“I met Lear once. I didn’t look at him. Her, if you say so. Maybe that explains why I was told not to turn around and look. He, she, whoever, used voice masking. I assumed it was so that later I wouldn’t be able to recognize the voice.”
“And did you know Lear planned to do this? To use biot madness this way?”
“No.”
Plath set her teacup aside carefully. Her hands were still hard to control with any finesse. The cold seemed to have sunk deep in her, joining the cold, dead spot where Noah had been held in her thoughts. “Where do you stand, Vincent?”
He did not pretend he didn’t understand. He grasped her meaning immediately. “I’m not sure I know who I am,” he began.
Wilkes interrupted. “Yeah, well, welcome to the new reality. We’ve all been mind-fucked one way or the other.” She laughed her mirthless heh-heh-heh and said, “We really are BZRK now, I guess. Crazy.”
“I wish they would stop showing that,” Anya said, transfixed by the TV.
“Where do you stand, Vincent?” Plath repeated.
“I have to …” He began, hesitated, shook his head, and continued. “I have to go back to basics. To what I believe. For a start, my name is not Vincent. It’s Michael Ford.”
“I’m sticking with Wilkes. It works for me.”
“I’m Michael Ford,” he said, almost wonderingly. Like a little kid talking about some new and amazing thing he’d just learned. “I’m Michael. I believe … I believe people should be free, that’s why … I believe they should be left alone. That’s why I joined BZRK.”
“That’s why everyone joins,” Anya said, speaking that last word with distaste. “No one ever joins to do evil. It just always ends up that way.”
Vincent winced as if she’d struck him.
Plath said, “Burnofsky is releasing self-replicating nanobots. Maybe they were all destroyed in the Tulip, maybe not. If he did it, if they aren’t all killed, well … anyway, the Twins and Burnofsky are no longer the problem. Lear is the problem. And I don’t think she’s done. I think she’ll keep at it. She wants to …” She shrugged. “I have no idea what she wants.”
“Noah would have,” Vincent said softly. “He was a gamer. This is all a game. It’s been a game from the start.”
Plath stared at him, thinking. He did not look away. “A game,” she said finally. “And what’s the point of this game?”
“Games have no point,” Vincent said. “The point of the game is the game. The purpose is to play. But games have structure. They are built and written. And you can only play one at a time. Lear is wiping the board of the old game, replacing it with his … her own game.”
“How do we win?”
“To win you have to understand the …” He shook his head. “You can’t beat the game designer at her own game.”
“Sure you can,” Wilkes said. “I used to beat my little brother at games all the time. I’d pull the power cord out of the wall. Game over.”
Before she got on her plane, Lystra Reid, Lear, punched a code into her phone and pushed Send.
The text went to the nearest cell-phone tower. The signal went from there to a central router that pushed it up to a satellite from whence it was bounced to another satellite, and still another as it wound its way south. Eventually it was picked up by a satellite dish.
From there it traveled just a few hundred feet to a computer server that recognized the code and translated it into sixteen thousand individual digital instructions that then mostly retraced the digital path of the incoming message.
Elapsed time, 3.4 seconds.
In crèches concealed in locations in several cities across North America, Europe, and Asia, DNA stew was bathed in various enzymes before receiving three micro-doses of drugs and a final jolt of electricity.
Forty-eight thousand biots—three for each of the sixteen thousand DNA signatures—came to life.
Only fifteen thousand, eight hundred and four people (a number had died since their fateful visit to a medical testing lab) saw windows open in their minds.
Of those, fewer than a third understood what it meant.
They generated more than three thousand terrified calls to 911 in the U.S. and 999 in the UK and 112 in the European Union.
“That’s the first tranche,” Lear said. To the pilot, she said, “Okay, we can go now.”
Bug Man did not want to ask. He risked making her angry, and in this new world, where his life belonged to her, he did not want to do that. But he couldn’t help himself.
“My mum?”
“By now she’s thinking, ‘Blimey, what’s that then?’ ” Lear said, switching to an exaggerated British accent. “There’s windows in me head, innit?”
Bug Man’s throat convulsed. Tears came to his eyes, impossible to stop.
“Best to move on, Buggy,” Lear said. “Get over it. Look at me. My father died tonight, and do I seem all weepy? Hey, have you decided what color teeth you want?”
“What?”
“The teeth. The teeth!” She pointed at her own. “How about green? I like green.”
As the jet taxied the acid rolled toward forty-eight thousand biots.
“Hah, there we go, yeah,” Lear said. “Now we’re going to play.”
“We know her name now. Lystra Reid,” Plath said.