BZRK: Apocalypse

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?

Again, a glimmer! It was moving away, but it evidently needed light. So did Plath, so any hope of concealment was forgotten now, any hesitation set aside with the decision to chase.

She saw him! Or at least an impression of something moving. She was gaining on him. Gaining! Which most likely meant it was a nanobot. That at least would be a relief.

Please, God, if there is a God down here in the meat, let it be the enemy, the true enemy.

Suddenly the light ahead dimmed as if it had dropped into a crevasse. She charged ahead, caught up in the chase, adrenaline flooding her system with urgency, breathing hard in her bed, trying to remain perfectly still so as not to wake Keats.

Her biot raced; she saw the dip ahead and killed her illumination, rendering herself almost invisible while using the enemy’s light as a beacon.

She looked down, and there it was, waiting for her.

It was no nanobot.

She grabbed Keats’s head in her hands and held it still, just inches away from her, stared into his eyes, pleading and said, “Noah, help me. Help me, Noah.”

“My Stockholm lair. Yeah. Lair. Because the supervillain needs a lair, yeah?”

It was a nice hotel suite, a very nice hotel suite at the Stockholm Grand. Nice view out over the very civilized waterfront with bright-lit ferries and stately buildings. Multiple bedrooms, understated taupes and beiges and earth tones.

“It’s not all that …” Bug Man started to say before stopping himself.

“Not so lairlike?” Lystra asked, and laughed. “Well, I have a much better lair somewhere else. Far to the south, you might say. You’ll like it … if I let you come with me.”

Bug Man stood as awkwardly as one might expect a young man to stand when threatened with death.

Lystra laughed again and waved him to a seat. He sat on leather. It made a squeaking sound that might almost have been a fart.

“That was … um …,” he said.

“Did you just fart in my presence?” She was pretending to look fierce. But Bug Man had seen her true ferocity, and this wasn’t it. He relaxed a very little bit.

Lystra went to a sideboard and poured an amber liquid into two heavy crystal glasses. She handed one to Bug Man.

He sniffed and recoiled.

“It’s Balcones True Blue. Lovely whiskey, that. Made with Hopi blue corn.” She took a single cube of ice with a pair of silver tongs, carried it to him, and dropped it in his glass. “You taste it now. Then you keep drinking as the cube melts, which lowers the proof. The flavor evolves. Each sip will be subtly different.”

Bug Man took a sip. It was fire in liquid form, and he started coughing, which made her laugh. It was a cruel laugh, and there, again, a glimpse of the harsh bone beneath soft flesh.

“My father used to let me drink whiskey with him,” Lystra said. She sat down opposite Bug Man. He glanced at her bare legs. She noticed.