BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

“Lear?” Keats said. “Not the Armstrong mystery weapon?”

“Games,” Vincent said, as though that word should mean everything and the saying of it had exhausted him.

Keats couldn’t quite think of what to say. On the one hand, this was Vincent. On the other hand, this was mad Vincent. Shattered Vincent.

Seventy percent Vincent.

“You want anything to eat?” Keats asked. “I was thinking of ordering Chinese.”

“Did Lear just see it?” Vincent mused, ignoring Keats. “Or has he known all along? Should I ask him?” There was something almost like a smile on Vincent’s lips. “There will be more.”

Keats might have pursued it, but a few thousand feet away, his much smaller self saw that the moment was fast approaching. He readied himself to confront the lion in his den.

With Nijinsky dead, Burnofsky was off his leash. He had no way of knowing this—not yet—but there was no longer a biot in his head. Or to be more accurate, there was still a biot attached to his optic nerve, but no one was peering through those biot eyes any longer. The biot had no real brain of its own, nor did it have instincts. It continued to live, but only to live. Immobile.

Burnofsky had a Post-it note. He wrote on it: Floor 34. Viral research.

He held this note up in front of his eyes. Held it there for far longer than it should take to read it. But he guessed that whoever was running the biot in his head—and he believed it was Nijinsky—would not be focused on his every moment.

He was careful in the way he did this because Burnofsky knew perfectly well that his lab was under surveillance. He had come to accept that fact. Privacy was dead, anyway, particularly if you worked for the Armstrongs. But he knew the camera locations and angles. Sometimes he forgot—he had a worrying sense that his little self-inflicted wound of the other day might have been observed.

Well, the Twins had seen worse, hadn’t they? They’d seen him puking his guts out. He was morally certain that they’d been watching one dark night months earlier, back before he’d been wired, when he had sat for twenty minutes with a loaded pistol in his hand trying to get up the nerve to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger.

So what was a little cigarette burn, eh? Better than the opium pipe, right? Better than the vodka bottle. He wasn’t drinking now, not that he’d made some lifelong decision to quit; he just wasn’t drinking right now. Or snorting coke. Or smoking opium.

No, he was all cleaned up. He laid the Post-it note down in the ashtray in front of him, shielding it with his body from the hidden camera. Then he began to light a cigarette and in the process burned the note to ashes.

He drew in the smoke of his cigarette and wondered if he would get to the end of it without burning himself.

The burning was—

“Shit,” he muttered. Nijinsky would think it was a reference to a computer virus. He wouldn’t understand that Floor 34 was a crash program involving actual viruses. Biological viruses.

Burnofsky had only stumbled upon the information by chance. He was hiring a new engineer and happened to speak to one of the people in human resources, who smiled, told him he had plenty of available engineers, and thank God at least Burnofsky wasn’t looking for a virologist.

Virologist. A scientist specializing in viruses, of course. And why was anyone at Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation working on biologicals of any kind?

It had to be Floor 34. Burnofsky knew most of what AFGC was into, he should have known about a biological nano program of any sort. Were they working on their own version of biots? Were they preparing to toss his nanobots aside? The possibility worried Burnofsky a bit.

As always when he was anxious, his thoughts went to opium, and then to his work, and then to Carla. And from there to the Great Forbidden Memory.

Burnofsky knew exactly what they had done to his brain. He knew. He was a scientist; he had wired many a person, done to others what had now been done unto him. He knew that tiny wires in his brain had been used to create shortcuts—sending thoughts around the usual circuitous neural pathways to hook into the most intense sensations.

In other words, he knew that Nijinsky had connected memories of his daughter’s death to pleasure centers. He knew Nijinsky had made his greatest guilt into a sick and disturbing fantasy. He knew that. He could picture the wire in his own brain. He could imagine just how Nijinsky had done it.

But that changed nothing. It did not stop the physical reaction when he thought of that most awful of days.

I killed her.

And I’m thrilled.

At first he had thought of using his own nanobots to go in and rewire himself. But of course Nijinksy would see him. Burnofsky could take Nijinsky’s biot—Burnofsky wasn’t quite Bug Man or Vincent when it came to nano warfare, but he was confident that he could outfight Nijinsky.

But somehow … No.

Somehow the will to fight back always seemed to dissipate.

Was this still more wiring? Probably. If so, it was effective. He would form the desire, formulate a plan, start to get his resources in order, and then, then, then something.… It would all just leak away.