BZRK

One of them pointed at Nijinsky.

“Shit,” Nijinsky said.

Vincent collapsed the legs on the left of V3 and the right of V4 and rolled the biots over the legs of the blinded nanobots.

Bug Man’s aerial attack missed, and he slammed into the blinded nanobots, stabbing his own creatures.

A net wash: two of Bug Man’s boys dead, but time wasted and time was not his friend.

Time to swim.

He pushed off into the transparent fluid. Biots were not good swimmers—their legs could motor away, but the result was more of a churn than a swim. Twisting the claws with each stroke could give it some additional forward momentum, but not much. The only comfort was that nanobots were even worse.

The biots floated just above the massed nanobot army.

“You look familiar,” a cop said to Nijinsky. And just in time Nijinsky’s fingers slid from the fake passport in his inner coat pocket to the real one.

“Well, I do some modeling,” he told the officer, a short, powerfully built woman.

The male officers scowled.

“Where have I seen you?”

Nijinsky shrugged. His biots were racing to catch up to the battle raging deep within the president’s brain. He was not Vincent—experiences on multiple levels at once tended to make him a bit slow and distracted.

“You mean …” he said as his biots dodged around a sticky cluster of macrophages.

“Like what do you model?” she asked, getting less friendly by the second. She flipped open his passport while Vincent, behind him, waited with seeming calm and a slightly puzzled expression. “Simple question, Mr. Hwang. What do you model?”

“Oh. Well, I guess most people recognize me from the Mountain Dew billboards.”

The cop shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”

“Armani underwear?”

She crinkled her forehead at him, comparing face to photo. “Were you ever in a movie?”

Yes, he had been in a movie. But he wasn’t happy about it. And the cop had been playing with him because she was grinning, and he could see that she was anticipating enlightening her fellow officers.

“Yes, Officer,” he said, “I—”

“It’s sergeant,” she corrected, and pointed at the stripes on her sleeve.

“Sergeant,” he corrected tersely. “I was in the last Saw movie.”

“What happened to you in that movie?” Now the other cops were grinning, knowing there was a funny coming.

Nijinsky sighed. “I was castrated by a chain saw.”

“Ouch,” one of the men said.

“Must have been after you did the underwear ad, huh?” the woman asked, enjoying the moment immensely, although to her credit she avoided guffawing.

“I’m so glad I can be comic relief, Sergeant,” Nijinsky said as his biots dug through the meninges of the president and pushed their way into the brain itself.

“Did you see anything suspicious, Mr. Hwang?”

He shrugged. “There were a bunch of sirens, we looked around, and someone said there was a fire.”

“And why did you come to the UN today?”

Time to take a chance on getting Vincent out with him. “I’m actually on a date. My friend here,” he indicated Vincent, “is a big fan of President Morales. I told him we wouldn’t be able to see anything. But …” Nijinsky shrugged.

Vincent carefully led a floating nanobot and fired the fléchette gun this biot carried. The pellets were slowed instantly, but with extraordinary luck they might jam a joint on the nanobot.

The cops checked Vincent’s ID and asked him the same question, but then the sergeant said, “Go on, Mr. Hwang. You’ve suffered enough.”

“Ouch,” a second officer said.

Vincent sliced a badly positioned nanobot open and grinned, as though sharing Nijinsky’s discomfort.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Plath lay in the garbage.

And she walked through the deep folds of a human brain. It was a long trek to the hippocampus. It was buried deep in the crumpled tofu. Wilkes had taught her the way, the long way down and under, to find the brain stem, that stalk a hundred times as thick as the largest sequoia.

“Then just go north,” Wilkes had said.

“North?”

“Up.”

“How do you tell which way is up?”

“Blow a bubble, see which direction it floats,” Wilkes had said, then she had added, “Of course, biots can’t blow bubbles.”

Then Wilkes had relented. “If it seems like the stem is getting smaller, you’re going south. If you run into spaghetti the size of a subway train, you’re heading north.”

Plath had found the cerebellum, the spaghetti bowl. She’d pressed on beneath, lost but maybe not, going in the right direction or not. Someday maybe to emerge. Or not, and if not then to leave her own sanity down here, down in the meat.

Maybe Keats had escaped. Surely. Maybe he was free, but they might have him. She wished she was still tapped into the eye so she could see if Keats was suddenly dragged before the Armstrong Twins. And because then she would be within reach of light and air and escape.

Was there something unique about the brain upon which Plath’s biots walked?

This was a brain that had ordered kidnappings, beatings, and murders.

This was the brain that had turned a silly cult into a tool for recruiting an army.

This was the brain that dared to plot a new course for evolution itself. That desired the end of all human freedom. That might, by action or by error, unleash upon the world the catastrophe of self-replicating nanobots.