“Yes, ma’am.”
“Mmm. You can go, Stillers.”
Stillers seemed relieved. Bug Man was not. It was better to have at least one extra person in the room in case Lear lost it again.
She flopped beside him on the couch. They had been watching together for the last few hours. Eating and watching in a bizarre parody of a girls’ night at the movies. Bug Man had been half afraid she’d decide to paint his nails or talk about her love life.
“I’m glad you decided to join me, Buggy. Good old Buggy. You get it, yeah. You’ve been down there, down in the meat. You’ve been part of the game for a long time.”
Bug Man did not remember choosing to be here. He remembered being blackmailed and threatened, made a party to yet another crime. If anyone ever lived to tell this story in some history book, he would be labeled as the guy who killed a president and almost killed a pope. Which was unfair. He was, at most, an accessory.
An accessory to the end of the world.
“Get us a drink, Buggy. You know, I wanted to get Sadie here, too. I thought she would be fun to have around, yeah. For a little girl-time, you know? We could talk girl stuff, yeah, that I can’t talk about with you.”
He poured them each a bourbon. She had said they had enough for two years, at least. He hoped that was true, because he felt he was going to need to drink an awful lot.
I’m turning into Burnofsky, he thought. Old degenerate trying to drink away his sins. That’s me now, but not old. So I can live with this for a long time. If she doesn’t kill me.
“What is that? Is that a cross? Oh, that is awesome. They’re nailing that woman to a cross!”
Bug Man was sick so far down into his soul that he wished he could shut down his brain, go into some kind of coma—wake up later, maybe a lot later. He waited for the shaky video to end then navigated to the next clip.
“So Sadie, that didn’t work out. But I’ve got you, Buggy. And it’s all working,” she said. “All working. Except for the self-replicating nanobots. Yeah. The goo.”
“I haven’t seen anything like what you’re looking for,” Bug Man ventured. “Just crazies, no buildings eaten up or whatever.”
“Mmm. Yeah.” Lear was pensive. “Probably all burned up when the Tulip came down. Burned up with the Twins. Wish I’d been able to stay to see even more of that, yeah. Yeah. Burning Armstrongs, that would have been excellent.” She shrugged and sighed, disappointed. “But all it takes is one of those SRNs to survive. Just one.” She bit a fingernail and added a superfluous, “Yeah.”
“I’m sure—”
“Shut up!” Lear snapped. “You’re not sure. I’m not sure, so you’re not sure.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Gotta exterminate them, somehow. They’ll just … just keep on. Gotta be a way to stop them.”
“Race to the end of the world,” Bug Man said, his tongue loosened by the whiskey. “Choose your apocalypse.”
“I can’t let them beat me, the Twins. Burnofsky.”
An idea occurred to Bug Man. If he spoke it, he would never be able to unsay it. If she liked the idea, she would be happy with him. If not …
“I have an idea,” he said.
“Speak it, Buggy.”
“You have people’s biots. You can send them a message. To the right people. I mean, you have all that cross-referenced, right? I mean, you would know which people were in the Pentagon, or maybe in Russia, wherever.”
She was looking at him with the intensity of a cobra looking at a mouse. “Spit it out of that mush mouth, Bug Man.”
“Okay, say you have some general, or whatever. You fire up his biots, right? He knows now what’s coming. He knows he’s screwed. But biots can see, right? They could see, you know, if you showed them a sign. Held up a sign in front of them.”
She stared at him for a full minute, during which Bug Man wondered if he would have the strength even to resist if she decided to kill him. Did he even want to live?
Then she reached out one hand, pinched his swollen cheek, and said, “Buggy, you are a genius.”
THIRTY-ONE