BZRK: RELOADED

In 2012 Dr Grossman claimed to have been consulted by the CIA on the so-called gray goo scenario, the fanciful notion that self-reproducing nano machines could run amok and obliterate all carbon-based life-forms in a matter of days.

A student, Jing Ju Chow, who claimed to have seen two men throw Dr Grossman from the twenty-eighth floor observation deck of the UT Tower, recanted when questioned by campus police and was later fatally injured in a car-on-pedestrian accident off campus.

The University mourns both of these tragic deaths.

ARTIFACT

Drug Enforcement Agency

New York City

Surveillance Report–China Bone

Item: Subject 49630, code name “Rocker Girl.” Subject observed arriving 10:27 p.m. Electronic monitoring via her phone indicates she ordered injectable heroin. Audio monitoring produced only some singing and incoherent conversation with China Bone staff identified (tentative) as Cheng Lee.

Item: Subject 67709, unknown subject. Desc: Male, Asian, 35-40 years, 5’8”. Arrived by limo. Attempting to trace origin.

Item: Subject 42001, code name “Burn Out.” Arrived 12:02 a.m. Electronic monitoring via planted microphone 45-114. Subject ordered bourbon and opium pipe. Following ingestion suspect began to speak. Previous surveillance shows this is a common pattern for the subject. Transcript follows:

(inaudible) just (inaudible) deliver and then. And then, hah. Watch the bugs grow. (inaudible) baby, sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. Your bitch mother. Yeah. Oh Jesus I’m sorry sorry. But we all die. We all die, baby. (inaudible) We all surely do die and if it isn’t the easy way it’s the hard way and the twins would have made it hard. Bugs in your brain. Has to (inaudible) I never should have. Didn’t know they’d (inaudible). You went easy though. You went so easy baby. Hah. Thanks to your dad. Hah. My gift baby the easy death instead of the hard. My gift . . . easy . . . (inaudible.) But (inaudible) pay up. They will pay up. My little blues will end it all end it end it. Tens to hundreds to (inaudible) millions to billions eat it all up, eat it all up eat it all up down to the rock. All . . .

End transcript.

SIX

The law firm sent a limo for Plath, but not to the BZRK safe house. The limo picked Plath and Keats up at the address she’d given them: outside the Andaz Hotel on Fifth Avenue.

Plath had not been staying at the Andaz, and a cursory investigation would reveal that fact, but it was at least plausible that she might have been there. The McLure Company maintained a suite year-round for visiting dignitaries.

Plausible.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had the use of a posh suite at a hotel?” Keats muttered as the town car inched its way uptown. “Why are we staying at that miserable shit hole when we could be frolicking on clean sheets?”

“Frolicking? I seem to recall offering to frolic with you. I was going to frolic your brains out.” She was determined to keep the mood light. Wave upon wave of sadness and fear had crashed on her since that terrible day when her father and brother had been murdered. More would come.

Too much.

She couldn’t break. Maybe the day would come when she broke, but not yet. So she smiled and so did Keats. It felt like the first genuine smile for either in quite a while.

“Sorry, had to save your life first,” Keats said. “Duty before booty.”

“You shouldn’t always be the good boy, Keats,” she teased. “Don’t you know that messed-up girls like me prefer bad boys?”

“You are toying with me.”

“I used to break my toys,” she said.

“Is that a warning?”

“I wouldn’t break you. I might bruise you a little . . .”

“Okay, that’s quite enough.”

“Might bend you. There could be some chafing . . .”

Keats grinned, unable to manage a stern expression. “Now you’re going past toying to torturing.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It’s cruel.”

“Mmm. I’m trying not to be the goody goody.”

“No one thinks you’re the goody goody,” he said.

“You sure?” she asked, her tone rueful. “Jin needs me, even Lear needs me, if there really is a Lear, but I failed them, didn’t I?”

Keats glanced at the driver. He didn’t seem to be listening, and they were talking in whispers. Keats leaned closer. “Listen to me, Plath—”

“It’s Sadie on this trip,” she interrupted. “The lawyer and the others know me by my real name. So just for this trip, let’s not play crazy little BZRK games. Let’s act like real, normal people.”

“Sadie,” he said, trying it out. Liking it. Feeling flattered by the right to use it. “Do you want to know my real name?”

“Keats will do. I like it, actually. It suits you. You could totally be a poet.”

Veer away from tragedy, back onto safe ground.

We take the names of madmen because madness is our fate. But Keats, the real one, the poet, hadn’t really been mad, just depressed and addicted.

Plath, on the other hand: head in a gas oven while her children played in the next room.

Veer away from that, too.

“I know nothing about poetry,” Keats said.

Plath said nothing for a while, watching the street go by, wondering whether Caligula had them in view. Wondering whether AFGC also had them in view. The reading of a will is not a very private matter, private in terms of the actual reading, perhaps, but not in terms of who knows it’s happening.

“This could be dangerous,” she said.

“Maybe,” he agreed. “Do you know how to do this? I mean, this whole reading of the will. There’s a lot of money involved, right?”

She nodded. “Money. And power.”

“And you’re okay with all that, not nervous?”

“I’m nervous,” she admitted. “But I know what to say. I know what I want, and I know how my dad set things up. But that doesn’t mean they’ll go along with it. In fact, I’d be surprised if they did.”

“So I guess we’re talking hundreds, even thousands of dollars, eh?” he asked, deadpan.

“Something like that,” she said.

And for a while she didn’t think of Keats but of her father. Grey McLure always said he was a three-star scientist with five-star luck. But that wasn’t true. He’d been unlucky enough to lose his wife, and die alongside his son. Not lucky, but smart, and far-seeing. He had laid in contingencies she had thought ridiculous and irrelevant when he told her of them.

“Don’t forget,” he had told her. “Alice in Wonderland. The You Bullshit Bank. Your mother’s birthday.”

“Whatever,” she had replied, attention focused on thumbing a text message to some friend. The memory, like so many memories of him, came with a twinge of regret that she had not, somehow, cherished him more, him and Stone, both.

Three more blocks passed in starts and stops and her nerves were getting to her now. Small talk and banter, don’t think about it, any of it, just let it happen.

“You are a great kisser,” she said suddenly through her knuckles, choosing not to meet his gaze.

“Am I?”

“Don’t fish for compliments. A poet would never do that.”

“You’re worried,” he said. “You’re being nice to me because you think we’re about to be killed.”

“A little bit, yes,” she admitted. “But also, you’re just a really good kisser. And you know what I like, Keats?”

“What?”

“Your chest. I like your chest. It’s very hard.”

“Okay, really, that’s quite enough,” he scolded. “We’re in a limo, possibly going into danger, and you’re playing the tease.”

“I like your chest,” she repeated. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Unh?” he said, not feeling quite in control of this conversation.

“Are your nipples sensitive?”

“I sort of hate you right now,” he said, shaking his head and trying unsuccessfully not to grin.

Teasing was safe. Maybe it was foreplay leading to love, but it didn’t have to be. Keep it all superficial. Make it about bodies and pleasure. The world had it all backward: it wasn’t sex that was dangerous, it was love. She’d lost people she loved. It was love that brought unendurable pain.

“Death or madness, right?” she said with what she hoped was a brave, devil-may-care attitude. “There’s no reason not to have whatever fun we can. You’re insane for a long time and dead forever.”

“We’re here,” the driver called back.

The car pulled to a stop beside a food stand. The driver hopped out and came around to open the passenger door. Keats had already started to open the door and now felt foolish.

The law firm’s building was on a corner. There was a revolving door and flanking it regular glass doors. Security—McLure men—waited. They wore dark suits and had Bluetooth earpieces. They wore sunglasses even though it was cloudy. They screamed “security.”

The AmericaStrong thugs were less obvious. They had been nicknamed TFD—Tourists from Denver—for favoring chinos and down parkas, for dressing out of a Land’s End catalog. The McLure men wanted to look like security; the AmericaStrong people did not.

Four McLure security.

Six TFDs.

And all alone, a man in a long, faded black duster over even more faded lilac and leaf-green velvet. A jaunty top hat that matched his blazer.

Plath watched with eyes that had now seen violence and knew it when it threatened. She gritted her teeth, not so much afraid now as angry. There was a fine line between those two—fear and rage.

“Sadie, get back in the car,” Keats said.

But she didn’t. She watched, one hand on the car door, watched with eyes that now saw so much more than they ever had before. Was that what violence and fear did? Did they give you new eyes?

It all happened without any obvious action. Somehow, in some way that seemed to take place at the subliminal level, the McLure security spotted the TFDs as threats.

And somehow, those same McLure men recognized the man in the faded velvet, not as an individual, they didn’t know him, no, but they knew what he was.

And so did the TFDs.

His name, at least the name he used, was Caligula.

Plath knew he would have been the one to kill Ophelia. He would also be the one to kill her, if she ever threatened BZRK. She had seen him in action and could entertain no fantasies about surviving if he came for her.

Invisible lines connected McLure men and Caligula. Invisible, intangible calculations were made. Some scent in the air, maybe, some inaudible whisper in the ears.

The TFDs walked on by.

And Plath—Sadie McLure—walked with Keats past the McLure men, all of them smiling, a tense, alert welcome, and accepted the door held open for her.

“You okay?” Plath asked Keats.

“Just relieved not to have wet myself,” he said. “That won’t be the end of it. They’ll be waiting when we come back out.”

But Plath doubted that.

Keats’s hand closed around hers. She could picture what was happening at the nano level: skin like fallen leaves, fingerprints like the plowed furrows of some arid farm, sweat beads popped by the contact, mingling.

It was an absurd romantic illusion to imagine that they could avoid death so long as they held on to each other. But Plath, carrying the name of a poet, had a right to a small measure of illusion.

Dr Anya Violet, who had been dragged unwillingly into violence, into lunacy and horror, sat forgotten in her room, in her narrow, filthy room, and against all odds and logic thought of Vincent.

Oh, she knew it was all part of the same insanity. She knew that Vincent had been inside her head, that he had wired her. She was a scientist, a trained observer. She knew.

Once she had found Vincent desirable. That had been honest. That had been real. She remembered meeting him for . . . At least, she believed she remembered. She searched for the memory, ran the pictures back in her head, testing them for tampering. It was hard to tell. Hard to be sure; in fact, impossible to be sure. But she believed that first meeting at least, and that first visceral impression, had been real.

She had found him interesting. And sad. Sadness was not a terrible thing to her. She was Russian by birth, from Samara, located in the middle of nowhere. She was not an American raised on the idea that happiness was the natural human condition. She tired quickly of smiling people. Have a nice day. Hey, honey, smile.

She had seen wariness in Vincent, lessons learned, pain endured, limitations accepted. He was perhaps ten years younger than she, but that was only chronology.

Where it didn’t matter, Vincent was young. The other places, where it mattered, he was old, old, old and sad.

He had touched her that first time. Yes, of course he had targeted her. She was a scientist at McLure, a biot researcher and designer, and Vincent had even then been laying out a back door to McLure, anticipating the day.

So he had touched her that first time, and yes his invisibly small biots had raced up her shivering shoulder and across the neck and into her through nose or ear or eye.

Into her brain, there to probe and discover and spy and wire her. To prepare her for a continuing relationship that he needed and she wanted.

Yes, she had wanted. Yes, that surely was an honest memory. Yes, that first liquid feeling had been real, that first parting of her lips, that first animal response to him, that at least had been completely real.

And now she loved him.

Real love? Or wired love? In the end did it matter?

They had made love. Not once, more than once. Had it been enhanced by busy biots laying wire and transponders in her brain? He had claimed not. He claimed he wired her only minimally, only to obtain her . . . professional . . . services. He wired the scientist in her, not the woman.

So he had said.

Did it matter? Did it change the fact that her heart had been a desperate animal in her chest? Did it change the way he’d made her breath catch in her throat? Did it change the fact that she had gasped and made strangling, inarticulate cries into a pillow, and he had taken the pillow away because he wanted to hear her, needed to hear her pleasure, needed to experience second-hand at least what pleasure could be?

Maybe some of it, most of it, all of it, was false.

He had told her that it was not. Vincent had sworn that he only made her more suggestible to co-operating on the building of new biots, that he would never . . . That that sort of thing was not BZRK, not what they fought for.

Did it matter?

Anya sat in her one chair remembering, and while remembering thus was unable to work on the formula she’d begun to complete on the sketch pad, covered like a college chalkboard with obscure symbols.

There was a knock at the door.

Her eyes flew open. She waited a few seconds for the unsteadiness in her voice to calm. “Yes?”

There was the sound of a lock. The door swung inward, practically halving the room. Nijinsky stepped in.

Anya didn’t like him. He was beautiful and perfect and not interesting to her. And she knew that his relationship with Vincent was deeper than her own. She was jealous of him. It annoyed her somehow that he had chosen a Russian nom de guerre. The Chinese American model didn’t have a Russian soul, he was not a Nijinsky.

“Dr Violet,” he said politely. He glanced at the sketch pad, quickly at her, then resumed his usual mask of indifference. “I wanted to talk to you about . . . well, whether you’ve had any strange feelings lately.” Nijinsky raised his eyebrows and made a slight, wry smile.

“Why don’t you tell me what you mean,” Anya said curtly.

“Okay. I mean that Vincent still has a biot inside you.”

She nodded. The idea was not a surprise to her. “So, a little Vincent still crawling around in my hippocampus or wherever. A little biot controlled by a madman.” She had to laugh. “Wasn’t there a song? The lunatic is in my head?”

Nijinsky’s brown, almond eyes went cold.

She noticed and shook her head derisively. “Ah, I see, we aren’t supposed to say that kind of thing about Vincent, are we?”

“He cares about you,” Nijinsky said. “He saved your life.”

“Right after he endangered it,” she snapped. “I’m not sure that counts as a net plus.”

Nijinsky said nothing.

“Where are the others? His other biots? You used a singular in describing the one he had in me.”

Nijinsky nodded. “One is dead. One is in a dish, rebuilding, healing. The other one I’m carrying. It’s right here. He tapped his forehead lightly.

“And so you and I both get to keep a little piece of him.” Anya was tired of sparring. “No. I haven’t noticed anything. If anyone is wiring me I’m not noticing it, and if a . . . mentally unbalanced . . . twitcher were doing it, it would be clumsy enough for me to notice. So, I very much doubt that Vincent is even aware of the biot inside me. If he is, it’s as a series of hallucinatory images that probably mean little or nothing to him.”

Nijinsky nodded. “I haven’t seen any activity at all from his biot.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, his knee almost touching hers. In a straight man she would have suspected a flirtation.

“What’s on the pad?” he asked bluntly.

“I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know you have surveillance in here. I know you’ve already seen and investigated.”

He shook his head. Then he hung his head down and shook it again. “No, actually. We don’t have the manpower for that, I’m afraid. I mean, yes, we have a camera in here, but aside from making sure you haven’t hanged yourself or tried to dig a hole through the wall . . .”

“It’s what I was working on before you and your charming crew decided to destroy my life,” she said, but the bitterness was false and sounded it. Vincent was not something she could regret.

“Biot?” he asked.

“Biot version four,” she said. “Fourth generation. What you use now is version three. Or threes with various upgrades.”

“Okay,” he said cautiously. “Do you want to tell me?”

“It’s faster. It can jump. It has an improved rack for add-on weaponry. The legs are stronger.”

“Yes?” he asked, not nearly as cool as he wanted to sound.

“And it has a rather interesting penetrating proboscis, hollow of course, with a bladder. Mosquito-derived.”

“So it can suck blood?” He was puzzled.

“It goes the other way. The bladder can be filled with any number of interesting agents—chemical, bacteriological, viral—and injected. No more carrying sacks of germs with you if you want to plant something deadly.”

“We don’t do that,” Nijinsky said.

“Ah. Of course. I forgot: you’re the good guys,” she mocked. “Not for you, planting a bit of flesh-eating bacteria in some enemy’s brain.”

“There are limits,” he said.

“Just like you don’t wire people.”

He raised his head and looked at her. “Dr Violet, we will endeavor to remove any alterations made in your brain.”

She swallowed in a suddenly dry throat.

“We do things out of extreme necessity,” he went on, sounding sanctimonious even to himself. “Vincent wired you, as little as he could, just enough to—”

“I’m in love with him,” she said, and now her voice was no longer tight and controlled. “And your solution is to take that away from me? And then what?”

He looked quickly away, as if eye contact had become painful.

Neither spoke. His knee no longer touched hers. She wondered if his biots were now making the slow, laborious climb up the length of her thigh on their way to her brain. No, not likely: he could have simply planted them on her face, no need for subterfuge.

“What else?” he asked.

“The visuals are better. It will make wiring easier and more accurate. The downside? You feel pain when it feels pain. And God himself only knows what effect it has if you lose one.”

Nijinsky controlled his breathing, not wanting to signal his excitement. “Can you make them?” he asked.

“Version four? Of course I can make them, they’ve been successfully tested,” she said. “Get me to the lab and I can grow one in a few hours.”

Nijinsky nodded. Not an easy proposition. The McLure labs had been the scene of a bloody battle. A massacre. But Lear had been busy, and a backup existed.

“What if it wasn’t your lab?” Nijinsky asked. “What if it was a place with all the same equipment, the same samples or most of them, essentially the same data files, even better computers, and so on?”

That surprised her. “You have another lab in New York?”

“Not in New York,” he said, and offered no further explanation. She ran down a list of equipment. To each item Nijinsky said, “Yes.”

“Well, aren’t you clever little conspirators?” she asked sarcastically. “Yes, if everything is as you say, yes, I can do it. But why should I?”

“What do you want?” he asked.

“So many things,” she said with a hard laugh.

Silence again, as the truth seeped into her consciousness. The truth was a pain in her heart. “What do I want? Don’t. Don’t take him from me. Don’t send your bugs into me, and don’t cut the wires, and don’t find his last biot and take it from me.” Tears had already rolled down her cheeks. “It’s all I have of him.”

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