BZRK: Apocalypse

From now until Plath let her go, Anya’s sight would be shared. Plath would see what Anya saw. In the bathroom and bedroom, too, inevitably. The idea made Keats’s skin crawl, but this was BZRK.

Fighting for freedom. Saving the world.

Yeah, but hadn’t they done that when they stopped the Armstrongs from controlling the president? And when they stopped Burnofsky’s gray-goo scenario? Hadn’t they already won?

Then how was it they were still trapped in this paranoid universe where they used the names of dead or made-up madmen? How was it that they were still taking orders from an invisible character called Lear?

The thought was out of his mouth before he could check it. “Why are we still doing this?”

Wilkes snorted. “Pretty blue eyes asks the right question. Why are we still doing this?”

“Because we haven’t won yet,” Plath said. But she didn’t quite like that answer. “It’s not over yet.”

“How does it get to be over?” Keats asked. “How will we know it’s over?” He had been leaning forward, now he drew back. “Look, isn’t this about the knowledge, really? Once we know how to make nanobots and biots, how do we ever unlearn that? It’s like nuclear bombs, isn’t it. How do you stop it spreading once the technology exists?”

“When the last of us is dead, it’s game over. For us. Right?” This was the first time Billy had spoken. “I mean, it’s a game, right? Biots versus nanobots. Take over the world. Isn’t it a game?”

“No, it’s real,” Plath insisted. “The Armstrong Twins are real, and we’re real, and Jin was real.”

“Yeah, but …” Billy felt the weight of disapproval. “Yeah, but games are real. That’s what you don’t get, with respect to you, Plath. Games are real to the people playing them. While they’re playing.”

No one said anything; after all, Billy was just a kid. But Keats couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d just heard something important, that Billy had blurted out the truth. It could be real, and dangerous, and deadly, and yet still be a game, he thought.

When was a game over? When you lost.

Or when you won and went off in search of a new game.

Biot versus nanobot. That was the game. But now, according to Plath by way of Lear, a new level was being revealed. Something out there could kill biots remotely. Dead biots meant madness. It meant killing yourself on an escalator in Saks.

So why bother to blow up a boat? If you could generate then kill biots, then why did it seem so much like manipulation? The Armstrong Twins would not hesitate if they could kill Plath and him.

So why wasn’t he dead?

Because the game was somehow more complicated than that.

The video played again, looping. Keats watched the faces watching Nijinsky. They watched in surprise as he stared and spoke to the air. Then in shock as he threw himself down the escalator. Horror as he fed the silk scarf into the mechanism that choked the life from him.

Then, Keats picked up the remote and rewound.

“Enough!” Wilkes yelled.

“Wait,” Keats said. “Don’t watch Jin. Watch the people around him. That woman. The one with the ink.”

He advanced it in slow motion, focusing on the woman.

She pulled out her phone and glanced at it. Checking e-mail? Or checking the time?

She stole a glance at Nijinsky.

“She’s looking at Jin,” Keats said.

“He was a good-looking dude, maybe she—” Wilkes began, but then she fell silent, because now was the part where Nijinsky started to lose it. The people nearest were shooting him irritated or concerned looks. The woman was not. She was half smiling, watching … waiting.

Waiting.

“She knows,” Keats said.

He cut to the next video, the horrific one showing Nijinsky on the escalator. There was a woman just a dozen steps behind him.

“Fuck! It’s her,” Wilkes said.

Now everyone was leaning toward the screen, checking the dress, checking the shoes, the hair, comparing them to the first images.

“Yes,” Plath confirmed. It’s the same woman. Jin got to this place by running, then hurling himself down the escalator. And she followed him? What kind of person follows a crazy man?”

Now, again, Nijinsky fed the scarf into the escalator.

But this time they watched the woman behind him—the shoulders, the hair.

She stepped past and over the strangling Nijinsky. Not panicked. Calm.

She knelt by Nijinsky. Her hand shot out, took something.

“The phone,” Plath said. “She took his phone. The time signatures. She sent the text.”

“It’s an Easter egg,” Keats said. “Billy’s right: it’s all a game. And that woman is an Easter egg. We are supposed to see her.”

Jindal could barely restrain himself. His first meeting with the returned Twins had ended with his being dismissed like a disappointing schoolboy. Now they would have to listen. “We have confirmation. Proof. They’ve hacked our network. Somehow they exploited a hole in the AmericaStrong computer system and worked their way back to us, back to core AFGC systems.”

Charles saw the meat of it immediately. “Floor Thirty-Four?”

Jindal shook his head so hard he couldn’t speak until he had stopped. “No, that is walled off entirely. But the good—”

“Do they have our nanobot blueprints? Our technical specs?”

“Yes. And they’ve been looking at this building.”