He was inside her. His biot. Down here in these endless folds of pink flesh. At least she hoped he was, hoped he was not on her other eye spying, or worse, far worse, somewhere deeper still, laying wire.

Let it not be him. Not him. That was a betrayal she could not survive.

The tissue that was the ground could appear to be a wall, a floor, or a ceiling, depending on your perspective. The biot world was one where gravity was almost irrelevant, certainly in this liquid environment.

She was aiming for the hippocampus, a deep structure, an ancient part of the evolving brain. It was the router of the mind. If someone was wiring her, that’s where they would likely start. The implanted brain-mapping imagery was a guide, though an imperfect one because no two brains were identical, and where she might expect to find a figurative gully could be a plunging valley.

In the real world her body was responding almost on its own, as though it was not connected to her, not connected to the brain upon which she now walked, the brain that was the processor of every contact between his tongue and her flesh.

Madness. She laughed. He stopped.

“No, no, no, don’t stop,” she said.

“You were giggling.”

“Shhhh,” she said, and pushed his head back to where it had been.

Toward the hippocampus, but with a stop on the way. She crept her biot forward slowly, slowly, dousing her illuminators one by one, just enough to feel her way forward to—

Light out. In the darkness of her own brain she saw his biot’s light. There was his biot, not moving, just standing on the bulging basketwork he had so painstakingly constructed in order to save her life. The work had been started by her father; almost completed now by her lover.

His biot was not wiring her. It was not him.

Far away and as close as the artery that pounded beneath her feet, she felt him, felt his banked power, knew he was close to losing control, and liked that idea a great deal.

She sent her biot forward toward the hippocampus, turning lights back on as she moved away from Keats’s biot.

She tripped over it before she saw it. One leg scraped across something that did not feel like flesh, something hard and sharp.

Wire.

Did Keats feel the sudden chill that went through her? He did not slow or falter. But now her mind was reeling, no longer vague and disconnected from her body and its reactions.

She had been wired.

Wait, was that a glimmer of light?

She killed her own biot’s light once more and stared hard into the visual field in her brain. Into the visual field that showed her brain to her brain.

There! For just a second. Less than a second. A glimmer of light.

“Bastard,” she muttered.

Keats did not hear her, he was beyond that.

The light had come from behind a pulsing vein. There was no innocent excuse. There were no light-emitting life-forms down here.

The fear rose

in Plath now, competing with simmering rage. It began as a dull electrical charge in the base of her spine and fanned out from there to become nausea in her stomach and a tightened chest that felt too small to contain her air-starved lungs and pounding heart.

Who was on the other side of that vein, that vein the circumference of a subway tunnel? Who and what was back there?

Bastard, bastard, bastard, she raged, but silently.

Plath stifled her fear, and her biot plunged after the retreating nanobot. She noted that she had decided now that it was an Armstrong nanobot, not a BZRK biot, not Keats, not anyone from her side. Because that—

Wait. When had she acquired this readiness to believe the best of BZRK? Was that a naturally occurring thought? Or was it part of the wiring? Was that what this foe was doing right now, right now practically under her nose—finding ways to dampen her suspicion?

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