Bzrk Apocalypse (33 page)

nerve.”

The camera no longer showed the man in question.

“Can you get back to his eye?” Plath asked.

She still hadn’t realized . . . Keats nodded. “On my way.”

“You don’t give orders here!” Benjamin raged at Plath.

But his brother was no longer with him on that. Charles said,

“Why would Caligula blow up the Tulip?”

Plath glanced at Keats, who seemed to her to be elsewhere. Look-

ing through his biot’s eyes, seeing a different scene altogether.

In fact, Keats’s biot was racing madly back toward Caligula’s eye.

His biot swam and crawled, shouldered its way through the clinging

platelets, the lymphocytes, the tendrils of detached neurons, floating

like seaweed.

He had never moved so fast. He didn’t wonder at which direction

to take, which planes to use to flow through the 3D maze of Caligula’s

brain. The calm had come over him.

He knew what was coming for himself, but he was no longer

afraid. A slight smile stretched his mouth. His eyes glistened.

He was there, in that place of peace and calm and wild, frantic

action.

“Floor Thirty-Four,” Plath said to Benjamin. She didn’t know what

Floor 34 was. Just that it was the one part of the Tulip aside from the

data center that was unreachable by elevator. A guess. An intuition.

A bluff.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

The silence that followed was all the confirmation necessary.

Charles was shaken.

“And who sent Caligula to do this act of terrorism?” Benjamin

asked, voice silky and malevolent now.

“Me,” Plath said.

Charles blinked. “But . . . Surely you . . .” His tone was almost

pleading.

“Lear,” Wilkes said when Keats remained silent. “It was Lear. He’s

wired her. He got Vincent to wire her. We’ve cleared her brain of wire,

but—”

“So now you see that we were right! Now, now with our beautiful

people all dead on the
Doll Ship
, all destroyed. Now you—”

“Look, you’re a piece of shit who needs to die a painful death. The

two of you,” Wilkes snapped. “But we do not blow up buildings full of

innocent people. We’re trying to stop this happening.”

Benjamin’s face was a snarl. Charles was guarded, worried. It was

he who said, “Jindal, get Burnofsky up here.”

Keats had reached the optic nerve. He sank a probe. “I can see,”

he said in a dreamy, disconnected, emotionless voice. “Caligula is

looking right at it. At the bomb. There’s a timer.”

“How much time left?” Jindal asked.

Benjamin raged at him. “Follow my brother’s orders, now!”

“I have a weak picture,” Keats said, speaking to Plath. “I’ll try for

a better one.”

Jindal rapped orders to his people, then, undeterred—
Accus-

tomed to abuse,
Keats thought—he said, “Our people will be through

the door into the sublevel in a few minutes.”

“How are they getting through?” Plath asked.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“They’re cutting through the steel with a blowtorch and once

they’re in—”

“A blowtorch? Cutting into a room full of gas?” Wilkes cried.

“Isn’t that, uh, stupid?”

“She’s right,” Charles said.

“No,” Plath said sharply. “No. Maybe better to blow it up now

rather than wait. Less gas now. More later.”

“System,” Charles said. “Exterior, sublevel doors.”

As one they all turned to look at the monitor. Four frames. Three

showed nothing but doors. The last showed two men wearing welding

helmets. The bright light of the torch caused lens flares that obscured

the progress of the work.

“Seven minutes, eighteen seconds,” Keats said. “I can see it now.

I can see it clearly. Seven minutes and . . .” And it all came back to

him. The calm of battle had run its course once his biot had reached

its goal. Now Keats couldn’t go on. He had run out of indifference to

his own fate.

Part of him didn’t want to tell Sadie. What would be gained? But

he had to speak. He had to say good-bye.

“Sadie,” he said.

She must have registered the sadness and gentleness in his voice.

She turned to him. “Yes?”

“Sadie,” he said again. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve seen Alex.

I know what it means. Death or madness, I . . . I guess I believe in

another life, maybe. After this one. So . . .”

She stared, uncomprehending. Then a sharp intake of breath.

Her eyes widened. “Oh, God.”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“What?” Wilkes demanded.

“I’m getting my other biot as far from your aneurysm as pos-

sible,” he said. “But you’ll need to kill me. You can’t have it in your

head with a madman running it.”

“Noah,” Sadie said. Sadie, and not Plath. Sadie. “Noah . . . We

have to . . .”

He took her hand in his. “We always knew it could happen.”

“Order the men down there to cut straight through, forget cut-

ting a hole, tell them just to cut all the way through in a single spot,”

Benjamin told Jindal.

“Better to burn than to blow up,” Benjamin said. “And thus, it

ends.”

“You can’t . . . Noah . . .”

“When Caligula burns, so will my biot, Sadie. You know what

follows. It’s okay.”

“Noah . . .” She was in his arms, and tears were running down

her face.

“Yes, of course, pity for the pretty boy, eh?” Benjamin said sav-

agely. “Pity for poor, poor Noah. None for our people on our beautiful

ship. And none for hideous freaks.”

Burnofsky watched the counter on his computer monitor. The num-

ber of self-replicating nanobots had just crossed thirty-two million.

The next doubling would take it to sixty-four million, then one hun-

dred and twenty-eight. Pretty soon megabots would give way to

gigabots and hence to terabots.

He laughed at that, slurred, “I made a funny,” took a drink,

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MICHAEL GRANT

sucked on his cigarette, and touched the butt of the pistol that was

stuck into his belt.

He’d been feeding the nanobots everything he could find: stale

doughnuts, candy bars from the machine down the hall, half a salami

he’d found in the staff fridge. He hadn’t slept in . . . how many hours?

How many days? It was all kind of fuzzy.

He had the remote control in his hand. Press the button and the

force field would drop. His nanobots would eat their way out into the

world and from there they would never stop. They would eat their

way through the building, its furnishings, and anyone dull enough

to wait around.

But before they finished the Tulip they’d be carried on breezes or

simply fall from chewed-through walls down onto the streets. Nearby

buildings would be infested and begin the same accelerated decline and

rot. The pace would accelerate as the nanobots doubled and doubled.

What would the reaction be? What would the government do?

Nothing short of a nuclear weapon would stop the spread, and they

would wait far too long for that. Nanobots would find their way onto

ferries, cars, ships, and planes.

For the first few days the damage would be most visible at the epi-

center. But then, here and there and all around the world they would

appear and double and double and double.

People would flee to the woods and deserts. And they would sur-

vive for a while—maybe weeks, maybe months. In places the nanobots

would consume all there was to consume and cease doubling. But by

that time they would have eaten every living thing and much of the

nonliving things as well.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

He asked himself, where would be safe? Or at least, where would

be
safest
? The coldest places, he supposed. Nanobots tended to be

immobilized when things got cold enough, down to minus twenty-

three Celsius or minus ten Fahrenheit. But even in the coldest lands a

warm day would set them off again.

“God bless global warming,” he muttered, and laughed at his own

wit.

People thought they were scared now? They thought they were

terrified by Lear’s plague of madness? Wait until they saw their crops,

their home, their car and its gas, their dogs and cats and cows and

pigs, all chewed up, masticated by trillions of nanobots that did little

but crap out more nanobots.

Wait until they realized how hopeless it was. How powerless

they were. Wait until they saw the little sore on their ankle become a

bleeding hole and endured the agony of being eaten alive, consumed,

like a beetle being swarmed by fire ants. It would be like leprosy on

fast-forward. It would be like flesh-eating bacteria on meth.

Sure, maybe in places there would be pockets of a few scattered

humans who would hold out for as long as six months. But it wouldn’t

matter. The nanobots would eat the algae out of the sea and every

oxygen-producing plant on the land and then, inexorably, the atmo-

sphere itself would become fatal to life.

Dirt. Water. That would be planet Earth. Just dirt and water and

a vast, inconceivably vast swarm of nanobots. Mindless. Without soul

or sin. Efficient, relentless, unstoppable killers without malice, with-

out meaning, without moral judgment. Without guilt—that most

destructive, weakening, sickening, disabling of emotions.

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MICHAEL GRANT

Yes, his babies would obliterate without guilt.

He pulled up the picture he’d found of Lystra Reid and gave it the

finger.

“Game, set, match, Lear. Death or madness? I got a little hint for

you, sweetheart. The answer is death. Death, brought to you by Karl

Burnofsky.”

Out in the lab he heard a disturbance: raised voices, a bustling

movement, chairs scuffling. The door to his office was locked. He

drew the pistol.

Someone banged hard on his door: a cop’s knock.

“Damn,” he said. “I’d have liked to hit a billion first.”

“Burnofsky! Come out here. The bosses want you.”

“I’m busy,” Burnofsky yelled.

“Don’t think they care, Dr. B. You’ve got about ten seconds.”

The Twins wanted him, did they? Well, why not? It would be

worth a laugh. And he had something special for them, just for them,

something ever so special.

“Give me a second!” he yelled. In his desk, all the way at the back,

he found the little vial he’d prepared against this very moment. He

slipped it into his pocket along with the remote control that could

unleash Armageddon and opened the office door for what he sus-

pected would be the last time.

The area within the force field continued to fill with his children.

Keats had his biot back on Caligula’s optic nerve. He was again seeing

what the killer saw. Caligula seemed to be sitting, perhaps with his

back against a wall. His legs were stretched out before him. He stared

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

at his missing fingers, bleeding freely, unbandaged. He leaned down

to rub a spot of mud from his boot, glanced at the timer—six minutes

and nine seconds—then apparently coughed as his head jerked vio-

lently and his hand came up to his mouth.

Just six minutes until the natural gas flooding the basement

would achieve sufficient density that a spark would bring down the

entire building. The gas was invisible dynamite being stacked, ton

upon ton. Caligula’s eye glanced toward the ruptured pipe. He had

a picture of something in his hand, a photograph of a serious little

girl slumped in a busted-webbing lawn chair outside a shabby trailer.

There was a Ferris wheel in the background.

Caligula coughed again and drew something out of his bag. Keats

saw a small steel cylinder, a clear plastic hose smeared with Caligula’s

blood, and a clear plastic mask with elastic straps. It reminded him of

the lecture aboard an airplane:
Should there be a sudden loss of cabin

pressure . . .
Caligula pulled the mask on, and now the plastic partly

filled Keats’s view. Caligula was determined to wait out the—

No, he was up, up and staggering, but not toward the rupture, nor

toward the elevators. Keats saw a steel door. Caligula’s eye went to the

handle, then his hand as it touched the metal of the door.

“He knows your guys are burning through,” Keats said dully.

“Jindal!” Charles yelled in response.

Jindal talked into his phone and reported, “They say they’ll be

through any second.”

Caligula glanced back toward the bomb. Glanced at the gun in

his hands. Suddenly they trembled. He seemed to be struggling to

hold on to the weapon; his mutilated hand was still bleeding freely,

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MICHAEL GRANT

but even the fingers on his good hand looked stiff, uncooperative.

The gun fell from his grip. The picture, too, was facedown on the

floor.

“He’s having a stroke,” Keats reported.
Go on
, he told himself,

just keep watching. Until the end. Be the good boy. No freaking out,

no last-minute pleas.
Tough, that’s how his brother Alex had always

been. “He’s stroking out from the artery I cut.”

Sadie was looking at him, her eyes ashamed, horrified.