Did they mean to hand her over to the chanting mob? They had caught sight of her, the others standing on the catwalks, and soon a new chant began.
Join us! Join us!
They weren’t angry words, but the chant grew ever more intense. From encouraging to angry to hateful.
Join us!
It was a curse.
Join us!
It was a threat.
They hustled her down the stairs and through the now-enraged crowd. People spit on her. Someone punched her, then others. Her shirt was ripped. Someone pounded her calf repeatedly.
“You’re all crazy! You’re all crazy!” she screamed.
Someone in the crowd punched her in the mouth and various voices yelled, “Shut her up, shut her up, join us, join us!”
The officer and the two sailors were now having a hard time getting through the mob. KimKim slipped and Minako fell hard to the floor, crashing on her neck. A kick caught her shoulder. Feet were stomping all around her.
KimKim bent over her, shielding her with his body. He was scared, she could see it.
“You’re all crazy!” Minako screamed, on automatic now, as caught up in the madness of the moment as the fanatics around her.
“My friends!” a huge voice bellowed.
“It’s Mr Charles!” some cried out. “The Great Souls!”
The amplified voice repeated, “My friends! My friends! Calm yourselves! Calm yourselves!”
The kicks and punches lessened and the legs receded around Minako. But she did not stop screaming, “You’re all crazy!”
The sailors manhandled her up off the floor and half carried, half dragged her to the elevator lift. She saw the legs, the two and the one, and suddenly she was deposited at their feet, at the feet of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.
Charles’s voice boomed again as the lift began to rise. “My friends, do not hate this girl. She is simply unenlightened, as are too many in this sad world. But never fear! Our time is coming. The future belongs to us!”
Cheers rose like a tide all around her, and yet still she screamed, “You’re all crazy!”
Benjamin’s foot moved. The toe of his shoe was against her side. He pressed his weight down and ground the skin of her waist against the metal.
Minako heard Charles say, “We don’t have a twitcher aboard, brother.”
“So much the better,” Benjamin said. “The old ways, then. The old ways.”
“Where the hell is Burnofsky?” Bug Man asked Jessica. Back in the hotel room in Crystal City. Back to just the two of them, claustrophobic, the walls closing in again.
Go limp.
The president was doing whatever she was doing. Writing her crazy eulogy.
Bug Man was doing nothing.
Jessica was watching Evil Dead 2 on the TV. That kind of thing had never been her taste back in the old days. That kind of thing was Bug Man’s taste.
“I don’t know who Burnofsky is, baby,” Jessica said. “Do you want to have sex?”
“For God’s sake no!” Bug Man said, exasperated. “Jesus Christ, why would you think that? That’s not the answer to everything. That’s not—”
He was arguing with himself.
He was arguing with what he had done to her.
She turned her still-amazing eyes, those incredible hazel eyes that looked so alien in her African face, on him, all liquid willingness to please, and he wanted to punch her. Honest to God, he wanted to punch her in the face and see whether she responded with a bland, programmed response.
He could. He could punch her and she would ask him if he was tense, if he needed something to relax him, a massage perhaps, or a blow job.
Where the hell was Burnofsky? Bug Man had checked the flight and the traffic. There was no way it could take Burnofsky this long to get from National Airport to Crystal City. He could walk it in less time.
Go limp.
It was ridiculous! He had his nanobots all up in the brain of the single most powerful person on Earth, and he was sitting here doing nothing nothing nothing, waiting for some old burn-out junkie to show up. Go to the office and watch passively, as he had earlier, or sit here and cycle through the movies and TV shows.
This was not the game.
The game was going on without him.
Anthony Elder had a sudden, unbidden memory of himself in London. Of his life changing when he found a mate from school who had a high-speed Internet connection.
Anthony had practically moved into Mike’s home. They had played Batman Begins and Call of Duty 2, mostly. But the friendship began to wane when it became obvious that Anthony’s skills far exceeded Mike’s. Mike was not a talented gamer, and Anthony—who had adopted the online name Bug Man—was not just a good player, he was one of the best.
Tensions had come to blows and Anthony had come out on the losing end. It finished his friendship with Mike and forced him offline.
He might as well have been a junkie: he needed the game that badly. He sought out other kids at his school to replace Mike, but Anthony was not very good at making friends. He was arrogant and unwilling to hide it. He didn’t do particularly well in his classes, but no one believed it was from lack of ability.
Anthony just didn’t care.
He thought of the time between falling out with Mike and before the blessed day when his mother could finally manage a fast Internet connection as a sort of time of emptiness, of longing. Without the game—some game, any game—Bug Man was just Anthony.
He had Burnofsky’s number. He dialed it. It rang through to voice mail.