BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

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.”

FIFTEEN

African beaches. Or was it Costa Rica they had talked about? Africa, yeah, that was it. 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.