BZRK Origins (BZRK 0.50)

The tumor was getting nothing now.

And all I could think was: die. Now at last, you fucking monster, die.

Burnofsky came to the funeral. I avoided his gaze. He knew something had passed between us that could not now be overcome. He knew we had become enemies.

He tried to speak to me. I looked through him.

Donna did not attend. She was being treated for severe depression and psychosis following a suicide attempt. On top of Mitch’s suicide, it became painfully clear that we were linked inextricably with our biots. To lose a biot was to lose a part of ourselves. Had Donna been sane enough to follow my order, I, too, would have lost my mind.

In some way that I never understood scientifically, when we create a biot we transfer some part of our soul into it. We make ourselves hostage to it.

I found out later where we had gotten the tissue samples we used to create the first experimental biots. Most were from a small village in the Ivory Coast.

All of those early biots had been destroyed.

The village, thousands of miles away, had succumbed to what the doctors from Doctors Without Borders diagnosed as some form of mass hysteria. Within a few weeks—on days corresponding with the dates when we had destroyed the test biots—seven people in the village had lost their minds and either killed themselves or been killed in the act of committing atrocities.

There was no escaping the biot effect. Distance was no defense. To lose a biot was to lose your mind.

I would never be rid of it.

No one who created a biot could ever be rid of it.

My financial angel profited handsomely when one of our new generation drugs was approved by the FDA. I had money enough to buy back all shares of McLure Labs.

I began to take the business more seriously, and began to groom Stone to take over some day. He was the oldest. He was the more studious. Sadie had never shown any interest in McLure Labs.

We got along well, the three of us. I like to think I became a better father. Birgid’s death had placed the responsibility plainly on me. And each time I joked with Stone or teased Sadie, I knew that my own time might be short. I had to be a father while I could, because we had no way to know when my biot might die and take me down to the desperate place where Mitch and Donna had gone before.

And if that wasn’t my end, well, I knew now that the eyes of the Armstrongs were on me. And I knew now what they were.

Over the next few years I would hear from Lear from time to time. I would be sent bright young people. A strapping, fun-loving British soldier named Alex. A serious young man named Michael. And I would meet the man who even then in those early days answered only to the nom de guerre Caligula.

Lear was forming a small army to counter the Armstrongs and Burnofsky. An army of those willing to risk madness to fight evil.

I had been enlisted in that war. It was a war to save humanity itself from slavery. But for me it was above all a fight to save my children. I would do whatever I had to do to protect them, to keep them safe and apart.

Because I never wanted them to have to hear the word BZRK.