Bzrk Apocalypse (20 page)

much better than looking at that torture chamber on her body.

“I went crazy, yeah. Into the nuthouse with me. I was rich by

then, had my businesses going pretty good, but yeah, off the deep

end, yeah. Meds did nothing; they still talked to me.”

Your conscience, you sick bitch
, Bug Man thought.

“Not my conscience,” she said, for all the world as if he’d said it

out loud. He had to resist the urge to cover his mouth with his hand

lest he say something to get himself killed.

“Psychotic break. Not functional. Everything falling apart . . .

and he came back. Daddy. He said he would if it came to it, if, you

know . . . if. I guess he thought I might eventually get weirded out over

his killing my mother. Drink?”

She poured them each several fingers of bourbon. Bug Man

gulped his down. He needed to pee desperately, but this was so not

the time to ask to be excused.

“Nuts, yeah. So back he came, my daddy. And he said, ‘I know

about this man, this scientist. He’s doing some weird stuff with nano-

technology. Maybe he can help. Only he refused, you see, and Daddy

couldn’t kill him and neither could I, because, well, he was protected.”

“Burnofsky?”

“Burnofsky?” She shook her head. “But good guess. No, it was

162

BZRK APOCALYPSE

Grey McLure. He was just starting—freaking out over his wife dying

and he couldn’t save her with his new toys. Then his daughter and the

aneurysm, yeah. Yeah. People went crazy, though, see? Off this new

thing he’d invented. This
biot
!”

The word came out in a roar that made Bug Man jump back.

“This biot. So, maybe, yeah, maybe if a dying biot would make

a sane person crazy, hey. Maybe, right? Yeah? Maybe the other way,

too.”

“Jesus. They gave you a biot.”

She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah. My very own. And then they killed it.

And you know what? It worked. It
worked
. I wasn’t crazy anymore.”

The hell you weren’t
, Bug Man did not say.

“The tattoos stopped talking to me. I could cope, yeah. I could

manage. Making tons of money. And then I saw it—saw the game.

Saw the way I could do it. Make a whole new world, yeah.”

She fell silent then, staring down into her drink.

Bug Man stood on wobbly legs and went to the bathroom. In the

glaring fluorescence he stared at his own face as if staring at a ghost.

He was shaking. He felt an urge to sit down and empty his bowels, but

who knew what the crazy woman would do?

Oh, that’s right
, he told himself.
Not crazy. No, she was all cured.

He peed and washed his hands, and having used up all his stall-

ing tactics went back out.

Lystra Reid had not moved a muscle.

He sat down.

And unprompted she said, “Oh, and the actress? Sandra Piper?

Bitch cut me off in traffic.”

163

(ARTIFACT)

Plath:
I need Caligula.

Lear:
Name the place.

164

SIXTEEN

The news was all about the Nobel madness. Twenty-four hours a day.

MSNBC, Fox, CNN.

Only the BBC made a connection to the bizarre case of the New

Zealand cops.

Only the Web site Buzzfeed made a connection between the

Nobel madness and the inexplicable suicide of Sandra Piper.

Everyone, though, connected it to the bizarre death of the Ameri-

can, Chinese, and Brazilian heads of state.

Fear was spreading. A sharp observer would already be able to

spot a wariness in people’s eyes and in their words. There was a feel-

ing in the air.

Fear. Like the scent of smoke. Like the distant rumble of tank

engines and clanking tracks. Like sirens in the night.

The theories about the cause were: food poisoning, mass hysteria,

and some sort of terrorist attack using a form of nerve agent.

Only Cracked.com actually listed nanotech on its “8 Ways to

Explain the Big Brain Meltdown.”

There were several loops of footage than ran more or less con-

tinuously online and on TV. One was a cell-phone video of a scene

165

16

MICHAEL GRANT

of madness from inside the Golden Hall. A second showed a blood-

stained woman in a party dress rushing from the hall amid a panicked

crowd, then suddenly launching herself at a passing woman and

biting savagely into her neck. Another showed a former American

secretary of state waving madly at invisible flying enemies.

Of course there were also clips of the new president looking sol-

emn and vowing to give the Swedish government any assistance they

required. Ditto footage of the British prime minister, the French pres-

ident, and a long list of folks who had no idea what was going on, all

vowing to get to the bottom of it.

Rye ergot. That was the first guess. Rye ergot, a disease caused by

fungus that grows on some foods and can cause symptoms similar to

an LSD dose.

Tests for rye ergot were all negative.

“Just like Nijinsky,” Keats said. “It’s all connected.” He was watch-

ing the BBC coverage. “It’s all the same bloody thing, isn’t it.”

He was talking to no one. Plath was out, and though a part of

Keats was with her—sitting on his hands, waiting for a cue—he

felt alone. Abandoned. Both here and there. Both large and small.

Slumped into his chair and on edge, ready for a race. Not for the first

time, he wondered mordantly what he had to fear from madness.

Wasn’t this already madness?

Billy was absorbed in a video game. Vincent was there, staring,

almost forgotten by Keats.

Keats sat before the television, watching through his two eyes,

and seeing the windows in his head, watching from other eyes. “It’s

all one. But who?”

166

BZRK APOCALYPSE

The voice when it spoke surprised him. What the voice said was

chilling.

“Lear,” Vincent said.

Keats turned to look at him. He was still showing nothing, Vin-

cent. A blank expression, sad eyes. Only his brow seemed to speak of

any emotion; if tension can be called an emotion.

“Lear?” Keats said. “Not the Armstrong mystery weapon?”

“Games,” Vincent said, as though that word should mean every-

thing and the saying of it had exhausted him.

Keats couldn’t quite think of what to say. On the one hand, this was

Vincent. On the other hand, this was mad Vincent. Shattered Vincent.

Seventy percent Vincent.

“You want anything to eat?” Keats asked. “I was thinking of

ordering Chinese.”

“Did Lear just see it?” Vincent mused, ignoring Keats. “Or has

he known all along? Should I ask him?” There was something almost

like a smile on Vincent’s lips. “There will be more.”

Keats might have pursued it, but a few thousand feet away, his

much smaller self saw that the moment was fast approaching. He

readied himself to confront the lion in his den.

With Nijinsky dead, Burnofsky was off his leash. He had no way of

knowing this—not yet—but there was no longer a biot in his head.

Or to be more accurate, there was still a biot attached to his optic

nerve, but no one was peering through those biot eyes any longer.

The biot had no real brain of its own, nor did it have instincts. It

continued to live, but only to live. Immobile.

167

MICHAEL GRANT

Burnofsky had a Post-it note. He wrote on it:
Floor 34. Viral

research.

He held this note up in front of his eyes. Held it there for far lon-

ger than it should take to read it. But he guessed that whoever was

running the biot in his head—and he believed it was Nijinsky—would

not be focused on his every moment.

He was careful in the way he did this because Burnofsky knew

perfectly well that his lab was under surveillance. He had come to

accept that fact. Privacy was dead, anyway, particularly if you worked

for the Armstrongs. But he knew the camera locations and angles.

Sometimes he forgot—he had a worrying sense that his little self-

inflicted wound of the other day might have been observed.

Well, the Twins had seen worse, hadn’t they? They’d seen him

puking his guts out. He was morally certain that they’d been watch-

ing one dark night months earlier, back before he’d been wired, when

he had sat for twenty minutes with a loaded pistol in his hand trying

to get up the nerve to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger.

So what was a little cigarette burn, eh? Better than the opium

pipe, right? Better than the vodka bottle. He wasn’t drinking now, not

that he’d made some lifelong decision to quit; he just wasn’t drinking

right now. Or snorting coke. Or smoking opium.

No, he was all cleaned up. He laid the Post-it note down in the

ashtray in front of him, shielding it with his body from the hidden

camera. Then he began to light a cigarette and in the process burned

the note to ashes.

He drew in the smoke of his cigarette and wondered if he would

get to the end of it without burning himself.

168

BZRK APOCALYPSE

The burning was—

“Shit,” he muttered. Nijinsky would think it was a reference to a

computer
virus. He wouldn’t understand that Floor 34 was a crash

program involving actual viruses.
Biological
viruses.

Burnofsky had only stumbled upon the information by chance.

He was hiring a new engineer and happened to speak to one of the

people in human resources, who smiled, told him he had plenty of

available engineers, and thank God at least Burnofsky wasn’t looking

for a virologist.

Virologist. A scientist specializing in viruses, of course. And why

was anyone at Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation working on bio-

logicals of any kind?

It had to be Floor 34. Burnofsky knew most of what AFGC was

into, he should have known about a biological nano program of any

sort. Were they working on their own version of biots? Were they pre-

paring to toss his nanobots aside? The possibility worried Burnofsky

a bit.

As always when he was anxious, his thoughts went to opium, and

then to his work, and then to Carla. And from there to the Great For-

bidden Memory.

Burnofsky knew exactly what they had done to his brain. He

knew. He was a scientist; he had wired many a person, done to others

what had now been done unto him. He knew that tiny wires in his

brain had been used to create shortcuts—sending thoughts around

the usual circuitous neural pathways to hook into the most intense

sensations.

In other words, he knew that Nijinsky had connected memories

169

MICHAEL GRANT

of his daughter’s death to pleasure centers. He knew Nijinsky had

made his greatest guilt into a sick and disturbing fantasy. He knew

that. He could picture the wire in his own brain. He could imagine

just how Nijinsky had done it.

But that changed nothing. It did not stop the physical reaction

when he thought of that most awful of days.

I killed her.

And I’m thrilled.

At first he had thought of using his own nanobots to go in and

rewire himself. But of course Nijinksy would see him. Burnofsky

could take Nijinsky’s biot—Burnofsky wasn’t quite Bug Man or Vin-

cent when it came to nano warfare, but he was confident that he could

outfight Nijinsky.

But somehow . . . No.

Somehow the will to fight back always seemed to dissipate.

Was this still more wiring? Probably. If so, it was effective. He

would form the desire, formulate a plan, start to get his resources in

order, and then, then, then something . . . It would all just leak away.

The answer was no. He would not finish this cigarette by putting

it out in the ashtray.

He took one long, final pull on the cigarette butt—it was down to

the last inch—lifted his shirt, and stabbed it into his stomach.

The pain was staggering. The smell of burned flesh was like

opium, somehow, a narcotic that turned the pain into a dream, a

swirling unreality.

And most of all, it took his mind off Carla. Because despite all of

Nijinsky’s careful work, Burnofsky felt that if he had to endure that

170

BZRK APOCALYPSE

horror-excitement one more time, he would find his gun and finally

do it.

The HNDS—hover-capable nanobot deployment system—or

“Hounds” were roughly triangular in shape and no bigger than a

paper airplane.

The original drone architecture was under development for the

U.S. military and the CIA. Stealthy, relatively quiet, wonderfully

maneuverable, their only real drawback was that their range was lim-

ited to twenty miles. The military wanted a seventy-five-mile range,

and the CIA weren’t interested unless they could be flown at distances

up to five hundred miles.

So the drones—once designated the hover-capable surveillance

system (HOSS)—had been repurposed. Twenty miles might not quite

be the thing for the soldiers or the spies, but it was perfectly adequate

for use in massed preprogrammed attack by nanobots.