“Better to burn than to blow up,” Benjamin said. “And thus, it ends.”
“You can’t … Noah …”
“When Caligula burns, so will my biot, Sadie. You know what follows. It’s okay.”
“Noah …” She was in his arms, and tears were running down her face.
“Yes, of course, pity for the pretty boy, eh?” Benjamin said savagely. “Pity for poor, poor Noah. None for our people on our beautiful ship. And none for hideous freaks.”
Burnofsky watched the counter on his computer monitor. The number of self-replicati
ng nanobots had just crossed thirty-two million. The next doubling would take it to sixty-four million, then one hundred and twenty-eight. Pretty soon megabots would give way to gigabots and hence to terabots.
He laughed at that, slurred, “I made a funny,” took a drink, sucked on his cigarette, and touched the butt of the pistol that was stuck into his belt.
He’d been feeding the nanobots everything he could find: stale doughnuts, candy bars from the machine down the hall, half a salami he’d found in the staff fridge. He hadn’t slept in … how many hours? How many days? It was all kind of fuzzy.
He had the remote control in his hand. Press the button and the force field would drop. His nanobots would eat their way out into the world and from there they would never stop. They would eat their way through the building, its furnishings, and anyone dull enough to wait around.
But before they finished the Tulip they’d be carried on breezes or simply fall from chewed-through walls down onto the streets. Nearby buildings would be infested and begin the same accelerated decline and rot. The pace would accelerate as the nanobots doubled and doubled.
What would the reaction be? What would the government do? Nothing short of a nuclear weapon would stop the spread, and they would wait far too long for that. Nanobots would find their way onto ferries, cars, ships, and planes.
For the first few days the damage would be most visible at the epicenter. But then, here and there and all around the world they would appear and double and double and double.
People would flee to the woods and deserts. And they would survive for a while—maybe weeks, maybe months. In places the nanobots would consume all there was to consume and cease doubling. But by that time they would have eaten every living thing and much of the nonliving things as well.
He asked himself, where would be safe? Or at least, where would be safest? The coldest places, he supposed. Nanobots tended to be immobilized when things got cold enough, down to minus twenty-three Celsius or minus ten Fahrenheit. But even in the coldest lands a warm day would set them off again.
“God bless global warming,” he muttered, and laughed at his own wit.
People thought they were scared now? They thought they were terrified by Lear’s plague of madness? Wait until they saw their crops, their home, their car and its gas, their dogs and cats and cows and pigs, all chewed up, masticated by trillions of nanobots that did little but crap out more nanobots.
Wait until they realized how hopeless it was. How powerless they were. Wait until they saw the little sore on their ankle become a bleeding hole and endured the agony of being eaten alive, consumed, like a beetle being swarmed by fire ants. It would be like leprosy on fast forward. It would be like flesh-eating bacteria on meth.
Sure, maybe in places there would be pockets of a few scattered humans who would hold out for as long as six months. But it wouldn’t matter. The nanobots would eat the algae out of the sea and every oxygen-producing plant on the land and then, inexorably, the atmosphere itself would become fatal to life.
Dirt. Water. That would be planet Earth. Just dirt and water and a vast, inconceivably vast swarm of nanobots. Mindless. Without soul or sin. Efficient, relentless, unstoppable killers without malice, without meaning, without moral judgment. Without guilt—that most destructive, weakening, sickening, disabling of emotions.
Yes, his babies would obliterate without guilt.
He pulled up the picture he’d found of Lystra Reid and gave it the finger.
“Game, set, match, Lear. Death or madness? I got a little hint for you, sweetheart. The answer is death. Death, brought to you by Karl Burnofsky.”
Out in the lab he heard a disturbance: raised voices, a bustling movement, chairs scuffling. The door to his office was locked. He drew the pistol.
Someone banged hard on his door: a cop’s knock.
“Damn,” he said. “I’d have liked to hit a billion first.”
“Burnofsky! Come out here. The bosses want you.”
“I’m busy,” Burnofsky yelled.
“Don’t think they care, Dr. B. You’ve got about ten seconds.”
The Twins wanted him, did they? Well, why not? It would be worth a laugh. And he had something special for them, just for them, something ever so special.