Bzrk Apocalypse (28 page)

be wrong. So he leaned closer to her, bending down so that she could

not avoid looking at him. “Madness like a bloody plague. All over. It’s

all
Lear
. It’s Lear making biots and then killing them to drive people

mad. Hundreds of dead already. The Pope went mad and attacked

little children. Sadie, that’s his game.”

“The Pope?”

“Lear.
Lear!
And we have to stop him. We have to stop Lear!”

“The Twins,” she said, sounding vague.

“Yeah, them, too,” Keats said. “Come on.”

He grabbed her hand and yanked her along with him.

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Wilkes stood up as they burst into the living room. Billy was

absorbed in his phone.

“Caligula’s going to blow up the Tulip,” Keats said. “We have to

stop him.”

“Blow up the Tulip?” Wilkes said. “I thought that—”

“Yeah, well, it’s back on.”

“You’re going to stop Caligula?” Wilkes demanded skeptically.

“You and what army, pretty blue eyes? You’ve seen him in action. This

won’t be biot war; this will be kill or get killed, with a dude who is a

genius at killing!”

“We have a gun. Just one. It’s—”

“It’s in the drawer in the kitchen, below the silverware.” This

from Billy. Casual, as though it was no big thing that he knew where

they’d hidden a gun. Then, “It’s a Colt forty-five. Seven-round clip.

One spare clip. We have a total of fourteen bullets.”

“I’ll do the best I can with it,” Keats said, knowing in his heart

that it wouldn’t work, knowing—because, yes, he
had
seen Caligula

work—that Caligula would kill him before he fired a shot.

Wilkes, seeing that despair, shook her head and said, “Keats, you

aren’t a gunman. Neither am I.” She looked pointedly at Billy.

“Yeah,” the young boy said. “I can do it.”

“No,” Keats said. He shook his head. “No. That’s wrong. That’s

over the line.”

“It is over the line.” They stopped, looking back almost guiltily,

to see Plath.

“This doesn’t involve you,” Keats said. He didn’t mean it to sound

angry, but it did.

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MICHAEL GRANT

Plath shook her head. “Of course it involves me, Noah. I gave the

order to Caligula.”

“Can you just take back the order?” Billy asked.

Plath shook her head. “That was all part of the game. Lear’s game.

For whatever sick reason he wanted me to choose to do it. But that

doesn’t mean he’ll stop just because I change my mind.”

She looked around at them, defiant, defying her own shame. “I .

. .” She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know . . . how my brain is

. . .” She sighed again. “I don’t know anything, I guess. I was used. I

was controlled, but then, even after you guys . . .” She made a gesture

with her hand, as if she was pulling something out of her head. “I

still wanted revenge, and the wiring played into that. I still wanted

revenge. I guess I do even now. But yeah, what Mr. Stern told me . . .

There has to be a line.”

Keats saw tears flowing and his heart yearned to touch her, to

take her in his arms and protect her. But that felt impossible now.

“I thought of what my dad would say,” Plath said, dejectedly. “My

dad, my brother . . . There still has to be some kind of limit. A line

drawn.” She wiped away the tears, then, resolute, said, “So we stop

Caligula. But. But we give the gun to the kid.”

Caligula disliked disguise, but he knew how to use it. There were two

approaches. You could either become part of the background and

therefore be ignored—like a janitor. Or you could pass yourself off

more boldly, pretending to be someone in authority, someone who

would compel obedience. For example, pretending to be a cop.

And Caligula understood diversion. He’d spent a part of his life

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

working the carnival as a trick shooter and knife thrower, and he’d

met his share of magicians. Sleight of hand was all about misdirec-

tion: look over there, not over here.

Finally he understood simple brutality.

All three were required to gain access to the subfloors of the

Tulip.

He dressed as a janitor, having first determined what the AFGC

janitors wore and when they worked and through which entrance

they came. He gathered his long gray hair into a bun and pushed it up

under a do-rag, slipped into gray-blue overalls, and, crucially, applied

just enough dark makeup to be arguably Mexican. In the world as it

was, a dark-skinned older man dressed as a janitor was as close to

invisible as it was possible to be. It wasn’t just that people didn’t notice

you; it was that they actively avoided making eye contact with you or

noting any feature.

But timed to coincide with his fraught passage through the secu-

rity station on the first subfloor, Caligula arranged a distraction in

the form of a call to NYPD claiming to have seen a homeless white

woman waving a knife and threatening people on the street in front

of the Tulip.

The choice of a fictional white woman was important, because

it in no way pointed to a theoretically Hispanic janitor. And, as well,

there actually was a homeless white woman with a shopping cart on

the sidewalk. Five bucks and a secret message from “aliens” in the

person of Caligula had ensured her presence.

The police duly came roaring up. The security guards at the

entrance duly ran to see what was happening. And the sublevel

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MICHAEL GRANT

security guards duly glued themselves to their monitors and mut-

tered jealously about
those guys upstairs who at least have something

going on
.

Caligula dragged a heavy floor cleaner past without notice.

Down the stairs. One level. Two. The door was locked but was

easily defeated with a six-inch segment of metal venetian blind.

The temperature went up ten degrees from stairwell to mechani-

cal room. As mechanical rooms went it was a nice one, three stories

from grated floor to pipe-crossed ceiling, with catwalks offering

access to massive blowers, electrical boxes, alarm systems, and tele-

phone and cable panels.

Everything was color coded, so it was easy to pick out the natural

gas pipes from the water lines and cable conduits.
Red. An interest-

ing choice,
Caligula thought. He might have gone with lilac. He liked

lilac.

The first job was to make sure no one was down here. He walked

around, looking lost with his floor cleaner until he located the engi-

neer on duty. He was a middle-aged man, staring at an iPad propped

in front of the readouts he was meant to be watching.

Caligula gave him a hello wave and a hatchet in the neck, step-

ping nimbly out of the way of the blood spray.

He squeezed fast-drying epoxy around the edges of the doors.

He looked around, spotted a metal table, dragged it over to the

door, tipped it on its side, and epoxied it across the door. Once the

epoxy had hardened in twenty minutes, it would take a tank to break

through. He would leave via the freight elevators, which he’d be able

to watch more easily.

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The next thing was to eliminate any source of spark. It wouldn’t

do to have the gas ignite too soon. He turned off the heating sys-

tem. He decided to accept the risk of a random spark from one of

the electrical panels—unlikely, given the pristine newness of the

building.

Then he located the safety shutoffs that would choke off the gas

in the event that the computers decided a pipe had ruptured. He

jammed that useful piece of equipment with a wrench.

Which left only the last three phases: opening the flow, setting

the timer on the igniting explosive, and getting the hell out of the

place before it blew up.

About twenty floors above Caligula, Burnofsky worked. The beauti-

ful thing about nanotech, he thought, was the whole nano thing itself.

Nano: small. Tiny. Invisible to the human eye.

He could begin growing self-replicating nanobots within full

view of the hidden cameras. A million of them looked like a couple

of handfuls of dust. Blue dust, in this case, because in a moment of

wracking guilt back before—before the new Burnofsky—he had given

them the color of his daughter’s eyes. He’d done that as a strange

expiation. An homage? Was that the right word?

He was still secretive about drinking the booze. He rolled his

wheeled office chair back into a blind spot, poured into an empty

soda can, then rolled back into view.

Were the Twins watching? He didn’t really care, so long as they

didn’t try to stop him.

He had ten million SRNs so far. SRNs with no limits. SRNs that

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MICHAEL GRANT

would replicate and replicate, doubling in number and doubling

again and again and again until there were not millions but billions,

trillions, as many as there were grains of sand on all the beaches of

the world.

What was the famous quote from 1984? He Googled it. He wanted

to get it right. Ah, there.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a

human face—forever.

Well, no, Mr. Orwell,
Burnofsky thought
. If you want a picture of

the future, imagine a world scoured clean of every living thing.
And

more. Imagine that having taken and used all the easiest forms of

carbon the SRNs keep going. They eat the steel out of buildings, the

coal and oil and diamond out of the earth itself. They wouldn’t just

destroy all life, they would relentlessly remove all possibility that

life would ever again arise to trouble an empty planet.

His eye scanned down the page of quotes from Orwell and came

to rest on this:
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting

them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Hah. Well, the Twins had tried it. The Twins, with their mad

plan to unite all of humanity into one vast interconnectedness. A

new world where they would be accepted. And more than accepted:

esteemed, loved.

And Lear? What was young Lystra Reid’s motive?

Burnofsky’s own motive was clear to him now. He had done evil

for ambition’s sake. He had tortured himself for that evil and sought

to close the eyes of the world to his shame.

Then he had been rewired so that the evil gave him pleasure. And

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now he would close the eyes of the world because it would bring him

pleasure.

He would wait for a few more doublings. Then he would drop the

force fields that held the SRNs contained and unleash the gray goo.

Then? Well, then he would go back to his old haunt, back to the

China Bone. There would be time for them to prepare him a pipe.

He would float on a cloud of purple opium haze and wait for the end

of the world. When the nanobots reached him, well, that’s when he

would take a last drink and fire the heroin into his veins and leave

the world behind, dying with two raised middle fingers to humanity.

Suarez wished she had music, but the cockpit was not large enough to

allow her to reach for her headphones. It was just that the mad rush

of sheer speed demanded some propulsive music to go along with it.

It was crazy. It was also crazy fun.

The sleigh was a dream to drive. Computer-assists and auto-

mated systems made it more like a video game than a craft moving at

a hundred and fifty miles an hour. The little icon that was the sleigh

on the GPS display was zooming along past . . . well, past nothing,

really. This was Antarctica. There were no towns, houses, roads, or

any feature, really, aside from the blur of ice and the gray blanket of

hazy, overcast sky. The target was coming closer very fast, and she

didn’t really have much of a plan for how to approach it.

Most likely roaring in at three times freeway speeds—with jet

engines screaming and ice crystals trailing a plume—was a bad idea.

The smart move would probably be to park the sleigh a few miles

away from the target and walk in on foot. Much more subtle that

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MICHAEL GRANT

way. But on the ice one did not casually decide to abandon a vehicle

that provided shelter and warmth. Not to mention a vehicle with an

impressive array of weapons.

So she would try to bluff it out. Whoever she encountered would

probably suspect her cover story was nonsense, but what could they

do about it, really?

“People who buy illegal missiles and smuggle them onto the ice?”

she said aloud. “Plenty. That’s what they can do: plenty.”

On the other hand, Suarez was only the third woman ever to

qualify for SEALs, so she was no weakling. She was formidable.

“That’s right, talk yourself into it,” she muttered.

It was a good thing she had the computer navigating, because she

would never have seen the dry valley. It was a rift in the ice, which at

this point was a relatively sparse two hundred meters thick.