BZRK Origins (BZRK 0.50)

Our first thought experiment was called Merman. It was a reference to the classic movie The Cabin in the Woods. We were able to use Mix-n-Match to combine human DNA with elements of sturgeon and codfish. Of course we didn’t create an actual Merman, but we could have. With a few more tweaks we could have created an actual one, a human/fish hybrid with functioning gills and a fish’s tail. It could have survived in cold water. It would have been mentally impaired and be nearly blind, but still.…

We didn’t. But we thought about it. I remember an after-work party, someone’s birthday, I suppose. I remember sitting at some bar with Donna, Jasmine, and Prim, and talking about it. About the whole playing God, Frankenstein thing. Another few beers and who knows?

Now, though, it was not fun and games. Now I was enlisting my people in a criminal enterprise. They couldn’t resist the lure of the research any more than I could, and the scientists who balked at crossing those lines? I gave them other work.

I was also defrauding my financial angel, who expected me to be doing useful work.

The biot would be useful, if it worked, but useless, too, since its very existence had to be concealed. If it worked, we would have a tool of amazing power … that no one could ever know about.

It was Jasmine who said, “Dr. McLure, could we not give the creature something analogous to a stinger, or snake’s tooth, some capacity to carry a drug or even an acid of some type to use against the tumor?”

And that’s why we brought in cobras to supply us with DNA.

It was then that a couple of things fell into place. Because of course I realized that if the biot could be designed in such a way as to deliver drugs, well, why not actual venom? Why not bacteria? The biot, in short, could be weaponized.

Which I realized in a flash was what Burnofsky must be doing with his nanobots. That was why he wanted a one-kilometer range. It wasn’t necessary if what you were doing was sending nanobots to kill tumors. But it might be very useful if you were sending them to kill.

I invited Burnofsky to dinner.

“Birgid, you are looking beautiful,” Burnofsky said. He took her hand and kissed it, old school, and he made it work. He was a wreck of a human being, but he could elevate his game on occasion. And he liked Birgid. He was jealous of our happiness, but not in any malicious way.

Birgid took his coat. If I remember, this would have been December, just before Christmas. Stone and Sadie had gone to visit their grandparents for a few days.

Carla was not with Karl. I asked after her.

“Oh, she’s actually got a job, believe it or not.”

“A job? She’s just a teenager, isn’t she?” Birgid asked.

“Oh, it’s a little internship sort of thing at Armstrong.”

“Making snow globes?” I asked, trying to sound witty but ending up seeming churlish.

“Something like that,” Karl said. “What smells good?”

Birgid smiled. She had not lost her smile. At this point she’d been through two surgeries and one round of chemo. So her blonde hair was short, having just started to grow back. A close observer would have noticed a hollowness around her eyes. A very close observer might have noticed that she moved with more care than she once had, a physical caution. She was a woman who had learned that the world is not a soft and welcoming place, but a place of sharp edges and petty humiliations.

But still, she smiled.

“I made something I found in a Gordon Ramsay cookbook,” she said. “It’s a sort of shepherd’s pie. Comfort food. As cold as it is, I felt something comforting would be …” She faltered, shrugged, and finished with “… comforting.”

There was a flicker of sympathy in Burnofsky’s rheumy eyes. He knew, of course, that she had cancer. And he knew that I was desperate to use my biots to save her.

We drank some wine. We ate. We talked banalities of politics and sports and some show at the Met and some lecture at the Y. Birgid told a story about how Sadie had fought for the right to say “crap” at school. (Sadie won the point; she usually does.)

Then Birgid grew tired. Her endurance was coming back, but she was still very easily tired. She left the “gentlemen” to our whiskey, like something out of Downton Abbey.

“Why a kilometer, Karl?” I asked.

He nodded. “I was wondering when you’d ask about that.”

“You’re weaponizing nanotechnology,” I accused him bluntly.

He didn’t deny it. He didn’t admit it. He just said, “And you’re violating at least three separate laws, Grey.”

“You know why,” I said. “What you’re doing—”

“Is dangerous?” he supplied. “But creating new life-forms isn’t?”