Bzrk Apocalypse (3 page)

water with her legs. She’d sunk beneath the waves repeatedly, rising

each time to gasp in a single breath mixed with salt water, to cough

and gag, and yet to keep her legs churning, until a fishing boat had

come to the rescue.

They would find a way to reward Ling. They vowed that. She had

saved their lives and very nearly died herself.

The Armstrong Twins had made their way from Victoria harbor

to Vietnam, where they had financial interests and owned a small but

useful number of local government officials. From there they’d made

their way to Malaysia, to the Sarawak state on the island of Borneo.

The Armstrong facility there was involved in mining rare earths.

And it did a bit of logging, as well, all very eco-friendly, with careful

replanting programs and all of that. Whatever it took to avoid too

much scrutiny. The Armstrongs were good corporate citizens out of

self-interest.

But this facility was not strictly about mining or logging. It was

built of three elements: there were two identical buildings, each a

crescent, facing each other across an elongated oval that formed an

enchanting tropical garden, a sort of tamed version of the surround-

ing rain forest.

There were trees and flowers, streams full of fish and waterfowl,

pink gravel pathways leading to benches, and seating areas where the

white-collar employees could take their lunches alfresco.

At the top of the oval, connecting the two crescents, was a stumpy

tower topped by a domed observatory. There was an impressive

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MICHAEL GRANT

optical telescope that profited from the profound darkness of the sur-

rounding countryside.

No one was using the telescope at the moment because it was

pouring rain. It often poured rain here. And when it poured it was

unlike anything Charles Armstrong had ever known in New York. It

came down not in drops but in sheets. The heavens did not sprinkle

on Sarawak, they emptied buckets and bathtubs and swimming pools.

Charles watched a lizard climbing up the glass side of the dome,

pushing against the stream of water. Sarawak had lizards. It had liz-

ards and snakes and birds in abundance.

“I would have thought the rain would wash it off,” Charles said.

His brother, Benjamin, was less interested by the lizard or the

rain, but of course could see both since it was impossible for the twins

not to face in the same direction. Their individual eyes could roam

this way or that, focus independently under the direction of their sep-

arate brains, but they did not have separate heads, rather two heads

melded together.

This gave them two mouths, one nose, and three eyes. The middle

eye was a bit smaller than the other two and often had an unfocused,

glazed quality. It could see, but its focus was not consciously directed

by either Charles or Benjamin. Rather it often seemed to have a mind

of its own and would focus where it willed, suddenly granting depth

perception to one or the other twin, but never both at once.

They were large, the twins were, tall but even more broad, with

shoulders capable of carrying the unusual weight of their doubled

head. Two arms, neither muscular; two fully developed legs; and a

third, stunted leg.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

At the moment they were sitting in a modified electric wheel-

chair. It was far more capable than the usual motorized wheelchairs

and had been given an almost dashing, exotic look with burgundy

velvet trim, two side panels that likely concealed weapons, and wheels

that looked more racetrack than hospital, but it remained, in the end,

a wheelchair.

The observatory was their haunt for now. There was a bedroom

down a ramp, and a specially outfitted bathroom. But the bedroom

had only conventional windows. All their lives had been spent indoors,

and they craved the openness of the observatory, even when all they

could see was water sheeting down the glass and a lizard struggling

against that tide.

“Looking at lizards,” Benjamin said, disgusted.

They had both been depressed since the sinking of the
Doll Ship
.

The
Doll Ship
had been their happy place, the place they could think

about when life became too gloomy or the pressure too intense. Now

it was gone. All those poor people, the people who worshipped them,

who saw beauty in their deformity, all of them gone.

“Fish food,” Charles said, knowing where his brother’s thoughts

had wandered. “And we still don’t know how it happened.”

“A Swedish intelligence officer and a British admiral.”

“But how?”

“Many questions, brother.”

They turned the wheelchair to face the large monitor that hung

above a touch-screen desktop. The monitor was divided into twenty-

four smaller frames. Three were tuned to various news outlets. The

rest were clearly surveillance cameras. An empty room with desks. A

17

MICHAEL GRANT

break room with one woman making coffee. A lab with two people

in white coats moving to some unheard music while they tapped on

keyboards. A puzzling view of what might be a warehouse.

One by one the video tiles flipped to be replaced by different

views. Every corner of the Armstrong empire.

They could see everything, but what could they control? They

weren’t even sure they could return to New York. London, too, might

be out of bounds.

“We are hiding like rats from a cat,” Benjamin said.

“We’re foxes at the very least,” Charles said, trying to make it

sound like a good thing, trying not to think about the way fox hunts

usually ended with dogs tearing at the cornered animal. “System:

locate Burnofsky,”

A larger picture appeared, in the center of the monitor. The object

of their search had his back to them. He was hunched over a terminal.

“There’s our Karl,” Charles said, steel in his voice.

“Ours?”

Charles sighed. “Either he hit bottom on some grand, final bender

and decided to turn his life around. Or—”

“Or BZRK wired him,” Benjamin said.

“Ling!” Charles yelled. “It’s dinnertime, and I find I would enjoy

a drink.”

They shared a digestive tract, despite having two mouths. It took

consent from both for either to drink alcohol. Or to eat, though they

tried to be tolerant on that. Benjamin liked to snack on a bowl of Chex

Mix sometimes, and Charles preferred fresh fruit. Apricots. He loved

a perfect apricot, though a really good one was hard to find.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“A drink, yes,” Benjamin said. “And maybe more than one apiece.”

Ling appeared, moving with a gliding speed that belied her

advanced years.

“Ah, our friend and hero, Ling. I shall have a glass of wine,”

Charles told her. “A Cabernet, I think.”

“I’ll have a Cognac,” Benjamin said. “You know what I like.”

They sat glumly watching the video frames opening and clos-

ing around Burnofsky as the system cycled randomly through the

hundreds of surveillance cameras. Here was a woman making copies.

There a man staring blankly into space. A couple putting on coats

ready to go home. Jet-lag-dulled shoppers at the Twins’ O’Hare Air-

port store. Two men debating something, both pointing at tablets.

At the bottom of each window was a small tag giving the location.

Athens. Newport News. Tierra del Fuego. Johnson City. AFGC—the

Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation—had locations all over the

world, even without counting the shops in virtually every airport.

“We have not lost, brother,” Charles said softly, with what he

hoped was an undertone of iron resolve.

“Yet we’re in hiding.”

“We have not
lost
. We are not
beaten
. We have the Hounds. We

can rebuild the twitcher corps. We can start again. And we have Floor

Thirty-Four.”

“Floor Thirty-Four’s a losing tactic,” Benjamin snorted. “Defen-

sive. It takes down BZRK. But it does not give us back the president we

lost, or the premier we lost, goddammit! God
damn
it!” He slammed

his fist down on the desk, making Charles’s glass of wine jump. “Or

Bug Man. Or the
Doll Ship
.” He moaned. “What we have lost! What

19

MICHAEL GRANT

we have
lost
!” He drained the snifter of Cognac in a single long swal-

low.

“When Floor Thirty-Four is ready, we take down BZRK and all

they have within weeks. It spreads, brother; it will find them in all

their hiding places. And when it has done its work, we will be without

enemies, we—”

“Without enemies? You think BZRK is our only enemy? Don’t

you know the Chinese are dissecting every body they fish out of Hong

Kong harbor? They know. They
know
! And if the Americans and

Europeans don’t know yet, they will soon.”

“What is it you want, Benjamin? To unleash the gray goo?”

The
gray goo
, a ridiculous name for a deadly threat: self-repli-

cating nanobots. Nanobots building more nanobots with whatever

material they found at hand. Going from thousands to millions and

billions and trillions in mere days, consuming every last atom of car-

bon and a good many other elements as well. Everything that lived

or had lived on the surface of planet Earth. Everything that made life

possible.

Nanobots were the mechanical answer to biots. Just as small, but

without the eerie and inexplicable link that connected a biot to its

maker. Nanobots had to be run through a game controller. They were

somewhat less capable, but they had a huge advantage: it was nothing

to lose a nanobot. But to lose a biot? Well, that way madness lay.

Benjamin gestured at the screen. He happened to be focused on a

family at one of the AFGC shops, this one at Airport Schiphol in the

Netherlands. A family. Man, woman, blond child, poring over souve-

nirs. “I hate them sometimes. I hate them enough to do it.”

20

BZRK APOCALYPSE

Charles intuited which frame his brother was focusing on. “Yes,

but imagine them as
ours
, brother. Imagine them united with us.

Imagine them happy to look at us. Imagine what we can make them

into with our nanotechnology and our friends from Nexus Huma-

nus.”

“Nexus Humanus,” Benjamin snorted. It was a cult they had

financed as a way to recruit twitchers to control nanobots, and other

useful folk. But it had lost steam, like bargain-basement Scientology.

“We had it, the world we seek. The
Doll Ship
.” A tear welled in Benja-

min’s eye, swelled, and went rushing down his cheek.

“Nonsense, brother, it was only a
model
of the world we seek.”

“A world united,” Benjamin said, bitterly wondering at his own

naivety. Weeping, figuratively at least, for the benighted human race

that was being deprived of the utopia he saw so clearly. “One vast

interconnectedness, with us at the nexus.”

“It can still be. It can. But not if we unleash the SRNs. Not the

gray goo, not that final act of Götterdämmerung. The lesser tack,

though . . .” Charles was offering a sacrifice to the god of Benjamin’s

rage. A step short of apocalypse.

“Massed preprogrammed attack,” Benjamin said, accenting the

final word. Nanobots could be programmed to carry out simple com-

mands autonomously. Large numbers of them, so long as the task was

simple. Millions of them if necessary. They could be programmed to

destroy all in their reach for a certain period of time and then turned

off, a sort of localized, small-scale gray goo.

“If it’s true that the intelligence agencies either know or will soon,

then we won’t be safe, even here. But if we disrupt . . . If we launch

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MICHAEL GRANT

mass releases. Washington. London. Beijing. Give them something to

keep them very busy. And at the same time use the Floor Thirty-Four

weapon to take out BZRK . . .”

“There he goes. Burnofsky. He’s doing it again.” Benjamin had

spotted it. He gave the voice command to expand the screen. Burnof-

sky’s image pushed all the others aside.

In the image—high-def, no grainy monochrome—Burnofsky

had lit a cigarette. He took a few puffs. Sat, staring at nothing. Took

another drag on the cigarette.

“Here it comes,” Benjamin said.

Burnofsky slid a desk drawer open. He drew out a framed photo-

graph of a young girl.

“The daughter,” Charles said. “He’s never gotten over it.”

Burnofsky looked at the picture and puffed his cigarette so that

now the smoke partially obscured the image, swirling up around the

hidden camera. They could see only the side of the man’s face, but the

smile was huge, ear to ear. The smile and a silent laugh.

“Volume up,” Charles ordered.

Burnofsky was making a chortling sound, a private, gleeful,

somehow greedy sound. Like a miser counting his money.

“Bugs in your brain, baby,” he said, laughing happily. “Bugs in

your brain.”

“System: zoom in on Burnofsky’s face,” Benjamin ordered. The