BZRK (BZRK 1)

The hotel was not fashionable. It was dark and smelled like soy sauce and

peanut oil. The bar was even darker, but it smelled of beer and fried wontons. There were just four small tables and an equal number of stools at the bar, and no one was there but Anya.

Vincent saw her before she saw him. He noted with quiet satisfaction that she had dressed for the occasion. This was their first planned meeting. Well, the first that Anya knew to be planned. A date. Previously she’d worn the comfortable work-casual clothing she wore in her lab. Previously she’d come here for her after-shift drink precisely because there was zero chance of being hit on and she could just have a fruity drink or two and chill, relax, mellow, slough off the brain-draining activity that defined her work.

That had changed when she met Vincent. For one thing Vincent was an attractive younger man. Anya was ten years older than Vincent. Anya was lovely. Tall, with near-perfect legs and just a little poochy-pooch at her waist that hardly anyone would notice, and her skin still looked very good, and so did her reddish-brown—do they call that auburn?—hair.

A good face. A face with character, which in this case meant that she had the echo of eastern invasions from the steppes.

And Vincent. Ah, once he confessed to the whole anhedonia thing there wasn’t a woman worth her tight skirt and her generous display of cleavage and the expensive scent steaming from her neck who wasn’t interested.

Unable to experience pleasure.

We’ll see about that.

That’s what they thought. And he would find a way to explain that he still knew how to give pleasure. That was game, set, and match, as one might say if one were talking about tennis.

Anya’s working theory was that Vincent had probably dated nothing but bimbos his own age or younger. All very pretty, no doubt, but what did a girl that age really know?

“Vincent!” Anya said, lighting up, swiveling on her stool so that he would catch just a bit more inner thigh than was strictly necessary. Kiss kiss, cheek cheek, all very New York. But Vincent slid back just a bit slower than he might and let his cheek linger a little too long, and yeah, she responded.

He drew back at last, and now in addition to seeing her flushed face he saw through two sets of biot sensors.

V1 was headed toward the eye, running through a deep valley filled with tumbled crystalline boulders of makeup. Expensive makeup—finer grained—had a tendency to stick to biot legs, a bit like mud.

V3 confronted a landscape Vincent could not at first make sense of. He was on a long, gently curved plain of dimpled, spongy flesh. But in the distance, perhaps half a centimeter mack, was a huge pillar as big around as a redwood tree. It was vertical to the fleshy plain. V3 was sideways, which meant that actually the thick pillar was roughly horizontal.

Vincent’s actual eyes, the big, brown, real ones, flicked toward Anya’s ear. Of course: an earring. Maybe white gold or platinum. Through the eyes of the biot it looked flaked and corrugated, like an old muzzle-loading cannon. And when the biot got closer, Vincent had a view of the hole, the puncture through which the metal passed.

In the macro Vincent saw the diamond that hung below the lobe. He’d never seen a diamond from biot level. It might be interesting. But this wasn’t a sightseeing trip.

One in the eye, one in the ear.

“I just stopped off to get a few things,” Vincent said, holding up the bag as proof. “I was early. But I didn’t want to be rude and show up early.”

Maybe he could have just trusted her. Maybe he could have told her what he needed. Maybe he could have brought her into BZRK. That had been his original plan, to recruit her, to have a back door into the McLure labs.

But he couldn’t afford a maybe anymore. He needed a yes. He needed what she could give to the cause, and he needed it immediately.

Ticktock. It was all a matter of necessity, and didn’t necessity justify everything?

“It would have been okay. I was early, too.”

They shared a conspiratorial “we like each other” smile. Vincent assumed she was planning on sleeping with him. He certainly hoped so: he needed time to do his work.

He needed time with Anya. And, too, there was attraction. Vincent was anhedonic; he wasn’t asexual. Need was one thing, the pleasure one took from satisfying a need was a different matter.

Damnit. She’d been swimming. Or maybe just showering. Either way, V3, in her ear, had just run smack up against a wall of water. Probably no more than a few milliliters, but it was held in place by surface tension, so rather than forming a lake he could run across, it was more like a giant water balloon he would have to swim through.

Unless he broke the surface tension. In which case V3 would go for a sort of flume ride, probably into the outer ear. But also possibly into a hastily raised napkin and from there to a lap or the bar counter.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” Vincent said to the bartender.

Anya put her hand on his arm and laughed. “No, no, this is awful, really. No self-respecting man should drink this. Too sweet.” She was so confident in interrupting. He noticed. Older woman, accomplished woman, advanced degrees and a responsible position.

“We’ll have two shots of vodka, very cold, neat,” Anya said. She winked. “My Russian blood, you know.”

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” Vincent flirted.