Bzrk Apocalypse (4 page)

camera zoomed. “He’s crying as he laughs. Crying and laughing.

Here it comes.”

Burnofsky lifted his shirt up off his corpse-white concave belly.

They had a poor angle on this, just barely able to see.

22

BZRK APOCALYPSE

Burnofsky sucked hard on the cigarette, and holding the smoke

in his lungs, stabbed the lit end of it against his belly.

They heard the sizzle.

He held it there; held it, held it, held it . . . and then, with a cry of

pain that caused smoke to explode from his mouth, Burnofsky at last

pulled the cigarette away.

“Karl, Karl, Karl,” Charles said.

“Exercising, eating well, no more drugs, far less alcohol.” Benja-

min recited the relevant facts. “Seemingly less depressed. And this

self-mutilation is the price, somehow. You know it’s BZRK, brother.

You must
know
that. He’s wired. They’ve taken our genius from us.”

Charles sipped his wine. He had to take it slow if Benjamin was

going to be swigging brandy. “I don’t
know
it. But, do I suspect it?”

He let the question hang.

“We must return home. Home to the Tulip.”

“Back to the Tulip?” Charles’s voice was troubled. “Even now that

will be dangerous.”

“I’ve spent—
we’ve
spent—our lives skulking and hiding, brother.

Is there not, finally, a time to stand up and be seen and counted?”

Charles didn’t argue. He knew it would be pointless. Benjamin

would have his own
G
ö
tterd
ä
mmerung
. Charles felt sick inside. He did not want this to end in apocalypse. He had never wanted anything, really, but for all the world to be happy. And to accept him

for what he was. And if only he could be allowed to wire the entire

human race with his nanobot forces that beautiful vision would be

realized. A world of peace. A world free from want and hate and fear

and pain because every human being would be brother, sister, father,

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MICHAEL GRANT

mother to every other human being.
One vast interconnectedness.

“We hit back,” Benjamin was saying. Over and over. “We hit

back!”

Charles closed his eye and heard the voice of his brother, so many

years ago, so long ago, before they understood. Before they came to

accept their isolation and loneliness. The voice of the child Benjamin

was the voice of the grown man now.

Hit back, hit back, hit back.

On the screen Burnofsky was giggling and crying.

24

FOUR

Sadie and Noah were bundled into a Land Rover and driven straight,

without packing, without ceremony, without time to breathe, to a pri-

vately owned airstrip and practically shoved aboard a Gulfstream.

The pilot filed a flight plan for the relatively short hop to Sam-

bava Airport on the main island of Madagascar. But that would be the

expected route, and if the enemy had gone to the trouble of blowing

up a boat, would they hesitate at an airport assassination?

So the Gulfstream flew on, took on fuel in Kenya, and made the

long haul to Madeira to prepare for the final leg to New York’s Teter-

boro.

At Madeira the security men let them off the plane. Plath and

Keats took a taxi into the whitewashed city of Funchal, where they ate

voraciously at a café that smelled of garlic, red wine, and cedar, and

served cod and prawns and good, doughy bread in a sky-blue stucco

dining room. The Gulfstream had left in too great a hurry to take on

food, and despite their picnic lunch hours earlier, they were starving.

“So what do we do now?” Keats asked. He had the sense that this

might be the last time they could speak freely. There was a single

weary McLure security guy outside on the street, gun out of view but

25

MICHAEL GRANT

not out of reach, but no one was watching or listening in the res-

taurant and the clatter of cutlery on pottery and china would have

obscured their words in any case.

“Back to New York,” she said with a shrug.

“And then?”

“Then we do whatever Lear tells us to do.” It sounded bitter. It

was.

Keats tore at a piece of bread then used it to sop up some gravy.

“That’s not proper, is it? Proper table manners, I mean.”

“Yeah, that’s what I care about,” Plath said. “Table manners.” She

offered him a smile and put her hand on his.

“It doesn’t make sense, that’s the thing,” Keats said.

“Manners?”

“Blowing up the boat.”

One of Plath’s continuing joys in her relationship with Keats

came from the fact that in just about every case where she wondered

if he was understanding things, he was. He might look a bit like the

naïve dreamboat guy, but those too-blue eyes and sensuous mouth

were deceptive. There was a sharp, observant brain there as well.

When am I going to stop underestimating you, Noah?
She asked

herself this silently, and in her mind he was firmly Noah still, not

Keats. Keats was work. Noah was . . . Well, what? Love?

He loved
her.
Did she love
him
?

Was it a class thing? The fact that she came from money and his

family had never risen to middle class? Was she really that shallow?

She wouldn’t have thought so, would have angrily denied it. But at the

same time, coming into her inheritance had without doubt added just

26

BZRK APOCALYPSE

a bit of swagger to her worldview.

She was rich. Very rich. He was very much not. Was that why she

still held something back from him? That would be shameful. Or was

it simply that she had seen him in ways no young woman is meant to

see a young man? She knew too much and had memories that were

far too vivid and intrusive. She knew what his lips looked like in the

micro-subjective.

She knew that down there, where distances were measured in

microns, those full lips were crusted parchment. She knew that his

fingertips looked like arid, plowed fields. She knew that his tongue

was serried ranks of pink hoods, and that trapped between the rows

were bright false-color bacteria.

She knew that living things crawled in his eyelashes, tiny things,

unless you were down in the meat and saw them m-sub. Then they

didn’t look so small. M-sub fleas looked like spiky, punk versions of

the armored oliphaunts from the
Lord of the Rings
movies, except

that they could jump a thousand times their own height.

She knew, above all, that all the intelligence and charm and wit,

all of his readiness to commit, all the love he was so ready to express,

was nothing but minute electrical charges firing along neurons in the

wet folds of his brain.

She had not just seen these things on an image captured from a

scanning electron microscope. She had
been
there in her biots. She

had seen them all with biot eyes that were as real to her as her own.

Even now she knew that Noah was seeing the same with her. One

of his biots was in her brain right now. All three of hers—P1, P2, P3—

were in the vial she wore on a chain around her neck for safekeeping,

27

MICHAEL GRANT

but she was still seeing through their eyes, seeing a long, rainbow-

hued glass wall. Three distinct windows were open inside her visual

field. And if they ever began to go dark . . . Then would come the

madness she defied by taking the name Plath.

Down in the meat.

Once you had gone down in the meat, the images could not sim-

ply be set aside and ignored. And after memories came imagination,

so that she would picture things she had not seen through biot eyes as

they would look at m-sub.

She would see the micro detail of his lips and her own; she would

see the rough furrows of his fingertips as they brushed her nipples;

and she could imagine the billion tail-whipping sperm cells as he

ejaculated.

It was all, at the very least, distracting. Though somehow it never

seemed to distract
him
—

Keats waved his hand up and down in front of her face.

“Sorry,” Plath said, and snapped back to reality. “I was consider-

ing. The boat. Yeah, it was both crude and ineffectual.”

“Armstrong wouldn’t come at us that way,” he said. “If they knew

where we were, they’d deploy nanobots. There have been servants in

and out of the house, we had a doctor in when I got food poisoning;

there were opportunities for infestation.”

“Or they could have targeted some of Stern’s people and bounced

the nanobots to us from them. I mean, if you know where two mem-

bers of BZRK are, you try to
wire
them, you don’t try to kill them.” She glanced over her shoulder upon saying the word
BZRK
, pronounced

with vowels intact: “Berserk.”

28

BZRK APOCALYPSE

Keats nodded, tore off another piece of bread, sopped up more

gravy, and popped it in his mouth. Plath could imagine the scene

down at the m-sub. The teeth would be impossibly huge, scaly not

smooth, massive mountainous gray boulders dropping from the sky

and rising from below to crush and—

I have to stop this. I have to get control of my thoughts.

Too easy to let that consciousness of another universe take over

her mind. Too easy to go from distraction to revulsion. She had to be

able to be with another human being without always picturing that

other, stranger reality.

“Maybe it was something totally different,” Noah suggested.

“Maybe there was a fuel leak on the boat. Maybe we’re just overreact-

ing.”

“Maybe,” Plath said. “But our time in the Garden of Eden had

to end eventually. We had to go back. We’re supposed to be running

things.”

Keats met her gaze and shook his head slowly. “No, not we. You,

Sadie.” Then with a wry smile he corrected himself. “You,
Plath
.”

She could have said that they were partners. She could have said

that obviously he was as important as she was.

But she had not told him about the message from Lear telling her

to get back in the game. The message she had ignored for days.

She wondered if she should tell him now.

But instead she copied him and mopped up some gravy. She

didn’t have time to worry about tending to Keats’s ego. Her mind was

filling with the implications of the suspicion that they were being

shepherded.

29

MICHAEL GRANT

Driven.

Manipulated.

Anthony Elder, who had once used the name Bug Man, was shopping

for onions at Tesco. Not just onions, there were other things on the

list, too. But it was onions that somehow irritated him.

Nutella

Beans

Bread

Pasta (store brand, nothing fancy)

Mushrooms (fresh, button, 1/2 pound)

Cheerios

2 oranges

3 onions (the white kind)

Three onions. The white kind.

This was his life. Again. His mother was already on him about

going back to school. To
school
!

“You don’t want to go on neglecting your education, Anthony.

That’s most likely why you were let go.”

Let go.

Well, no, Mum, I wasn’t exactly let go. I ran for my life—flew for

it, actually, all the way back to England—after my mistakes caused

the American president to blow her brains out in front of the whole

world. It wasn’t because I couldn’t conjugate French verbs or recall the

date of the Battle of Hastings.

30

BZRK APOCALYPSE

He didn’t say that to his mother, of course.

He walked down the cereals aisle searching for Cheerios, maneu-

vering around a woman who was pushing both a baby buggy and a

shopping cart. He found the cereal, puzzled for a moment over what

size box he should be getting. His mother would chide him no matter

what he chose.

Small, then. Easier to carry home. Less chance of catching some

smart remarks from passing thugs.

He’d been on top of the world. Now he was self-conscious about

being seen by others his age, struggling with plastic bags of pasta and

Nutella and onions. The white kind.

A pretty girl coming toward him looked right through him as if

he was invisible.

He’d had the most beautiful girl in the world. Jessica. She’d been

a slave to him. A slave. The memories made him ache inside. He

would never get within conversational range of a girl like that again.

Top of the world, that’s where he’d been. But all that was gone

now. All that gone and now he was invisible to women and girls. He

was a moderately attractive black teenage boy with no obvious signs

of wealth or future prospects. Why
would
they look at him?

He rounded a corner, walked glumly past aisles of this and that,

entirely forgetting the pasta, ignoring the plastic-wrapped slabs of

meat to one side, heading to onions.

He felt rather than saw that something had changed.

Instinct. Some sense that was not quite sight—sound, smell, or

touch. The certainty that he was being watched. Without turning to