BZRK (BZRK 1)

“Yep. Jump. You can jump probably ten times your own body length. You jump up and grab on. Don’t worry about gravity. Gravity is nothing to the likes of us!”

Plath held her breath, trying to calm her heart. She closed her eyes—her macro eyes—and leapt.

The biot twisted expertly in midair and landed upside down. Her legs gripped, and she hung there like a fly on the ceiling; but it was no longer a ceiling, it was a vast farm field spread out before her. Vertical and horizontal had lost their usual definite meanings.

“Hah!” Plath cried.

“Yeah, hah!” Wilkes agreed. “Definitely: hah.”

“I’m on my own finger.”

“Heh-heh-heh,” Wilkes cackled. “Better than “’shrooms.”

Plath wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but she was feeling the rush of this adventure now. She was freaking Spider-Man.

“Now what?” Plath asked.

“Now you stay put in the nano, and you go over and poke your boyfriend in the eye in the macro.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Plath said automatically.

“That’s good, because what you’ll see of him will probably deep-freeze your girl parts. If you know what I mean.”

Wilkes was a strange girl, with her creepy, eye-dripping tattoo and her clothing that somehow split the difference between dominatrix and thrift-shop emo. But Wilkes was her Yoda on this trip, so Plath was inclined to be tolerant.

Plath focused on the task of walking toward Keats. The boy’s face had an expression of mixed amazement and fear that was probably a pretty close facsimile of her own.

They met at the foot of the MRI. Ophelia stood beside him. Her smile now was all about mystery and memory. She was remembering when she’d done this same thing, felt these same trembling fears.

“You first, Keats,” Ophelia ordered. “You just put the tip of your finger as close to the eyeball as you can get without touching it. Then you hop off.”

Keats’s finger trembled close to Plath’s eye. She couldn’t help herself blinking as he touched her.

“Ahh!” he cried, and jerked back.

“Eyeballs!” Wilkes said, and laughed her heh-heh-heh laugh. “They’re a trip.”

Plath’s turn. She tried to touch his eye. She saw the vast white orb beneath her, like she was in orbit on an alien farm planet above an Earth of red-rivered ice and a distant …

She jumped.

But the eyeball, that sky-filling planet, drew suddenly away.

“Sorry!” Keats said.

There was nothing beneath Plath’s biot feet. She was falling.

“Don’t move, moron!” Wilkes yelled at Keats.

Plath fell, twisting. The “ground” zoomed past below her. Like she was flying a supersonic jet just inches off the ground. She saw no detail, not at this speed, not twisting madly like this.

Sick fear welled up in her.

“Grab anything you can grab!” Wilkes shouted. “Shit!”

The ground was falling away, like she’d been flying low over a mesa and had the ground suddenly dip.

Then she saw something gigantic on the horizon. It appeared first as a sort of ridgeline, a swelling rise stabbed with leafless tree trunks, each traumatized by something that had chopped it crudely off. Like someone had clear-cut a sparse forest of redwood trees.