Bug Man heard shouts and cries in the background. A female voice was crying, “Noah! Noah!” Then it stopped. The line went dead.
Bug Man could see flames behind windows on the tenth and twelfth floors of the Tulip.
On the street below, the first fire engines were pulling up, but Bug Man doubted there was anything they could do. The Tulip was doomed.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I’m wiff you. I’m in. All the way.” What alternative did he have? “So, I’ goin’ to tell you, Burnofshhky didn’ shound righ’. Too happy. He’shh got shomething goin’ on, I know tha’ old fart.”
Lear was curious. “What could he be up to?”
“SRNs. The gray goo.”
“No,” Lear said confidently. “We wired him up. Nijinsky wired him.”
“And Nijinshhky’s dead. So you don’ know wha’ going on in hi’ head anymore. I wired the presiden’ and guessh wha’, shuicide wa’ not par’ of the plan for her.”
Lear was pensive. She could become coldly rational when she needed to, Bug Man had learned. She would make a fascinating case for some psychiatrist some day, he thought mordantly. Or a whole hospital full of psychiatrists.
Out of her mind but still able to plan the end of the world. Then again, who else but a crazy person would even want the world to end?
“Charles, Benjamin,” Jindal pleaded. “There’s one stairwell still clear. But we have to go now!”
“Hundreds of steps?” Charles asked wistfully. “My brother and I, walk down hundreds of steps?”
“We can carry you,” Jindal said. “We—” He stopped, because his inclusive wave, meant to indicate the security men, now included no one. The security men had fled.
Still left in the Twins’ sanctum were the Twins themselves, Jindal, Wilkes, and Plath. And the gasping, dying body of Noah Cotton, the former Keats, now on his back in a wide pool of his own blood.
“Will you drag us down the stairs, faithful Jindal?” Charles said. “No, I don’t think we’ll allow that. Instead …” he shouted, “a drink, if you please!”
The building was shaking now, successive waves of it—an artificial earthquake as small explosions and gouts of flame made their way inexorably upward, floor after floor.
“The gray goo,” Benjamin said. “How many SRNs do you have, Burnofsky? The flames have not reached your lab yet. Yes, better the gray goo. The best possible outcome. Apocalypse!”
“Fetch me a bottle, Jindal,” Burnofsky said, “and I’ll tell your bosses all about it.”
Plath realized she was kneeling in Noah’s blood. She was looking in horror at his brain, a pulsing pink mass that swelled out from the bullet’s hole. Wilkes took her hand, but Plath felt nothing. She knew she had to look away, but it felt like abandonment to look at anything but her lover.
He had loved her. Had she ever really loved him in return? How could she know? From memories that had been tampered with, in a brain still coping with violation? That truth was no longer entirely recoverable. Nothing was. Everything that she knew and remembered, everything she felt, had to be mistrusted.
On the big monitor, cameras showed gift shops and labs, darkened bedrooms and banks of computer servers. The Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation went on, largely untouched, even as its headquarters burned.
Plath seemed to make up her mind. “We’re leaving,” she said.
“The hell you are,” Benjamin snarled.
Plath looked at him, not afraid to meet his furious gaze. “I’m going to find and kill Lear.” But she made no move toward the door.
“Lear doesn’t matter, not anymore,” Charles said. “I’m afraid I no longer have the will to resist my brother. The self-replicating nanobots will be released. They will scour this planet, and sooner or later, they will find Lear.”
Jindal had found a bottle. Burnofsky uncorked it and took a drink before offering it to the Twins. “It’s not up to you, Benjamin, it’s up to me.” He revealed the remote control in his hand. “I push this button, and the world begins to die.”
“Give it to me,” Benjamin demanded. “We paid for your work. They’re ours, those little machines of yours, ours!”
Burnofsky laughed. “Hitler’s bunker. I’ve been trying to think what this reminds me of, and that’s it. With the Russians closing in, there was Hitler in his underground bunker still handing out orders. Like he had an army to command. Dead man rapping out orders.”