BZRK Reloaded (26 page)

TWENTY-THREE

For the second time in a very few days Bug Man was shaking. He
had run from the club, run straight out the door, raced down the
street through crowds of young professionals who now, when they
looked at him, did not see a very lucky guy with an amazingly hot
girlfriend, but saw instead a scruffy-looking kid who was most likely
running from cops.

He forced himself to stop running. Forced himself to walk, but he
could not force himself to stop scraping his hand over his head again
and again, as if he was trying to scrub something out of his hair.

Jesus, they would kill him for sure this time. They would kill
him. But that was only Fact Number Two turning endlessly, endlessly
around in his brain. Fact Number One was that she had betrayed him.
The bitch! The skank! After all he had done for her, after all he had
given her. Gifts and …He was sure he’d given her gifts. A necklace!
That’s right, he had given her a necklace once.

And he had given her himself. Had he ever hurt her? No. Had he
ever raised a hand to her? No.

Without a backward glance, without a second thought, she had
just dumped him. Dumped him. Him! The bitch! Had none of it been
real? After all they’d done together, the minute he unwired her she
turned on him? The minute!

The outrage built in him, feeding on itself, growing ornate and
detailed, and was almost enough to force the thought of what would
happen next from his mind.

The bitch. She was going to get him killed. He had shown her the
president. He had taken her to the office. What the hell? And now she
was with some kind of cop? What were the odds of that happening?

Where was Burnofsky? That was the question, where the hell was
he? It was his fault. If Burnofsky had shown up none of this would
have happened.

He had to call him. He wasn’t supposed to, it was a security
breach, but damn, what wasn’t a security breach now? Jessica was
with some kind of cop, and she knew. She knew!

He moved away from the drinking crowd and onto a quieter
street. Bug Man ran the conversation in his head. Burnofsky, Jessica
has gone rogue. She lost it and ran up to some cop or coplike person.

Burnofsky would ask how the hell that happened. And Bug Man
would lie. He’d say nothing about unwiring her, and he definitely
wouldn’t talk about the way she’d looked at him suddenly as if he was
some kind of lousy insect. Like he was nothing!

And for sure nothing about letting her see the nanobot feed from
the president. Why had he done that? Because he thought she cared,
that’s why, because he wanted her to see that …Never mind, why
wasn’t the question.

Yeah, it was just one of those weird things, Burnofsky. Sometimes, you know, there’s a failure rate with wiring, right?
If you have to kill her, Burnofsky, no problem, man, because she
represents a threat. So, do what you gotta do, Burnofsky. The thing is,
it wasn’t my fault.
You want to know why was I out in the world? Why was I in some
club? Because …because she had run off and I was trying to get her
back, that’s why.
Yes, that would all work. Maybe he wouldn’t die. Maybe.
He reached for his phone. He kept it in the back pocket of his
pants, but it wasn’t there, nor was it in the front pockets, or the other
back pocket, and he checked each again, because maybe he missed it.
She had it. That was it. The bitch had his phone! Or else it fell
out in the cab when he was reaching for his wallet, damn, yes, he had
accidentally pulled it out and set it on his knee while he was …and
now what? Now what? Call from a pay phone? There were no damned
pay phones!
The hotel. He had to get a cab and get back to the hotel right now
and call Burnofsky. To hell with security, this was an emergency.
He hailed a cab, which drove on by. So did the next three.
Wait, it wasn’t far to the office. He could walk there.
It was a five-minute walk, time that he divided between fearing
for his own safety, wishing death and hellfire on Jessica, and feeling
terribly alone.

Some new area of consciousness had opened up for Keats. He’d been
lost, consumed by the game, and any self-awareness would have
fatally distracted him. But this was different. This was an awareness
as unreal as the state of the rest of his mind, a new feeling, a new
type of consciousness.

He wasn’t Noah Cotton looking at Noah Cotton, he was …
someone. Some nameless observer. Some attenuated, thin-stretched,
overheated mind watching his own brain from far away.

Look at him go, this new awareness thought. Look at the moves!
Hah! Now that’s game.
He remembered the testing he’d undergone what seemed like a
long, long time ago under Dr Pound. A chainsaw, the real thing, had
been sawing toward his leg. Electrical shock. And yet he had stayed in
the game, lost himself in the game.
What he was seeing himself do now was so far beyond that. This
wasn’t juggling two balls in the air, playing two games at once, it was
a mind-altering expansion of the limits of his brain’s function. It was
an acid trip. It was nirvana.
He heard a phone ring. His new distant self was aware of Nijinsky
getting up to find the phone and say, “It’s Burnofsky’s phone.”
The hydra targets were fewer now. He was no longer killing
in dozens, he was chasing down single individuals, crawling after
them as they plunged into fat and blood, ripping through capillaries, plowing through a pustule of tight-packed football-size
bacteria.
He killed his last one there, in the base of a pimple, having to
shove seething bacteria aside while ripping the hydra apart.
The ringing stopped, Nijinsky did not answer. “Googling the
number.”

Each of the fourteen visual inputs now showed no hydras in sight.
None in the blood, none in the fat.

The new awareness began to fade, slow as a sunset. His normal consciousness began to return. He began to feel his own heart.
He knew the goggles were rimmed in sweat. His skin was cold but
seemed to vibrate, like his body was plugged into a massager. His ears
were ringing.

Nijinsky said, “The number is an office building in the city, looks
like a main switchboard number—it ends in double zero. Not far
from here, maybe eight, ten blocks.”

“Bug Man?”
The phone rang again, same number.
“Did you get them all?” Billy asked him.
Keats was silent. He tried to answer but he couldn’t. Words
wouldn’t come yet, like that part of his brain–body connection was
numb and needed to get circulation back.

“Did you get them all?” Billy asked again.

Keats was pulling out. Nanobots crawled back through the rush
of platelets, easier coming back out with the current, though the current had slowed now as the clotting factor webs adhered and began
to twine together. Nanobots and biots cut their way back through
the fat cells that had sagged to fill in the tunnel. It was like digging
out after a mine cave-in. He felt an edge of claustrophobia he hadn’t
experienced earlier in the mindlessness of battle. He was conscious of
Wilkes’s biots joining him.

Plath’s biots waited as Keats’s army emerged.
He wanted to ask her whether any hydras had come this way, but
he wasn’t all the way back yet, words still …Instead, one of his biots
made a gesture, sweeping a claw around the crater.
“Three came back this way,” Plath said up in the macro. “I got
them. Take the goggles off, Keats. Do you hear me?”
Still Keats didn’t speak, but a hand went up to his head and peeled
them off.
His eyes moved slowly to focus on her. Then he looked down at
his hand, where the goggles lay. She took them from him and he did
not protest.
Wilkes pointed a finger at Keats, looked at Plath, and in a voice
that was half awed, half laughing, said, “Your boyfriend here is a son
of a bitch down in the meat. I mean, damn!” She nodded her head
fast, “Oh yeah, honey, game. Game! He got them all, I maybe got a
dozen; he didn’t leave me any, he got them all.”
“Nonsense,” Burnofsky said. But his voice lacked any confidence.
He was going through the motions, trying not to sound defeated.
“The replicants are easy to kill,” Plath said. “They aren’t controlled, they’re just programmed, and they can’t defend themselves.
Even the factory models were helpless without a twitcher.”
She looked from the stunned Keats to the feral Wilkes; from
Nijinsky to Burnofsky. “Your big secret weapon can be killed, Burnofsky.”
“Once they’re in their millions you’ll never stop them! You won’t
even find them until it’s too late!”
Plath stood up. Her joints cracked from the tension. “Jin, what
are we doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that call. From the office building. You know who it is, or
at least who it probably is.”
“It’s probably a big building. It’s getting light out….”
Plath stared at him. Was he looking for an excuse to do nothing?
She looked around the gloomy church. In the far corner sat Vincent with Anya. Vincent actually seemed to return her gaze, almost
as if he knew her.
She reached and touched Keats’s cheek. He looked up at her, but
he did not speak. He was shattered, for now at least. He had not lost
any biots, but he had just played and won a game no human should
have been able to play. He and Vincent, both lost for different reasons
in the same war, both, she hoped, coming home again.
She looked at Nijinsky, who had not been the same since arriving
in Washington. He refused to meet her gaze.
Three broken men. And Billy, who was holding the tail of his
shirt to the small hole in his face.
Burnofsky’s phone rang again, again the same number. Someone
was desperate.
“We have to go after Bug Man,” Plath said. “It’s why we came
here.”
“Enough for now,” Nijinsky said. “I’ll update Lear. He’ll—”
“I’m curious about something, Jin,” Plath said.
“Yes?”
“Earlier, when we were going after the hydras, before Keats just…
well, did whatever he just did. Wilkes jumped in with her biots, you
didn’t. Why?”
“I would have.”
“You didn’t.”
“Are you calling me a coward? I set off a bomb, Plath. I just killed
a bunch of men tonight. Are you calling me a coward? I’m not the one
who didn’t have the courage to take out the Armstrong Twins!”
Plath recoiled. There it was, out in the open.
Nijinsky was shrill, over-the-top outraged. Too much to be real.
“The only reason this whole thing isn’t over is because you didn’t step
up when you had the chance, Plath!”
“Oh, tensions mount,” Burnofsky taunted.
To Plath’s surprise, Wilkes spoke up. “Because she’s a normal kid,
Jin, and normal people don’t like killing. How did you like it?”
Nijinsky blinked. “She can’t just call me a coward,” he said weakly.
“I’m not doing that,” Plath said. “I’m saying why didn’t you volunteer to throw your biots into it? Because I have an idea why.”
Nijinsky swallowed. He was breathing heavily. He started to say
something but stopped.
“I think you couldn’t do anything, Jin, because it would mean
revealing where your biots were,” Plath said.
Wilkes was looking hard at Nijinsky. “Where were they?” she
asked. When he failed to answer, she turned to Plath. “Where were
they?”
“Where they still are. In me,” Plath said. “Wiring me.”

Keats was remembering a scene from one of the Bourne movies, Jason
Bourne so far down underwater that it seemed impossible that he
would ever reach the surface. That’s how he felt, but instead of water it
was blood and skin and he had to claw his way back to daylight.

He’d done that, actually, yeah. His biots and the nanobots were all
up and out but his mind was not yet breathing fresh air. He wondered
in some abstract way if he had done permanent damage to his brain.

It was confusing. It was mad. It was impossible. The human brain
created only one person, one self, and yet somehow he was no longer
singular but multiple. Multiple Noah Cottons had played the game
and hunted the hydras.

Now he needed to fold all of that back into a single person again,
reassemble himself from component bits. Multiple personalities? Was
that it? No, multiple functionalities.

Then—and goddamn, there should have been some kind of cool
sound effect for it—suddenly all the parts snapped back together and
he said, “Ah!” really loud.

Then, “Ah-ah-ah, oh, hell, ah-ah!”
He jerked up from his seat and hugged himself with his arms,
paced three steps left, sudden turn, three steps back, rubbing his head
hard making an even bigger mess of his hair.
Every eye was on him. And now he was self-conscious and feeling
as if he’d been very inappropriate. He was embarrassed.
“Sorry,” he said. Then, seeing that they were still staring, he
added, “Kind of a rush. Hah! Kind of bloody amazing.”
“Are you all right?” Wilkes asked, less mocking than usual.
“Aside from being taken apart like I was made out of Lego and
then put back together? I think I’m all right.” Then, sensing that he’d
missed something, he said, “What?”
“We were just discussing why Nijinsky didn’t want to bring
out his biots,” Wilkes said with a significant look at Plath.
Keats’s memory provided the last minutes of conversation. His
face darkened. “You wired Plath?”
“I’m in charge while Vin—”
Keats hit him, a looping, somewhat inaccurate right that caught
Nijinsky on the jaw, snapped his head back and elicited a loud, “Ow!
What the hell?”
“I think our boy here may not have all his Legos back in place just
yet,” Wilkes said.
“You wired one of us?” Keats yelled, ignoring Wilkes. “You wired
Plath? To do what? What did you do to her?”
He was advancing with unmistakable menace on Nijinsky. Nijinsky stood his ground until Keats was almost nose to nose.
Nijinsky didn’t answer. So Plath did. “He’s been ensuring my loyalty. Isn’t that it, Jin?”
“Nothing that wasn’t already there,” Nijinsky said. “I …strengthened your existing attachments. You would have felt it all eventually.
We don’t have time for eventually.”
“Attachments?” Keats whispered menacingly. “To?”
Nijinsky’s recovered, belligerent look said it all.
“You bastard,” Keats said. “You made her care for me.”
It was Burnofsky who said, “Soldiers don’t fight for king and
country. They fight for each other. They fight for the poor deluded,
trapped bastard in the next foxhole.”
Nijinsky didn’t argue. He just said, “Vincent was out. Lear laid it
on me to be the right man. He laid it on me.”
“Vincent swore to me he would never wire me or any of us,” Plath
said. “He said if we ever discovered it, it would destroy our trust in
him and he’d be worth nothing as a leader after that.”
Nijinsky moved back a step, almost like he’d been shoved.
“And you know what, Jin? He was right.”
“Yeah, well I’m what you’ve got for a leader,” Nijinsky snapped. “I
may not be the right person, but I’m it.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Wilkes said. “I don’t think so. I like you,
Jin, but dude, I’m not taking orders from you anymore.”
There followed a long silence. Finally, almost sobbing with something that seemed strangely like relief, like a massive weight had been
lifted from his shoulders, Nijinsky said, “Yeah? Well, who else then?”
Wilkes jerked her thumb. “The rich bitch, here.”
Plath felt the blood drain from her face. “What?”
Keats said, “She’s right, Sadie. You know she’s right.”
“You’re a better twitcher than I am,” Plath pleaded.
“Yeah. But I saw the way you handled Thrum and Jellicoe. I saw
how you called out Caligula. I also, by the way, saw you slip a note to
Stern. You have the money; you have your own private army. More
important, you’re a natural. Like I am down in the meat you are up in
the macro. Until Vincent gets all the way back to us, you’re it.”
“Yeah, what pretty boy blue eyes said,” Wilkes said.
“But I’m too young for this,” Plath pleaded.
“So was Alexander the Great.” To everyone’s surprise, this came
from Anya, who had walked Vincent over to join them. Vincent was
calm and quiet, but he was still not with them. “So was Joan of Arc.”
“David killed Goliath and cut off his head when he was just a
kid,” Wilkes said. “What? Why the looks? I’ve read the Bible. It’s
mostly slaying and screwing.”
Plath felt like someone was squeezing her heart inside her chest.
Nijinsky breathed in like he was taking his first breath in five
minutes. “Huh,” he said. And then, a smile spread across his face,
showing perfect teeth, and he laughed. “Lear was right. I’m the wrong
person.”
“What’s your vote, Burnofsky?” Wilkes asked him. “Who worries
you more? Handsome Jin or Freckles McMoneybags here?”
Burnofsky said nothing.
“I’m sorry, Sadie, but you’re it,” Keats said.
Was there a part of Plath that was flattered? Yes. Was there a
larger part that was horrified? That, too.
“Okay,” Plath said. “Until Vincent is back. Only until then. And
I hope that’s soon.”
“Yes,” Nijinsky said, but not in a resentful way. He looked too
relieved. He was having a hard time not jumping up and down. He
was like a condemned man who just got the right telephone call from
the governor.
“Okay, then, two things,” Plath said. “First, Anya, are you with
us? Not as a prisoner or whatever, but as one of us?”
“I’m with Vincent,” she said. “Which means I am with you, too.”
Plath nodded. “Billy? We can get you away from all this to somewhere safe. I can arrange that.”
Billy shook his head. “No, ma’am. I’m good. I can help.”
“Okay then,” Plath said. “We’re going to hold on to Burnofsky,
and we’re going to turn him. We’re going to take Bug Man and do
the same. And then we’re going to unwire the president and stop the
Twins and . . .” She stopped herself there.
Wilkes laughed her heh-heh-heh laugh. “She was going to say,
‘and save the world.’”