Bzrk

by Michael Grant

  “Your clothing. Be careful, some of it may be hot. I microwaved it. You can get dressed now.”

  Ophelia. Sadie recognized the name from somewhere. Something fictional. Classical, not modern. It was just out of her grasp but she’d Google it later.

  “Microwaved?”

  “Microwaves aren’t as much use against biots, like those I know you’re familiar with. But nanobots contain tiny amounts of metal, and that makes them vulnerable to a good, old-fashioned microwave oven.”

  Sadie began pulling on her clothing. “Nanobots?”

  Ophelia smiled. That made her prettier. It was one of those “light up the room” smiles. Sadie wished she could do that. “I’ve been given the job of prepping you. So I’ll answer everything. Except of course about anything personal.”

  “Shakespeare. That’s where Ophelia comes from.” Sadie squirmed into her bra.

  “Yes.” Ophelia nodded. “From Hamlet. His crazy girlfriend.” The smile went away. “I’m sorry about your father and brother.”

  “Yep,” Sadie said curtly. Enough condolences.

  “Nanobots,” Ophelia said. “There are two branches of nanotechnology: the biological and the mechanical. Coffee?”

  Sadie was dressed. “I guess a Scotch would be out of the question?”

  A different smile appeared, not the room-lighting one, a more quizzical, challenging one. Ophelia could do a lot with a smile.

  “Sorry. Yeah. I’m under age,” Sadie admitted.

  Again a new smile, this one sad, worried. “There are no children or adults with us. But I don’t think we have any Scotch.”

  Sadie said, “It was my dad’s thing. Scotch. He said it helped him to stop thinking at the end of the day. Once I came into his libratory— that was his made-up name for it because it was books and a microscope and …” She stopped talking.

  Right into it; she had walked into remembering and feeling, and the goddamned tears were coming. Do not remember all of that, she told herself. Do not remember Dad in his ridiculous libratory, kicked back in his ancient leather chair with his feet up and a crystal tumbler in his hand, frowning up at his dusty old chalkboard covered in incomprehensible scribbles.

  She would interrupt his concentration. To play the piano, which was also in the libratory. Or to show him a drawing. Or just to stand there because if she did, he would grab her and there would be a mock-ferocious struggle and she would end up letting him hug her.

  Splattered into the concrete at the stadium. Burned in a greasy fire. And Stone with him. Her decent, funny, gentle brother.

  “Coffee would be good,” Sadie said.

  Ophelia led the way to a kitchen. It was clearly a kitchen without a housewife or househusband. It was the kitchen of indifferent individuals who parked their tea or cookies or chips here or there. The coffee machine had a full pot, but no one had scrubbed that glass pot out probably since the day it was first purchased.

  They sat at a round table. Sadie took her coffee black. Ophelia with milk and sugar. The mugs were anonymous. The coffee was bitter.

  “It’s called a bindi,” Ophelia said. “The thing you’re staring at.”

  “Okay,” Sadie said. No point denying that she had been staring at the jewels that sparkled from Ophelia’s forehead. “From India, right?”

  “Yes. It’s somewhere between a tradition and a fashion statement. It was a gift.”

  “It’s very pretty.”

  Ophelia didn’t seem convinced that Sadie was being sincere. “So. You know about biots. You know that Grey McLure created that technology. And he gave us access to it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we need it,” Ophelia said. “There was a long history between your dad and a … well, between Grey McLure and the Armstrong Twins.”

  Sip. “I’ve heard of them. There’s something wrong with them, right?”

  “Clean so far.” This was Renfield, coming in, pulling a chair out, and sitting a couple of feet back from the two females.

  Ophelia’s smile this time was pained, and a little embarrassed. “Renfield has two biots on you.”

  When he had blindfolded her. Of course.

  “You’ve had biots aboard before,” Renfield said. “One of them dropped a Teflon fiber on your cochlea.” He shrugged. “It wouldn’t cause any problems, but I’ll remove it, anyway.”

  Sadie had grown accustomed to knowing that microscopic quasi-spiders were traveling around and through her body. Her father’s biots, and most recently the medicos. But it was unpleasant thinking of this boy’s eyes and ears strolling around inside her brain. The irritation was lessened somewhat by the fact that he had a bit of booger clinging precariously to one nostril. It gave Sadie an advantage over the cocky Eurotrash.

  “The scans would have shown nanobots on your skin,” Ophelia said. “But they can quite easily hide inside you. For that we need to take a closer look.”

  “Or not. If they’re hiding out,” Renfield said. Then he did a very strange thing. He quickly pinched off the hanging booger.

  Sadie stared at him. He looked past her.

  Guilty.

  “You can see what I see,” Sadie said. She stood up, suddenly furious. “I was focusing on your nose, and you saw it.”

  “A biot can sink a probe into the optic nerve, or even into the visual cortex,” Ophelia said. “It’s hit-and-miss. Sometimes you get a pretty complete picture. Sometimes—”

  Sadie slammed her good hand down on the tabletop. It made a loud noise and caused her coffee to jump. Then she stabbed a finger at Renfield’s smug face and said, “Get out of my head.”

  “You don’t give me—”

  “Do you like the feel of hot coffee on your—”

  “Calm!” Ophelia cried. “Calm. Calm. Renfield? Stay out of her senses. That’s not necessary to your job.”

  Two things were instantly clear: there was rank with these people, and Ophelia, as soft-spoken as she was, outranked Renfield.

  And Renfield was conceiving a powerful dislike of Sadie. That, too, was clear.

  “What else can he do in my head? Can he read my memories?”

  “No,” Ophelia said, still in her calm, calm, calm voice. “We can’t really read memories. But we can locate them. It’s like … Well, think of it like this: we can find it the way you can search a book for a particular word. But we can’t then read the whole book. We can find the location of an idea. Then, we can spin a wire and just lay it on the surface, or we can belay off a pin that’s jabbed into the brain, or we can plant a transponder.”

  “And what does that do?” Sadie demanded, glaring at Renfield.

  “Wire or transponder, it connects two different memories or thoughts. It connects them in ways that the mind had not previously done. For example, we could locate your memories of a favorite pet. A cat, maybe. And we could link that memory to something you feared or hated.”

  Renfield smoothed his hair back with his hand. “And every time you think, kitty, kitty, you also think, fear, fear.”

  “Enough of those connections and you can alter the way a person thinks. You can create false fears. You can rewrite memories. You can create love or hate.”

  Sadie, still refusing to sit down, said, “My father never would have done any of that. That’s obscene.”

  “This isn’t McLure Industries,” Renfield said. “Your father gave us the tech. He didn’t run the show.”

  “Who does?”

  “Lear.”

  “Who the hell is Lear?”

  This now was the most subtle of Ophelia’s many smiles. This one was made of respect and fear and submission. “Lear is Lear. And that’s all any of us will ever know.”

  (ARTIFACT)

  Statement of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.

  We are not evil men.

  We do not desire power. We do not desire the subjugation of others. Our goal is freedom for the human race.

  How many starve as we turn away? How many die from preventable diseases as we
ignore them? How many of our fellow human beings languish in political prisons, or the prison of their own addictions? How many are without hope, when we might give them hope?

  We are a freak of nature: two men joined together by an accident of nature in our mother’s womb. Our brains are individual but interconnected. We cannot be separated without one of us dying.

  And isn’t that how all mankind should be? Shouldn’t we all survive only so long as others do? Shouldn’t we all be part of one great human race without hatreds, without wars, without cruelty?

  We are never lonely because we are we, and not just I. Many look at us with pity or with horror. Believe us when we say that we feel the same for all of you, trapped in your eternal loneliness.

  For all of human history humans have been given the opportunity to love one another. And for the most part we have failed. But this need no longer be the case. Technology offers us a way out of harsh, cold, hostile separation.

  I hear you thinking, “But that is the human condition.”

  But why should we not seek to better the human condition? Have we not from time immemorial turned to technology to give ourselves powers that we did not naturally possess? Did we not use fire to stay warm and cook our food? Did we not use the electric light to banish the night? Did we not take to the air in balloons and airplanes and jets and thence to space itself in rockets?

  Now we have the technology to banish not only the literal night, but the long, dark night of the human soul. With nanobots we can connect all people, everywhere, into one great race: the human race. No longer will some go hungry while others get fat. No longer will we turn a blind eye to cruelty, because we will feel all cruelties as our own.

  Only ignorance stands between us and our goal of uniting the human race into something so much more profound than a mere social network. We can create a nexus of the entire human race.

  We have in our hands the beginnings of true utopia.

  Some will choose the path of evil and resist this glorious future.

  We will mourn them.

  Charles and Benjamin Armstrong

  (ARTIFACT)

  KING LEAR

  Dost thou know me, fellow?

  KENT

  No, sir; but you have that in your countenance

  Which I would fain call master.

  KING LEAR

  What’s that?

  KENT

  Authority.

  King Lear, William Shakespeare

  TEN

  Vincent contemplated the China Bone and watched—from the Asian grocery across the street—as Karl Burnofsky shuffled inside.

  Burnofsky was flanked, at a discreet distance, by two TFDs—Tourists from Denver. Two of the usual AmericaStrong security men from Armstrong Fancy Gifts. One was a woman, actually, but that was beside the point.

  The Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation might be run by a mad, twisted creature, but its outward face was relentlessly low-key. Their AmericaStrong men didn’t walk around trying to look like Secret Service or extras from a Hollywood muscle flick. They dressed in L.L. Bean and Land’s End. They wore pima-cotton polo shirts and down jackets. So that in New York City they always looked like those most invisible and easily forgotten of creatures: tourists.

  TFDs—Tourists from Denver.

  Burnofsky went inside to find that elevator. The two TFDs stayed outside, waiting and chatting and stamping their feet against the cold until a car drove up to offer them warmth and shelter.

  The China Bone: no sign, of course, discreet, always discreet. It had been here in Chinatown since 1880, though within Chinatown it had moved maybe a half dozen times. The people who needed to find it, found it. In the old days it had been just the better class of opium smokers. All Chinese at first, largely sailors. Then some of the artsier, more adventurous Victorian-age white men.

  The China Bone had grown more refined and exclusive by the 1920s. It expanded from opium and marijuana during Prohibition to include alcohol as well. The style, as Vincent had once seen through the right eye of a waiter, was very upscale. Think Ritz-Carlton for wealthy drug addicts; that was the modern China Bone. A little too gilt and plush for Vincent’s austere taste, but he supposed if you were going to be an opium addict—and Burnofsky certainly wasn’t about to stop—this was the place to indulge.

  Vincent had caught a glimpse of Burnofsky then, through the waiter’s eye, as the brilliant drunk and addict—and God knew what else—slid into one of the many alcoves, there to await the pipe.

  It had been fascinating to Vincent. Burnofsky was a genius. Not the sort of man one thought of wasting hours in drug-induced fever dreams. And inevitably perhaps Vincent wondered whether the drug could give him what he had never experienced: pleasure.

  Vincent had come no closer to Burnofsky then. And he had very nearly lost his biot when the waiter decided on a sudden trip to Mexico with some friends.

  The disadvantage of the biot: unlike the nanobot, the biot had to be retrieved.

  Vincent paid for the organic Thai rub and the green chilis he’d picked up. A few spicy things, not so that he would enjoy the food he made, but so that he could at least acknowledge it.

  Something.

  He’d been twelve when he was diagnosed with the anhedonia. Anhedonia commonly had a psychiatric cause, usually drugs. So they thought then, anyway, and so his mortified parents had assumed. Little Michael using so many drugs he’d lost the capacity for pleasure, oh my God, what have we done to cause this?

  It was a long two years of virtual house arrest before they got around to taking a look at possible physical causes. Then they found the lesions on his nucleus accumbens as well as the inadequate production of dopamine.

  Vincent stepped out of the direct neon and fluorescent glare and into the cold night, holding his little plastic bag. He had happened across the shop while trailing Burnofsky many months ago. He’d continued to shop here; it was a very well-appointed store. But he had also become fascinated by the China Bone, by what it represented: a need for pleasure so terrible it drove people to self-destruction.

  His actual mission was at a hotel bar just a block away. That’s where he would find the woman.

  Anya Violet. Not her birth name. She had been born Anya Ulyanov. Russian. When her father had moved the family from Samara to New York, he’d changed the surname to something a wee bit less … problematic. Ulyanov had been the original surname of Lenin. A lot of weight to carry around, that name. So. Bye-bye Ulyanov, hello Violet, which at first had been pronounced Wee-o-lett. Now Violet. Like violent without the “n.”

  Anya’s mother had always liked the flowers. Violets.

  Dr. Anya Violet, current employment in a secret section of McLure Industries. Even her friends and family didn’t know that her work was with biots. Vincent did only because BZRK had long had full access to McLure’s secure computers.

  Who the hell was Lear that he’d been able to get such total support from Grey McLure? And how many times had Vincent asked himself that question? And how many times had he stopped himself from pursuing it, because while Lear might be anyone and had become a nearly mythical creature, Caligula was very real, and Vincent had a definite impression that if he ever did penetrate Lear’s secret, Caligula would stab, shoot, garrote, drown, or otherwise end Vincent’s life.

  That was Caligula’s … contribution … to the cause.

  Vincent thought of the note he had appended to his report. “I am not Scipio.”

  Scipio was the Roman general who had finally destroyed Carthage.

  Would Lear accept this push back? Would he or she allow Vincent to refuse Carthage commands in the future? Or would Lear know that in the end Vincent would do what Lear needed him to do?

  Tonight would be the third time Vincent accidentally ran into Anya at this bar. Anya lived nearby. Vincent didn’t, but he had an apartment a block away that looked exactly as if he lived in it. In case.

  The hotel was not fashionable. It was dark and smelled like soy sauce and
peanut oil. The bar was even darker, but it smelled of beer and fried wontons. There were just four small tables and an equal number of stools at the bar, and no one was there but Anya.

  Vincent saw her before she saw him. He noted with quiet satisfaction that she had dressed for the occasion. This was their first planned meeting. Well, the first that Anya knew to be planned. A date. Previously she’d worn the comfortable work-casual clothing she wore in her lab. Previously she’d come here for her after-shift drink precisely because there was zero chance of being hit on and she could just have a fruity drink or two and chill, relax, mellow, slough off the brain-draining activity that defined her work.