BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

Should he even bother? Plath had pushed him aside. Why should he help her now?

He keyed in her phone number, hit the button for text, and typed.

There was a sudden rush of liquid rolling down the inside of the tube. It was no more than a droplet in the real world, but it was as big as a house in the m-sub.

“Ah,” he said, as the acid engulfed both his new biots.

The next thing he said was also, “Ah,” but this time he shouted it.

And the next “Ah” was screamed.

And the next twenty or so.

He broke into a run—frantic, terrified, still clutching the phone with its typed but unsent message.

“No! No! No!” he shrieked as he raced to the open escalator and threw himself down it. Threw himself, as if he was trying to fly. Arms outstretched, face forward.

He hit the steel steps, and his face exploded in blood. He climbed to his feet but was pulled off-balance by the moving stairs and pirouetted down until he landed again, hard.

But not hard enough to kill himself.

Nijinsky swung around, off the bottom of the escalator, and this time he had a plan, a mad, desperate plan, one he could barely hold on to. He tied his long scarf i

nto a knot as he descended a second, upward-bound escalator.

People ran out of his way, bounded up the steps to avoid him. They yelled things like, “What the hell, man?” But mostly they just got out of his way.

Nijinsky knelt on the stairs. Rising, rising, and lay the end of his silk scarf on the step before him.

Five seconds.

Four.

A wild, giggling shout rose from his throat as the end of the scarf was sucked into the escalator. The shout ended abruptly as the relentless mechanism devoured the scarf, tightened it around his neck, slammed his bloody face into the steel, chewed up his left hand, cut off his air.

He could no longer speak. No longer scream. Blood filled his head, and still the noose tightened.

His windpipe was crushed. Blood now seeped from his eyes and ears. The phone fell from his fingers and lay with message unsent on the steel serrated edge of the escalator.

By the time some bright shopper thought to push the emergency-stop switch, Nijinsky was dead.

The message on Plath’s phone was from Nijinsky.

It read, 2 new biots.

But she had muted her phone and would not see the message until later because she was meeting with Stern. Again.

Plath did not ask Keats to join her this time. She would discuss the Tulip with Mr. Stern, but she would mostly be asking him what he had discovered about Lear.

Attempts to learn about Lear counted as treason within BZRK. Treason led to bad things, and she did not want to implicate Keats in that.

Of course, Keats had a biot in her brain. If he was very curious he could make the long trip out into an ear canal and listen in.

She didn’t think Keats did things like that. It would be out of character. But in this new world she had entered such things had to be considered. In this new world the human body was not a singular object—it was an ecosystem. It was a Brazilian rainforest full of flora and fauna, from creepy, crawly mites to big, fat balls of pollen to Dr. Seuss–like fungal trees, to a hundred different types of bacteria, all the way down to viruses. None of it strictly human. The average human body had far more nonhuman cells than human ones, though they comprised only a fraction of the weight—about five pounds in most people.

You moved differently through the world when you truly came to accept that fact. When you knew that you were crawling, covered, congested by nonhuman life-forms. Sometimes you couldn’t quite see the line between yourself and the world around you.

All about her on the sidewalk were other ecosystems, each body a similarly complex environment. Each body in turn a small part of a larger system. A system called New York. Or, more inclusively, the human race. Formerly meaningful divisions had lost some solidity. What seemed solid in the macro was so much less so down in the meat.