BZRK (BZRK 1)

“I’m tired of ears,” Wilkes pouted.

“Keats, you and I will do a little of that, and then we’ll go all the way in.”

Plath said, “I don’t understand why I can’t be the one to take care of my own brain. Why is it everyone else’s job? Why does he have to do it?”

“Plath, think about it. If the aneurysm ever does rupture, as your brain is dying and you’re wracked with migraines, hallucinating in all probability, who is going to run your biots in to fix the leak?” She leaned forward and took Plath’s hand in hers, held it until Plath had forced herself to relax into the touch. “You’re important to us. You have resources we will need, when you’re able to access them. And this boy … this young man … is going to keep you alive.”

EIGHTEEN

Plath placed her finger in the open flower of the crèche.

It was the hand of God descending from the sky. Huge. Like someone stabbing a pink blimp into the pinkish soil of the culture medium.

She saw her finger, both small and large, both a part of her hand and a giant pillar disappearing up into the sky.

Both were in her head.

She gasped.

“Now make your biot move toward it,” Wilkes said.

“How?”

They sat in chairs next to each other. Two rickety chairs placed side by side but pointing in opposite directions so that Plath was face-to-face with Wilkes.

A similar setup on the other side of the MRI machine. Plath could see Keats’s eyes. Her destination. Insane.

“Think it,” Wilkes said with a shrug.

She thought it. And yes, she could see the dimpled spongy surface of the medium flowing by beneath her as she ran. Hah-hah! It worked.

“You have six legs,” Wilkes said. “Plus two arms.”

“Uh-huh.” Plath wasn’t really listening. She was focusing on the sheer speed with which that window inside her brain was moving toward the finger. Zoom.

She saw the swirls of fingerprint now. An object the size of a skyscraper, but curved, and covered in amazing whorls that soared up and away into the sky. It looked strangely like some stucco walls that are finished with a toothed trowel.

But as she ran—as her biot ran—the giant became even more detailed, and close up the fingerprints began to look like farmland seen from an airplane, the prints like furrowed fields but where each row stood five or six feet high. And there, strangely atop the rows rather than down inside, were what might be holes drilled at regular distances.

The flesh became less smooth and now seemed more like a desert of dry, baked earth.

Anxiety hit her in a wave. She was meant to climb up onto that alien surface. Her finger twitched, scooted wildly across the surface, almost riding over the biot.

“Aaaah!” Plath cried.

“Don’t worry, you can’t crush it. Too small. You know how hard it is to squash a flea?”

“It’s … It’s leaking! My … the … my finger!”

And indeed from the holes a glistening liquid began to seep. A liquid that sat atop but did not soften the baked soil terrain. Little droplets that just sort of stayed there.

“Sweat. You’re jumpy so your skin starts to sweat.”

Plath stopped. The curve of the fingertip made what had seemed like a vertical pillar into a descending roof of dried, tilled soil now intermittently oozing small droplets of liquid. The drops should fall like rain, but they didn’t. It clung to the cracked, furrowed surface.

“Freaky, huh?” Wilkes asked with a smirk.

“I’m supposed to get up there?”