BZRK (BZRK 1)

KENT

Authority.

King Lear, William Shakespeare

TEN

Vincent contemplated the China Bone and watched—from the Asian grocery across the street—as Karl Burnofsky shuffled inside.

Burnofsky was flanked, at a discreet distance, by two TFDs—Tourists from Denver. Two of the usual AmericaStrong security men from Armstrong Fancy Gifts. One was a woman, actually, but that was beside the point.

The Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation might be run by a mad, twisted creature, but its outward face was relentlessly low-key. Their AmericaStrong men didn’t walk around trying to look like Secret Service or extras from a Hollywood muscle flick. They dressed in L.L. Bean and Land’s End. They wore pima-cotton polo shirts and down jackets. So that in New York City they always looked like those most invisible and easily forgotten of creatures: tourists.

TFDs—Tourists from Denver.

Burnofsky went inside to find that elevator. The two TFDs stayed outside, waiting and chatting and stamping their feet against the cold until a car drove up to offer them warmth and shelter.

The China Bone: no sign, of course, discreet, always discreet. It had been here in Chinatown since 1880, though within Chinatown it had moved maybe a half dozen times. The people who needed to find it, found it. In the old days it had been just the better class of opium smokers. All Chinese at first, largely sailors. Then some of the artsier, more adventurous Victorian-age white men.

The China Bone had grown more refined and exclusive by the 1920s. It expanded from opium and marijuana during Prohibition to include alcohol as well. The style, as Vincent had once seen through the right eye of a waiter, was very upscale. Think Ritz-Carlton for wealthy drug addicts; that was the modern China Bone. A little too gilt and plush for Vincent’s austere taste, but he supposed if you were going to be an opium addict—and Burnofsky certainly wasn’t about to stop—this was the place to indulge.

Vincent had caught a glimpse of Burnofsky then, through the waiter’s eye, as the brilliant drunk and addict—and God knew what else—slid into one of the many alcoves, there to await the pipe.

It had been fascinating to Vincent. Burnofsky was a genius. Not the sort of man one thought of wasting hours in drug-induced fever dreams. And inevitably perhaps Vincent wondered whether the drug could give him what he had never experienced: pleasure.

Vincent had come no closer to Burnofsky then. And he had very nearly lost his biot when the waiter decided on a sudden trip to Mexico with some friends.

The disadvantage of the biot: unlike the nanobot, the biot had to be retrieved.

Vincent paid for the organic Thai rub and the green chilis he’d picked up. A few spicy things, not so that he would enjoy the food he made, but so that he could at least acknowledge it.

Something.

He’d been twelve when he was diagnosed with the anhedonia. Anhedonia commonly had a psychiatric cause, usually drugs. So they thought then, anyway, and so his mortified parents had assumed. Little Michael using so many drugs he’d lost the capacity for pleasure, oh my God, what have we done to cause this?

It was a long two years of virtual house arrest before they got around to taking a look at possible physical causes. Then they found the lesions on his nucleus accumbens as well as the inadequate production of dopamine.

Vincent stepped out of the direct neon and fluorescent glare and into the cold night, holding his little plastic bag. He had happened across the shop while trailing Burnofsky many months ago. He’d continued to shop here; it was a very well-appointed store. But he had also become fascinated by the China Bone, by what it represented: a need for pleasure so terrible it drove people to self-destruction.

His actual mission was at a hotel bar just a block away. That’s where he would find the woman.

Anya Violet. Not her birth name. She had been born Anya Ulyanov. Russian. When her father had moved the family from Samara to New York, he’d changed the surname to something a wee bit less … problematic. Ulyanov had been the original surname of Lenin. A lot of weight to carry around, that name. So. Bye-bye Ulyanov, hello Violet, which at first had been pronounced Wee-o-lett. Now Violet. Like violent without the “n.”

Anya’s mother had always liked the flowers. Violets.

Dr. Anya Violet, current employment in a secret section of McLure Industries. Even her friends and family didn’t know that her work was with biots. Vincent did only because BZRK had long had full access to McLure’s secure computers.

Who the hell was Lear that he’d been able to get such total support from Grey McLure? And how many times had Vincent asked himself that question? And how many times had he stopped himself from pursuing it, because while Lear might be anyone and had become a nearly mythical creature, Caligula was very real, and Vincent had a definite impression that if he ever did penetrate Lear’s secret, Caligula would stab, shoot, garrote, drown, or otherwise end Vincent’s life.

That was Caligula’s … contribution … to the cause.

Vincent thought of the note he had appended to his report. “I am not Scipio.”

Scipio was the Roman general who had finally destroyed Carthage.

Would Lear accept this push back? Would he or she allow Vincent to refuse Carthage commands in the future? Or would Lear know that in the end Vincent would do what Lear needed him to do?

Tonight would be the third time Vincent accidentally ran into Anya at this bar. Anya lived nearby. Vincent didn’t, but he had an apartment a block away that looked exactly as if he lived in it. In case.