BZRK: Reloaded

They were running late, so there was no sequestering in a secure side room, the Secret Service after some debate allowed her to walk in the front door like a regular person. Everyone in the cathedral— and it was jam-packed—had of course been checked out, and in any case these were congressmen, senators, White House staff, major donors, foreign prime ministers, first ladies and first gentlemen, and other well-behaved folks. It was a sea of black suits and black dresses and somber looks.

The president’s pew was at the front. It felt like a very long walk between those massive columns, beneath that distant vault of a ceiling, past the eyes that followed her, that were always on the president. And of course the cameras, discreetly mounted on brackets, one aimed at the altar, one remotely controlled following her, and a third panning the room picking out this or that celebrity.

But there was no doubt that at this moment Morales was on just about every TV screen in America.

A rector preceded her, Gastrell and two Secret Service agents followed behind, but the president walked alone, arms at her sides, head high, eyes front. She walked at a steady pace, a reassuring pace, sending the message, that’s right, world, the president of the United States was still strong and in charge.

She sat. A sort of sigh of relief rose from the audience, and shuffling as people got comfortable.

The Right Reverend Jenny Hayes did a reading, followed by MoMo’s own parish priest, Father Miguel Richards. The choir sang. It was lovely. MoMo would have liked that, although he would have been bored by the readings.

Then the first lady of Canada, Hanna Ellstrom, gave the first eulogy. She’d been a friend to MoMo; they’d liked each other and had hung out at important functions while their more important spouses were doing their terribly important business. Ellstrom’s voice broke when she described a joke MoMo had played on her.

Then at last it was time for the main event. No one was expecting great eloquence from Morales. She had never been an especially compelling speaker.

As she walked slowly up the steps to the special bulletproof podium, the president knew that all she had to do was read the speech. It was short, just twelve minutes long.

Twelve minutes.

Bug Man had a sketchy, grainy view out over the audience at National Cathedral. He had excellent positions for viewing through the president’s eyes. After all, he’d had weeks to get it right. But there were still limits on the method, and none of the people were recognizable, they were just dancing gray pixels. The huge columns were just shapes and shadows.

The words on the autocue swam into view, ghostly and blurred. Only a few words could be made out. He might have brought in still more nanobots to refine the resolution, but he was going the opposite direction: his nanobots were retreating from the dark corners of the president’s brain, rushing for the exits, and soon those nanobots still attached to the optic nerve would also be detached.

There was no winning this game, but there was a way to keep BZRK from winning: destroy the value of what they had. And what they had was him: Anthony Elder, Bug Man.

They were after him because he controlled the president. If you can’t get the puppet, get the puppeteer. And if the puppeteer no longer pulls the strings?

It was bug-out time. Bug Man …out!

And then? And then what? The question made his stomach clench in a knot. He would have to run very far, very fast. Get his nanobots out of the president and leave them somewhere they would never be found. If he did that BZRK would have no use for him. The Twins would still try to kill him, but they’d look for him a whole lot harder if he still had a grip on Morales.

Was Vincent seeing what Bug Man was doing? He had to hope so, he had to pray, and he did pray most fervently, that Vincent saw he was bailing on the president.

“I’m out!” he yelled, chattering. “I’m getting out!”

Fighter nanobots, spinners, all of them were assembling at the far end of the president’s optic nerve, two dozen all together now, wheels down and racing for daylight.

Bug Man looked around for a piece of paper. Nothing. He pulled out his phone and thumbed text onto a note. Then as his tiny soldiers, all platooned together, ran full tilt, he held the message up in front of him. He pinched the text as large as it would go:

Bailing. No good to you now Vincent. I quit.

If it is possible for a place to be both hellish and beautiful, the drainpipe was it. Looking through her biot’s eyes, Plath looked up and saw hard fluorescent light from high above. It was a ring of light, brilliance around a dark center formed by the drain stopper.

A huge, rough pillar of steel rose up to the stopper and extended down, out of sight, to the levering mechanism. She would have liked to be there, climbing that steel post, because although it was tangled here and there, long stretches of it were clear.

But here, on the wall of the pipe, she was in a jungle. Hairs as big as anacondas, in every shape and type, formed a bewildering thicket. They soared free, or were squashed together; they were scaly and rough-barked; some were clean, others had joined to form nests of bacteria.

And such bacteria. Varieties she had never seen, some like soccer balls, some like tadpoles, some mere twitching sticks, still others busily dividing. They came in all the colors of a demented rainbow. These, here, were the great predators of the human race, the tiny bugs that twisted guts and dimmed eyes and burned humans alive from the inside.

If the bacteria were frightening, other things were startlingly beautiful—crystals of unknown provenance, bubbles of soap that turned the ring of light into a rainbow, fantastic sculptures of debris trapped in balls of hair.