BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

“She did,” Burnofsky said. “The initial go-ahead, anyway. I can show you the video. She finished cleaning up the blood and went to her pad, pulled up the ETA mission, and approved it. Rios has long since started planning counterattacks on BZRK. The president has scheduled a meeting with him to discuss raiding McLure, blocking their accounts, arresting individuals on suspicion of terrorism. I am confident she will give him free rein; Bug Man has succeeded in that. And gentlemen, wasn’t that our goal?” Burnofsky puffed out his cheeks in a sort of world-weary gesture. “Bug Man screwed up, but—and it’s a very big but—he did accomplish the goal. We own the president, and we control ETA, the agency that will deal with any nanotechnology information.”

“Damn, Karl, you might have told us,” Charles chided, but he was too happy to be genuinely angry.

“This thing with Monte Morales, it’s a blip,” Burnofsky said. “It’s a bump in the road. And you’re …tired.” He tried to send a meaningful look to Charles without it being intercepted by Benjamin, but of course that was a physical impossibility.

What he wanted to say was, Look, your twin is losing it. If he goes, you go. Get him out of here. Get him some rest.

“I can handle Bug Man,” Burnofsky said. “Jindal will be here running the daily operation. I can go to Washington and supervise the wiring of the president personally. If I do have to take it over, I can do it without relying on signal repeaters. Meanwhile, Rios is moving immediately against BZRK in DC and New York. BZRK will be effectively taken out, in this country at least. We’ve been probed by Anonymous, but we’re confident they’ve been shut out. We have substantial control of the FBI, we have some assets in the Secret Service. Our overseas targets are being well managed. So…honestly? Now’s a good time for a break.”

Charles looked hard at Burnofsky, reading his thoughts. Charles knew his brother’s stability was tenuous at best.

“You’ll go to Washington yourself?” Charles asked, seeming oddly deflated. “You’ll take charge?”

“I will go. I will oversee the wiring. I’ll touch base with Rios. And I’ll deal with Bug Man.”

Benjamin frowned. Then his eye brightened, and the third eye seemed to join in sympathy. “The Doll Ship.”

“It’s in the Pacific. Somewhere near Japan, heading toward Hong Kong to pick up a very nice haul of Korean refugees, and one moderately good twitcher,” Jindal reported. He had deemed it a safe moment to speak up. Jindal was a true believer, a Nexus Humanus cultist, wired and, in the favorite Nexus Humanus phrase, “Sustainably happy.”

A sucker, in Burnofsky’s view. A fool. A middle manager with delusions of importance.

The mention of the Doll Ship soothed some of the anxiety from Benjamin’s face. Charles, too, softened a bit.

“The Doll Ship,” Benjamin said, and his bruised mouth smiled.

Sick bastards, both of you, Burnofsky thought. Sick, sad, screwedup freaks. It would be good to get them out of the way for a few days.

He had work to do.

THREE

“Rrrraaaaarrrrrgh!”

Vincent bellowed like a beast.

Like a lion at feeding time.

Plath put her hands over her ears.

“Rrrraaaaarrrrrgh!”

The sound was muffled, but the doors and walls of the safe house

were flimsy and sound carried, especially at night. Plath was due to start receiving her inheritance: at the very least, she decided, she could pay for a better safe house.

She took her shower. It was an awful little bathroom; no one ever cleaned up, and the mildew was eating the tile grout.

She could imagine it at the nano level. That was the start of the madness, the thing that softened you up and prepared you to lose it entirely. Like Vincent. Like Ophelia, probably, poor girl, wherever she was. Like Keats’s brother, Kerouac. It began with that terrible parallel view. Down there. Down where human eyes were only supposed to squint through a microscope’s lens, not walk among the alien flora and fauna.

Mildew. The bacteria on her own hands. The colored footballs of pollen. The mites. The soap and pounding hot water slicking it away, but not all, never all. The beasties were with us always.

I don’t want to end up like Vincent.

Keats’s biots were inside her head. So was one of her own. He was repairing her aneurysm, and she had one biot on board, as the jaunty semi-nautical phrase went, and another in a petri dish soaking up nutrients

She could have gone off to find Keats’s biots, down there, down in the meat. Her biot—P2 as it happened—was resting comfortably on the back side of her left eyeball. Occasionally she would move her biot as a dutiful lymphocyte came oozing along to clean up whatever this alien monstrosity was.

Had she wanted to, she could have had her own biot help Keats. But a biot face …Well, it was bad enough to know precisely, exactly, what vermin crawled the surface of Keats’s skin. She didn’t need to see the bizarro-world distortion that was his biot’s face.