“You two have met, right?”
“Briefly,” Plath said. Then added, “I don’t drink.”
“Yes, you do, yeah, not a lot but on occasion,” Lear said smugly. “Yeah.” She handed Plath a glass. Plath took a sip, grimaced, and put the glass aside.
“If we’re going to be friends, you’re going to have to get into the spirit of things,” Lear said, her face darkening.
So Plath picked the glass back up and followed Lear’s direction to sit, sit down, take it easy, relax.
Plath sat. She saw the TV, currently on a YouTube of a burning house. Where it was she had no idea. Bug Man sat stiff and wary.
“I did it,” Plath said.
“Did it?” Lear asked.
“I blew up the Tulip. I gave the order to Caligula. Then I followed the breadcrumbs here.”
That had the desired effect of throwing Lear off stride. “Are you trying to tell me that—”
“Did I know it was you behind it?” Plath interrupted. “Yes. After you killed Jin it was obvious that he had failed you, somehow. Was it that he found out the reason you’d ordered him to wire Vincent?”
Lear, small smile growing. “In a way. Nijinsky hated you. He didn’t like being pushed aside for some kid. So that was part of it. But yeah, he was starting to get cold feet. Developing a conscience.”
“I didn’t want to die choking on my own tongue on an escalator. So I didn’t fight it very hard. I could have sent my own biots in to stop it all happening, my own rewiring. But I could see where it was all going.”
“Oh?”
“I came to like the idea. I came to like the whole, meticulous planning of it. It was brilliant. It was genius. It’s historic.”
Lear’s nostrils flared, and her eyes widened. “Historic?”
So, Plath noted, she liked that word. “Well, yeah,” she said. She took a sip of the whiskey, suppressed the face she wanted to make, and instead said, “It gets better as you get used to it.”
“Historic, yeah?” Lear prompted.
“I remember this lecture in history class. All about Genghis Khan. You know, the Mongol guy.”
“I know.”
No, Plath thought, Lear had not heard of the great Khan. But she didn’t like admitting it. “Well, the point was that Genghis killed, like, thirty million people, no one is sure how many. Maybe twice that much. There was this one thing where he took a bunch of captured enemies, and built a platform on top of them. His own soldiers had lunch on the platform as it slowly crushed all the men beneath.”
“Yes,” Lear said fervently.
“But the point was, that later, like nowadays, we look back on him, Genghis, I mean, as a great historical figure. He, like, improved the economy and so on by clearing out a bunch of people who were in his way. But he killed millions.”
“He changed the game. But I’m changing it more. I’m changing it all,” Lear boasted. “I’m creating whole new species, yeah, to take over. I mean, you know, thanks to your dad, who was a genius. Yeah. By the way, condolences on his death, he was a great man.”
Plath’s mask almost dropped then. Almost. “Yes, he was.”
“But we used his techniques and played around, and now we have three very interesting species. Macro, not micro. We’ll breed them up, yeah, and then release them when the time is right. One of them can’t metabolize anything but pork and human meat. Hah! Later, at the next level, yeah.”
“But how are you going to watch what happens? I mean …” She waved a hand at the YouTube video. “How much longer is Google going to work?”
“Oh, don’t worry. The satellites will work independently for a long time. And we’ll start placing cameras here and there, when the time is right.”
“You’ve thought of everything,” Plath said.
Lear smiled, a shark’s smile this time. “You don’t really think I’m buying any of this, do you?”