blue and never looked

  at you, always looked, by virtue of some artist’s design or simple error,

  away.

  Benjamin was the first to suggest that the two new mannequins

  might be made into the equivalent of Charles and Benjamin. “We would just need a saw,” he’d said. “A saw, some glue, some

  clamps.”

  This had not started the fight. The fight had started because

  Charles had felt they should have identical hair, but Benjamin had

  liked the fact that they had this small difference.

  They had been sawing awkwardly away at the tough plastic when

  the fight turned ugly. Charles had threatened his brother with the

  saw, waving it around furiously as they conducted their argument in

  the reflection of a tilted, oval-framed mirror on a floor stand. Benjamin had started screaming, “Use the saw, use it, use it to

  saw us apart! Saw us apart!”

  Then Benjamin had yanked a hinged arm from Jessie and started

  beating Charles with it.

  Not their first fight or their last.

  But the two of them had always found a way to manage. They

  loved each other. What was the alternative? They were stuck together. “We will not mutilate this girl just because she reminds you of

  Sadie McLure,” Charles said.

  “Look at her,” Benjamin sneered. “She thinks she’s beautiful.

  Does she think I’m beautiful?” He glared at Minako. She was handcuffed wrist and ankle to the gurney. He tried to force his face down

  close to hers but Charles resisted. They came close to toppling over.

  KimKim, who had been lent to them as servant, steadied them with a

  timely grab for Charles’s arm. He let go as qui
ckly as he could. Ling,

  who had been across the room, glared poisonously at KimKim. “Brother, we cannot make ourselves beautiful by making others

  hideous,” Charles pleaded. “You know that this is not the way. We are

  here with our people. They love us.”

  “They have no choice!” Benjamin raged.

  “Just as people have no choice but to fear us,” Charles argued. “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it all. Enough. All my life …I want . . .” “What do you want, Ben?” Charles could feel his own heart and

  lungs clenching, tightening from his brother’s emotion.

  “To no longer be this,” Benjamin cried out. “To be a man and

  not a freak. To smile at a girl and not have her run screaming. It’s

  pathetic, isn’t it? I should accept my life. Pathetic.”

  “We aren’t accepting it,” Charles snapped. “And please stop, we’re

  hyperventilating, I can barely breathe! We are accepting nothing. We are changing the world! We are remaking the human race! We’ve begun on this ship, my God, did you hear the cheers and the cries? It

  was love, brother.It was love for us.”

  Benjamin said nothing, just stared at the terrified girl with the

  sprinkling of freckles. At long last, in a dreamy voice, Benjamin said,

  “I’ve thought of having Burnofsky wire me.”

  “What?”

  “But it wouldn’t work, would it. Do you know, Charles? Because

  when you wire a brain, you can only connect those things that are

  already there. What is there in my brain, in my memory, that could be

  tapped for happiness? For joy? When that evil girl, that spawn of Grey

  McLure, was in my brain, what was she wiring together? Old hates

  and new. Old pain and new pain. Emptiness, brother, you know it’s

  true, emptiness. That’s what she made me face. That’s what I couldn’t

  pretend away. Wherever she stuck a pin she hit sadness and rage and

  pain. And nowhere happiness.”

  “There were good times,” Charles said weakly.

  Benjamin made a small laugh. “Do you know what memory she

  tapped into? Certainly not what she had hoped, but there it was, the

  memory of that day, that morning, when Sylvie and Sophie Morgenstein awoke.”

  Charles bit his lip and closed his eyes, remembering now as

  well.

  “How they screamed,” Benjamin said. “Not because they saw us, but because we had made them into us. Pretty twins sewn together. They saw the horror of the rest of their lives stretching out before

  them. They saw the horror of being us.”

  “They were in pain,” Charles said. “They were startled.” “I was never so happy again as at that moment,” Benjamin said. Charles remained silent. How could he argue? The memory was

  clear to him as well. The feeling of …what? Revenge? Yes, revenge.

  Not just on the Morgenstein twins, but on everyone who had ever

  sneered or mocked or shrieked.

  Revenge.

  The word must have filtered into Benjamin’s brain because now

  he took it up. “Revenge on all of them. On our father and mother. On

  life. On God.”

  Then Charles swallowed in a dry throat. “Those tactics are no

  longer necessary. We have the technology now. This girl, we don’t

  want her to scream, we want her to sing, like all the others on this

  ship. Besides, it won’t be the same. She’s not a twin.”

  “She’s not a twin,” Benjamin conceded. Then his eye brightened.

  “There’s no twitcher. But the equipment is aboard. There are nanobots.”

  “We’ve never . . .” Charles began, but he was intrigued. “We’ve seen it done many times,” Benjamin said. He stroked the

  side of Minako’s head and she tried to pull away, as though his very

  touch was foul and poisoned. “She cannot go unpunished. I won’t allow it. Not after what the McLure girl did to me. No, that is the last

  time I will be humiliated and made a fool of.”

  Charles was troubled, but this was better than the alternative. And

  it fit within the beliefs they now had, the enlightened understanding

  that had come hand in hand with the power to rewire minds. Terrorize and inflict pain, yes, but only if necessary. This act, conquering

  the girl down in the nano, would empower Benjamin, hopefully without feeding the growing madness in him.

  “Then, let’s go, my brother and friend,” Charles said. “Let’s go …

  what is it the twitchers say?”

  “Down in the meat,” Benjamin whispered. “Down in the meat.”

  Pia Valquist had understated the nature of her contact in the Royal Navy. Understated both in terms of his position—rear admiral— and relationship. They had been friends. Close friends.

  There was something very nineteenth century about Admiral Edward Domville. He was not particularly fit or trim, he was beefy, long-armed, short-legged and his face was the cheery red you might expect of a man who had spent years climbing masts and running out cannon. Of course he’d done neither; he had mostly served in submarines.

  Pia had not been attracted to him because of his looks, but rather for his intelligence and completely unaffected sense of humor. His family stretched back to the Norman Conquest, with many an admiral or general or member of Parliament in that long lineage. Possibly even a marquess (or was it a baron?), if she recalled correctly.

  They met in the lobby lounge at the Intercontinental Hotel. Most of Hong Kong was within a stone’s throw of water, but the Intercontinental was very nearly in the bay.

  “Pia, my God, you’ve let yourself go completely,” he said, grinning around a missing tooth.

  “Eddie, I can’t believe they still let you wear that uniform.”

  They did a cheek kiss that went on a bit longer than it might if they’d really been only casual acquaintances.

  “Let me! Hell, they’ve given me extra decorations. The sheer weight of them is wearying. How have you been, Pia?”

  They looked at each other like old friends, in fact were old friends. The admiral was beginning to show his age in the jowls and the bulbousness of his nose. On the other hand, the extra decorations he’d alluded to were not for merely standing around and looking distinguished.

  They took a table that looked out through prismed windows onto a stunning view of Hong Kong harbor and across the water to the wall of skyscrapers that was a sort of mirror of the similar wall of skyscrapers just behind the hotel.

  “Tea is coming,” the admiral said. “Neither milk nor sugar, as I recall. But what can one expect of a Swede?”

  “I have something rather bizarre, Eddie. You’re going to have a hard time believing what I have to tell you.”

  “Am I?” His eyes narrowed and he got that conspiratorial badboy look that she liked.

  “Have you ever heard of the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation?”

  “I believe they deal in gift shops. Also weapons systems,” he said drily.

  “And you know about the Armstrong Twins?”

  “In a general sort of way,” he admitted. The tea came, and they spent several minutes performing the small rituals of pouring, parceling out sandwiches, tasting, complimenting.

  “They are a tragic case,” Eddie said. “Or perhaps I should say tragic cases, plural.”

  “Do you recall an old American surplus amphibious assault ship that foundered off the coast of Brazil a couple of years ago?”

  “Oh hoh,” he said. A tiny sandwich hovered in his hand, forgotten.

  “Eddie, it was a floating house of horrors. The Armstrong Twins were kidnapping people, often very young people, and using drugs and lobotomization and quite frankly Nazi techniques to . . .” She fell silent when she realized from his ex
pression that none of this was news to him.

  Eddie sat back in his chair, and the cheery face was less cheery by several degrees. “I have heard rumors.”

  “The hell,” Pia said hotly. “You knew?”

  Eddie shrugged. “There isn’t a great deal that goes unknown on the high seas. If the Royal Navy doesn’t know it, the Americans do. In this case, we both had suspicions.”

  “Eddie, don’t dance around on this, please. I’ve met and interviewed one of the survivors.”

  That surprised him. “Have you?”

  “She’s in Finland. And let me tell you that her story would give you nightmares. She lives in fear, surrounded by former Mossad and dogs and electrified fences.”

  Eddie looked grim. “By the time we knew anything about it, it had sunk. There was nothing actionable.”

  “Actionable?” She chewed on the word. “You’ve spent too much time with Americans.”

  He laughed at that. “Oh, no question. I’d far rather be spending my free time with lovely and ageless Swedes.”

  “Eddie, there’s another.”

  “Another man? I’m shocked.”

  “Another Doll Ship. That’s what she called it: the Doll Ship. It’s a human doll house for the Armstrong Twins. And there’s a second. A replacement for the one that sank. They are still at it.”

  Eddie’s face darkened. His eyes went from interested to predatory. “Is there indeed? Do you have proof?”

  “I have evidence. Circumstantial evidence. I need you to supply proof.” Pia sat forward and spilled a little tea in the process. “Eddie, they kidnapped a young Japanese American girl from Okinawa just a week ago. A fourteen-year-old child. The Doll Ship is near.”

  She let that hang in the air. The wheels were turning in her friend’s head.

  “The Albion has completed maneuvers with the Five Power Defense Arrangement and is steaming toward Hong Kong for a bit of a show….”

  The admiral made a tiger shark smile that must have come down through generations of prize-seeking Royal Navy captains and a few privateers as well. His eyes were dreamy. He said, “I was just this very minute thinking that the Albion could do with a sudden, surprise inspection by a senior officer. Do the Americans know anything about this?”

  She shook her head. “I came straight to you.”

  “Better and better,” he said. “Do you have a description of this Doll Ship of yours?”