BZRK Reloaded (12 page)

They said she would understand soon. Someone they called
Toblerone—like the chocolate bar—had taken sick, so they were
without an adjustor until he recovered. But don’t worry, Minako, they
said, Toblerone will be back, or someone just like him, and your happiness will be assured.
You will be as happy as any of us.
Have you watched the third video? Wasn’t it the best ever?
Have you read the pamphlet titled “Youth and Happiness: They
Really Do Go Together”? Didn’t you find it amazing?
But Minako overheard two of the proctors—those in charge of the
village of Benjaminia—talking in hushed voices. Toblerone had died.
Meningitis, they said. And now, in the wake of a suicide by someone
called Joe Carpenter, there was no “twitcher” on board, no adjustor.
That left her, Minako, the only unadjusted person aboard, aside
from much of the crew.
All of this was mysterious to Minako, who spent her days worrying about her mother and her little brother. And sketching on the
paper they supplied her. And pretending to read the boring Nexus
Humanus pamphlets.
And counting.
And crying.
And plotting escape.

Helen Falkenhym Morales lay in her bed alone. So strange. She had
spent nights without MoMo while on overseas trips. Rare, but it
happened. But in the three years she had slept in this room in the
private portion of the White House, she had never been alone.

Now, alone.
Her staff was walking on eggshells with her. They were keeping
things from her, trying to give her time to come to grips with the
tragic death of her husband.
Morales saw the moment in memory, saw her own hands as they
grabbed MoMo’s head and SLAM!
It had made a sound like a cracking walnut. That was how hard
his head hit the tile.
Crack.
She’d been lucky the tile didn’t break.
As it was, everyone had bought her story of finding MoMo dead
in the bathtub when she got up in the night to relieve herself.
Now she had a cover for any strange behavior. People would say,
Oh, she’s coping with the grief.
But what she was coping with was the question: What in God’s
name had happened to her? How could she have done that terrible
deed? She was not a murderer.
Her heart was broken. She had killed him. She had bashed in the
head of the only man she had ever loved.
Something …a gear had slipped. Like when she was little and
riding her bicycle and suddenly the chain would fall off the sprockets
and the pedals were no longer connected and the bike would wobble
as she tried to regain control.
That’s how she felt.
She was scared. The pain in her heart was so terrible it had to be
physical, it couldn’t just be her emotion squeezing her like that, like
an iron fist that wanted to stop the beating.
Reality did not leave the president alone to grieve. She wasn’t the
only one who seemed to have slipped a gear, the entire country had
gone nuts: the bizarre death of Grey McLure and the indescribable
horror at the stadium; the UN massacre; a terrible mass murder in
a house on Capitol Hill; and now early reports were coming in that
some of Rios’s ETA people had lost it and shot up a bookstore, supposedly in a gun battle with a terrorist.
The thing on Capitol Hill was at least a local matter. So far. The
rest was all on her plate. She was getting hourly updates on the investigation into the UN terror attack, each report amounting to the same
thing: we don’t know. Now she was getting word that there was a fullscale turf war going on over the bookstore massacre, with FBI and
Washington police fighting over witnesses.
She had picked a very bad time to lose her mind.
There was Cognac in the nightstand, very high-end Cognac, a
gift from the French president. She’d already had one snifter. Now she
had a second one. She downed it in a gulp.
No one would blame her for having a drink.
Except of course that she didn’t drink. Never had liked the stuff.

“The attic,” Benjamin said. “I was thinking of the attic.”
“I often remember it,” Charles admitted, but he didn’t like talking
about their childhood.
The Twins traveled by private jet. There was no other practical
way. Their jet had a specially built seat, and handrails bolted to the
overhead so they could hold themselves upright for the trip back and
forth to the specially built bathroom.
They stayed aboard the plane during refueling in Novosibirsk,
Russia. They did not get off until the plane had landed and taxied into
a secure hangar at Hong Kong International.
The Twins had traveled with three bodyguards, a personal assistant named Samuel, and an old Vietnamese woman named Ling. Ling
was a piece of work—ancient, wrinkled, short but squat and amazingly strong. There would never be a need to wire Ling to ensure her
loyalty—the Twins owned her body and soul after they had bribed
the communist authorities in Hanoi to release Ling’s son from prison.
At the airport Charles and Benjamin transferred to a helicopter.
It, too, was specially equipped. It belonged to the Doll Ship and
had been flown to shore to accommodate them. The only problem
with the helicopter was that it was too small to take all three of the
bodyguards. There was room for only the Twins, Ling and a single
AmericaStrong operative whom everyone called Altoona after his
hometown.
The helicopter whined its way to full power and tilted out through
the doors of the hangar. The weather had turned nasty, with low
clouds and gusting winds. Rain and worse wind was ahead. Already
the flight conditions were less than optimum for a landing on a pitching ship. But they hadn’t come all this way to be denied now.
“Our friends were mannequins,” Benjamin said bitterly, spitting
the words.
“Listen, brother, you must fight these memories. She wired you,
that McLure girl. You know that. You know that these memories are
given too much prominence because she wired you.”
Benjamin stared dully ahead. “My best friend was Poppy. Do
you remember her, brother? I imagined going out to the movies with
her. With a mannequin. With a thing. A thing made of plaster over a
metal frame, topped with a yellow wig.”
The helicopter lifted off with a lurch that upset the stomach they
shared. The city stabbed up at them with a hundred bright skyscrapers. Then the busy harbor. And finally they were out over gray water.
“I wanted to look under her dress,” Benjamin said. “A mannequin.”
“For God’s sake, let it go. We aren’t those children anymore, Benjamin.” The words were painful. The memories were painful. Worse
than painful, shameful. Humiliating.
“Aren’t we those children, Charles? And yet we are en route to the
Doll Ship, and what is the Doll Ship but the doll house with anatomically correct mannequins?”
“The whole world will change, Benjamin. We are going to change
the whole world. Do you understand that? I know you do. All of that,
all the …all the past, will be a prologue and everything will be—”
“We will still be what we are, though, won’t we?”
“If the world changes, how can we be the same?” Charles asked.
“It’s going to be better, Benjamin. It will be better. And soon. For now,
there’s the Doll Ship.”

The Doll Ship had passed from the Philippine Sea into the South
China Sea. Minako, in the nickel steel bubble of Benjaminia, knew
nothing of it. All that could be noticed inside that eerie pressure
cooker was that the swell of the ocean now had a shorter interval—smaller, faster waves, and sometimes the whole place would
sink into a trough before taking a hard slap that would have people
reaching for handrails.

“They are on their way!” the public address system blared. “The
Great Souls are in the air and on their way!”
English was the language of the Doll Ship. But Minako heard
cries of pleasure and excitement in half a dozen languages. The girl
downstairs—her name was Fatima—spoke Spanish and despite being
aboard the Doll Ship for six months had not acquired much English.
What she did know were mostly slogans from the endless Nexus
Humanus books and pamphlets and videos.
She was happy. “Sustainably happy,” although Minako doubted
she understood the words.
Minako was not happy. She had wondered if she should climb up
to the highest level and leap off the railing. The fall would be something close to a hundred feet, more than enough to kill her.
How long a fall? Two seconds? Three?
If only she could be sure it was not four seconds . . .
The loneliness choked her sometimes. Choked the air from her
lungs. Her mother. Her friends. Her bedroom. Her things. All of it
gone. All of everything that had ever seemed normal had been traded
for this floating madhouse, these bright-eyed lunatics.
Fatima had seen her crying and come to stand outside Minako’s
quarters, speaking from the catwalk outside. “No be sadness, Minako.
Be happy. Be joy!” She pronounced that last word “yoy.”
“I don’t feel joy,” Minako had said. “Why would I? I’ve been kidnapped. My mother cries every night, I am sure. I can see her in my
mind, I can see her crying for her daughter. I can see her eyes all red.”
“No, no, Minako. The world entire will be happy. Tu mama she is
happy you. Happy you.”
“Don’t you miss your parents?” Minako had asked.
And a bleak, hollow look had come into Fatima’s dark eyes. “No?”
She had said it as a question. Then, more confidently, “No. They are
come, the Great Souls.”
“Who are these Great Souls?” Minako had asked.
“You have not look at photos?”
Minako shook her head. “No.”
“Yes. Toblerone, this is why. His sicking.”
“What is so special about these people?” Minako asked.
Fatima smiled mysteriously. “Very beauty. Most beauty men.”
Then she said, “I have photo in my lodge.”
And if only the timing had worked out a bit better Minako might
have had a chance to see what Fatima could show her. But before that
could happen, the announcement came.
“Everyone assemble in the commons, wearing your cleanest
clothing and happiest face!”
Fatima had yelped and run off, forgetting entirely her offer to
Minako.
Minako had only one change of clothing, the Doll Ship was
not known for its style. Women wore black slacks and powder-blue
blouses. Men wore khakis and white shirts. Young girls wore a sort of
school uniform: pleated skirt and white blouse. There were no young
boys, a fact that only at that very moment dawned on Minako.
None of the clothing fit very well, but the laundry kept things
very clean and very well pressed. Even the knee socks were ironed.
Minako knew, because it was her job to work in the laundry.
A strange laundry it was in a belowdecks space between Benjaminia and Charlestown, with workers from both towns, all happy,
happy to be doing laundry, sorting, loading into the big industrial
washing machines, using the padded steam-iron machines to press
trousers, all of it so very, very happy.
Except when a young man named Xander had evidently climbed
inside one of the big industrial dryers. It must have happened at night
when the laundry was quiet. He had set the cycle, pushed the Start
button, and used a wad of tape to pull the door shut behind himself,
triggering the dryer to start.
Minako had not found him, but she had been in the area when
the first scream announced the grisly results. Proctors had come running and pulled the bloody, burned body from the dryer. Minako had
seen it slip from their grip and hit the floor.
Suicide by dryer. So. Not everyone was happy, happy, happy you.
Ever since she had reached puberty and the obsessive compulsive disorder had worsened, Minako had suspected she was crazy.
But it was impossible that these people could be genuinely happy,
deprived of their families, taken from their homes, kept in an awful
steel ball and made to do drudge work all day. Xander was the proof,
wasn’t he?
Either they were mad or Minako was, and for the first time in
Minako’s life she had begun to suspect that here, at least, she was the
least crazy person around.
She changed clothing, acutely aware, as she often was, of a sense
of being watched, even when she changed clothes. Even when she
used the toilet or showered. There were no secrets aboard the Doll
Ship. No need for secrets when everyone was so happy they sometimes locked themselves in a dryer.
She joined the rush of people down to the commons, the flat
space at the bottom of the dome; there was no alternative, and she
hoped, somehow, that these Great Souls would be rational. In any
event she would get to see the men responsible for this place, the gods
of this monstrous sphere. Maybe they would see that they had made
a terrible mistake taking her and that she—she somehow being different than all these other people—should be returned to her home.
The word home made her throat tighten.