Authors: Michael Grant
Minako McGrath had screamed.
She had not fainted, but as she screamed something had hit her in
the back of her head, and that buckled her knees.
No one had warned her, no one had told her that the fanciful,
mythological painting on the ceiling of the dome was of a real person.
People.
It had simply been too much. She was not so delicate as all that,
she had seen many people with deformities and she had never felt
anything but compassion for them. And maybe, no certainly, she
would come to feel that same compassion for these unfortunates.
Except that these were no helpless beggars. These were the Great
Souls, the ringmasters of this floating asylum, the bastards who had
kidnapped her.
She lay in her quarters. There was a bruise on the back of her
head. Someone had brought her here, someone had smeared antibiotic ointment on the back of her head, matting her hair.
She sat up. The headache was an explosion in her skull.
There was singing, loud and not very good.
One mind.
Two great guides.
No more war.
No more hate.
It’s never too late.
Minako did not recognize the tune. She stood up and fought
down a wave of nausea that almost did make her faint.
She went to the door. It was locked. She could see out into the
sphere, but the door was locked. The railings were crowded with singing, banner-waving people. Through the gaps she could see that the
floor of the sphere was crowded with ecstatically happy celebrants. It
was all like some weird melding of rock concert, celebrity red carpet,
and political rally.
The monsters were still in the elevator cage, which had come to
rest just a few feet above the crowd. People reached out to touch them,
tried to push their fingers through the wire. Like teenage fans with a
pop star.
The song went on and on, and Minako had the distinct impression that it had been going on this way for quite some time. The
sphere throbbed with it.
Finally the recorded music played a rousing finale, and the singing devolved into yells and cries and shouts of “Charles! Benjamin!”
and “Benjaminia welcomes you!”
We love you!
Sustainable happiness!
Charles waved his arm expansively, soaking it all up. Benjamin
was less obviously pleased. His face had endured some damage and
his expression was more a scowl than a smile.
It mattered not to the admiring fanatics.
Benjamin! Our wonderful Benjamin!
Our prince!
Our guide!
Minako felt a very different sense of sickness, not nausea but
terror. A chant was building, all the voices together, an inexorable
rhythm.
Ben-ja-min!
Ben-ja-min!
Charles was pointing to his brother, a ringleader, cheering on the
cheerers. He was deliberately drawing attention to his twin. And it
seemed to be working, a little at least. The scowling Benjamin waved
his arm before letting it drop to his side.
But then his eye drilled straight into Minako. He could see her.
She recoiled from that terrible stare.
Only then did Benjamin smile.
Minako fell back, out of sight, and sat on her bed. This was all a
nightmare. A nightmare. It couldn’t be real.
She was shaking. The sheer malevolence in that single eye.
They were going to hurt her.
The chant had changed now.
We are everyone!
We are everyone!
We’ll be everywhere!
We’ll be everywhere!
Three men appeared at the door to Minako’s quarters. They
were crewmen, not inhabitants of Benjaminia. One was the young
Asian from the beach, KimKim, the one who had wanted to abuse
her. But he was not leering now; he was standing very stiff and
proper. The second man was older and she had never seen him
before. She knew the third one was an officer; he had epaulettes
on his shirt.
“You’re coming with us,” the officer said brusquely. He had an
accent she couldn’t place.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
Minako backed into her room, as if that would stop them.
The officer said, “If you fight it will be worse.”
Until that instant she had not been sure she would fight. She had
no weapons. She wasn’t going to win. Nor would she even manage to
hurt them. But she would fight.
The two sailors stepped into the room and Minako threw the
useless pamphlets at them. They reached for her and she kicked and
scratched and none of it had any effect but to make her ever more
enraged, enraged by her own impotence and weakness.
The younger one soon had her around the waist and threw her
onto the ground. Once again a roll of duct tape was produced and
wound quickly around her ankles and wrists.
“You’re all crazy! You’re all crazy!” Minako cried at the top of her
lungs. “This is a madhouse!”
They tried to tape her mouth, but the older one dropped the tape
and it rolled out of the door and bounced over the short lip of the
catwalk to fall out of view.
“Idiot,” the officer said. “Just grab her.”
The two sailors hefted her up onto their shoulders. She kicked
and squirmed and smashed her head against the young one’s temple.
She contracted her stomach muscles and made them both stumble as
they carried her out onto the catwalk.
For a terrible moment she thought they meant to throw her over
the side. Maybe that would be better. At least then it would be over
quickly.
Did they mean to hand her over to the chanting mob? They had
caught sight of her, the others standing on the catwalks, and soon a
new chant began.
Join us! Join us!
They weren’t angry words, but the chant grew ever more intense.
From encouraging to angry to hateful.
Join us!
It was a curse.
Join us!
It was a threat.
They hustled her down the stairs and through the now-enraged
crowd. People spit on her. Someone punched her, then others. Her
shirt was ripped. Someone pounded her calf repeatedly.
“You’re all crazy! You’re all crazy!” she screamed.
Someone in the crowd punched her in the mouth and various
voices yelled, “Shut her up, shut her up, join us, join us!”
The officer and the two sailors were now having a hard time getting through the mob. KimKim slipped and Minako fell hard to the
floor, crashing on her neck. A kick caught her shoulder. Feet were
stomping all around her.
KimKim bent over her, shielding her with his body. He was
scared, she could see it.
“You’re all crazy!” Minako screamed, on automatic now, as
caught up in the madness of the moment as the fanatics around her.
“My friends!” a huge voice bellowed.
“It’s Mr Charles!” some cried out. “The Great Souls!”
The amplified voice repeated, “My friends! My friends! Calm
yourselves! Calm yourselves!”
The kicks and punches lessened and the legs receded around
Minako. But she did not stop screaming, “You’re all crazy!”
The sailors manhandled her up off the floor and half carried, half
dragged her to the elevator lift. She saw the legs, the two and the one,
and suddenly she was deposited at their feet, at the feet of Charles and
Benjamin Armstrong.
Charles’s voice boomed again as the lift began to rise. “My
friends, do not hate this girl. She is simply unenlightened, as are
too many in this sad world. But never fear! Our time is coming. The
future belongs to us!”
Cheers rose like a tide all around her, and yet still she screamed,
“You’re all crazy!”
Benjamin’s foot moved. The toe of his shoe was against her
side. He pressed his weight down and ground the skin of her waist
against the metal.
Minako heard Charles say, “We don’t have a twitcher aboard,
brother.”
“So much the better,” Benjamin said. “The old ways, then. The
old ways.”
“Where the hell is Burnofsky?” Bug Man asked Jessica. Back in the
hotel room in Crystal City. Back to just the two of them, claustrophobic, the walls closing in again.
The president was doing whatever she was doing. Writing her
crazy eulogy.
Bug Man was doing nothing.
Jessica was watching Evil Dead 2 on the TV. That kind of thing
had never been her taste back in the old days. That kind of thing was
Bug Man’s taste.
“I don’t know who Burnofsky is, baby,” Jessica said. “Do you want
to have sex?”
“For God’s sake no!” Bug Man said, exasperated. “Jesus Christ,
why would you think that? That’s not the answer to everything.
That’s not—”
He was arguing with himself.
He was arguing with what he had done to her.
She turned her still-amazing eyes, those incredible hazel eyes
that looked so alien in her African face, on him, all liquid willingness
to please, and he wanted to punch her. Honest to God, he wanted to
punch her in the face and see whether she responded with a bland,
programmed response.
He could. He could punch her and she would ask him if he was
tense, if he needed something to relax him, a massage perhaps, or a
blow job.
Where the hell was Burnofsky? Bug Man had checked the flight
and the traffic. There was no way it could take Burnofsky this long
to get from National Airport to Crystal City. He could walk it in less
time.
Go limp.
It was ridiculous! He had his nanobots all up in the brain of the
single most powerful person on Earth, and he was sitting here doing
nothing nothing nothing, waiting for some old burn-out junkie to
show up. Go to the office and watch passively, as he had earlier, or sit
here and cycle through the movies and TV shows.
This was not the game.
The game was going on without him.
Anthony Elder had a sudden, unbidden memory of himself in
London. Of his life changing when he found a mate from school who
had a high-speed Internet connection.
Anthony had practically moved into Mike’s home. They had
played Batman Begins and Call of Duty 2, mostly. But the friendship began to wane when it became obvious that Anthony’s skills far
exceeded Mike’s. Mike was not a talented gamer, and Anthony—who
had adopted the online name Bug Man—was not just a good player,
he was one of the best.
Tensions had come to blows and Anthony had come out on the
losing end. It finished his friendship with Mike and forced him offline.
He might as well have been a junkie: he needed the game that
badly. He sought out other kids at his school to replace Mike, but
Anthony was not very good at making friends. He was arrogant and
unwilling to hide it. He didn’t do particularly well in his classes, but
no one believed it was from lack of ability.
Anthony just didn’t care.
He thought of the time between falling out with Mike and
before the blessed day when his mother could finally manage a
fast Internet connection as a sort of time of emptiness, of longing. Without the game—some game, any game—Bug Man was just
Anthony.
He had Burnofsky’s number. He dialed it. It rang through to voice
mail.
No game was anywhere near as good as twitching. He was a
twitcher. He needed it. He needed to be down in the meat.
He glared at Jessica, just sitting there, looking beautiful, gazing out of the window at the lights of the city, sighing occasionally,
bored but obedient.
It struck him then what he had done. “I hacked my own game,”
he said. Jessica was like any game where you knew all the shortcuts,
where you had all the hacks. The game lost any value.
He had a portable twitching controller.
He had nanobots of course.
“Come here, Jessica. I just need to poke you in the eye.”
She would get Keats and they would drive away. Stern would
meet them. Then, somehow, African beaches. Bodyguards. And a
message would be sent to the Armstrong Twins: We are out of this
war of yours.
We are civilians now.
Leave us alone.
Nijinksy shone a flashlight down the dark hole beneath the altar.
“It was a bootlegger’s hideout,” Nijinsky said, cutting off her fantasy.
He led Plath and Anya down a surprisingly well-built set of concrete
steps. After some searching they found a wall switch, and Nijinsky
flicked the light on.
It couldn’t quite be called a cave, it was more just an underground
pit dug out of the clay soil. Dirt walls, dirt roof held up by a latticework of recently added four-by-four and two-by-four beams.
The floor was covered by interlocking steel mats. A big rock
protruded, and the steel flooring went around it. The entire space
was large enough that it had to extend beneath several adjacent lots.
There were dusty, dried-out casks, the big ones you might see at a
traditional winery, against one wall. Farther on the lighting improved
dramatically, and the metal flooring had been covered by a thick blue
plastic tarp.
It was in this section, an area that smelled less of mold and must,
more of fresh-dug dirt, that the lab equipment was set up.
“A lab in this hole in the ground?” This from Anya, who stepped
gingerly onto the tarp and went from one hulking piece of equipment
to the next, marking them off a mental checklist, powering each one
up, checking read-out panels.
Keats was upstairs with Wilkes and Billy, checking locks on the
back door and the small window, barricading with the pews and
assorted scrap lumber. All the way down in the sub-basement Plath
could hear the dull impact of a hammer driving nails to strengthen
defenses.
Burnofsky’s words were still buzzing in her brain.
It was true, wasn’t it? She had been suckered. She’d been tricked
into this. She was a rich girl on a revenge high, but led into it by the
eternally unseen Lear. Who else had sent Vincent to recruit her?
Who was Lear, exactly? And who the hell did he, she, or it think
he, she, or it was to do this to her?
You’ve been hurt so now, by God, it’s your fight. Yours. Oldest
game in history: idealists and patriots turned into vengeful killers.
Somewhere, Lear is laughing.
“Very well done,” Anya said, giving her verdict on the underground lab.
Nijinsky nodded. “Good. Then we may as well get started.
Assuming you’re ready, Dr Violet.”
Anya Violet turned soulful eyes on Plath. “Is she ready?”
Plath blinked and brought herself out of her dark reverie. “Ready
for what?”
Nijinsky stood with his back to the lab. He faced her in what was
almost certainly a calculatedly frank and honest way. She could have
sworn he was striking a pose, and he knew how to do that. But it
wasn’t working.
“There’s some new technology,” Nijinsky said.
Anya snorted.
“We have something very special we need you to do.”
“What’s with the royal we, Jin?” she demanded.
“The what?”
“We. Who is we? You and Dr Violet?”
“We,” he said, sounding a little exasperated. “We. BZRK.”
She stared at him, searching his eyes. They were anything but
inscrutable, that old cliché. Nijinsky did not hide his feelings well. He
knew he was asking something he had no right to ask; he knew he was
leading her into danger.
“What is it you have planned for me?” she asked.
“There’s a new version of the biot. Version four. It has a number
of improvements,” Nijinsky said, almost as if he was trying to sell her
a new car.
She stared at him. “What?”
“We think …I think …No, we think . . .”
“Oh, man,” Plath said.
“With the version four we think you can pull off a deep wire. On
Vincent. That maybe you can bring him back.”
Nijinsky and Anya watched her, very different expressions
on their faces, waiting. Nijinsky waiting to offer up some compelling argument, but his attention elsewhere all the while, like he was
watching a movie in his head. Anya with a sadness that went deep.
“You want me to take on another biot?” Plath asked dully. “Each
new biot …I mean, what happens when . . .” She felt a chasm opening
up beneath her. They were going to make her just like Vincent. Each
new biot was a risk. Each new biot was another opportunity to draw
the “insane” card from the deck.
“We …I …think you have the skills, Plath. The empathy. If she
were …we’d have asked Ophelia,” Nijinsky said, obviously aware of
the lameness of his plea.
“Yeah, but she’s dead.”
Nijinsky nodded. “Yes. She’s dead.”
“Killed by us.”
“The FBI had her,” Nijinsky argued.
“Yes, the FBI. Our FBI. The guys who chase bank robbers and
terrorists, except now, suddenly they’re the enemy.”
“Listen to me,” Nijinsky said, stepping toward her. “I want you to
listen to me, Plath—”
“My fucking name is Sadie!” she screamed.
There was a long, ringing silence. Anya Violet was looking at
Nijinsky, watching to see how he responded.
“Listen to me, Plath,” Nijinsky said with barely contained panic.
“I heard what Burnofsky had to say. And some of it’s true. Yeah, you’re
trapped. Yeah, it sucks. But we are still the good guys. It wasn’t us who
killed your father. We loved your dad. This is your dad’s fight. Your
dad helped to create this, this, this …BZRK.”
Plath found she was having a hard time breathing.
Nijinsky pressed his advantage. “Your dad bankrolled us. Your
dad saw where it was going, saw what was happening. And they murdered him. Your brother, too.”
“My afterthought brother,” Plath said bitterly. Then, “I miss
them.”
“Look, I’m not trying to play the saint here,” Nijinsky said, hands
spread in supplication. Those hands were shaking. “You want to say
there’re some shades of gray here? You want to say we’re not always
ethical or whatever, yeah. Did we k—” And suddenly he couldn’t
say it. A sob just choked him in midword. The next words had to be
squeezed out. “We killed Ophelia, who was my friend, who I would
have died for? Is that what you want to lay on me? Because I’ve had a
long day, too.”
Plath had seen Vincent stark, staring, twitchy, raving. This was
almost as bad. Tears rolled down Nijinsky’s cheeks. He was falling
apart.
“Plath …Sadie …I don’t know …I just know we are …maybe not
right, but more right than them. We have to be. That’s all I’ve got.
We’re more right than them.” He shrugged helplessly. “We believe in
freedom. And your dad believed in it.”
Plath found her gaze drawn away from the desperate, sad Nijinsky to the seemingly eternally, organically sad Anya.
Anya said, “I love Vincent. Maybe you can save him. I cannot, but
maybe you can.”
“He wired you,” Plath said, somewhere between scorn and pleading.
Anya made a helpless gesture with her hands. “And your friend,
Keats, did he wire you? He is in your head.”
The idea shocked Plath. No way. No.
Anya said, “Listen, I am not saying he did. I don’t think he did.
But you care for him. Because you like his face. Because you think he
is attractive or funny or smart …What is the difference?” She shook
her head impatiently. “What is the difference?”
“The difference is what this war is about,” Nijinsky said. He was
reluctant, but he couldn’t stop himself; he couldn’t let it go by that
there was some equivalency between genuine, real, honest emotions
and the man-made results of nanobot or biot rewiring. “It’s about free
will.”
Plath made a sound of disbelief. “Maybe we should get off this
philosophy because it’s going in circles. Just tell me why we are in
such a hurry with Vincent.”
“Because we are talking about taking on Bug Man inside his own
brain. If we take him down and do it without the rest of Armstrong
finding out …Their most trusted soldier would be ours. And we could
wire …unwire …the president.”
“You don’t think that you, me, Keats, Wilkes—the four of us
together—could take on Bug Man?” Plath asked.
“Put us on a number line,” Nijinsky said. “One to ten, in terms
of skills as a twitcher. I’ll start with myself. I’m a three. Wilkes is
no better, she’s brave, but she’s still a three. You, Plath? You’re an
unknown. You haven’t really been tested. Keats has talent, and he
may be as good as Bug Man some day. But Bug Man has the experience. You’re not getting the math right: Bug Man is the best. He’s a
ten out of ten. If we all four go against him, all he has to do is make
one kill against each of us.” He held up a single, manicured finger. “One kill and we’re done. That’s our weakness. All four of us at
once? We’d be giving Bug Man a chance to wipe out our whole cell
in a single fight.”
“Even if I can somehow help Vincent,” Plath said, “what makes
you think Vincent can beat Bug Man this time around?”
“He will also have the new biot. Faster, stronger, better armed,”
Anya said. “We’re going to grow one for him.”
“Also, we have no choice,” Nijinsky said. “It’s Vincent or we lose.”