A small tinny voice came through the iPhone’s speaker. “What do you expect? To see him suddenly well? To leap up and cry, ‘Huzzah?’ It won’t be so easy.”

Nijinsky didn’t answer, just pressed his lips tightly, took a deep breath, and said, “Do it, Plath.”

She maneuvered the sac directly against the pin. With one clawed hand she tore a small—it seemed only an inch or so, m-sub—hole. At first the liquid would not come. She used a second leg to press gently on the sac. A droplet formed. It would be invisibly small to anything but a very good microscope up in the world.

The droplet hung, golden in the artificially colored world of her biots’ vision.

Then it dropped.

The destruction was immediate. Between her front legs, just below her sleek insect head, the brain cells burst open like a stopmotion depiction of fruit rotting.

The cells popped. There was no sound, but they popped. Burst, spilled the goo inside, as the acid attacked in detail. She could see mitochondria squirming as though they were tiny insects.

Fumes rose from the melting flesh. She had no ability to smell, and her hearing was not attuned to the hissing sound. She could only see it.

“It just burned a few cells,” she reported.

“Push the pin to one side, see if you can open a tunnel,” Nijinsky advised.

She did, pushing the pin as far as she could, leaning her tiny weight into it. The flesh resisted as though fearing what was to come. A small hole was opened. The problem seemed to be that the acid’s droplets were too large to fit into the narrow tunnel. Her second droplet melted just a few cells, which now congealed, like cooling lava.

“It isn’t working. I can’t get it to work.”

“Use a second pin. Widen the hole.”

“I’m making a mess.” She looked at him, pleading, weak, wanting to get out, turn it off, walk away.

“Plath,” Nijinsky said.

She pulled out a second pin and slid it down precisely beside the first. Now she was hit with a second wave of memories. Not all of it was games.

Vincent, spanked by his father for cursing.

Vincent, a baby, so tiny those little hands reaching for his mother’s breast, vision all skewed with lurid flares and colors that looked like something from damaged film stock.

“There’s other stuff, other memories. His mother—”

“Do it, Plath, dammit, we are out of time,” Nijinsky said in a terse, angry voice that was his version of yelling.

With her biots working together she wedged the pins apart, and yes, now she had a hole opened into the depths of his brain. With a third limb she reached to widen the tear in the sac.

“Aaahhh!” She swore and jumped halfway out of her chair. “It broke, it broke, it broke!”

The sac had simply disappeared like a balloon that’s been popped. Acid flowed everywhere. Droplets splashed and burned in the cerebral spinal fluid, like the flowering of anti-aircraft fire in some old World War II movie. Some of it sank into the brain, burning, exploding cells, obliterating all it touched.

And some of it splashed onto her biot body, eating with insane intensity at her middle leg’s shoulder joint, causing that leg to flail wildly as if it had caught fire.

The new biot could feel pain.

“AaaaaAAAHHH!” she cried.

“Goddammit, get her out of there!” Keats yelled.

Some, maybe even most of the liquid flowed into the hole.

Plath gritted her teeth and kept the pins apart even as she watched one of her claws melt and curl up like a burning scrap of paper.

“Jesus, it’s everywhere!”

Tags: Michael Grant BZRK Science Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net