Michael Grant - BZRK - RELOADED

To say nothing of what would happen if the MiniMites began to adapt and to chew away at buildings and bridges and so on.

But there were fail-safes and cut-offs and so on for all of that.

Foolproof stuff. And the hydras were being designed to reproduce only so many generations before dying off, and to consume only so much living tissue. The goal, after all, was to rewire the human race, not to obliterate it.

That was the plan.

That was not, however, Burnofsky’s plan.

Burnofsky carried his drink to his workstation. There he had a monitor attached to a scanning electron microscope. He pressed a remote control in his pocket and the surveillance camera on the wall switched seamlessly to file video. He doubted the Twins would understand what he was doing, but there was no point taking chances: they would see only what he wanted them to see.

On the monitor Burnofsky saw nanobots. They were rather different from the ones being so carefully created in the main lab. Burnofsky smiled to see them. Busy little creatures. Hydras busy doing what SRNs did: self-replicating.

But there were a number of differences between these and the hydras beyond his lab door. Some of those differences were visible, most not.

Funny , Burnofsky thought, gazing with pride at his creations, that people talk about the gray goo scenario , and in truth the hydras in the main lab were basically gray.

But these were not.

These nanobots were blue. The exact blue of his daughter’s eyes.

For Immediate Release

Public Affairs Office/University of Texas, Austin

The entire University of Texas family is saddened by the loss of Professor Edwin H. Grossman. Dr Grossman apparently leapt to his death from the top of the University of Texas tower. In recent months Dr Grossman had been under great strain. Students reported that his usual lectures on nanotechnology had taken on a paranoid character, with Dr Grossman falsely claiming that nanotechnology was already being deployed in a bid by unnamed forces to effectively reprogram the human race.

Dr Grossman, one of the world’s leading researchers on microscopic machines, wrote a book in 2011 warning that self-replicating nano devices could run out of control with dire consequences. The book was published without the support of the University or his department.

In 2012 Dr Grossman claimed to have been consulted by the CIA on the so-called gray goo scenario, the fanciful notion that self-reproducing nano machines could run amok and obliterate all carbon-based life-forms in a matter of days.

A student, Jing Ju Chow, who claimed to have seen two men throw Dr Grossman from the twenty-eighth floor observation deck of the UT Tower, recanted when questioned by campus police and was later fatally injured in a car-on-pedestrian accident off campus.

The University mourns both of these tragic deaths.

Drug Enforcement Agency

New York City

Surveillance Report–China Bone

Item:Subject 49630, code name “Rocker Girl.” Subject observed arriving 10:27 p.m. Electronic monitoring via her phone indicates she ordered injectable heroin. Audio monitoring produced only some singing and incoherent conversation with China Bone staff identified (tentative) as Cheng Lee.

Item:Subject 67709, unknown subject. Desc: Male, Asian, 35-40 years, 5’8”. Arrived by limo. Attempting to trace origin.

Item:Subject 42001, code name “Burn Out.” Arrived 12:02 a.m. Electronic monitoring via planted microphone 45-114. Subject ordered bourbon and opium pipe. Following ingestion suspect began to speak. Previous surveillance shows this is a common pattern for the subject. Transcript follows:

(inaudible) just (inaudible) deliver and then. And then, hah. Watch the bugs grow. (inaudible) baby, sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. Your bitch mother. Yeah. Oh Jesus I’m sorry sorry. But we all die. We all die, baby. (inaudible) We all surely do die and if it isn’t the easy way it’s the hard way and the twins would have made it hard. Bugs in your brain. Has to (inaudible) I never should have. Didn’t know they’d (inaudible). You went easy though. You went so easy baby. Hah. Thanks to your dad. Hah. My gift baby the easy death instead of the hard. My gift . . . easy . . . (inaudible.) But (inaudible) pay up. They will pay up. My little blues will end it all end it end it. Tens to hundreds to (inaudible) millions to billions eat it all up, eat it all up eat it all up down to the rock. All . . .

End transcript.

The law firm sent a limo for Plath, but not to the BZRK safe house. The limo picked Plath and Keats up at the address she’d given them: outside the Andaz Hotel on Fifth Avenue.

Plath had not been staying at the Andaz, and a cursory investigation would reveal that fact, but it was at least plausible that she might have been there. The McLure Company maintained a suite year-round for visiting dignitaries.

Plausible.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had the use of a posh suite at a hotel?” Keats muttered as the town car inched its way uptown. “Why are we staying at that miserable shit hole when we could be frolicking on clean sheets?”

“Frolicking? I seem to recall offering to frolic with you. I was going to frolic your brains out.” She was determined to keep the mood light. Wave upon wave of sadness and fear had crashed on her since that terrible day when her father and brother had been murdered. More would come.

Too much.

She couldn’t break. Maybe the day would come when she broke, but not yet. So she smiled and so did Keats. It felt like the first genuine smile for either in quite a while.

“Sorry, had to save your life first,” Keats said. “Duty before booty.”

“You shouldn’t always be the good boy, Keats,” she teased. “Don’t you know that messed-up girls like me prefer bad boys?”

“You are toying with me.”

“I used to break my toys,” she said.

“Is that a warning?”

“I wouldn’t break you. I might bruise you a little . . .”

“Okay, that’s quite enough.”

“Might bend you. There could be some chafing . . .”

Keats grinned, unable to manage a stern expression. “Now you’re going past toying to torturing.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It’s cruel.”

“Mmm. I’m trying not to be the goody goody.”

“No one thinks you’re the goody goody,” he said.

“You sure?” she asked, her tone rueful. “Jin needs me, even Lear needs me, if there really is a Lear, but I failed them, didn’t I?”

Keats glanced at the driver. He didn’t seem to be listening, and they were talking in whispers. Keats leaned closer. “Listen to me, Plath—”

“It’s Sadie on this trip,” she interrupted. “The lawyer and the others know me by my real name. So just for this trip, let’s not play crazy little BZRK games. Let’s act like real, normal people.”

“Sadie,” he said, trying it out. Liking it. Feeling flattered by the right to use it. “Do you want to know my real name?”

“Keats will do. I like it, actually. It suits you. You could totally be a poet.”

Veer away from tragedy, back onto safe ground.

We take the names of madmen because madness is our fate. But Keats, the real one, the poet, hadn’t really been mad, just depressed and addicted.

Plath, on the other hand: head in a gas oven while her children played in the next room.

Veer away from that, too.

“I know nothing about poetry,” Keats said.

Plath said nothing for a while, watching the street go by, wondering whether Caligula had them in view. Wondering whether AFGC also had them in view. The reading of a will is not a very private matter, private in terms of the actual reading, perhaps, but not in terms of who knows it’s happening.