Authors: Michael Grant
The sun was up, and Bug Man was scared.
He had tried seven times to call Burnofsky.
Then he had called Jindal. He hadn’t told Jindal anything, just
“Burnofsky never showed up,” Bug Man said. No other detail,
just that. That was enough. Jindal told him to hold while he tried to
call Burnofsky, and then texted Burnofsky when he got no answer.
Then Jindal tried to use the phone locator app. It showed Burnofsky’s
GPS had been turned off.
“Where are you?” Jindal asked Bug Man. He was sounding desperate, and part of Bug Man thought, Welcome to my world.
“I’m at the office,” Bug Man said.
“Then you have to …I . . .” Jindal said. “Okay, keep working on
the president. Just, you know, keep working.”
Bug Man tried not to reveal his relief. “Are you ordering me to keep
working on POTUS, because it looks like you’re in charge, Jindal.”
“Yes. Yes, just keep doing that.”
Bug Man hung up the phone, his mind racing. Okay, so, he was
doing what Jindal ordered him to do. That was his defense: Burnofsky
had gone off on some epic drunk or whatever, so Bug Man had called
Jindal, and at that point, it was all on Jindal.
Maybe Burnofsky was dead. That would leave the Twins even
more dependent on Bug Man. That was a happy thought.
Out in the hallway he heard something. He strained to hear, then
relaxed. A vacuum cleaner. Just the cleaning crew. He made sure the
door lock was set.
Okay. Back to the game. That would get his mind straight.
He settled into the twitcher chair.
The vacuum cleaner was closer. Someone was slipping a key into
the lock! Bug Man bolted from the chair and raced to the door just
as it opened.
He pushed against the door but the damned vacuum cleaner
blocked it. Behind the vacuum cleaner was a girl who looked too
young to be working a cleaning crew. She had a weird tattoo under
her eye. She also had headphones in and was obviously listening to
loud music as she vacuumed and didn’t even notice Bug Man as he
blocked the door until her vacuum cleaner banged into his foot.
Then she looked up and seemed puzzled.
“Go away,” Bug Man said, not quite yelling but speaking loudly
enough for her to hear over her music.
The cleaning woman sighed and removed one earbud. “Qué?”
“Don’t come in here,” Bug Man said.
The cleaning woman turned off her vacuum cleaner. It was suddenly quiet. “Tengo que limpiar aquí. I am …I am must cleaning.”
“No, you don’t,” Bug Man said. “No, um, no necessitatay. Whatever. No.”
“Is my tío, my, in English my sister? No, no, my uncle! Is my uncle
his job. He be anger me.”
“I don’t give a fuck about your uncle being anger you!” Bug Man
yelled. He reached through the gap and tried to push her vacuum
away. Her hand shot out and caught him around the wrist.
“Please no break el aspiradora!” Wilkes said, and was incredibly
pleased with herself for dredging up the Spanish word for vacuum
cleaner. Who knew ninth-grade Spanish would be useful someday?
“I’m not going to break anything,” Bug Man said heatedly.
“Unless you keep from closing this damn door.”
“Chinga tu madre!” Wilkes snapped, and gave him the finger.
He closed the door. He locked it. And for good measure he manhandled a large potted fern over to block it.
Then he sat down at his twitcher station, breathed deep, and
never even considered that three biots— two of Vincent’s originals
and one new fourth-generation version—were racing from his wrist
up his forearm.
Nijinsky was left behind with Billy and Burnofsky.
“What do you think, kid?” Nijinsky asked him. “We don’t have
time to build you a biot right now, but we happen to have a whole
bunch of unused nanobots. Want to see the inside of a degenerate
murderer’s brain?”
Nijinsky said. He poured himself a short shot from the vodka bottle.
“A plan?”
“Yeah,” Nijinsky said, and threw the shot down his throat. “What
is it we want to do to Mr Burnofsky here? We want him to change
his mind. We want him to change sides. We want betrayal from Mr
Burnofsky.”
Isn’t that right, Burnofsky?”
“You’re too weak to lead but tough enough to take on a helpless
old man,” Burnofsky said.
Nijinsky nodded. “Yeah, that’s about right. I would never have had
the strength to murder my own daughter on orders from some freaks.
Yeah, that’s strength, right? And then rather than own what you’ve done
and who you are, you decide it’s time to kill everyone in the world.”
Nijinsky touched a finger to Burnofsky’s eye. Billy gasped as
through nanobot eyes he saw his first biot. Nijinsky translated into
biot was not nearly as handsome.
“Ever hear of the nucleus accumbens, Billy?”
“No sir.”
“Well, some people call it the pleasure center. That’s a bit simplis
tic, but it’s not far wrong.”
“Yeah?”
“So, here’s my idea,” Nijinsky said. “We reverse things. See, now
every time he thinks about what he did, he feels self-loathing. He
hates himself for it. So he self-medicates and then he turns it all outward into hatred. So we change that.”
Nijinsky leaned close to Burnofsky and said, “What do you think
of that?”
Burnofsky said, “Complicated. You have to locate the memory.
Then you have to do what? Connect it to all my better angels? Or just
burn the memory out?”
“Yeah, I could do that, thanks to my spiffy new four point oh. But
Plath nearly fried herself playing with acid down inside Vincent. So I
think I’ll stick to good old-fashioned wire.”
“Maybe you could make me queer,” Burnofsky spat.
Nijinsky shook his head. “We’re not recruiting. No, I think I have
a simpler approach: I think I’ll find that memory, the one that tortures you so badly, and I’m going to wire it to your accumbens.”
Burnofsky had nothing to say.
“So you’ll remember it, you’ll remember killing her. And when
you do, you’ll experience deep, intense pleasure.”
“No.” Burnofsky shook his head.
“The emotional need for drugs will diminish, you won’t be selfmedicating anymore. You won’t need to. The rewiring will alter your
entire motivational structure. That murder will become your greatest
source of joy.
“No,” Burnofsky said. He shook his head violently. “No. No!”
“Kind of interesting, isn’t it?” Nijinsky said. “Grey McLure
became involved in nanotechnology in hopes of saving his wife and
later his daughter. His motivation was to save his daughter, and yours
flows from the fact that you killed yours.”
“You won’t stop it,” Burnofsky blustered. “If I don’t do it the
Twins will. Sooner or later they’ll come to it. Right now all they want
is acceptance and love. They’ll come to it, though, the gray goo. Even
without me they’ll see the truth—that it’s all foul and filthy and
degenerate and deserves to be wiped clean.”
“Feel free to keep ranting, Burnofsky. Billy, since we have your
nanobots to do some drilling, we’re going in through the nose, up into
the sinuses. It’s easier to reach the nucleus accumbens. It will be fun!”
“No,” Burnofsky pleaded. “No, don’t do this. She was my daughter! She was all I had!
“The man who would kill us all begs for his humanity. Rich,”
Nijinsky said. “Follow me in, Billy.”
They had let themselves into a vacant office two floors down from
where Bug Man was slipping into the twitcher station. They had the
keys, of course; a janitor had given up his pass key for the six hundred dollars Plath withdrew from a nearby ATM.
Vincent sat almost comatose in an office chair beneath a dusty
wall-mounted sign that read Schatten GmbH. There were old computers and old office supplies, and it looked as if no one had occupied
the place for some time. The electricity had been turned off. What
must once have been an orange, left on the windowsill, had collapsed
in on itself and grown a fine coating of green mold.
Plath, Keats, Wilkes, and Anya perched on chairs and the edges
of desks. The four of them tried not to stare at Vincent.
Only Plath had any idea what was happening with Vincent’s biots.
She had sent all three of her biots along with Vincent’s aboard Wilkes’s hand, and transferred from there to Bug Man’s wrist. Wilkes’s
own biots were hanging back, waiting in the grooves of Bug Man’s
palm.
Plath’s job was to watch Vincent’s biots make their approach,
then to peel off and gain access to Bug Man’s eye and see what he saw.
It seemed insane to her—an apt word, insane—that Vincent could
still be nearly comatose in the macro but responsive in the nano. But
she could almost understand it. (Which might also be insane.) A biot
was not an “other.” It was not outside of you, it was part of you. It was
like a finger or a leg.
Still, accomplishing the mission would require Vincent to understand at some level, to know where his biots were and why. Did he
understand? If not, Bug Man would destroy him once and for all.
There would be no coming back from further losses.
Vincent was going into a fight he absolutely had to win, and yet
he might not even know the fight was on.
“He’s moving,” Plath reported. Everyone glanced at Vincent. She
corrected, “When I say he’s moving . . .”
“Yes, his biots,” Keats said. He smiled at her.
She did not return the smile. She knew how vast the brain was
down there, down in the meat, and she knew that Nijinsky could
easily enter her brain and lay wire without Keats’s own biot having
spotted him. But it was still hard to shake the suspicion that Keats had
known what Nijinsky was up to and had just concealed it from her.
Could she really trust even him?
The rational, reasoning part of her knew better, understood that
because Nijinsky knew the location of her aneurysm he would of
course easily avoid Keats’s biot. Keats would never have known. And
yet . . .
“Down the rabbit hole,” she whispered to herself, “And all of us
as mad as hatters.”
Vincent was running free. So good to be running free. He was two,
a twin, but not identical. Half of him was familiar, the sights, the
sensation, the speed, but the other half over there, no right here, was
faster, stronger, and saw more clearly.
Two halves of him. The real, true him, running wild over dead
skin cells, threading through widely spaced, dark spikes like branchless palm trees, bent almost parallel with the ground.
He was conscious of another creature, much like himself, but different, following behind, keeping pace. She—and he was somehow
sure it was a she—was no threat. A friend? Possibly, but certainly no
threat, no, he had an image of the threat; he remembered them, the
other game pieces, the ones with the center wheel, the machines that
zoomed along on six legs or lowered that wheel.
He remembered their dangerous claws and spikes and vulnerable
visual array.
There was something else, too, a vision in his head of large, slowmoving, gloomily lit creatures arrayed in a semicircle. Noises came
from them. Sometimes he almost understood those noises. And
sometimes they reached toward him with long five-pointed starfish
hands that never touched him, not him, the real him, the mismatched
twin him that raced now toward an ascending wall of impossible
height.
Up the arm. Onto the shoulder. Toward the neck, yes, he knew
what all those things meant: they were geographical features of the
game space. They were roads that sometimes presented obstacles but
not now as he ran like a tornado across an Oklahoma wheat field.
Somewhere ahead would be the frozen white lake and the pulsing
capillaries and then on to the darkness within. Down in the meat.
Down in the meat. Back to the game. The thought of it triggered
feelings in him. Fear. Or was it anticipation?
Joy? Something like it, not joy, but something satisfying, something that flooded him with a dark, wild urge that balanced the fear,
that turned fear into rocket fuel.
One of the gloomy dark creatures in that other reality made a
noise. “Look: he’s smiling.”
Ropes coiled down from the lead helicopter. Before the rope ends
touched the deck, the Royal Marines were descending. They came
down so fast it was as if they were simply dropping from the sky.
The second saw what was happening as he dropped. He fired off
six quick rounds over the heads of the mob, warning shots aimed
carefully toward the open sea. His bullets made tiny splashes in
green-gray waves.
He slid down to rescue his buddy but was knocked to the deck by
aa middle-aged woman and had his hand stomped by a furious little
boy.
The mob was unafraid, unimpressed, enraged, energized by
some power that went even beyond the motivations of loyalty to the
Great Souls: they were human beings who had been locked in a cage,
had their brains crudely rewired, had been fed a diet of propaganda
and carefully avoided feelings that sometimes rose up from within
like a geyser, feelings of fury and loss and confusion.
And now they had targets. They had someone to attack and
permission to unleash all that was buried deep inside them, all the
emotion that had been papered over by sustainable happiness.
They were fearless because in that moment, caught up in the hysteria of the mob, they were insane.
A teenage boy bit into the hand that had been stomped. The
marine shrieked in pain.
A flash-bang grenade went off, a noise like the crack of doom. But
out in the open the flash meant little.
More ropes coiled down and with shocking speed the marines
dropped to the deck. First two of them managed to link up, then a
third, then a fourth to form a little square, back to back, hammering
with their rifle butts at every target that presented itself, men, women,
children, smashing and yelling and now the professional discipline
was paying off against the untrained civilians.
The square of marines grew to eight, old school, like some desperate Custer’s Last Stand, back-to-back, side by side, a formation so
old it was old by the time of the ancient Romans.
“Masks on!” their sergeant roared in a voice that could nearly be
heard three miles away on shore.
They took turns slipping gas masks over their faces. The Sea King
veered sharply away to lessen the rotor downdraft. Then from the Sea
King came rocket-propelled gas grenades, fired straight into the mob.
Some of the grenades hit people, knocking them flat. Gas swirled and
some choked, but the wind was too strong and the fumes were soon
carried off.
But the marines had gained a precious foothold. There were a
dozen men now, backs to the helicopter where Minako screamed in
sheer terror.