BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

“I do. Care,” Plath said.

But Keats didn’t hear it. He let himself go and fell into the pictures in his head. The movements of his fingers would be sequential, one then another, then another, but there was no way, no way in hell to do it unless he lost himself.

Fourteen microscopic creatures to move in two radically different environments.

Don’t think.

K1 and six nanobots dove after the hydras heading down into the blood.

K2 and six nanobots raced after the ones tunneling into the subcutaneous fat of Billy’s face.

Keats heard nothing. He lost awareness of the room he was in. Forgot Plath. Did not feel the hard pew under his thighs. Was not thirsty or hungry. His heart did not beat, he did not breathe, not so that he noticed, anyway.

Once before, when he had been tested, all the way back in London, he had gone away like this, lost himself in the game, felt nothing, ceased to exist as a consciousness.

Within the red gravel a hydra leg. One of Keats’s nanobots clawed it and reeled the hydra in. The others swarmed over the first and over the shredded hydra using both as a ladder, fighting the surge and pause, surge and pause of the red avalanche.

Seven different views of platelets and lymphocytes and clotting fibers. Seven sets of arms and legs, all swarming, all searching, catching a second hydra, ripping it apart, another and stabbing it, and another and another, catching up to a massed body of the replicated hydras, weak, shambling disjointed creatures built with only one ability: to build more of themselves.

The hydras did not fight, they were not controlled, they were as simple and mindless as mites, no one in charge; they were on automatic. They didn’t fight, they didn’t flee, they just gobbled up flesh and shit out carbon while the MightyMites did their sub-visible work, building more, ever more hydras.

Not Keats’s concern. Just kill them.

A millimeter and a world away K2 and six nanobots squeezed through fat cells like partly deflated beach balls made of wax, all white with clinging platelets and strands of unknown fibers. The hydras had stopped tunneling and now were digging and consuming, creating a sort of cavern in the skin as they entered a new replication cycle.

They were everywhere in the cavern, top, bottom, sides, all busy and oblivious and Keats tore into them, slaughtering, dismembering. It was like work in a meatpacker’s plant, assembly-line chopping and hacking, killing as fast and efficiently as he could.

The bodies of massacred hydras clogged the cavern until his nanobots were forced to dig through the debris of their bodies to find more to kill. Lymphocytes were oozing into the chamber, adding their slow-moving predation to the slaughter.

And then, a very different creature. Also blue, also a hydra, but gleaming with sharp, distinct lines, with bristling weapons. But even this, a first-generation hydra, a factory-made hydra not a cheap replicant, was uncontrolled. Mindless. programmed.

K1 yanked out two legs and left it crippled and helpless. The lymphocytes would finish the job.

Heedless, a mad rush now, just rush, all fourteen visuals at once, and oh, God, it was good.

It was blankness. Emptiness and fulfillment. A wild beast, fourteen wild beats, chasing and killing and chasing and killing.

Plath, not wearing the goggles, able still to see in the macro, up in the world, saw an ecstatic smile on Keats’s face. She had never seen him smile like that, lips trembling, teeth bare. She felt her gaze drawn irresistibly to Burnofsky. She expected to see him gloating at the animal revealed in Keats. But he was not gloating. His mouth worked, and he chewed his lip. His washed-out eyes were hungry.

He was jealous. He was a junkie watching another addict mainlining the ultimate drug.

Plath felt sick. Her biots waited on the crater as Wilkes’s two biots came rushing by and swan dived into the blood. Clotting nets were slowing the flow now. Plath couldn’t see Keats’s nanobots or biots, just the tumbling platelets and, riding that red tide like driftwood, the nanobot legs, heads, and insides.

A tear rolled down Burnofsky’s cheek.

Keats’s blue, blue eyes had disappeared behind the bug-eyed goggles.

Wilkes was laughing to herself. Heh-heh-heh.

He’d said he loved her, and she had not answered. Now she wondered if she gave him everything he wanted, her body, even her love, would any of it matter as much to Keats as this terrible game?

“What’s happening?” Billy asked her.

“Madness,” Plath answered.

Pia Valquist and Admiral Edward Domville rode through the storm aboard a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter. It was not the very best way to travel through high winds and lightning. The natural background noise of the helicopter itself was deafening, but when you added shrieking winds and sudden thunder like God tearing the sky open with his bare hands, you had a great deal of noise.

And a great deal of movement as pockets of wind acted like surprise elevators, dropping the Sea King hundreds of feet, or shooting it suddenly upward, all the while buffeting it back and forth. There was something about the constant bobbing and weaving that made Pia think of a boxer in the ring, always keeping his head in motion.