BZRK Reloaded

by Michael Grant

  Nijinsky. He had gone with Anya to observe Vincent, the actual physical Vincent, upstairs in the church. “Ophelia’s dead tired.” That hadn’t made any sense, but it caused Plath to fall silent. After a while Plath began to confuse Vincent’s memories with

  her own. Was it Vincent or her who had ridden the pony? Was it her

  or was it Vincent who had gotten poison ivy? Was it Vincent or her

  who had recruited Nijinsky?

  First bloody nose.

  First bath as a baby.

  First time he had slid his hand up a girl’s leg.

  First time tumbling out of his crib.

  First time eating popcorn.

  Then, suddenly, she was seeing herself through Vincent’s eyes.

  He had found her attractive. In the macro she blushed. He had first

  met her when she was in a bathtub.

  She saw Kerouac, Keats’s brother, as he was in Vincent’s memory. He wasn’t much like Keats. He was more athletic, not larger but

  muscular, tough. His eyes did not have Keats’s tenderness. She would

  never have wanted to run away with Kerouac.

  She had never pictured Kerouac smiling, somehow, laughing,

  but Kerouac had enjoyed life. He was telling Vincent a story about teaching his little brother to play goalkeeper. And laughing. And Vincent had wondered what it was like to take vicarious pleasure from

  another person.

  Suddenly Plath saw images that could only be digital. There were

  stunted game creatures with swords.

  And then, a thrilling ride through a bizarre alien landscape. Digging into a sort of Lego-like world.

  Passing through magical doors.

  Games. Games, a dizzying array of them. Game controllers,

  touch screens, racing and leaping and …not joy, not for Michael Ford

  who would later be called Vincent. But a suspension of the strangeness that was always with him. And a rush. Very much a rush. There were people—just names on a leaderboard, but with

  humans behind them—and Vincent knew them, knew their strengths

  and weaknesses, and they knew him.

  He was somewhere rather than nowhere.

  And he was someone. MikeF31415.

  “Wilkes,” Plath said. “Google MikeF31415.”

  “Why?”

  Plath didn’t answer, but she heard the distant sound of fingers on

  a touchscreen.

  “There’s a lot of hits,” Wilkes said. “Game sites.”

  “I’ve seen that handle before.” This from Billy the Kid, who had

  crept downstairs after being ignored by the others. He was looking over Wilkes’s shoulder. He sounded respectful. “Whoa. Whoa.” Pause, then, and in a deeper register, “Whoa, this dude is good. I mean, way

  good. Respect.”

  Games and more games. This tiny corner of Vincent’s brain was

  a library of games. And with them came feeling. Not pleasure, but not

  numbness, either. Michael Ford AKA Vincent had found something

  he cared about.

  And then, there it was: Bug Man’s nanobots.

  They were racing toward Vincent’s biots, their center wheels

  down for speed. The exploding head logo that marked all of Bug

  Man’s nanobots was seen in flashes.

  The sight sent chills through Plath. She froze in place, pushing

  the probe ever so gently to the left, to the right, back, center again. She saw the ripped off legs of Vincent’s biot spinning away in the

  cerebrospinal fluid.

  Worse, far worse, she felt Vincent’s fear.

  “Unh!” she said.

  “What?” Wilkes. Bored, but hearing the change in her voice. “Get Jin,” Plath said. “Get him now.”

  The twitcher station on the Doll Ship was as complete and up-todate as the ones back at the Armstrong Building, and better than the one Bug Man had in Washington.

  In addition, there was a portable model to be used as backup. The controls for the portable unit were less sophisticated, and the visual feedback in particular was less efficient.

  Charles would get one, Benjamin the other. Charles knew Benjamin would end up with the better equipment—that was the problem in dealing with an irrational, emotional person: they could simply dig in their heels and outlast you.

  Making a virtue of necessity, Charles said, “Take the more comfortable equipment, Benjamin.”

  Benjamin did not demur.

  They did not need Minako to be present in the room with them. In fact, Charles would have preferred she not be, but here again Benjamin had his way.

  So Minako had been immobilized in a metal chair with handcuffs.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she said in her charmingly accented English.

  “We are not sadists,” Charles said, sounding wounded. “This is not some horror movie. We are going to help you.”

  “Just let me go. Please. Please, I want to go back home.”

  Charles was fitting the equipment to his head. It took two hands, which meant he and Benjamin had to cooperate, though Ling was there to help, and they’d been given the services of the crewman named KimKim.

  “Fasten it around the back, KimKim, if you would, please,” Charles said. “Yes, it can go tighter.”

  It was extremely uncomfortable, the two of them wearing the helmets—neither could go all the way on, obviously, so contacts were imperfect. The lighter portable model fit better, offsetting some of the advantage Benjamin had.

  And why am I thinking in terms of advantage? Charles wondered. This isn’t a competition.

  Of course they must look grotesque to both KimKim and the girl. As always, Ling remained silent.

  “We are not going to hurt you, Minako; we are helping you,” Charles said. “You have lived your entire life alone, whether you recognized it or not …Yes, now get the first syringe, KimKim. We need to link to the nanobots. This is exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Benjamin said curtly.

  “I’m sorry,” Minako cried. “Whatever I did, I’m sorry, please let me go.”

  Charles’s bifocal vision—his depth perception—dropped out. This was a common experience. The center eye, the shared eye, could link either to him or to Benjamin. It was always obvious to whom the third eye was linked at any moment, because when it was active it provided depth of field otherwise lacking.

  KimKim lifted the syringe from its stainless steel cradle. “I don’t know how to give anyone a shot,” he said nervously. Then added, “Sir.” Then amended, “Sirs.”

  “It’s not really a needle,” Charles explained. “There’s no sharp tip, you see. You just need to place it very close to Minako’s eye and squeeze the plunger very carefully.”

  “You cannot do this,” said Minako. “Please. Please, please.”

  “Young lady, there is nothing to be afraid of,” Charles said, working on his best friendly voice.

  “Who’s to stop us?” Benjamin snapped.

  “You should understand that we are doing this to make you happy, Minako. Think of it …think of it as if there was a disease in your brain and we are going to cure you. When we are done you will feel happier. You’ll find that you—”

  “I see!” Benjamin cried. “I can see through their eyes! I’m seeing through the nanobot eyes! Hah!”

  KimKim carefully placed the tip of the needle—it might not be sharp, but it certainly looked like a needle—as close as he could to Minako’s eyelid. She squeezed her eyes shut and yelled, “Someone help me! Help!”

  KimKim pulled back. “If you don’t sit still I’m going to poke you!”

  “I can see through all their sensors, oh, oh!” Benjamin said. “I see all the other, all my …all the nanobots, we’re all jumbled together, oh!”

  KimKim used two fingers to pry Minako’s eyelid open and quickly pushed the plunger.

  “Ah!” Benjamin cried. “Like a roller coaster.”
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br />   “Now me, now me, the second syringe!” Charles ordered. “In the other eye!”

  KimKim raced for the second syringe and now Minako was sobbing on the edge of hysteria. She started babbling numbers. “One, two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen.”

  “What is she doing?” Charles demanded, distractedly.

  “Prime numbers, you dolt,” Benjamin snarled.

  “Nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine, thirty-one.”

  Charles tried to ignore his brother’s condescension—Benjamin had always been better at math—and focused instead on the virtual control panel that appeared in the screen the helmet projected—lopsidedly—onto his eye. His fingers twitched in the gloves. The interface was a virtual touchscreen. He searched for the button labeled, Register.

  He pushed it by barely moving his index finger. A second prompt opened up. Did he want to register nanobot package six? Yes, he did.

  And then, “Ah!”

  It was startling, though he’d seen it many times on video. All at once he was looking through six sets of sensors. It was hard to make sense of what he was seeing. A tangle of mechanical legs and sensor arrays and immobile wheels. The nanobots were not neatly stacked but rather tangled in a ball.

  KimKim hit the plunger and the nanobots all exploded down a steel pipe and landed in a spare splash of liquid in Minako’s eye.

  “Thirty-seven, forty-one, forty-three, forty-seven!”

  The visuals were too much, too overwhelming, too many eyes looking in too many directions. What was it Bug Man did when he had too many nanobots to control individually? Platooning. And there was the prompt in the form of a question: Platoon?

  Charles said, “Yes,” then realized this was not a voice-activated control. He drew a finger around the six nanobot avatars and touched the Platoon? prompt.

  The nanobots moved automatically into a formation, two lines of three.

  Sudden darkness.

  Charles awkwardly shifted the helmet to see out into the world. He looked at Minako. KimKim had let go of her eyelid. She was squeezing her eyes tight shut again, still rattling off prime numbers. He felt a moment of pity for her fear.

  But pity was weak tea compared to the fascination of feeling himself actually down—physically in—a place he’d only seen secondhand. He pulled the eyepiece back into alignment.

  There was no sense of touch. He poked a leg at the eye surface beneath him. All six of his nanobots did the same. No sensation. But the visuals were amazingly convincing. He was there, actually there!

  He had much to learn, and Charles knew he would never be Bug Man or Burnofsky. But oh, Lord, it was amazing.

  Then with a flick of a finger he sent his six nanobots racing. The center wheels dropped into place, the legs spread out like a canoe’s outriggers.

  And zoom!

  Zoom!

  The speed was breathtaking. Charles had never even walked quickly, let alone run, let alone this wild motorcycle speed.

  “Min,” Charles said. “Call to the galley and order us some coffee and sandwiches. We’ll be here for some time.”

  Can a damaged mind be cured?

  Can a damaged mind be cured by subtraction?

  Can the thing, the one thing, that sent you over the edge merely

  be removed from your brain? Is it like writing a book, where the author can simply highlight a scene and hit the Delete button and change the course of the story?

  Is it all just a data file? Is that all the human mind is: a sort of computer made of meat? Highlight folder: Delete. Empty trash. All gone.

  All better now.

  Shane Hwang, who called himself Nijinsky, considered these philosophical questions and badly, badly wanted not to make a decision.

  “There’s cutting,” he said to Plath, who was still in her easy chair but not looking at all easy. “And there’s burning with acid.”

  “Jesus,” Plath said. “I . . .” She stood up. She paced away, looking strangely tall beneath the low dirt ceiling, turned, and came back. “I think it’s as close as he ever came to some kind of …not joy, that’s not the right word. Gaming, I mean, it’s as close as he came to feeling like he belonged.”

  Nijinsky noticed that Keats stood awkwardly, wanting to make some physical contact with Plath, not doing it for fear of …something.

  “He’s upstairs growling like a dog,” Wilkes said in a grating voice. “We have to try something, right?”

  “We might be cutting his soul out,” Plath said, twisting her fingers together.

  Wilkes made a rude sound. But she didn’t argue, she couldn’t. Instead she pushed a thumbnail into the flesh of her arm. Hard.

  Speaking of crazy people, Nijinsky thought mordantly.

  Like any of them were normal. Keats and Plath might have come in normal, but they wouldn’t stay that way. Wilkes had always been a little nuts. And maybe he himself had been normal, or something like it, once upon a time.

  What did you think this was? Nijinsky asked himself. Did you think this was a romance novel? It’s war.

  What did you think you would become when you got into this? Did you think you were a hero? You pushed the green button, Shane. You didn’t see the results, but you know what happened. You know that those men were killed.

  They were there to kill us, all of us. Kill or be killed.

  “What would Vincent want?” Keats asked, speaking for the first time.

  “To be making the decision himself, not leaving it up to all of us,” Nijinsky snapped, drawn out of his circular contemplation. Interrupted in the act of chasing his own tail.

  “And what would his second choice be?” Keats asked, looking Nijinsky in the eye, very steady.

  Nijinsky resented it. “What would your brother want?” he shot back. “If we were talking about operating on—”

  “He’d want me to make the call,” Keats said. “If he couldn’t do it himself, he’d want me to do it. I don’t know Vincent very well, but my guess is he’d want you to decide, Jin. He’d want you to try and rescue him from where he is.”

  “Like I failed to do when it mattered,” Nijinsky said. “When Bug Man had him. Rescue him now like I didn’t do then.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Yeah,” Keats said finally. Because someone needed to.

  The strange thing was, Nijinsky was relieved at the answer. He had needed his guilt recognized.

  Wasn’t that what they were fighting for? The right to feel every jolt of pain life had to give? The right to suffer? To not be sustainably happy?

  “I’m not the right person to lead this,” Nijinsky said to three blank faces. “Unfortunately none of you are, either. So, I’m it.” He nodded and felt his chin quiver and decided it didn’t really matter if they saw that. “Send your model four out to take on a load of sulfuric,” Nijinsky said to Plath. To Wilkes, he said, “Go make sure Dr Violet is with Vincent. Have her prepare the acid for Plath. Then stay there with him, report to me.”

  Wilkes ran off immediately, leaving Plath and Keats with Nijinsky.

  After a while Nijinsky realized the awkwardness was all about him. He excused himself.

  But he went only as far as the stairs, waited there out of sight, listening. Because that’s what the right person would do. Because the right person would want to know what Plath and Keats said to each other.

  He overheard.

  “Don’t do this,” Keats said.

  “I have to try to—”

  “Like hell you do.”

  Plath felt like the basement was out of air. She clenched a fist until

  the nails cut into her palm and thought, Jesus, just like Wilkes. She said, “I thought you were saying it was the right thing to do!” “For Vincent, yes,” he said. “For you …You have to get out of this, Sadie. I see it in your eyes, you want out.”

  “I want us both out,” she said in a near whisper.

  She had turned away. He didn’t want to talk to her neck. He took

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p; her shoulders and turned her around. It was not roughly done, but it was more definite than Keats had been before. He wasn’t asking her to face him, he was demanding.

  “Together?” he asked. “Yes, together,” she said, shaking off his grip but facing him nonetheless.

  “But you said—”

  “Don’t fucking tell me what I said!” Her head jerked forward with the force of it, making him back up. “I was making sense. I was being mature. I was trying not to hurt you or hurt me.”

  “And now, what? Now you don’t care?”

  “Listen to me, Noah,” and all at once it wasn’t Keats, it was Noah. She repeated the name, defiant. “Listen to me, Noah. If this works, if we save Vincent, we may be able to save your brother. And someday we may be able to save each other.”

  “Don’t do this for me or for my brother,” he pleaded. “Don’t. You can get out. You can escape. This doesn’t have to be your life.”

  She took his face in her hands.

  He closed his eyes.

  It was not a kiss as prelude to desire. It was a kiss that sealed fates.

  EIGHTEEN

  The new version-four biot—biot 4.0—moved more slowly with its internal bladder filled with acid. It was also carrying a separate bladder full of acid, just a sort of plastic trash bag really. It moved slowly back along the tortuous path it had followed earlier. Across the frozen lake of the eye with its below-the-surface rivers of swollen capillaries.

  Follow the long curve, down beneath the eyelid, a long walk it was, it felt like a mile. Around and around until the muscles, like bridge cables, merged into the slickery ice surface now more pink than white.

  The muscles twitched. Vincent’s eyes, well, he didn’t sleep much, which all by itself made him twitchy. More so when he was strapped down. They had cut down on his meds to let him react more normally. At the moment, to react normally meant to laugh softly, madly, to himself, to occasionally bark like a seal, and other times simply to roll his eyes up as far as they would go. It felt to Sadie like he was trying to turn his eyes all the way around and look back at his brain. Which given what he knew made a certain amount of sense.

  Plath’s biot could not make out human speech very well, less well when she was down in the meat. She heard what she knew to be a voice, a soft, soothing voice, Anya no doubt, but it was like hearing a truck rumble by on the street outside.