became involved in nanotechnology in hopes of saving his wife and
later his daughter. His motivation was to save his daughter, and yours
flows from the fact that you killed yours.”
“You won’t stop it,” Burnofsky blustered. “If I don’t do it the
Twins will. Sooner or later they’ll come to it. Right now all they want
is acceptance and love. They’ll come to it, though, the gray goo. Even
without me they’ll see the truth—that it’s all foul and filthy and
degenerate and deserves to be wiped clean.”
“Feel free to keep ranting, Burnofsky. Billy, since we have your
nanobots to do some drilling, we’re going in through the nose, up into
the sinuses. It’s easier to reach the nucleus accumbens. It will be fun!” “No,” Burnofsky pleaded. “No, don’t do this. She was my daughter! She was all I had!
“The man who would kill us all begs for his humanity. Rich,”
Nijinsky said. “Follow me in, Billy.”
They had let themselves into a vacant office two floors down from where Bug Man was slipping into the twitcher station. They had the keys, of course; a janitor had given up his pass key for the six hundred dollars Plath withdrew from a nearby ATM.
Vincent sat almost comatose in an office chair beneath a dusty wall-mounted sign that read Schatten GmbH. There were old computers and old office supplies, and it looked as if no one had occupied the place for some time. The electricity had been turned off. What must once have been an orange, left on the windowsill, had collapsed in on itself and grown a fine coating of green mold.
Plath, Keats, Wilkes, and Anya perched on chairs and the edges of desks. The four of them tried not to stare at Vincent.
Only Plath had any idea what was happening with Vincent’s biots. She had sent all three of her biots along with Vincent’s aboard Wilkes’s hand, and transferred from there to Bug Man’s wrist. Wilkes’s own biots were hanging back, waiting in the grooves of Bug Man’s palm.
Plath’s job was to watch Vincent’s biots make their approach, then to peel off and gain access to Bug Man’s eye and see what he saw. It seemed insane to her—an apt word, insane—that Vincent could still be nearly comatose in the macro but responsive in the nano. But she could almost understand it. (Which might also be insane.) A biot was not an “other.” It was not outside of you, it was part of you. It was like a finger or a leg.
Still, accomplishing the mission would require Vincent to understand at some level, to know where his biots were and why. Did he understand? If not, Bug Man would destroy him once and for all. There would be no coming back from further losses.
Vincent was going into a fight he absolutely had to win, and yet he might not even know the fight was on.
“He’s moving,” Plath reported. Everyone glanced at Vincent. She corrected, “When I say he’s moving . . .”
“Yes, his biots,” Keats said. He smiled at her.
She did not return the smile. She knew how vast the brain was down there, down in the meat, and she knew that Nijinsky could easily enter her brain and lay wire without Keats’s own biot having spotted him. But it was still hard to shake the suspicion that Keats had known what Nijinsky was up to and had just concealed it from her. Could she really trust even him?
The rational, reasoning part of her knew better, understood that because Nijinsky knew the location of her aneurysm he would of course easily avoid Keats’s biot. Keats would never have known. And yet . . .
“Down the rabbit hole,” she whispered to herself, “And all of us as mad as hatters.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Vincent was running free. So good to be running free. He was two, a twin, but not identical. Half of him was familiar, the sights, the sensation, the speed, but the other half over there, no right here, was faster, stronger, and saw more clearly.
Two halves of him. The real, true him, running wild over dead skin cells, threading through widely spaced, dark spikes like branchless palm trees, bent almost parallel with the ground.
He was conscious of another creature, much like himself, but different, following behind, keeping pace. She—and he was somehow sure it was a she—was no threat. A friend? Possibly, but certainly no threat, no, he had an image of the threat; he remembered them, the other game pieces, the ones with the center wheel, the machines that zoomed along on six legs or lowered that wheel.
He remembered their dangerous claws and spikes and vulnerable visual array.
There was something else, too, a vision in his head of large, slowmoving, gloomily lit creatures arrayed in a semicircle. Noises came from them. Sometimes he almost understood those noises. And sometimes they reached toward him with long five-pointed starfish hands that never touched him, not him, the real him, the mismatched twin him that raced now toward an ascending wall of impossible height.
Up the arm. Onto the shoulder. Toward the neck, yes, he knew what all those things meant: they were geographical features of the game space. They were roads that sometimes presented obstacles but not now as he ran like a tornado across an Oklahoma wheat field.
Somewhere ahead would be the frozen white lake and the pulsing capillaries and then on to the darkness within. Down in the meat.
Down in the meat. Back to the game. The thought of it triggered feelings in him. Fear. Or was it anticipation?
Joy? Something like it, not joy, but something satisfying, something that flooded him with a dark, wild urge that balanced the fear, that turned fear into rocket fuel.
One of the gloomy dark creatures in that other reality made a noise. “Look: he’s smiling.”
Ropes coiled down from the lead helicopter. Before the rope ends touched the deck, the Royal Marines were descending. They came down so fast it was as if they were simply dropping from the sky.
The first of them hit the deck and was instantly overwhelmed by the mob that poured from the open spheres. The second saw what was happening as he dropped. He fired off six quick rounds over the heads of the mob, warning shots aimed carefully toward the open sea. His bullets made tiny splashes in green-gray waves.
He slid down to rescue his buddy but was knocked to the deck by aa middle-aged woman and had his hand stomped by a furious little boy.
The mob was unafraid, unimpressed, enraged, energized by some power that went even beyond the motivations of loyalty to the Great Souls: they were human beings who had been locked in a cage, had their brains crudely rewired, had been fed a diet of propaganda and carefully avoided feelings that sometimes rose up from within like a geyser, feelings of fury and loss and confusion.
And now they had targets. They had someone to attack and permission to unleash all that was buried deep inside them, all the emotion that had been papered over by sustainable happiness.
They were fearless because in that moment, caught up in the hysteria of the mob, they were insane.
A teenage boy bit into the hand that had been stomped. The marine shrieked in pain.
A flash-bang grenade went off, a noise like the crack of doom. But out in the open the flash meant little.
More ropes coiled down and with shocking speed the marines dropped to the deck. First two of them managed to link up, then a third, then a fourth to form a little square, back to back, hammering with their rifle butts at every target that presented itself, men, women, children, smashing and yelling and now the professional discipline was paying off against the untrained civilians.
The square of marines grew to eight, old school, like some desperate Custer’s Last Stand, back-to-back, side by side, a formation so old it was old by the time of the ancient Romans.
“Masks on!” their sergeant roared in a voice that could nearly be heard three miles away on shore.
They took turns slipping gas masks over their faces. The Sea King veered sharply away to lessen the rotor downdraft. Then from the Sea King came rocket-propelled gas grenades, fired straight into the mob. Some of the grenades hit
people, knocking them flat. Gas swirled and some choked, but the wind was too strong and the fumes were soon carried off.
But the marines had gained a precious foothold. There were a dozen men now, backs to the helicopter where Minako screamed in sheer terror.
Pia Valquist, aboard the second Sea King helicopter, said, “Let’s come at them from behind!” The admiral nodded, and the Sea King veered away just as the first rocket-propelled grenade was fired. It shot past the helicopter and exploded in the sea.
“That was close,” Admiral Domville observed with no apparent concern.
The Sea King zoomed along the length of the Doll Ship and came to hover just over the bow. Pia saw Hong Kong harbor now unmistakably close, tight-packed skyscrapers with every known type of craft from oil tankers to pleasure boats in the foreground. The city lights were coming on as darkness fell.
The marines from the second Sea King now began sliding down to the undefended bow.
“You know how to do this?” Domville asked Pia.
Pia slid a pistol into her pocket, grabbed a line, snapped on a friction carabiner, and said, “I think it will come back to me.” She swung out into the air and dropped toward the deck thinking it was a hoary old action-movie cliché but, in fact, she really was too old for this shit.
It took about three minutes before it clicked for Bug Man. He was back at the twitcher station, hooking into the president’s nanobots when it occurred to him that offices are cleaned at night, not in the morning.
Even then he froze for a few seconds, not wanting to believe it. Surely not. Surely BZRK hadn’t found him? How could they? And if it was BZRK, why hadn’t the girl with the strange eye tattoo just pulled out a gun and shot him?
But even as he raced through the steps to understanding and accepting, he already knew: they were going to wire him.
He shoved himself out of the twitcher station, tore off the glove, and ran for the small bathroom. Where had the phony cleaning lady touched him? His wrist? How long a run from wrist to eyeball or nose or ear?
The bathroom must have been some long-ago executive’s pride and joy. It wasn’t large, but it had a sink, a toilet, and a very small shower. Jindal had rented this office for the bathroom—twitching jobs could go on for a long time and they couldn’t very well have Bug Man running down the hall every time he needed to pee.
Bug Man turned the shower on hard and hot. He stripped off his clothes, dropping them to the floor, grabbed a washcloth and soap and began to scrub. He opened his eyes and stared up into the powerful jet. It hurt like hell and he couldn’t do it for more than a few seconds.
Then he vigorously, even brutally, scrubbed his face with the washcloth and soap, rubbing like he was trying to remove his own skin.
There was a second’s warning. Plath saw that the quality of the light had changed, from soft to harsh. Then a roar, like a waterfall. She jumped from her chair, grabbed Vincent’s arm and said, “Shower! He’s on to us!”
At that moment, down at the nano level, she was just crossing from horizontal (and upside down) to vertical as she rounded the long arc of Bug Man’s jaw. Vincent’s biots were ahead of her, barely visible.
The water hit like a dense meteor shower. In the m-sub the first drops of water were the size of swimming pools. They exploded across the skin with unimaginable force. Plath sank her biot talons into dead epidermal cells and crouched low.
The first drops had missed Vincent, but he must have seen them because he appeared frozen in place. And that was the last she saw of him because now the water was coming down like a fire hose. She could no longer make out individual droplets; it was like a tropical downpour where every drop falling was the size of a house. The violence of the assault was shattering, indescribable.
One biot managed to reach out and grab a hair, then pulled itself to that hair and held on. Her other biots kept having to grab new skin cells as others gave way like roof shingles in a hurricane.
Then the spray moved away, but her biots were still completely submerged in rivulets of water, each a rushing whitewater river.
Then the sky turned white and down from above came the washcloth, bigger than a circus tent. It was a massive, undulating wave, a fabric of rough cables woven together, with frayed ends like shrubsize bottlebrushes. It dropped across the landscape and moved swiftly down, then reversed direction, up and suddenly one of her biots, P-1, was torn from the epidermis. It was on its back, underwater, surrounded by a forest of massive threads.
Plath bit her lip and tried to climb back up one of the terrycloth threads to reach the skin again. She climbed over and through a cluster of bacteria like tiny blue tadpoles, also trapped in the material. The bacteria made her shudder, but she’d seen them before. They swam blindly around her biot legs like she was wading through a tidal pool of guppies.
P1 fought its way atop the bottlebrush thread, but then the water came again, pounding her through the cloth, beating her between bottlebrushes and skin, unable to grasp either firmly.
Loose!
P1 was caught in flowing water, like a child carried away on a water slide, slipped from the cloth, rushed madly over skin, grabbed frantically at anything that passed. Suddenly a deep pool that swirled like a draining toilet, madly around and around.
She was in Bug Man’s navel.
Then just as suddenly she was spilled out, caught by the raging torrent and carried into a dark forest of curling, leafless trees. She grabbed hold, one leg, then a second, holding two hairs where they met and rubbed together.
She chose one and held on to it for dear life.
Her other two biots had held on much higher up on Bug Man’s body. But Bug Man knew how things were down in the meat, he knew the resilience of biots.
P3, the biot 4.0, now saw something terrifying. It was a football field in length, a rectangle containing three full-length steel blades each capable of leveling a forest. The razor’s edges didn’t seem especially sharp in the m-sub, but they had a terrifying perfection that was alien to biology. In the gaps between blades Plath saw stubs of hair.
Bug Man was going to shave everything from face to wrist.
The blades touched down, pressed against the epidermis, and hurtled toward her biots. P2 was close enough to the left edge of the razor to make a mad dash to the side, racing from hair to hair like some demented Tarzan swinging through the trees.
But P3 was flat in the razor’s path.
She was watching a car crash, seeing what was coming, powerless to avoid it. She could only hold on and hope as the first of the blades flew harmlessly by overhead, a scythe that missed its wheat stalk.
But the second blade, a tenth of a second behind the first, snapped the tree P3 was holding on to, and she was jammed between blades in a Pick Up Stix jumble of broken hairs, random skin cells, and soap.
She felt, with the P3’s superior senses, the sudden swoop up, away, through the air.
Bug Man thrust the razor up against the showerhead where the power of the water was irresistible.
P3 was blown out of the razor.
It fell, trapped inside a water droplet. Fell like a missile toward the shower floor.
Pia and Admiral Domville had the sense to stay behind the advancing phalanx of marines that now worked its way back with swift efficiency toward the melee on the stern.
Neither had any business participating in the action, one was a
Swedish intelligence agent and the other a portly, middle-aged, very senior naval officer. Pia was tense and frankly afraid. Domville was neither. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was wondering how in God’s name he could possibly explain this to his own superiors—quite possibly a committee of Parliament, God forbid—but most of his brain had been swept up in a giddy froth of testosterone and adrenaline. Several of his ancestors had swung cutlasses and fired cannon, and Domville was thrilled to be carrying an assault rifle and going into harm’s way.
This was fun. Unless of course it ended badly, and he was forced into
early retirement.
The first group of marines retreated under renewed pressure and the haphazard but deadly assault of hand grenades. No order to mow down the mob had been given, but one marine was dead and another was bellowing in pain from shrapnel in his knee, and as well trained as the marines were, their mood was nevertheless ugly.
Domville’s detachment came rushing up the starboard side, out of view of the mob, then attacked with a loud hurrah using rifle butts and kicks to push them back.
Finally, the mob broke. First a few ran, then more, then all but a handful were racing back to their familiar spheres.
“Keep them bottled up!” Domville shouted. “Lieutenant, I’ll take three men to the bridge.”
The lieutenant detailed three marines as Domville and Pia began to run up the series of steep metal stairs that led to the bridge.
As he climbed, Domville’s earpiece informed him that a Chinese coastal patrol vessel was on an intercept course and the Doll Ship was now in Chinese waters. He had to wrap this up and present the Chinese with a fait accompli. He could claim he was in hot pursuit of an obviously illegal vessel holding international citizens as hostages. That might work.
The fact that half a dozen of those international citizens now lay dead and bleeding on the deck would, however, be a complication in that narrative.
They were racing up the last stairway to the bridge when a crewman appeared holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
The first marine fired his weapon and the crewman staggered back spraying blood from his neck—but not before he squeezed the trigger.
The RPG flew a mere ten feet before hitting a crossbeam. The explosion knocked all of them back down the stairway, and had it not been for the blood landing on Pia’s legs it might almost have been comic.
She crawled out from under the tangle of bodies, all still living, thankfully, though one corporal had a gushing wound in his arm.
Domville was stunned but already leading the charge back up the stairs, roaring for the others to follow him.
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