BZRK (BZRK 1)

The police had formed a cordon and were now passing people through a small gap. Get your IDs out. Get your stories straight.

Sure enough, three supposed demonstrators flashed what had to be NYPD or FBI IDs and were passed through to stand with the officers and point out the suspicious.

One of them pointed at Nijinsky.

“Shit,” Nijinsky said.

Vincent collapsed the legs on the left of V3 and the right of V4 and rolled the biots over the legs of the blinded nanobots.

Bug Man’s aerial attack missed, and he slammed into the blinded nanobots, stabbing his own creatures.

A net wash: two of Bug Man’s boys dead, but time wasted and time was not his friend.

Time to swim.

He pushed off into the transparent fluid. Biots were not good swimmers—their legs could motor away, but the result was more of a churn than a swim. Twisting the claws with each stroke could give it some additional forward momentum, but not much. The only comfort was that nanobots were even worse.

The biots floated just above the massed nanobot army.

“You look familiar,” a cop said to Nijinsky. And just in time Nijinsky’s fingers slid from the fake passport in his inner coat pocket to the real one.

“Well, I do some modeling,” he told the officer, a short, powerfully built woman.

The male officers scowled.

“Where have I seen you?”

Nijinsky shrugged. His biots were racing to catch up to the battle raging deep within the president’s brain. He was not Vincent—experiences on multiple levels at once tended to make him a bit slow and distracted.

“You mean …” he said as his biots dodged around a sticky cluster of macrophages.

“Like what do you model?” she asked, getting less friendly by the second. She flipped open his passport while Vincent, behind him, waited with seeming calm and a slightly puzzled expression. “Simple question, Mr. Hwang. What do you model?”

“Oh. Well, I guess most people recognize me from the Mountain Dew billboards.”

The cop shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”

“Armani underwear?”

She crinkled her forehead at him, comparing face to photo. “Were you ever in a movie?”

Yes, he had been in a movie. But he wasn’t happy about it. And the cop had been playing with him because she was grinning, and he could see that she was anticipating enlightening her fellow officers.

“Yes, Officer,” he said, “I—”

“It’s sergeant,” she corrected, and pointed at the stripes on her sleeve.

“Sergeant,” he corrected tersely. “I was in the last Saw movie.”

“What happened to you in that movie?” Now the other cops were grinning, knowing there was a funny coming.

Nijinsky sighed. “I was castrated by a chain saw.”

“Ouch,” one of the men said.

“Must have been after you did the underwear ad, huh?” the woman asked, enjoying the moment immensely, although to her credit she avoided guffawing.

“I’m so glad I can be comic relief, Sergeant,” Nijinsky said as his biots dug through the meninges of the president and pushed their way into the brain itself.