KimKim used two fingers to pry Minako’s eyelid open and quickly pushed the plunger.
“Ah!” Benjamin cried. “Like a roller coaster.”
“Now me, now me, the second syringe!” Charles ordered. “In the other eye!”
KimKim raced for the second syringe and now Minako was sobbing on the edge of hysteria. She started babbling numbers. “One, two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen.”
“What is she doing?” Charles demanded, distractedly.
“Prime numbers, you dolt,” Benjamin snarled.
“Nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine, thirty-one.”
Charles tried to ignore his brother’s condescension—Benjamin had always been better at math—and focused instead on the virtual control panel that appeared in the screen the helmet projected—lopsidedly—onto his eye. His fingers twitched in the gloves. The interface was a virtual touchscreen. He searched for the button labeled, Register.
He pushed it by barely moving his index finger. A second prompt opened up. Did he want to register nanobot package six? Yes, he did.
And then, “Ah!”
It was startling, though he’d seen it many times on video. All at once he was looking through six sets of sensors. It was hard to make sense of what he was seeing. A tangle of mechanical legs and sensor arrays and immobile wheels. The nanobots were not neatly stacked but rather tangled in a ball.
KimKim hit the plunger and the nanobots all exploded down a steel pipe and landed in a spare splash of liquid in Minako’s eye.
“Thirty-seven, forty-one, forty-three, forty-seven!”
The visuals were too much, too overwhelming, too many eyes looking in too many directions. What was it Bug Man did when he had too many nanobots to control individually? Platooning. And there was the prompt in the form of a question: Platoon?
Charles said, “Yes,” then realized this was not a voice-activated control. He drew a finger around the six nanobot avatars and touched the Platoon? prompt.
The nanobots moved automatically into a formation, two lines of three.
Sudden darkness.
Charles awkwardly shifted the helmet to see out into the world. He looked at Minako. KimKim had let go of her eyelid. She was squeezing her eyes tight shut again, still rattling off prime numbers. He felt a moment of pity for her fear.
But pity was weak tea compared to the fascination of feeling himself actually down—physically in—a place he’d only seen secondhand. He pulled the eyepiece back into alignment.
There was no sense of touch. He poked a leg at the eye surface beneath him. All six of his nanobots did the same. No sensation. But the visuals were amazingly convincing. He was there, actually there!
He had much to learn, and Charles knew he would never be Bug Man or Burnofsky. But oh, Lord, it was amazing.
Then with a flick of a finger he sent his six nanobots racing. The center wheels dropped into place, the legs spread out like a canoe’s outriggers.
And zoom!
Zoom!
The speed was breathtaking. Charles had never even walked quickly, let alone run, let alone this wild motorcycle speed.
“Min,” Charles said. “Call to the galley and order us some coffee and sandwiches. We’ll be here for some time.”
Can a damaged mind be cured?
Can a damaged mind be cured by subtraction?
Can the thing, the one thing, that sent you over the edge merely
be removed from your brain?
Is it like writing a book, where the author can simply highlight a scene and hit the Delete button and change the course of the story?
Is it all just a data file? Is that all the human mind is: a sort of computer made of meat? Highlight folder: Delete. Empty trash. All gone.
All better now.
Shane Hwang, who called himself Nijinsky, considered these philosophical questions and badly, badly wanted not to make a decision.
“There’s cutting,” he said to Plath, who was still in her easy chair but not looking at all easy. “And there’s burning with acid.”
“Jesus,” Plath said. “I . . .” She stood up. She paced away, looking strangely tall beneath the low dirt ceiling, turned, and came back. “I think it’s as close as he ever came to some kind of …not joy, that’s not the right word. Gaming, I mean, it’s as close as he came to feeling like he belonged.”
Nijinsky noticed that Keats stood awkwardly, wanting to make some physical contact with Plath, not doing it for fear of …something.
“He’s upstairs growling like a dog,” Wilkes said in a grating voice. “We have to try something, right?”
“We might be cutting his soul out,” Plath said, twisting her fingers together.
Wilkes made a rude sound. But she didn’t argue, she couldn’t. Instead she pushed a thumbnail into the flesh of her arm. Hard.
Speaking of crazy people, Nijinsky thought mordantly.
Like any of them were normal. Keats and Plath might have come in normal, but they wouldn’t stay that way. Wilkes had always been a little nuts. And maybe he himself had been normal, or something like it, once upon a time.
What did you think this was? Nijinsky asked himself. Did you think this was a romance novel? It’s war.
What did you think you would become when you got into this? Did you think you were a hero? You pushed the green button, Shane. You didn’t see the results, but you know what happened. You know that those men were killed.
They were there to kill us, all of us. Kill or be killed.
“What would Vincent want?” Keats asked, speaking for the first time.