BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

“What did you know, Vincent?” Plath asked again with deadly, weary calm that carried absolute authority. “Did you know who Lear is?”

He blinked and shook his head. Then he leaned toward her, frowning. “Are you saying you do know who he is?”

“She,” Wilkes said. “She, she, she. She. A sister. One of the vaginally endowed. Lystra Reid.”

Vincent drew back as if frightened. “You can’t do that, you can’t talk about Lear. Caligula will—”

“He’s dead, too,” Wilkes said. “That’s his work.” She stabbed a finger at the TV. “He’s dead. And Jin is dead. And Ophelia is dead. And Renfield is dead. And Billy is dead. Even the Twins are dead. And pretty—” She sobbed, and it was a moment before she could go on, her voice low and grating. “It’s a whole big bunch of dead tonight. Now answer Plath’s question, Vincent, or I swear to God I’ll find some way to make you dead, too.”

“I met Lear once. I didn’t look at him. Her, if you say so. Maybe that explains why I was told not to turn around and look. He, she, whoever, used voice masking. I assumed it was so that later I wouldn’t be able to recognize the voice.”

“And did you know Lear planned to do this? To use biot madness this way?”

“No.”

Plath set her teacup aside carefully. Her hands were still hard to control with any finesse. The cold seemed to have sunk deep in her, joining the cold, dead spot where Noah had been held in her thoughts. “Where do you stand, Vincent?”

He did not pretend he didn’t understand. He grasped her meaning immediately. “I’m

not sure I know who I am,” he began.

Wilkes interrupted. “Yeah, well, welcome to the new reality. We’ve all been mind-fucked one way or the other.” She laughed her mirthless heh-heh-heh and said, “We really are BZRK now, I guess. Crazy.”

“I wish they would stop showing that,” Anya said, transfixed by the TV.

“Where do you stand, Vincent?” Plath repeated.

“I have to …” He began, hesitated, shook his head, and continued. “I have to go back to basics. To what I believe. For a start, my name is not Vincent. It’s Michael Ford.”

“I’m sticking with Wilkes. It works for me.”

“I’m Michael Ford,” he said, almost wonderingly. Like a little kid talking about some new and amazing thing he’d just learned. “I’m Michael. I believe … I believe people should be free, that’s why … I believe they should be left alone. That’s why I joined BZRK.”

“That’s why everyone joins,” Anya said, speaking that last word with distaste. “No one ever joins to do evil. It just always ends up that way.”

Vincent winced as if she’d struck him.

Plath said, “Burnofsky is releasing self-replicating nanobots. Maybe they were all destroyed in the Tulip, maybe not. If he did it, if they aren’t all killed, well … anyway, the Twins and Burnofsky are no longer the problem. Lear is the problem. And I don’t think she’s done. I think she’ll keep at it. She wants to …” She shrugged. “I have no idea what she wants.”

“Noah would have,” Vincent said softly. “He was a gamer. This is all a game. It’s been a game from the start.”

Plath stared at him, thinking. He did not look away. “A game,” she said finally. “And what’s the point of this game?”

“Games have no point,” Vincent said. “The point of the game is the game. The purpose is to play. But games have structure. They are built and written. And you can only play one at a time. Lear is wiping the board of the old game, replacing it with his … her own game.”

“How do we win?”

“To win you have to understand the …” He shook his head. “You can’t beat the game designer at her own game.”

“Sure you can,” Wilkes said. “I used to beat my little brother at games all the time. I’d pull the power cord out of the wall. Game over.”

Before she got on her plane, Lystra Reid, Lear, punched a code into her phone and pushed Send.

The text went to the nearest cell-phone tower. The signal went from there to a central router that pushed it up to a satellite from whence it was bounced to another satellite, and still another as it wound its way south. Eventually it was picked up by a satellite dish.

From there it traveled just a few hundred feet to a computer server that recognized the code and translated it into sixteen thousand individual digital instructions that then mostly retraced the digital path of the incoming message.

Elapsed time, 3.4 seconds.