Bzrk Apocalypse (16 page)

Guns blazing. Bombs blasting. The image of the Tulip disintegrat-

ing, toppling, falling to the ground in fire and smoke was almost . . .

almost erotic.

And this was Plath—Sadie—who had refused when she had the

chance to kill the Armstrong Twins.

She had left for Île Sainte-Marie feeling betrayed that she’d been

trapped into BZRK. Feeling sickened by the violence and by what she

had seen and done down in the meat. Now she was ready to launch

an actual attack. To kill. To kill innocent people. Why? Was it just

because Lear had told her to?

What had changed?

The benign explanation was that she had learned and matured

and come to grips with grim necessity. The less benign explanation

was that she had become hardened and had lost her soul.

But she feared the truth was a third possibility: that she had been

wired.

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MICHAEL GRANT

How and by whom? The obvious suspect was Keats. After all,

he had a biot in her brain, ostensibly protecting her from a blown

aneurysm.

But why would Keats wire her? Orders from Lear? Or had he gone

over to the other side? Both seemed absurd. Keats would not blindly

orders. And he would never join the people who had put his brother

Alex in a mental institution.

Unless he had decided that BZRK was to blame. And wasn’t that

a plausible conclusion?
Wasn’t
BZRK responsible, in a way?

She ran down the list of other people who might have done it.

Maybe one of the McLure Security guys. Maybe one of the house

servants who washed sheets and delivered food. Or maybe someone

had gone to work in her brain as soon as she got back to New York.

But that would mean whoever was doing it had had very little time.

Which in turn meant that someone was very, very good at the job.

Someone.

But the
obvious
suspect?

She was circling the globe, around the eye that twitched beneath

her, making all the minute adjustments that eyes must do. She

skimmed the edge of her iris—serried ranks of gristly muscle fiber

waiting to react to light, opening and closing the dark, deep hole of

her pupil.

Down and around, beneath the permanent retraction point of

the eyelid, so that her “sky” was now an eternal mucous membrane.

Her biot skated on, slowed slightly by the claustrophobically low roof.

With absolutely no ambient light, she had illumination switched on—

glowing nodes built out of the DNA of exotic deep-ocean creatures.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

She was in the land of muscle bundles now, massive cables seemingly

fused into the melting ice of the eyeball and ascending into the dark.

And onward, farther around the globe—and now, at last, like

Yggdrasil, the tree that supported the world in Norse mythology, the

optic nerve rose into view.

Suddenly the world shifted wildly beneath her. Muscles jerked

crazily. In the real world, the light had snapped on.

She sat up.

Keats looked at her, saw her surprise, and said, “Sorry, did I star-

tle you?”

“No, no,” she lied. “I just . . . There was a Post-it note. . . . Never

mind.” She could see it lying on the floor of the bright hallway. “Are

you coming to bed?”

“Was kind of hoping to,” he said, not wolfishly, more just a tired

boy.

Plath pulled the blanket back to bare the sheets for him. He

nodded at the open space, smiled at it as if it was an old friend. He

stripped off his clothes while she lay back and closed her eyes, hoping

he would get the message.

She tried to calm her breathing. Keats was in her brain; he would

know from the pulse of blood through the aneurysm whether she was

perturbed.

Keats was warm beside her. He leaned over to give her the light-

est of kisses. Just a brush of lips and a whispered, “Good night.”

But to her surprise Plath found herself wanting more. She pushed

her fingers through his hair and pulled him close and kissed him

back. In the dark, even as she crawled toward her own optic nerve, his

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MICHAEL GRANT

lips were just his lips and not a parchment landscape.

He responded.

P2 began the ascent—direction was all very subjective in the

meat—began climbing that tree.

He was still holding back, not quite sure whether this kiss was a

prelude or just a very nice good-night. She pushed her tongue into his

mouth, and now he must feel the way her pulse raced.

Up the nerve, up to the impassable membrane that guarded the

brain itself. Her brain. She reared up on her four anterior legs and

used the sharp pincers on her front legs to slice as small a hole as pos-

sible through the membrane. A watery liquid oozed outward.

She checked herself, inspected as well as she could her biot legs,

looking for pollen, bacteria, fungus—all the things which can be

so deadly if carried into the brain. She found what looked like a

half-dozen tennis balls on her left rear leg and knocked them loose.

Bacteria, and very much alive: one was splitting as she watched.

Keats was kissing her now, everywhere. He was no longer

responding to her, but moving ahead, taking charge, setting the

pace, and for once Plath let him, willingly surrendering, needing

to surrender.

Her brain floated like a giant sponge, a sponge crisscrossed with

throbbing arteries and veins like the tangle of rivers and tributaries in

a delta. The fluid made movement slower than it was in an air envi-

ronment, and her biot claws had to grab on so as not to float away.

He was inside her. His biot. Down here in these endless folds of

pink flesh. At least she hoped he was, hoped he was not on her other

eye spying, or worse, far worse, somewhere deeper still, laying wire.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Let it not be him. Not him.
That was a betrayal she could not

survive.

The tissue that was the ground could appear to be a wall, a floor, or

a ceiling, depending on your perspective. The biot world was one where

gravity was almost irrelevant, certainly in this liquid environment.

She was aiming for the hippocampus, a deep structure, an

ancient part of the evolving brain. It was the router of the mind. If

someone was wiring her, that’s where they would likely start. The

implanted brain-mapping imagery was a guide, though an imperfect

one because no two brains were identical, and where she might expect

to find a figurative gully could be a plunging valley.

In the real world her body was responding almost on its own, as

though it was not connected to her, not connected to the brain upon

which she now walked, the brain that was the processor of every con-

tact between his tongue and her flesh.

Madness. She laughed. He stopped.

“No, no, no, don’t stop,” she said.

“You were giggling.”

“Shhhh,” she said, and pushed his head back to where it had been.

Toward the hippocampus, but with a stop on the way. She crept

her biot forward slowly, slowly, dousing her illuminators one by one,

just enough to feel her way forward to—

Light out. In the darkness of her own brain she saw his biot’s

light. There was his biot, not moving, just standing on the bulging

basketwork he had so painstakingly constructed in order to save her

life. The work had been started by her father; almost completed now

by her lover.

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MICHAEL GRANT

His biot was not wiring her. It was not him.

Far away and as close as the artery that pounded beneath her feet,

she felt him, felt his banked power, knew he was close to losing con-

trol, and liked that idea a great deal.

She sent her biot forward toward the hippocampus, turning lights

back on as she moved away from Keats’s biot.

She tripped over it before she saw it. One leg scraped across some-

thing that did not feel like flesh, something hard and sharp.

Wire.

Did Keats feel the sudden chill that went through her? He did

not slow or falter. But now her mind was reeling, no longer vague and

disconnected from her body and its reactions.

She had been wired.

Wait, was that a glimmer of light?

She killed her own biot’s light once more and stared hard into the

visual field in her brain. Into the visual field that showed her brain to

her brain.

There!
For just a second. Less than a second. A glimmer of light.

“Bastard,” she muttered.

Keats did not hear her, he was beyond that.

The light had come from behind a pulsing vein. There was no

innocent excuse. There were no light-emitting life-forms down here.

The fear rose in Plath now, competing with simmering rage. It

began as a dull electrical charge in the base of her spine and fanned

out from there to become nausea in her stomach and a tightened

chest that felt too small to contain her air-starved lungs and pound-

ing heart.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

Who was on the other side of that vein, that vein the circumfer-

ence of a subway tunnel? Who and what was back there?

Bastard, bastard, bastard
, she raged, but silently.

Plath stifled her fear, and her biot plunged after the retreating

nanobot. She noted that she had decided now that it was an Arm-

strong nanobot, not a BZRK biot, not Keats, not anyone from her

side. Because that—

Wait. When had she acquired this readiness to believe the best of

BZRK? Was
that
a naturally occurring thought? Or was it part of the

wiring? Was that what this foe was doing right now, right now practi-

cally under her nose—finding ways to dampen her suspicion?

Again, a glimmer! It was moving away, but it evidently needed

light. So did Plath, so any hope of concealment was forgotten now,

any hesitation set aside with the decision to chase.

She saw him! Or at least an impression of something moving.

She was gaining on him. Gaining! Which most likely meant it was a

nanobot. That at least would be a relief.

Please, God, if there is a God down here in the meat, let it be the

enemy, the true enemy.

Suddenly the light ahead dimmed as if it had dropped into a cre-

vasse. She charged ahead, caught up in the chase, adrenaline flooding

her system with urgency, breathing hard in her bed, trying to remain

perfectly still so as not to wake Keats.

Her biot raced; she saw the dip ahead and killed her illumination,

rendering herself almost invisible while using the enemy’s light as a

beacon.

She looked down, and there it was, waiting for her.

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MICHAEL GRANT

It was no nanobot.

She grabbed Keats’s head in her hands and held it still, just inches

away from her, stared into his eyes, pleading and said, “Noah, help

me. Help me, Noah.”

“My Stockholm lair. Yeah. Lair. Because the supervillain needs a lair,

yeah?”

It was a nice hotel suite, a very nice hotel suite at the Stockholm

Grand. Nice view out over the very civilized waterfront with bright-lit

ferries and stately buildings. Multiple bedrooms, understated taupes

and beiges and earth tones.

“It’s not all that . . .” Bug Man started to say before stopping him-

self.

“Not so lairlike?” Lystra asked, and laughed. “Well, I have a much

better lair somewhere else. Far to the south, you might say. You’ll like

it . . . if I let you come with me.”

Bug Man stood as awkwardly as one might expect a young man

to stand when threatened with death.

Lystra laughed again and waved him to a seat. He sat on leather. It

made a squeaking sound that might almost have been a fart.

“That was . . . Um . . . ,” he said.

“Did you just fart in my presence?” She was pretending to look

fierce. But Bug Man had seen her true ferocity, and this wasn’t it. He

relaxed a very little bit.

Lystra went to a sideboard and poured an amber liquid into two

heavy crystal glasses. She handed one to Bug Man.

He sniffed and recoiled.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“It’s Balcones True Blue. Lovely whiskey, that. Made with Hopi

blue corn.” She took a single cube of ice with a pair of silver tongs, car-

ried it to him, and dropped it in his glass. “You taste it now. Then you

keep drinking as the cube melts, which lowers the proof. The flavor

evolves. Each sip will be subtly different.”

Bug Man took a sip. It was fire in liquid form, and he started

coughing, which made her laugh. It was a cruel laugh, and there,

again, a glimpse of the harsh bone beneath soft flesh.

“My father used to let me drink whiskey with him,” Lystra said.

She sat down opposite Bug Man. He glanced at her bare legs. She

noticed.

“You miss your little love slave?” she asked.

“Jessica? You know about . . . that?”

“Yes, of course. You’re a rapist, Bug Man.”

He flushed. “No, I’m not. I never forced her to do anything.”

She leaned toward him, elbows on knees, drink cradled in both

hands. “You programmed her. You took away her free will. You