BZRK (BZRK 1)

Note: I am not Scipio.

SEVEN

Inside Sadie McLure’s head was a bubble. Sort of like a water balloon. Only it was the size of a grape and filled with blood.

It was thirty-three millimeters long, about an inch and a quarter. It was a brain aneurysm. Quite a large one. A place where an artery wall weakened and blood pressure formed the water balloon of death.

Because if it ever popped blood would go gushing uncontrolled into the surrounding brain tissue. And Sadie would almost certainly die. And if not die, then lose parts of her brain, perhaps be left a vegetable.

There was an operation that could be done in some cases. But not in this case. Because the balloon inside Sadie’s head was buried down deep.

She had seen the CT scans, and the MRI scans, and even the fabulously detailed, nearly artistic digital subtraction angiography. That had involved shooting dye through an artery in her groin.

Ah, good times. Good times.

If she had stayed in the hospital, they’d have done a CT looking for bleeding. Then they’d have done an MRI to get a closer look at the aneurysm.

That’s when they would have noticed something unusual. A certain thickening of the tissue around the aneurysm.

So they’d have done the digital subtraction thing and then, yep, then they’d have had a pretty good picture of something that would make their hair stand up.

They’d have seen what looked like a pair of tiny little creatures, no bigger than dust mites, busily weaving and reweaving tiny strands of Teflon fiber to form a layer over the bulging, straining, grape-size water balloon.

They’d have seen Grey McLure’s biots, busy at the job of keeping his daughter alive.

Sadie could see them now as Dr. Chattopadhyay—Dr. Chat to her patient—swiveled the screen to show her.

“There are the biots in the first image.” She tapped the keyboard to change pictures. “And here they are half an hour later.”

“They haven’t moved.”

“Yes, they are immobile. Presumably dead.” Dr. Chat was in her fifties, heavy, dark-skinned, skeptical of eye and immaculate in her lab coat over sari. “You know of course that I and my whole family mourn for your father and brother.”

Sadie nodded. She didn’t intend to be curt or dismissive. She just couldn’t hear any more condolences. She was suffocating in condolences and concern.

Over the last twenty-four hours she had absorbed the deaths. Absorbed, not coped with, accepted, gotten over, or properly mourned. Just absorbed. And somehow seeing those tiny dead biots was one step too far.

What her father had created was a revolution in medicine. It had taken him years. He had thrown more than a billion dollars into it, which had required him to buy back his own company from stockholders just so he could spend that kind of money without having to explain himself.

He had worked himself half to death, he and Sadie’s mother. Then, the cancer, and he was even more desperate to finish the work, to send his tiny minions in to kill cancer cells and save his wife.

The pressure he had endured.

But the biot project was too late for Sadie and Stone’s mother, Grey’s wife.

For three months after Birgid McLure’s death Grey was virtually invisible. He lived at work. And then … the miracle.

The biot. A biological creature, not a machine. A thing made of a grab bag of DNA bits and pieces. Spider, cobra, jellyfish. But above all, for the control mechanism that allowed a single mind to see through the eyes of a biot and run with a biot’s legs and cut with a biot’s blades, for that, human DNA.

The biot was not a robot. It was a limb. It was linked directly to the mind of its creator. It was a part of its creator.

Grey McLure’s biots had been injected as close to the aneurysm as was safe. They had set up a supply chain that ran through her ear canal to shuttle in the tiny Teflon fibers. And then they began to weave, a sort of macro-actual tiny, but micro-subjective huge, basket around the aneurysm.

“You’re lucky the overpressure from the explosion didn’t cause a rupture,” Dr. Chat said. “There’s some bleeding, but it seems to have stopped. Lucky.”

Sadie wanted to say something mean and sarcastic about her luck, luck that had left her an orphan, but stopped herself.

“Did it do anything at all to the aneurysm?”