That made Wilkes smile. A genuine smile, not her usual cynical leer. “Pulling it up, sir. Aye, aye, Captain. Pulling it up.”
Keats saw her two biots going at it, working well together to pull up the encrusted wire. The pins were sunk deep and completely overgrown. It took two biots straining to draw them slowly out of the brain like fence posts being pulled up. They came free but were still tangled in strands of neurons.
Wilkes had to tear the strands away, breaking actual brain connections in the process. To biot “ears” they made a sound like someone squirting water through their teeth and tearing denim.
No way to know whether these were just redundant cells tracking the wire or whether they had some legitimate purpose. Was she ripping away some cherished childhood memory? Probably not, probably these connections were just reinforcing the wire, but the human brain was astoundingly complex. BZRK had very sophisticated brain mapping, but still it was largely a crapshoot.
Gee, sorry about that, Plath, I just wiped out your memory of nursery school.
Keats was doing the same around the corner. There the wire was fresher, less overgrown. His biot stood at right angles to hers in the almost gravity-free liquid environment.
In the macro Billy said, “Can I ask a question?”
“Of course,” Keats replied.
“Why are we doing this?”
“Because someone has messed with Plath’s head, that’s why.” Keats obviously thought that was the end of it. But Billy pressed. “But isn’t everyone’s head messed with? I mean, stuff you see, or how you were raised. Stuff people did to you.”
There was something, maybe several somethings, behind that tremulous stuff people did to you.
But this was not the time to examine Billy’s demons. “That’s all natural, this is …” He was at a loss for words. “It’s wrong, that’s all.”
Billy fell silent after that. But Keats could see that he wasn’t convinced by Keats’s halfhearted effort to justify what they were doing. Keats went on about his business, tearing out wire, pulling pins. So did Wilkes, but now she took up the same line of questioning.
“Yeah, blue eyes, but we aren’t doing this with her okay anymore than whoever laid the wire down, right?” In the meat they were at right angles, here they sat facing.
“She’s not able to—”
“So we’re making her do it. Right? I mean, we’re unwiring her even though she obviously isn’t totally psyched about it.”
“Come on, guys,” Keats said. “It’s not the same. Someone wired her brain. Hacked her brain. Took over her brain. Now we’re fixing it. It’s not that difficult to understand.”
Wilkes began to argue, but then Billy yelled, “I see something!” His two biots had emerged from a brain fold to see a furtive shape disappear just beyond the reach of illumination.
“Nanobot?” Keats demanded.
“I don’t know. I can’t … I think it sees me. It’s running! He’s fast! He’s got moves, he’s got moves, man! 3D moves!”
“Stay with him, we’ll catch up,” Keats directed.
Billy was in the game now, racing as fast as his biots would go across a terrain of eerie hillocks, pulsing red worms as big as car tunnels, static sparks, and always the lethargically circulating fluid that slowed his every movement. His quarry disappeared into a shallow fold and Billy followed.
“Ahhh!”
“What?”
“Shit!”
Billy jumped out of his seat, knocking over his Coke. His fingers moved as though he was using a gamepad. His eyes seemed to dart after objects he could only see in the m-sub.
Billy’s first biot was down and minus two legs on the left side before he knew what hit him. He twisted both biots to see, and there, undeniable, unmistakable, the enemy: a biot.
“It’s a biot!” Billy yelled. “It’s a biot-biot-biot!”
“Don’t let him get away!”