BZRK Reloaded (15 page)

She decided immediately not to do that. Not to treat him like a child.
“What’s in the bag?” Plath asked.
“Laptops and phones. And guns.”
“Laptops and phones and guns, oh my!” Burnofsky parodied.
“I grabbed it all after we got shot up,” Billy said.
“Shot up?” Keats asked, as Plath turned a hard left.
“They pretended to be cops and came in. Bang bang bang.”
Plath saw Keats’s eyes in the mirror. She asked the question on
both their minds. “How did you get out alive? And have time to grab
laptops?”
Billy shrugged. “Everyone was dead by then. Except the one guy
I let go.”
“You let one go?” Plath could not help but be intrigued.
“It was over by then,” the kid explained. “He surrendered. Plus he
pooped himself, so it didn’t seem cool to shoot him.”
“Jesus,” Burnofsky said, disgusted, but at the boy, not at the disgraced man.
“There’s the place,” Plath said, leaning down to see out of the
windshield. “We’ll get out. Then I’ll go ditch the car and come back.
Do you have a gun on you now, Billy?”
“Yeah.” He drew it out from under his sweatshirt. It looked
absurdly large.
“If Mr Burnofsky here tries to run away will you shoot him?”
“If you want me to,” Billy said.
There as an awkward and overly long pause. Finally Keats said,
“Yes, that’s what we would like. If he runs or cries out, shoot him.”
“The good guys and their child soldiers,” Burnofsky said.

She had speechwriters, but it seemed wrong to ask one of them to
write a eulogy for her husband. The whole country would be watching and weeping when she read this speech.

And so far she had written the words,
I loved him. I don’t know why he had to die.
She was using a laptop, a highly secure laptop, of course— no one

hacks the president’s laptop. So she could write here, in the privacy of
her office—not the Oval, that was the official office—she could write
the truth or at least what she knew of the truth.

I don’t know . . .
Something happened . . .
Bad things happen . . .
Sometimes . . .
It was like bad haiku.
She swallowed Cognac. How had she ever disliked the stuff?
Why did she like it so much now?

There was a bill in Congress to …something important. Very
important.
Wasn’t it?
And one of the justices of the Supreme Court had been caught on
tape making calls to a porn site. And that would blow up in the press.
The Iranians were. . .
The Euro . . .
Terrorism . . .
Rios . . .
I didn’t mean to hurt him.
I loved him.
I still do. I miss him. But something . . .
Backspace—erase.
There were six nanobots tapped into her optic nerve. Left eye.
Getting actual visuals was hit or miss, but with multiple nanobots
tapping simultaneously, sometimes you could get a pretty good picture.
Bug Man could see what she was writing.
He was in his twitcher chair, in the office space, and Jessica was
standing beside him. He was showing her. She had never seen it
before, never even guessed at what Bug Man did at his “job.”
“See, I’m down there inside her head,” he explained.
“What are you doing there?”
Why was he telling her this? If the Twins found out, they’d kill
her. They’d flat out kill her. Or maybe not: maybe they’d make him
do it.
Or maybe they’d make him rewire her even more.
Once when he was maybe six, seven, he’d heard his mother
talking to her sister, his aunt, about some dude named Mills, an
American. His mother and aunt had been drinking gin and tonics,
not drunk but not sober, either. There had been a lot of laughing and
he’d ignored it all, in the next room, paying a game. But when the
laughing stopped and the conversation grew quiet, he’d put down the
game and crept closer to eavesdrop.
When his mother talked about this man, this MIlls person, her
voice grew heavy with emotion. It seemed like every three words there
was a sigh. She had cried, and Bug Man’s aunt had comforted her and
said things like, “You had him for a while, be grateful for that.”
“He loved me,” his mother had said.
“He loved you more than he loved life itself,” his aunt confirmed.
That cliché phrase had stuck with Bug Man, with Anthony Elder.
More than life itself. That’s how Jessica felt about him. She loved him
more than life itself. Of course that DeShawn, whoever he was, he
hadn’t been made to love. No one had wired him to feel that way.
Somehow it had just happened.
What would be left if he were to start tearing out the wire he had
laid in Jessica’s brain? What would she see when she looked at him?
What did she see now?
He looked at Jessica speculatively, watching her watch the monitor. Watching her understanding what he was and who he was. How
powerful he was. How important he was.
Why was he showing her?
Why was he even here? Burnofsky had told him to go limp,
to do nothing, but how could he do that? What if Morales pulled
some other crazy bullshit? What if she went nuts and killed someone else?
“She’s saying she loved him.” Jessica said softly, reverently. “She
must be sad. Strange, kind of, huh? I mean, the president being sad
and all. Because she’s so powerful.”
Bug Man wiggled one of the probes just a little, hoping for a better resolution.
I hurt him and I hurt myself in the process, and I don’t even know
why. Is that normal? Do you all understand how that happens?
Backspace—erase.
I was so determined. I knew at that moment what I had to do.
Backspace—erase.
Bug Man felt weakness in his arms. His breathing was shallow.
“I’m in trouble, Jessica,” Bug Man Anthony Elder said.
“You’re the best, Anthony,” Jessica said. It was automatic. He
knew the connections that made her say it. He had laid that wire.
“They’ll kill me if this goes wrong,” he said. “They’ll fucking kill
me.”
She laid a hand on his shoulder. She leaned down to nuzzle his
neck. “I can make you not so tense,” she said.
Jessica was beautiful, as beautiful as when he had first seen her,
and he wanted her so badly it hurt, wanted her so badly he’d pay any
price….
I loved Monte the first time I saw him
And his head made a sound like a walnut
Backspace—erase.
“Did she kill MoMo?” Jessica asked, and suddenly it was a little
girl’s voice. A voice full of wonder and sweet, innocent worry.
And even as she worried she was caressing his face and neck,
doing what he had programmed her to do, and something like panic
rose in Bug Man’s chest, making his heart beat too fast and then too
slow and he felt sick.
Oh God, how did it come to this?
That’s what the President typed. And Bug Man read it and
thought, Yes, yes: How?

The Stone Church was evidently abandoned, though perhaps not
so long ago. It was the sort of building that might have been considered historical, perhaps, but was small and ugly and too patched
up to quite make one think of George Washington in attendance. It
seemed squeezed and oppressed between a coin-op laundry and a
halfway house.

Needless to say, it was not one of Washington’s tonier neighborhoods. Local residents had decorated the stone exterior with graffiti,
none of it terribly original, none of it rising to the level of street art.

Keats used the tire iron from the car to pry plywood from the side
door. It was a noisy job. Billy slid through the opening and pushed
from the inside. Once in, Plath and Keats used the lights from their
phones to find a switch. Amazingly, the switch lit up a pair of clamp
lights hanging from scaffolding.

As their eyes adjusted they saw a space that was more impressive
from the inside than it had been from the outside. The only window
was a small, peaked, stained glass set beside the door. It was protected
by plexiglass so it had not been broken, but it had been largely
obscured by graffiti. Its much, much larger cousins were in a shallow
dome in the ceiling. It was impossible to see the scenes clearly, but
Plath counted ten panels. The moon shone through one and revealed
a scene of a man in a red robe raising a knife in a threatening manner.
The Ten Commandments, maybe, with “Thou shalt not kill” the only
one now illuminated.

A dozen long wooden pews had been pushed aside for the scaffolding. The purpose of the scaffolding must have been to begin some
restoration project, but there were cobwebs and maybe spiderwebs as
well and dust everywhere, so it had been abandoned some time ago.

There was an altar, a two-step platform topped by a large rectangle decorated with lacquered tile. A wooden podium or lectern was
tipped onto its side. Above the altar on the wall was a cross in rough
wood, probably a fairly realistic reproduction of the original. Someone had gone to a great of trouble to climb up there and set beer cans
at the ends and at the top. Two were green Rolling Rock cans and one
was a dented Colt 45 Malt Liquor can.

Billy had hauled his bag inside and set it down on the altar. He
searched behind it.
“We need Burnofsky tied up,” Plath said. She glanced around.
There was plastic rope, neon orange. She and Keats sat Burnofsky
on a folding chair and tied him to the scaffolding. The placement
of the metal pipes of the scaffolding dictated an odd, asymmetrical
arrangement that left one of the man’s arms stretched out and the
other raised over his head. If he pulled hard enough he might just
be able to pull the whole rickety structure down on himself, but they
were too shaken and weary to think of any better arrangement.
“This is hardly necessary, I’m an old man,” Burnofsky said, not
really putting much conviction behind it.
“Tape his mouth shut?” Keats wondered aloud.
Plath shook her head. “No. Maybe he wants to spill his guts.”
Keats grinned at her. “Seriously? Americans really say things like
that? Spill his guts? That sounds very Law and Order.”
“That’s probably where I heard it,” Plath admitted.
“You two make a cute couple,” Burnofsky said drily.
“Beneath the altar,” Keats said, recalling the text from Lear. He
joined Billy and the two of them tipped the altar over.
“There are stairs,” Keats said. “No light switch, though. I’m not
keen to walk down there with nothing but the light from an iPhone.”
“Wait for Jin,” Plath suggested. “I’m going to see what the old
man put on me.” She sounded tougher than she felt. She had come to
more or less accept that nano-scale images of her own eyes or brain
were simply a part of her consciousness, but traveling out over her
own skin still held terrors for her. She would have liked to take a good
long shower first at least. You never knew what microscopic monstrosities you might encounter.
“I can do it,” Keats offered, stepping back from the altar.
Plath shook her head. “Bad enough I’ve got you in my brain. I
don’t need you crawling over my epidermis.”
“Then I’ll update Lear and Jin,” Keats said.
Plath motored her two nanobots around her own eye. From the
massive Golden Gate Bridge cable–size nerve onto the eyeball itself.
The back side of the eye was very different than the front. If the
front was a sort of eerie frozen lake with an awful black pit in the
center surrounded by stretched chewing gum muscles, the back was
an alien landscape of seemingly impossible constructions formed by
nerves and muscles and surface veins like tree roots.
Or perhaps the veins were more like pythons. She could see the
shape of the blood cells that surged and slowed, surged and slowed
with each heartbeat. The platelets were a sort of slurry in the larger
veins, then branched off into smaller veins, and capillaries where they
piled up, single file like impatient children pushing in line.
It was impossible at this scale to see blood as liquid. They were
objects, each cell tiny but distinguishable. Wet red stones being forced
through a pale sausage casing.
Then there were the muscles, giant bundles of rubber bands that
fused into eyeball and jerked incessantly, though at the nano level
she didn’t so much feel the motion as see it when the slanting rubber
bands would thicken in contraction, stretch out in release, endlessly
adjusting as though somewhere there must be an absolutely perfect
angle for the eye and the muscles were determined to find it.
Plath’s biots came around into the light on the lower edge. Bottom eyelids move less and could be more easily climbed than the
swift-rushing upper eyelid. The edge of the lid was a shoreline of tall
bluffs topped by scaly, curving palm trees. Eyelashes.
The lower lid jerked and the line of palm trees shot toward her.
The lid and lashes rushed with startling speed, slid over her and blotted out the feeble light. She jumped both of her biots simultaneously
and caught the wet membrane above.
This movement she felt, the impact, as the eyelid suddenly
reversed direction and swept her back and away. Now clinging upside
down to the lid, the eyeball itself swept by above/beneath her.
She steeled herself for the next part as she climbed—upside down,
but in the nano up and down mattered very little—to emerge in the
line of eyelashes. There, face-to-face with her, a demodex.
In the m-sub—micro-subjective—the demodex was almost as
large as she was. Its face was a crude spider’s mouth and two utterly
blank Hello Kitty! button eyes. God only knew what it saw—surely
not much. The demodex was calmly munching a dead skin cell that
looked rather like a fallen leaf after a rain.
The demodex did not respond to her presence—nothing in a
demodex’s evolution had prepared it for this—it just kept eating.
The shortest way forward was to clamber straight over the mite.
With a shudder Plath sent her biots scampering across, through the
scaly trees, and out onto broken ground.
In and out of desert ravines, past scattered balls of pollen in half
a dozen different colors and shapes. The pollen grains looked oddly
like an assortment of footballs and soccer balls left carelessly on a
playing field.
Onto the cheek. Here the skin was smooth—no more ravines.
Those would come no doubt with age—but for now her skin was
a carpet of leaves, dead cells drifted onto a living substrata. As she
watched a handful of dead cells broke loose and fluttered away.
The biots could not see distances well. So Plath knew that the
massive, Everest-size mountain off in the distance was her nose, but
she wouldn’t easily have recognized it as such.
“Ahh, what the hell?” she cried. A long, low, dark berm was
directly ahead. The rough blanket of skin cells suddenly rose, looking like some kind of burial mound, like some dark tumor.
“Freckle,” she said, relieved to realize what it was.
“I like your freckles,” Burnofsky said up in the world. “I’m sure
your English friend admires them as well.”
She skirted the freckle and saw more of them across the landscape ahead.
As she neared her lip the fine hairs appeared, much smaller than
eyelashes, less like scaly palm trees and more like widely scattered
stalks of wheat. It was impossible to avoid the sensation that she was
racing across a fantasy landscape, something out of a science-fiction
movie. And while that was happening she was accepting a can of soda
from Billy, who had been sent to the 7-Eleven down the block to bring
in supplies.
Her biots saw the soda can—an unimaginably large object, a
Hindenburg rendered in lurid red—arise from the horizon and seemingly crash into the landscape ahead.
The Coke went down her throat.
“There’s a slight scratch where he brushed against you, I think,”
Keats said, up in the world. He was looking closely at her neck. “You’re
sweating. Don’t move.”
She turned her biots and saw the wall of water racing toward her.
It was a glistening ball, more like a water balloon rolling down a hill
than a drop of water, solid rather than liquid.
She cut sideways sharply but just then a pillar came stabbing
down out of the sky.
In the macro she saw Keats’s finger. He touched the drop of sweat.
He was very close to her, which may have been why she was sweating,
or maybe it was that she hadn’t taken off her coat and it was humid
in the church.
At the nano level something the size of the world’s largest sequoia
intersected the sweat drop, bursting its illusion of solidity. His fingerprint was turned toward her, a desiccated farmland of weirdly plowed
furrows. It stabbed into the yielding flesh of her cheek, which bent the
very fabric of the “ground” beneath her feet.
She saw his face. Both versions. One with concerned blue eyes, a
vertical worry line between his eyebrows, a mouth pursed in concentration.
And the other version, a sky-filling enormity, a falling moon with
distant smears of features, a towering volcano with twin calderas, two
lakes so vast you could sail them, an elongated red spot to rival the
one on Jupiter: his mouth.
“Thanks,” she said.
“No problem,” said the red spot. The wind from his mouth bent
the reeds and ruffled the pollen grains.
Plath noticed Billy standing to one side, staring. “You know about
this?” she asked him.
“The game? Biots and all? Sure I know.”
“The children’s war,” Burnofsky said. “The game. Always the
game.”
In both the nano and the macro Plath saw Keats’s eyes widen.
The huge sky-wide face turned away. “Shut it, old man. You work for
the Armstrongs? Then this is your fault. Your doing. So if you want
to smirk, you know what, maybe I can get past my usual reluctance to
smack a helpless old man.”
Burnofsky’s pale eyes rolled, but he fell silent.
Plath continued all the while racing down the length of her cheek.
“Put a finger near the scrape you said you saw.”
Keats did. His finger touched her throat. It was further to the
right than she’d expected, she must have come too close to her own
lips. Now she corrected her course, barreling toward the finger pillar.
She was away from the downy hairs now, upside down beneath
her jaw in deep shadow cast by the harsh bare bulbs. Her neck was at
right angles, but the curve was gentle and almost unnoticeable to her
weightless biots. The tiny talons in her twelve legs easily gripped the
dusty . . .
And there it was.
It lay on the surface of her skin. It was a gooey ball, almost like a
wad of gum, or spit, a roughly spherical wad that adhered to her skin.
She slowed to approach it cautiously. One biot to the right, one to
the left, two visuals added to her own true eyes, each a picture formed
in her visual cortex. The pictures didn’t so much overlap as coexist,
separate but simultaneous, a large-screen macro and two picture-inpicture smaller visual fields.
“I see it,” she said. “You can pull your finger away.”
“What does it look like?” Keats asked.
“Wow,” she said. “It’s …Okay, it looks about twenty feet in diameter m-sub.”
“About as big as a grain of table salt,” Burnofsky said.
“It’s…It’s nanobots. Like, a lot. Maybe ten or so. They’re all intertwined and covered in goo.”
“Yeah. Goo,” Burnofsky said, and laughed.
“Back away,” Keats said urgently.
Plath shook her head. The movement twisted the ground beneath
her. “They aren’t moving. Burnofsky doesn’t have a controller. They’re
just stuck there.”
It took them a few seconds to realize what had happened, and
then Keats grinned at Plath. “You mean we just captured a dozen
nanobots? I’ve got to believe that will be useful.”