Keats looked up sharply. He nodded once, a regretful expression. Then, “What do you think is on for this morning?”
“Something disturbing,” Plath said.
Keats smiled. “Thanks for taking care of me last night.”
“I thought it was the other way around.”
Keats shook his head and looked down at the floor. “I was a mess.”
Plath said, “Yeah, you’re right. Me? I was fine.”
A small laugh. “I wish I didn’t have to call you Plath. I don’t want to think of you as a poet who gassed herself.”
She was so close to telling him. Sadie. That’s my name. But with an effort she stopped herself. “They want us close. But they don’t ever want us to forget.”
Ophelia showed them to a room they had not seen before. It was up a ridiculously narrow interior staircase. It was like a shabby parody of the lab from McLure. Someone had hammered together a plywood table shoved against narrow, greasy windows that let in the gray gloom of New Y
ork. On the table a couple of mismatched microscopes, something that looked like a very expensive Crock-Pot, a small stainless-steel freezer.
But the focal point of the room was a massive piece of glowing, white machinery with which Plath was all too familiar.
“Is that an MRI machine?”
Ophelia nodded. “With some very customized add-ons. Yes. I’m told it’s worth about five million dollars. So don’t put your coffee cups on it.”
It was a bizarre anomaly. It was possible to accept the junky attic lab or the massive, humming hulk of technology, but the two didn’t seem as if they should share the same reality.
“We usually take more time with training,” Ophelia said. “But time is short. The enemy is planning a major strike. It’s a winning move if they pull it off. So we have to stop them.”
“What is the plan?” Keats asked.
“United Nations General Assembly. Most of the world’s heads of state—our President Morales, your Prime Minister Bowen, Keats. AFGC is going to try to place nanobots in them and others. China. Japan. India. Maybe more.”
Keats shot a look at Plath.
“AFGC. What is that, anyway?” Plath asked.
“The Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.”
“That doesn’t sound like an evil organization setting out to dominate the world,” Plath said.
“That’s the idea,” Ophelia said. “If you try telling someone the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation is taking over the world, they’ll think you’re crazy.”
“Would they be wrong?” Keats muttered under his breath.
Ophelia leaned close to him. She had a smile for this occasion, too, and it was solid steel. “It’s good to have a sense of humor, Keats. But don’t be flip. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a game.”
“No, miss,” he said, because Ophelia suddenly seemed much older than he.
Ophelia tapped an oblong plastic case on the cluttered table. “Your babies are in here. They’re warming to room temperature. When I open this box, they’ll see light, which means you’ll see through their eyes.”
Both Sadie and Keats looked nervously at the box.
“Each of you has two biots. Each of those biots has two types of eye. A compound insect eye that is very good at detecting motion, and a quasi-human eye that is somewhat better at color and definition. But the human brain is not well suited for making sense of these disparate visuals. So each of you has been altered.”
“Say what?” Keats snapped.
“When we sent our biots in, we brought a package of altered stem cells and planted them in your visual cortexes. It’s not strictly necessary—a biot runner can see without them—but they’ll see the actual, not the enhanced, visuals. See, down at the nano level there’s no real color. Pigmentation is too spread out, not sufficiently concentrated to be seen. So with bare visual you’ll see shapes and edges, but all gray scale. With enhanced visual you get color as well.”