BZRK (BZRK 1)

“Did you see anything suspicious, Mr. Hwang?”

He shrugged. “There were a bunch of sirens, we looked around, and someone said there was a fire.”

“And why did you come to the UN today?”

Time to take a chance on getting Vincent out with him. “I’m actually on a date. My friend here,” he indicated Vincent, “is a big fan of President Morales. I told him we wouldn’t be able to see anything. But …” Nijinsky shrugged.

Vincent carefully led a flo

ating nanobot and fired the fléchette gun this biot carried. The pellets were slowed instantly, but with extraordinary luck they might jam a joint on the nanobot.

The cops checked Vincent’s ID and asked him the same question, but then the sergeant said, “Go on, Mr. Hwang. You’ve suffered enough.”

“Ouch,” a second officer said.

Vincent sliced a badly positioned nanobot open and grinned, as though sharing Nijinsky’s discomfort.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Plath lay in the garbage.

And she walked through the deep folds of a human brain. It was a long trek to the hippocampus. It was buried deep in the crumpled tofu. Wilkes had taught her the way, the long way down and under, to find the brain stem, that stalk a hundred times as thick as the largest sequoia.

“Then just go north,” Wilkes had said.

“North?”

“Up.”

“How do you tell which way is up?”

“Blow a bubble, see which direction it floats,” Wilkes had said, then she had added, “Of course, biots can’t blow bubbles.”

Then Wilkes had relented. “If it seems like the stem is getting smaller, you’re going south. If you run into spaghetti the size of a subway train, you’re heading north.”

Plath had found the cerebellum, the spaghetti bowl. She’d pressed on beneath, lost but maybe not, going in the right direction or not. Someday maybe to emerge. Or not, and if not then to leave her own sanity down here, down in the meat.

Maybe Keats had escaped. Surely. Maybe he was free, but they might have him. She wished she was still tapped into the eye so she could see if Keats was suddenly dragged before the Armstrong Twins. And because then she would be within reach of light and air and escape.

Was there something unique about the brain upon which Plath’s biots walked?

This was a brain that had ordered kidnappings, beatings, and murders.

This was the brain that had turned a silly cult into a tool for recruiting an army.

This was the brain that dared to plot a new course for evolution itself. That desired the end of all human freedom. That might, by action or by error, unleash upon the world the catastrophe of self-replicating nanobots.

This brain, those firing neurons, those crackling synapses, this mass of pink cells floating in organic soup, had ambitions that dwarfed those of history’s great monsters.

This brain had murdered her family.

And yet, to look at it, down here, it was no different than Keats’s brain. No different than her own.

Where in this organ was the evil?

That was what needed to be killed, Plath knew.

And she knew that at the instant she decided that she had to change this brain, had to deprive it of its free will, her own brain would give no outward sign of having set out on a course of deliberate destruction.