Bzrk Apocalypse (37 page)

stink of smoke was in her nostrils, the taste of it in her mouth, and

more came when she coughed.

Vincent arrived silently and stood with Anya by his side, looking

like a man waiting for his own firing squad.

“What did you know?” Plath asked wearily.

“What do you mean?” he asked, and Wilkes was up out of her

seat and swinging a fist at him, which he blocked easily. She swung

again, but with less conviction, and he gently pushed her back down

onto the couch.

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MICHAEL GRANT

“What did you know, Vincent?” Plath asked again with deadly,

weary calm that carried absolute authority. “Did you know who Lear

is?”

He blinked and shook his head. Then he leaned toward her,

frowning. “Are you saying you
do
know who he is?”

“She,” Wilkes said. “She, she, she. She. A sister. One of the vagi-

nally endowed. Lystra Reid.”

Vincent drew back as if frightened. “You can’t do that, you can’t

talk about Lear. Caligula will—”

“He’s dead, too,” Wilkes said. “That’s his work.” She stabbed a

finger at the TV. “He’s dead. And Jin is dead. And Ophelia is dead.

And Renfield is dead. And Billy is dead. Even the Twins are dead.

And pretty—” She sobbed, and it was a moment before she could go

on, her voice low and grating. “It’s a whole big bunch of dead tonight.

Now answer Plath’s question, Vincent, or I swear to God I’ll find

some way to make you dead, too.”

“I met Lear once. I didn’t look at him. Her, if you say so. Maybe

that explains why I was told not to turn around and look. He, she,

whoever, used voice masking. I assumed it was so that later I wouldn’t

be able to recognize the voice.”

“And did you know Lear planned to do this? To use biot madness

this way?”

“No.”

Plath set her teacup aside carefully. Her hands were still hard to

control with any finesse. The cold seemed to have sunk deep in her,

joining the cold, dead spot where Noah had been held in her thoughts.

“Where do you stand, Vincent?”

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

He did not pretend he didn’t understand. He grasped her mean-

ing immediately. “I’m not sure I know who I am,” he began.

Wilkes interrupted. “Yeah, well, welcome to the new reality.

We’ve all been mind-fucked one way or the other.” She laughed her

mirthless heh-heh-heh and said, “We really are BZRK now, I guess.

Crazy.”

“I wish they would stop showing that,” Anya said, transfixed by

the TV.

“Where do you stand, Vincent?” Plath repeated.

“I have to . . .” He began, hesitated, shook his head, and contin-

ued. “I have to go back to basics. To what I believe. For a start, my

name is not Vincent. It’s Michael Ford.”

“I’m sticking with Wilkes. It works for me.”

“I’m Michael Ford,” he said, almost wonderingly. Like a little kid

talking about some new and amazing thing he’d just learned. “I’m

Michael. I believe . . . I believe people should be free, that’s why . . . I

believe they should be left alone. That’s why I joined BZRK.”

“That’s why everyone
joins
,” Anya said, speaking that last word

with distaste. “No one ever
joins
to do evil. It just always ends up that way.”

Vincent winced as if she’d struck him.

Plath said, “Burnofsky is releasing self-replicating nanobots.

Maybe they were all destroyed in the Tulip, maybe not. If he did it, if

they aren’t all killed, well . . . Anyway, the Twins and Burnofsky are

no longer the problem. Lear is the problem. And I don’t think she’s

done. I think she’ll keep at it. She wants to . . .” She shrugged. “I have

no idea what she wants.”

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MICHAEL GRANT

“Noah would have,” Vincent said softly. “He was a gamer. This is

all a game. It’s been a game from the start.”

Plath stared at him, thinking. He did not look away. “A game,”

she said finally. “And what’s the point of this game?”

“Games have no point,” Vincent said. “The point of the game is

the game. The purpose is to play. But games have structure. They are

built and written. And you can only play one at a time. Lear is wiping

the board of the old game, replacing it with his . . .
her
own game.”

“How do we win?”

“To win you have to understand the . . .” He shook his head. “You

can’t beat the game designer at her own game.”

“Sure you can,” Wilkes said. “I used to beat my little brother at

games all the time. I’d pull the power cord out of the wall. Game over.”

Before she got on her plane, Lystra Reid, Lear, punched a code into

her phone and pushed Send.

The text went to the nearest cell-phone tower. The signal went

from there to a central router that pushed it up to a satellite from

whence it was bounced to another satellite, and still another as it

wound its way south. Eventually it was picked up by a satellite dish.

From there it traveled just a few hundred feet to a computer server

that recognized the code and translated it into sixteen thousand indi-

vidual digital instructions that then mostly retraced the digital path

of the incoming message.

Elapsed time, 3.4 seconds.

In crèches concealed in locations in several cities across North

America, Europe, and Asia, DNA stew was bathed in various

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

enzymes before receiving three micro-doses of drugs and a final

jolt of electricity.

Forty-eight thousand biots—three for each of the sixteen thou-

sand DNA signatures—came to life.

Only fifteen thousand, eight hundred and four people (a number

had died since their fateful visit to a medical testing lab) saw windows

open in their minds.

Of those, fewer than a third understood what it meant.

They generated more than three thousand terrified calls to 911 in

the U.S. and 999 in the UK and 112 in the European Union.

“That’s the first tranche,” Lear said. To the pilot, she said, “Okay,

we can go now.”

Bug Man did not want to ask. He risked making her angry, and in

this new world, where his life belonged to her, he did not want to do

that. But he couldn’t help himself.

“My mum?”

“By now she’s thinking, ‘Blimey, what’s that then?’” Lear said,

switching to an exaggerated British accent. “There’s windows in me

head, innit?”

Bug Man’s throat convulsed. Tears came to his eyes, impossible

to stop.

“Best to move on, Buggy,” Lear said. “Get over it. Look at me. My

father died tonight, and do I seem all weepy? Hey, have you decided

what color teeth you want?”

“What?”

“The teeth. The teeth!” She pointed at her own. “How about

green? I like green.”

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MICHAEL GRANT

As the jet taxied the acid rolled toward forty-eight thousand

biots.

“Hah, there we go, yeah,” Lear said. “Now we’re going to play.”

“We know her name now. Lystra Reid,” Plath said.

Anya typed it in. Instantly the computer monitor lit up with links

and photos.

“I’ve seen her before.” Wilkes frowned, then snapped her fingers.

“Nijinsky. She was there when Jin died.”

“Lear. She’s thirtysomething, born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. Par-

ents not listed. Schools, nope. That’s about it except for later business

stuff. She owns a lot of medical testing labs.”

“That would make sense,” Anya said.

Vincent, seemingly exhausted by his earlier conversation,

remained silent.

“That’s probably how she met my father. And it’s how she got

DNA samples.”

“She will have millions of them,” Anya said.

Plath looked at the best photograph of Lystra Reid. What was

there in that pretty face to betray the existence of an evil, disturbed

mind? Nothing. The eyes were clear, the expression open, the mouth

smiling.

Plath remembered what Stern had told her. That Lear had used

burner phones but without masking the callback number. One had

been purchased in Tierra del Fuego. The other in New Zealand, she

could not recall the city. But both had been connected to Antarctica.

“Search ‘Lystra Reid’ and Antarctica,” she told Anya.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

That earned a raised eyebrow, but the search caused a long, slow

exhale. Lystra Reid had purchased a company called Cathexis.

“Pull up any articles on Cathexis Inc.,” Plath instructed.

The four of them read silently. Wilkes moved her lips. Plath felt

a new pang as just for a moment she thought to turn, look over her

shoulder, and ask Noah what he thought.

But there was no Noah. No Noah, no Nijinsky, no Mr. Stern, and

only a partial Vincent.

“Who has had any medical testing done in the last ten years?”

Plath asked.

But Vincent shook his head. “Irrelevant. If we’ve had biots made,

we’re in her database.”

“I have not had biots made,” Anya said. “But I have been tested at

one of her labs.”

“So we are all vulnerable. It’s possible that at any moment—”

“Great,” Wilkes said. “Fine. Let me go nuts. I’ll fit right in.”

Plath looked to Vincent. “What will she do next?”

Vincent thought about it, eyes dark beneath his brow, mouth a

grim line. “Her goal is instability. What else could it be? With her skills and her resources, if all she wanted was the whole world dead,

she could have grown smallpox or anthrax in a lab somewhere. And

she has nanotechnology. Why have us use biots to fight the Arm-

strongs? She had the upper hand all along. She could have used a lot

less effort and simply obtained a sample of their DNA, grown biots

for them, and inflicted biot madness.”

“Okay, why didn’t she?” Plath asked.

“Because she’s a gamer,” Vincent said with more confidence than

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MICHAEL GRANT

he felt. “She wants to win, yes, but first she wants to
play
. We were

Level One.”

“Then we’re in Level Two now.” Plath nodded. “Now she drives

the whole world crazy. Watches it. Shows up in person to enjoy Jin’s

death. Probably other events as well. She’s enjoying all that.”

“Sick bitch,” Wilkes muttered.

“She brought me back, made me a part of it again. Why?”

Vincent shrugged. “Because you’re her avatar. She wants you to

go on playing. Blue booking.”

“What?”

“Its an old gaming expression. It’s when a player keeps a journal

of the game, but from the POV of the avatar.”

“You are smart and rich and pretty,” Anya suggested. “Just as she

is. And alone. As she must be.”

“Lear sent me to recruit you,” Vincent reminded her.

“And when I was enjoying the island too much, she forced me

back into the game. She even left clues for me to find that would link

her to Antarctica.”

“Machines do not work well at very cold temperatures,” Anya

said. “And nanobots are machines.”

“Okay, so Antarctica because—”

“Because if the gray goo has been unleashed, it will have a hard

time penetrating hundreds of miles of subzero temperatures. It’s the

safest place on the planet if you’re worried about that.”

Vincent nodded agreement. This was the most engaged Plath had

seen him in a long while. Was he ready to take command again?
No.

This is my game now
.

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BZRK APOCALYPSE

“Antarctica is also a place to ride out whatever shitstorm she’s

unleashed,” Wilkes offered. “It’s as far away as you can get without

being on the moon.”

“So she camps there,” Vincent said. “Safe from the goo. And safe

from the consequences of her own game.”

“She camps. She waits. Why?”

“For Level Two to play out. So she can be there for Level Three.”

“And what is Level Three?”

Vincent shook his head slowly. “Only Lear knows that. It’s her

game.”

“And we can’t beat her by playing her game,” Plath concluded.

“We can only pull the power cord.”

“The power cord is south of here,” Wilkes said.

“She will expect that,” Vincent said.

“Expect it? I have a feeling it’s what she wants,” Plath said.

321

TWENTY-NINE

From New York to Tierra del Fuego was a bit over six thousand five

hundred miles, which at a speed of four hundred eighty knots took

eleven hours. It was not a pleasant flight for Bug Man. But he was

lucky. The rest of the world was faring much worse.

During the time Bug Man was in the air eleven more tranches of

forty-eight thousand biots, totaling five hundred twenty-eight thou-

sand, were generated from stored DNA patterns. Dividing by three

biots per person, that was approximately one hundred seventy-six

thousand people who lost their grip on sanity.

They were concentrated in fifteen major cities for maximum

disruption. New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, Los Angeles,

Tokyo, Mexico City, Moscow, Washington, Rome, Beijing, Jerusalem,

Mumbai, and Sydney.

By the time Lear’s plane landed at the Ushuaia’s airport, Los

Angeles, Jerusalem, and Berlin were burning.

The flight to the ice would be slower and in a less comfortable

plane: Lear’s sumptuous private jet could not land on ice. It was two