BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

“What are you talking about?”

Burnofsky made a lopsided grin. “It doesn’t matter. Game on, Billy the Kid.”

The nanobots reached the end of Billy’s finger.

He raised that finger toward his face.

In the up-is-down and none-of-it-matters world of the nano, the fingertip seemed to plunge down toward the face. Like a massive rocket aiming for impact, and Billy was riding that rocket.

Yee-hah.

Billy went around the circumference of his finger. He crossed from plowed farmland to an eerie moonscape, like the dried-out salt flats of Death Valley, hard-baked shale plates, not nearly as smooth down at the nano level as fingernails were up in the macro. Down here what was up there was like roof shingles.

But ahead, oh, there was the stuff, there was the world-wide wall of meat, the cheek, and above it a globe like the moon sunk into a pulpy earth. The eyeball. His eyeball.

The nanobots leapt from the crusty ground of the fingernail onto an endless curved plain of fallen leaves, and then slowed.

“Three minutes,” Burnofsky said. “It will begin now.”

The nanobots deployed curved hooklike blades from the ends of their rear legs. The front legs continued to power forward and the rear legs sank into the dried outer layer of epidermis, those fallen leaves of dead flesh, and began to plow them up.

When they had plowed a furrow—and there was no pain in harvesting dead skin cells—they stopped.

They turned.

Billy punched the virtual controls. He frowned, and Burnofsky saw that frown.

“I wish I could see what you’re seeing, Billy.”

The nanobots revealed then a feature that was unexpected. A jaw, toothless, but curving like the Joker’s slashed mouth, opened at the bottom of the nanobot.

The ripped and torn skin cells were sucked into the unhinged jaws.

Within seconds the nanobots began defecating a pinkish paste.

What happened next was a blur Billy couldn’t even see. The nanobots ’ legs moved like a spider on speed. Or like a sculptor, wasn’t that what they called guys who carved statues? A shape began to emerge from the pink goo.

Other things—tiny needles, busy sculpting cilia, jets of flame, on and off in an instant. A faint haze almost that was the MightyMites crawling across the nanobots like fleas on a dog, a scarcely visible blur of activity.

He was seeing programmed activity, he knew that much. He was seeing something that he was not controlling.

He looked for a Stop button. He searched the controls, punching this and that, trying to distract the nanobots, trying to make them do this or that. Or anything.

But his controls were no longer controlling. A prompt appeared, demanding a code.

“What’s happening?” Billy asked.

“Watch,” Burnofsky said with an almost sensuous whisper.

“The controls aren’t working.

“No, they won’t now unless you punch in the code. Thirty-two characters, alphanumeric,” Burnofsky said. “If you just start guessing, you should be able to hit the right sequence within, oh, probably a year—”

“Give it to me!”

It was now clear to Billy what was happening. New nanobots was being built from the pink goo.

As he watched the new monsters rose. They were crude, postapocalyptic versions of the original nanobots, less sharp-edged, rougher, simpler.