“Good title, that,” Lear commented. “Makes people think it can spread. Yeah. And it can, hah.”
Bug Man said nothing. This was his future now. He would live or die at Lear’s whim. Or she might just let him go crazy.
Three windows were open in his head. None of them showed much at the moment, just glimpses of the biots themselves. It was different than twitching nanobots, more intimate. You had only to think and the biot would move. No wonder BZRK had been so tough to beat. No wonder Vincent had ended up drooling nuts.
“Oh, look look look!” Lear pointed, as excited as a little child. “It’s starting to buckle. Look! Look! You can see rebar starting to stick out the side there. My dad came through in the end, I guess.”
“Your dad?”
“Yeah,” she said, almost fondly. “My dad. You must have heard of Caligula. Of course that’s not his real name. I gave him that nom de guerre. Caligula, yeah. Yeah.”
“Caligula’s your father?” He forced himself to quash the urge to say that this explained a lot.
His mouth hurt terribly. He had finally been allowed a couple ibuprofen swallowed with cold water, which had sent lightning bolts of pain shooting from his broken teeth but was already clearing up his speech. Now Bug Man was drinking raw bourbon, no ice, no water, no nothing, because it just didn’t seem to matter anymore if his brain was dulled. What was he holding out for? He was owned, body and soul. He was her slave. He was her dog.
“Mmm,” Lear said. “Was. Past tense. He killed my mother, you know. He tries to pretend it was me, yeah, like I could have done it. Like I could have killed her. Like I could have found her unconscious, yeah, and the cleaver, and thought … no. Yeah. But if I had, wouldn’t I have a tattoo of her?”
Bug Man nodded wearily, as if this proved her case.
“Adoptive parents, yeah, that’s different,” Lear said. “You saw them.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going,” Lear said. “It’s going. Oh, this will be the best. Get me a drink. I want to toast the Armstrong Twins as they die.”
“What have you done?” Charles demanded, aghast.
“Revenge is a dish best served cold,” Burnofsky said. “And you know what? Even with the fire below, I feel chilly.”
“Damn you, what have you done?” Benjamin yelled, desperation breaking his voice.
“My final work of genius,” Burnofsky said. “I programmed my SRNs to respond not just to a time signature, or even a specific energy source. I programmed them with a map. A topographical program.”
Charles began to scratch his chest, the place where his chest became Benjamin’s.
“Yep, it will itch at first,” Burnofsky said. “Then it will burn. And then, it will really start to become quite unpleasant.”
“What have you done? Tell us! What have you done?”
“I’ve granted your secret wish,” Burnofsky said. “You’ve lived with each other every single minute of your lives. Neither of you has ever been separate. Well, now you will be. The topography is you.”
“What?” Charles cried. “We’ll die!”
“Well, yeah,” Burnofsky allowed. “But not right away. Hey, I’ve put a lot of thought into this. You don’t think I’d make it easy for you. Has my life been easy? No, it has not.” He dropped the jocular tone. “You bought my soul, you two. You bought my soul …”
Benjamin tore at the buttons of their tailor-made shirt, exposing pink flesh with an angry, vertical red rash in the center. He clawed at it then whinnied in horror as his fingernails came away trailing ribbons of flesh.
“… and then you let me be mind-raped. My brain. It’s all I had after I killed her, my intellect. Oh, God, and still, still, do you know what they did to me? Do you know what BZRK did? When I think of her …”
“They’re on my back!” Charles cried.
“… I get turned on. Did you know that’s what they did to me with their wire? Crude. They thought, Well, we will just sort of reverse polarities on old Burnofsky’s brain. Like an old Star Trek, did you boys—”
“I can’t reach, I can’t reach!” Charles cried as he flailed madly, trying to reach his back with his hand, but that had never been possible.
“Ever watch that show? They were always reversing polarities. All bullshit. But that’s all Nijinsky had. Crude and cruel. A man should do penance for his crimes. A man should pay. A man should suffer, not feel pleasure.”
“We don’t deserve to suffer!” Charles shouted.