BZRK

But for wiring the human brain? It’s the user interface. It’s the betrayer. The Judas of the brain.

It is theoretically possible for nanotechnology to tap the hippocampus to in effect “light up” the locations of a specific memory. It might even be possible then for this theoretical nanotechnology to shut down areas of memory. Or even to augment them, or alter their import.

One could imagine a world in which a nanotechnology robot could run an artificial neural fiber between two different memories, or between a memory and areas of the brain associated with specific emotions.

Of course such a thing would be a criminal misuse of a promising technology, and I think it falls into the category of scare story rather than genuine threat.

TWENTY-SIX

Wilkes and Ophelia lay on the floor beneath billowing smoke drawn in from the gift store, where the fire had spread despite the sprinklers.

They were down, but Ophelia’s biots were not out, not yet, they were rushing to find refuge down in the meat of one of the twitchers.

Panic reigned in the room. The two twitchers—the young Asian boy and a pimply white kid with a lot of wavy brown hair—yanked off their helmets, TFDs kept screaming, “Stay down, stay down,” although neither of the bruised women were likely to get up.

And now came the shouts of “Drop your weapons, now!” And those were not TFDs, those were UN security, and not the rent-a-cops, either, but serious hard guys in body-armor and helmets, armed with assault weapons.

Some part of Ophelia’s mind saw what would happen next. The AFGC operation here was blown wide open. There was no way, none, to cover this up. The Armstrongs had made a terrible mistake, and now everything would be exposed.

They couldn’t let that happen. Which meant …

“They’re going to blow the room!” a man’s voice cried.

“No!”

The twitchers leapt from their seats; TFDs bolted, shoving them aside. The UN security, believing they were being charged, fired.

Ophelia grabbed Wilkes’s collar and dragged her toward the door and the security guys yelled at her to freeze and in one second he was going to squeeze that trigger and—

“They’re going to—” Ophelia yelled.

And then the explosion.

It was an incendiary placed in a suitcase. It was detonated remotely by Sugar Lebowski who had seen it all on-screen in her command post on the fifty-eighth floor.

Jindal had come down from the fifty-ninth, feeling more comfortable with security than up on the empty twitcher floor. His face was the color of cigarette ash. He turned horrified eyes on her.

“No alternative,” she whispered.

The only way with the whole operation exposed. Close off avenues to exposure. Damage control.

First she’d lost Nijinsky. Now this.

Jesus.

Disaster.

On the monitor she had seen a flash of white followed by nothing. She stood there willing a picture to return, but of course, no, that wasn’t happening.

Sugar knew that after the initial explosion there would be choking smoke and a fire that would burn so hot nothing would be left in the room. Not a wire, not a fingerprint, not even the metal in filled teeth. And definitely no nanobots.

She was shaking. Her hands trembled.

No choice. None at all. Not once the fire department and UN security got there, and coming right behind them, the SWAT teams and the FBI and the whole alphabet soup of investigatory agencies. They would have found everything.

Now they would find a few bones and little else.

Which might also be all anyone would find of Sugar Lebowski. Her mouth tasted like vomit. Her heart was hammering away so loud she almost couldn’t hear Jindal.

“Are they all dead?” Jindal asked. He sounded like a little kid asking his mommy.

“They’re fucking charcoal,” Sugar said harshly.

There was a camera mounted openly on the wall of the AFGC control room. Of course she knew the Twins had other cameras as well. Up there, a hundred feet above her, they would be watching. She could feel it.

It was clear to Sugar at that moment that she would be very lucky to live out the day. Letting Nijinsky escape would have been enough to infuriate the Twins. Yes, she’d been attacked, taken by surprise, and yes, Dietrich should share some of the blame, but they weren’t understanding, forgiving people, those two. But that paled to insignificance compared to this.

Was she so valuable to the company, to Charles and Benjamin, that they would have to keep her alive? Would she ever make it home to see her daughter?

Sugar turned to face the camera. “That’s just two twitchers,” she said. “We still have Bug Man, Burnofsky, One-Up, and Dietrich. One-Up is running late but she’s reliable. When she gets to the location with Dietrich, we can repurpose either Kim’s or Alfredo’s nanobots to him at the hotel location. If you choose, we can also shift One-Up from her current target.”

There was of course no answer.

Her insides twisted. She glanced at the link to the hotel location. It showed Dietrich already suiting up as the spare twitcher. She peered past him. The camera angle wasn’t good. One-Up’s chair was on the other side of a bed that had been pushed out of the way, and light was coming in through the window that blinded the camera a little.

But peering hard she could see that the far chair was still empty. She’d just reassured Twofer that One-Up was reliable. She was a prima donna, but she always showed up. But this was no time for her bullshit.

“Where the hell is One-Up?” Sugar yelled, losing her cool a bit as she considered her own likely demise.