A routine move (God, how had she come to think of this as routine?) down the optic nerve. The nerve cells were jittery, firing gigabytes of optical data beneath her biot feet. She hesitated, looked down with her biot eyes, and saw the cell beneath one foot begin to divide. It was surprisingly sudden in the final phase, looking like invisible hands were ripping soft bread dough in half. She almost laughed at how much it looked like something she’d seen in high school biology.
Her own nerves were stretched to breaking point. It had been one thing to feel brave alone with Keats. He brought out the tough girl in her, made her feel strong, like she had when she was with her brother. In fact, now it seemed as if the two were similar, though she’d never made the connection before. Noah and Stone McLure. She had, of course, loved her brother. And though she had tried to resist it, she loved Noah—she was pretty sure of that—though in a very different way.
The optic nerve was a long cable but so thick at this point that she could barely see the curve. The only light came from two illuminating pods that cast the faintest of greenish light—enough to allow her compound insect eyes to see motion, but barely enough to let her humanlike eyes interpret artificially enhanced color.
The optic nerve goes deep into the brain. The brain tissue presses in close all around, but not so close that a biot couldn’t crawl along beneath a weird, sparking sky of brain cells that warped in long, sensuous waves.
Suddenly she saw something she had not seen on previous trips. Her first impression was of maggots.
It looked like a corpse, roadkill, but completely covered in maggots the size of kittens. They seethed over it—white, gelatinous things with neither head nor eyes nor any other recognizable feature.
Lymphocytes. The defenders of Vincent’s body and blood. White blood cells.
It was his biot. His dead biot. The lymphocytes were consuming it, eating it, slowly wedging legs away from body, slowly absorbing its crushed and extruded insides.
“What can you see?” Keats asked, as Sadie drew in her breath.
“His biot,” she said.
“What?” Wilkes asked. She had checked on Vincent, tightened his restraints, then come back, unable to be alone with him.
“His …It’s his biot. The reapers have it.”
That was the term of art in BZRK: reapers. The slow-moving but deadly lymphocytes—they came in different shapes, colors, and sizes—were reminders that bodies have their own defenses. They were here cleaning up the mess, disposing of one of millions of invaders. Mindless. Relentless.
“Why the hell would his dead biot be in here?” Plath demanded.
“I brought it to him after we retrieved it from the president. I carried it out. It seemed the right thing to do,” Nijinsky said. “You give the dead child back to his parent.”
The lymphocytes had dislodged one of the legs. Its pointed claw stuck up in the air, waving slowly back and forth like some desperate flag of surrenderas the cells ate at it like it was a drumstick.
She raced back to the safety of her previous path, sick to her stomach. Her real stomach. Her biot had no stomach.
Don’t fear the reapers,—a song went through her head.
Through the eyes of her old series-three biot Plath saw the approach of her new, sleeker, more capable biot, making its way laboriously, hauling the sac of acid like some foul egg nestled between its hind legs. She felt the twin shudder of recognition as her two biots saw each other and saw the eyes that were so like her own and yet so different.
There is no explaining a biot face. There is no way to paint a fair picture of that awful melding of soulless insect with eyes that look like smeared, crushed-grape versions of human eyes, which somehow convey the image of the face from which they are derived.
The biot 4.0, the new kid, drew up alongside where the older biot was keeping station at the exact location, the very spot they meant to destroy.
The end of a long needle protruded from the brain beneath their feet. The needle was shoved almost all the way down. The biot had one claw gripping it. It looked like a murder scene.
The acid sack, the festering off-white egg filled with a burning yolk, was dragged into position. Plath had been instructed to poke a small hole in it. To let the acid ooze out, and to flow the acid down the needle, down into the sparking brain cells, burning as it went.
“I’m there,” she reported.
“Okay,” Nijinsky said. He had a phone line open to Dr Violet, upstairs with Vincent. “Dr Violet. We’re about to do it. Observe carefully.”
A small tinny voice came through the iPhone’s speaker. “What do you expect? To see him suddenly well? To leap up and cry, ‘Huzzah?’ It won’t be so easy.”
Nijinsky didn’t answer, just pressed his lips tightly, took a deep breath, and said, “Do it, Plath.”
She maneuvered the sac directly against the pin. With one clawed hand she tore a small—it seemed only an inch or so, m-sub—hole. At first the liquid would not come. She used a second leg to press gently on the sac. A droplet formed. It would be invisibly small to anything but a very good microscope up in the world.
The droplet hung, golden in the artificially colored world of her biots’ vision.
Then it dropped.
The destruction was immediate. Between her front legs, just below her sleek insect head, the brain cells burst open like a stopmotion depiction of fruit rotting.
The cells popped. There was no sound, but they popped. Burst, spilled the goo inside, as the acid attacked in detail. She could see mitochondria squirming as though they were tiny insects.
Fumes rose from the melting flesh. She had no ability to smell, and her hearing was not attuned to the hissing sound. She could only see it.
“It just burned a few cells,” she reported.
“Push the pin to one side, see if you can open a tunnel,” Nijinsky advised.
She did, pushing the pin as far as she could, leaning her tiny weight into it. The flesh resisted as though fearing what was to come. A small hole was opened. The problem seemed to be that the acid’s droplets were too large to fit into the narrow tunnel. Her second droplet melted just a few cells, which now congealed, like cooling lava.
“It isn’t working. I can’t get it to work.”
“Use a second pin. Widen the hole.”
“I’m making a mess.” She looked at him, pleading, weak, wanting to get out, turn it off, walk away.
“Plath,” Nijinsky said.
She pulled out a second pin and slid it down precisely beside the first. Now she was hit with a second wave of memories. Not all of it was games.
Vincent, spanked by his father for cursing.
Vincent, a baby, so tiny those little hands reaching for his mother’s breast, vision all skewed with lurid flares and colors that looked like something from damaged film stock.
“There’s other stuff, other memories. His mother—”
“Do it, Plath, dammit, we are out of time,” Nijinsky said in a terse, angry voice that was his version of yelling.
With her biots working together she wedged the pins apart, and yes, now she had a hole opened into the depths of his brain. With a third limb she reached to widen the tear in the sac.
“Aaahhh!” She swore and jumped halfway out of her chair. “It broke, it broke, it broke!”
The sac had simply disappeared like a balloon that’s been popped. Acid flowed everywhere. Droplets splashed and burned in the cerebral spinal fluid, like the flowering of anti-aircraft fire in some old World War II movie. Some of it sank into the brain, burning, exploding cells, obliterating all it touched.
And some of it splashed onto her biot body, eating with insane intensity at her middle leg’s shoulder joint, causing that leg to flail wildly as if it had caught fire.
The new biot could feel pain.
“AaaaaAAAHHH!” she cried.
“Goddammit, get her out of there!” Keats yelled.
Some, maybe even most of the liquid flowed into the hole.
Plath gritted her teeth and kept the pins apart even as she watched one of her claws melt and curl up like a burning scrap of paper.
“Jesus, it’s everywhere!”
“Are you hurt?” Nijinsky demanded.
“Yes, I’m hurt!”
The acid had splashed across both biots, she now saw. A tiny droplet was burning neatly through the carapace of the series three.
From the hole in Vincent’s brain rose a boiling mix of acid and melted flesh. It burned the brain cells and blew apart capillaries and frothed heavily like some awful parody of an undersea volcano.
“Dr Violet?” Nijinsky asked tersely.
“Nothing,” she answered promptly.
“It hurts like hell,” Plath yelled.
“It’s just in your head,” Nijinsky said.
“Of course it’s in her head,” Keats snapped. “Pain always is. Get her out of there!” When Nijinsky didn’t react immediately, Keats yelled, “Sadie! Get out of there.”
“It’s starting to melt the pins,” Plath reported, “And I am out of there, have to back away, Jesus!”
“Stay close enough to see,” Nijinsky ordered.
“Fuck you, Jin,” Keats snapped. “Sadie: get out.”
Plath motored both biots backward. She turned them to look one at the other, seeing through both sets of eyes at once. A leg fell, burned away, from her older biot.
The pain was intense but not worsening. Not like life-threatening pain. But pain, definitely pain.
She had pulled back a few meters m-sub.
The hole in Vincent’s brain was bubbling still, but like a dying fire. Whether the acid had maintained strength down to the target zone she couldn’t guess. But it had devastated an area that seemed at that scale as large as a small backyard.
The first lymphocytes were oozing along, heading toward damage. The earliest to reach the damaged area were burned by the acid and burst open like water balloons filled with oatmeal.
“I can’t reach the pins to pull them out,” Plath said. “The acid is eating at them, but they’re still there.”
“Okay, okay,” Nijinsky said at last. “Withdraw.”
Faint dawn was illuminating the stained-glass panels in the shallow dome atop the Stone Church one at a time. Anya had seen enough now to be sure that they did, indeed, illustrate the Ten Commandments.
Thou shalt not.
Thou shalt not lie, steal, covet, commit adultery, kill. The numbers were off a bit: Anya had learned her commandments in the Russian Orthodox church her grandfather attended. She had never been a believer, but she loved the old man, a disillusioned communist who nevertheless had remained a devout believer.
How has that worked out for you, Jehovah, the commandments and all?
Anya Violet touched Vincent’s face. He had become very still. His eyes were focused, no longer darting around. Focused with terrible intensity. But not on her. She felt invisible.
He was looking at something. Seeing something.
Nijinsky emerged from the hole beneath the altar. He crouched beside Anya. “Dr Violet. What are you seeing?”
“I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“What are you seeing?” Nijinsky pressed.
“He’s …he’s not moving. Not moving at all. He’s breathing. But his eyes, they are not moving. Not at all. His hands aren’t moving, his arms are just hanging.”
Nijinsky looked at Vincent. Vincent showed no sign of awareness. He was utterly still. Then, slowly, like a toppling redwood tree, he fell backward on the pew, then slid to the floor.
Nijinsky and Anya leapt. She touched his face. Nijinsky took his pulse.
“He’s alive,” Nijinsky said. “He’s alive.”
“He’s catatonic. What have you done to him?”
Nijinsky slid a hand under Vincent’s head and raised him up. Vincent’s eyes never moved. No change of focus.
Nijinksy slapped his face, not hard.
Anya drew back, but she did not object. Instead she said, “Harder.”
Nijinsky delivered a stinging slap.
Nothing. Not a flinch. Not a blink.
“Again,” she said, and somehow now she was in charge, delivering orders.
Nijinsky took a deep breath. This time no open-handed slap. He delivered a short but very sharp closed fist punch to the side of Vincent’s head.
Nothing.
Both of them drew back, staring in horror at those blank, empty eyes.
Then Nijinsky saw something that made him gasp.
But what he saw was not in the room.
Perched at the back of his own eyeball, one of his own biots gazed passively at Vincent’s still, inactive biot.
“What is it?” Anya demanded.
“Just . . .” And he didn’t say what it was, because he didn’t know, all he knew was that the flesh on his arms rose in goose bumps because for the first time, Vincent’s biot had stirred.
Nijinsky felt a chill. He could barely breathe.
“What is it?” Anya demanded.
Vincent’s biot turned eerily Vincent-like eyes on Nijinsky’s own biot. Then, while the real, macro Vincent stared blankly, catatonic, seeing nothing, his biot walked uncertainly to Nijinsky’s creature and extended a claw to touch.
“Anya,” Nijinsky said, his tone awestruck. “He’s …He’s aware.”
NINETEEN
“Aren’t you a bit young to be playing with guns?” Burnofsky asked Billy. Burnofsky looked bad. He’d spent the night tied up and staring longingly at the bottle of vodka. Jealously when he’d watched Nijinsky come and take a long pull.
Billy the Kid said nothing, because he had wanted to say, “I’m not playing,” and then there had been this huge rush of memories and it was like he’d swallowed poison or something. Like he wanted to heave up his guts and he’d already done that.
“Certainly young to be a murderer,” Burnofsky said. Again, Billy was on the verge of saying something and stopped himself. What he wanted to say was, “I’m not a murderer. I just defended myself.”
Except that wasn’t quite true, was it? He had gotten out, after all. He had then walked around the block and come back into the bloody safe house.
He had been safe. Free and clear. And then he had gone back. Of course he’d thought all the bad guys were dead. Right? Right, Billy?
As if he could read Billy’s mind, Burnofsky laughed. It was a bitter, angry sound.
“Maybe I’ll shoot you,” Billy said, irritated. “Might as well,” Burnofsky said. “If you don’t, one of the others will. Or more likely they’ll wire me.”
Billy noticed him glance at his suitcase. And Burnofsky noticed the curiosity.
“Ever run a nanobot, kid? Ever twitched?”
Billy shook his head.
Burnofsky said nothing more, just waited, and glanced at the suitcase again, and looked at Billy from half-closed eyes. Billy reached impulsively for the suitcase. He unzipped it. There was a clean shirt, underwear, a toiletries bag, and a zippered nylon case.
Billy glanced toward the stairwell. He hauled the zippered case onto his lap, wedged his gun under his leg, and opened the case.
“Looks like an old Xbox. Kind of. The glove . . .” It was like watching Burnofsky gaze lovingly at the bottle. Billy wanted to slip the glove on.
“Go ahead. It tingles. It’s much more sensitive than anything you’ve ever used before. You can set the tolerances, of course; at maximum, you barely need to move to twitch.”
Billy stalled, trying not to look greedy for the game. “Where are the nanobots?”
“Where? Ah, well, we have two kinds, you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Let’s call them the grays and the blues.”
“Okay.”
“The grays, well, they’re easy to move around, obviously. In fact, the biggest worry is losing them. See the two batteries?”
Billy had of course seen them. They were nestled in an peppermints tin. Two very average-looking batteries, a single AAA an
d a single AA.
Billy pulled the batteries out and cupped them in his hand. He prodded them with his index finger. He frowned and then pinched the protruding nub of the positive end of the AA and pulled. A cylinder slid out. Inside the cylinder were six glass tubes, each not much thicker than a sewing needle.
“Each of those contains two dozen nanobots,” Burnofsky said. Then he said, “Of course those are the grays.”
Billy heard the subtle disparagement in his voice. He looked up. There was a challenging, teasing look in the old man’s eyes.
“What’s the big deal about the color?” BIlly asked.
“It’s not about the color,” Burnofsky said in a near-whisper that forced Billy to lean in close. “It’s about capabilities. I mean, you’re a gamer, right, Billy?”
Billy the Kid had come up along a mean path strewn with bad people. He was not naïve despite being young. His instincts warned him that Burnofsky was up to something.
But he could handle Burnofsky. He slid the glove onto his hand. It seemed to come alive. It closed in around his hand, not squeezing exactly, but forming itself to fit perfectly. Like it had been made to order just for him.
He could feel thousands of tiny rubber needles pressing, tickling, itching for him to twitch just a little.
He grabbed the second battery and pinched the nub with his free hand. It was awkward now with the twitcher glove on. But he didn’t want to take the glove off.
“How do I get them out?”
Burnofsky’s look was unreadable. Something deep and dark was going on there. Something big. Finally he said, “You just snap the glass pipette. See the one end the way it’s scored? Snap it off and just upend it on any surface. The inside of the pipette is specially coated so the nanobots can’t grip. They’ll slide right out. Takes about five seconds.”
Billy held a single pipette up to the light. There was a suggestion of faint blueness, nothing more.
“What’s better about these?” Billy asked.
“Well, Billy, those are special nanobots. Those are very special nanobots.” Burnofsky’s voice was a whisper again. “Why don’t you empty them out in your palm?”
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