BZRK

“Whoa. No, whoa. No, wait up.”

Again, testing the Velcro. Again, not possessing superstrength. The Velcro gave up a few gritty Velcro sounds, but that was all.

“Pound was considered perhaps the greatest poet of the twentieth century.” The doctor locked the cart’s wheels and swung a bracket around to affix the machine to the chair leg in such a way that the glittering chain of the saw came to within a quarter inch of the back of the chair leg.

“Okay, I’ve quite changed my mind,” Noah said.

“But I’ve gone to all this trouble.” Pound winked up at him. “Unfortunately, Pound was also mentally disturbed. He was a rabid anti-Semite. And he was a supporter of Hitler.”

Pound had gone around to Noah’s left. He picked up a wire, thicker than the others, a cable really, and ending in two small alligator clips. Pound applied one of the alligator clips to Noah’s earlobe.

“Jesus!” Noah cried. “That bloody hurts!”

“Yes, and it will hurt a lot more later. I’ll just apply the ground to your nose.” The second clip pinched Noah’s nostril.

“All right then,” Pound said. “The sooner we start, the sooner we’re done.”

“What am I supposed to do?” The clips hurt. The presence of a chain saw was terrifying. And Noah did not want to hear about insane Nazi poets.

“Two games. One is the familiar first-person-shooter sort of game. The second is a different game, one that requires you to traverse a complex three-dimensional structure wherein you are represented by a cute little robot called Nano.”

Noah’s eyes blazed at that word. His brother had babbled that word madly.

Nano nano nano.

This then was what had driven Alex mad.

“This isn’t a game!” Noah cried, suddenly seeing the truth. “You’re going to do what you did to my brother!”

Dr. Pound raised his eyebrows in a leer. “The funny thing about Ezra Pound? He did much of his best work in a mental institution. You have thirty seconds to learn the game,” Dr. Pound said, walking over to his laptop. “Then we will begin.”

Both video monitors came on.

On the right Noah was represented by a gun. Symbols on the right side of the screen. Weapons choices? The environment a London street. No, not London: the taxis were yellow. New York, maybe. Animations of pedestrians walked by, cabs and cars and trucks drove by.

The graphics were impeccable. The sound was realistic.

On the left screen, the scenery was inexplicable. He was represented by a spider. The spider was atop a wavy, corrugated surface beneath a sort of Dalí cathedral of soaring buttresses.

When he flexed the left glove—no, no, they were crossed, that’s right. So right glove, left screen. When he flexed, the spider moved. And the gun. Hands crossed: he would need to remember that.

Okay, a game. Focus on that. They hadn’t sawed Alex’s leg off. He was panicking for nothing, had to stay calm here; it was all part of that Chinese American dude’s test, all about that. So foc—

“Aaaahhh!” The alligator clips sent a stab of unbelievably intense, immediate pain shooting from ear to nose. It convulsed that whole side of his face. His left eye filled with tears.

“Just so you understand the stakes,” Dr. Pound said. “And now: game on!”

A woman in the shooter game, just a housewife by the look of her, drew a knife and jabbed it straight for Noah’s face. He twisted the glove, causing his avatar to dodge, and flicked his right finger experimentally. His gun fired. The round hit a passing car, shattering its window.

And suddenly, the unmistakable, ear-shattering noise of a chain saw. Real world. Not game.

He shot a look down, and oh my God, it was spinning, and now the teeth were just grazing the wood of the chair leg, with splinters flying and sawdust cascading.

The left! Three crudely mechanical robots, not so different from his own avatar, came rushing across the sphere, and that wasn’t as important as the way a cab’s window was rolling down and a gun appeared and Noah twisted his glove and fired and the shooter’s very, very realistic face suddenly had a neat round hole in its forehead.

And the tiny buglike creatures in the other game, the left game, fired what looked like cute little beam weapons at—

“Goddamnit!” The electric shock again and stronger this time.

The little robots fired again and once more his face was convulsed, but now he’d missed the big man who came rushing out of an alley with an axe and swinging it and his avatar crumpling and the chain saw shrieked as it bit into the chair leg.

“Stop it!” Noah screamed, but he had no time for screaming because he had to propel his Nano avatar forward while stepping back from the axe coming down again and the little bugs spraying something at him and—

“Jesus!” as the shock seemed to blow his consciousness apart while the chain saw screeched as it bit fully into solid oak, and he could feel the splinters and feel the wind coming off it.

And then, the calm descended.

The shrill sound of the saw seemed now to come from a great distance.

Noah unsaw everything beyond the frames of the monitors.

He unfelt the fear.

He detached himself from the chair and the Velcro and the pinching of his nose and ear and unremembered his brother, and stopped feeling or thinking …

He leapt, came down behind the closest of the tiny robots and stabbed it with his needle-sharp leg and fired into the face of the man with the axe while racing across the sphere and flexing his spider legs and flying and pivoting to land on a bumpy gray wall that instantly attacked him with sticky fuzz balls and another shock and he kicked off a graffitied New York City wall and fired in midair and the businessman with the machine pistol never even aimed died with a bullet through his neck, arterial blood pumping.