Bzrk Apocalypse

ARTIFACT

An exchange of texts

Plath: Back in NYC. What is our mission?

Lear: Destroy AFGC.

Plath: What does that mean?

Lear: Find and kill the Twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated.

Plath: I’m to do this with 7 people?

Lear: You had your vacation. Besides there is an 8th.

Plath: Caligula?

Lear: I’ve always found him very useful.

[Long pause]

Lear: Time is short Plath.

Plath: Short why?

Lear: AFGC very close to developing remote biot-killer. Nature unspecified. Days not weeks until it is weaponized. You must strike before then. Tick tock. Death or madness.

ELAPSED TIME

The Gateway Hotel could not be repaired or rebuilt. The blowtorch heat of the burning LNG carrier-ship had burned everything capable of burning. Natural gas burns at temperatures ranging from 3,000 to 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, and that’s enough to incinerate furniture, carpet and paint. It’s also enough to melt glass and soften structural steel. A human body is a marshmallow.

The Gateway was a black, bent, crumpled horror that reminded some observers of a very old woman, bent by arthritis, in the act of falling to her knees.

Buildings on either side had burned as well. Buildings further back in Kowloon, where the gas had rolled through the streets before catching fire, were burned. Some had exploded, simply popped open like rotting fruit. Kowloon Park was a field of ash.

The Chinese government had not been able to conceal the extent of the disaster. It was visible from satellites and from the decks of passing ferries and cruise ships. This was Hong Kong, not some provincial outpost. The whole world passed through Hong Kong.

The government had kept a faithful account of the dead and presumed dead. Now over a thousand. The “presumed dead” included those so badly burned that no more than a few bones with the marrow boiled away had survived and could not be identified.

Divers were still pulling bodies out of the blistered and twisted hulk of the liquid natural gas carrier—the ship dubbed the Doll Ship—that lay at the bottom of Hong Kong harbor. The Chinese government was nowhere near as forthcoming on this part. The official story was that it had been simple error on the part of the ship’s captain. He was dead: he wasn’t going to argue.

No one spoke openly of the bodies of children found blown apart. No one spoke of the fact that one of the ship’s spheres, and possibly a second one as well (it was hard to tell), had never contained LNG but had instead been something very much like a human zoo.

Crewmen who had managed to jump ship were picked up and spirited away to a camp in far-off Qinghai province. A small number of British Royal Marines were held there as well. And twenty-four civilians, neither crew nor soldiers—inmates on the Doll Ship—were being held at a small local hospital that had been taken over by the Ministry of State Security. The MSS had drafted a dozen radiologists, neurosurgeons and pathologists, snatched them up from cities all over China and bundled them off to Qinghai.

Interrogations were under way.

Medical investigations were under way.

Neither was terribly gentle.

Chinese Premier Ts’ai attempted to shut down the camp, ordered all survivors to be executed and their bodies cremated. Which would have worked had not the governor of Qinghai province slow-walked that order. He smelled a rat.

Two weeks after the Hong Kong disaster, the MSS briefed certain members of the Central Committee on their findings from the survivors. And on Ts’ai’s unusual and very out-of-channels effort to shut down the investigation.

Twenty-four hours later the Chinese official news agency reported that Premier Ts’ai had suffered a stroke. He was getting the best care available, but doctors were not hopeful.

In fact, the top of the premier’s head had already been sawed off. His brain had been carefully scooped out of his skull, flattened and stretched, frozen, cut into handy one-centimeter sections, and was now being examined minutely under a scanning electron microscope.

They found numerous strands of extremely fine wire—nanowire—in segments as long as three centimeters, and a dozen tiny pins.

Similar wire had been found in the brains of survivors of the Doll Ship.

A careful—but less drastic—autopsy of President Helen Falkenhym Morales found no evidence of brain abnormality. Then again, the single nine millimeter bullet she had fired into her own head had bounced around a bit inside her skull and made a mess of the soft tissue.

The FBI director, a man who would not have fared well himself if his brain had been carefully examined under an electron microscope, pushed for the conclusion that the suicide was a result of depression following the death of her husband.

FBI forensic experts produced a report stating that the videotape purported to have been taken (by means unknown) directly through the president’s eye—the videotape that seemed to suggest that president Morales had beaten her husband to death—was a clever fake.

There was obviously no way for the images to be real. Presidents did not commit murder.

Then again, they didn’t make a habit of committing suicide, either. But that undeniably happened.

In a bit of historic irony, the authoritarian state of China discovered the truth, while the American democracy had thus far missed it.

But there were other investigations under way. A joint committee of Congress. An independent blue-ribbon panel featuring a former Secretary of Defense, a former senator from Maine, and the chairman, a former president of the United States.

Only one of them had thus far been compromised by busy little creatures laying wire.

Minako McGrath, who had been kidnapped and taken aboard the Doll Ship, was one of the few to escape entirely. With the help of an ex-marine, former Gunnery Sergeant Silver, who’d been aboard that floating horror show, she made her way back from Hong Kong to Toguchi, Okinawa, one step ahead of the Hong Kong authorities.

But she found some changes when she finally reached her home. Her Facebook and Twitter accounts were closed. Her Internet access—in fact her whole family’s Internet access—was blocked.

Then her mother was called in to see the commander of the local base where Minako’s father—himself a US marine—had been stationed before he was sent to Afghanistan and killed. She was told quite simply that if she could keep her daughter quiet her family would be safe, and her late husband’s official military service record would remain unblemished.

There was no direct threat. Just that promise. Just the carrot. The stick was only implied. The general looked sick to his stomach going even that far, but marines obey orders, and it was clear that he was passing on an order that came from very high up the chain of command.

Having been saved by one marine, and honoring the memory of her father, upon hearing the ultimatum Minako nodded solemnly and raised a hand in salute.

“Semper fi,” she said.

A week later Minako’s mother, the police chief of their little town, was offered a civilian contract to work in security on the base, at a seven-hundred-dollar-a-month increase in pay.

Minako got a Vespa motor scooter.

And from that point on, Minako only discussed the Doll Ship with her marines-supplied therapist, who duly shredded all records of her visits and prescribed Prozac.

Despite the separate efforts of the Chinese and US governments, Google searches for various conspiracies were up in the last month.

Way, way up.

Possible suspects included the Illuminati, the Church of Scientology, Anonymous, the Freemasons, the Roman Catholic Church, the Bilderberg Group, Iran, China, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, MI5 and MI6, Mossad, Agência Brasileira de Inteligência, direction centrale du Renseignement, the Russian Federal Security Service, and of course, space aliens.

With far fewer searches: the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.

And with only a handful of searches, most as a result of a accidental misspellings: BZRK.

There was no change whatsoever in searches for “Lear.”

FIVE

Plath. That was her name again. Plath, not Sadie.

She’d been back in New York for just thirty-six hours, sleeping the first half of that.

Plath was provided by the weather with a perfect disguise to move about the streets of New York. It was freezing and the faux-fur-lined hood of her coat along with superfluous glasses and her newly blonde hair made it very unlikely that anyone would recognize her.

She had taken a cab to the Tulip. The Armstrong headquarters was not a place where she could take any, even slight, risks of being recognized.

But she had gotten out and walked the last block to the Freedom Tower. It soared up into low-hanging clouds. One hundred and four stories of defiance to replace the lost World Trade Center towers.

She had not yet been born when the towers fell, but she had seen the video. They’d had a unit on terrorism in school.

The Tulip was not as tall as either the World Trade Center or the Freedom Tower.

She had distinct memories of the videos of that day, September 11, 2001. Funny that she recalled them so clearly. But there it was, playing over and over in her mind.

The jets.

The initial explosions.

The spreading horror of billowing smoke.

Two hundred people leaping to their deaths rather than die more slowly of smoke and flame.

The awe-inspiring, horrific collapse as the melted, hollowed-out building fell.

Find and kill the twins. Destroy all AFGC records. Kill or wire all AFGC scientists and engineers. Their technology must be obliterated.

It was all in the Tulip. The technology, the records, the scientists. The Twins. Up there at the top, floors, what, sixty-seven? Sixty-eight? She’d been rather distracted the last time she was in the Tulip, hard to recall the exact floors where the Twins lived and looked out over the concrete and haze of the city.

A single skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.

Her breath came out in a cloud of ice crystals. She looked around, feeling obscurely guilty, but no one in the sparse crowd of tourists or the crew at work around a steaming manhole was looking at her.

Under her breath, Plath made a sound. It was the sound of a slow-motion explosion.

Lystra Reid watched Plath as she looked up at the Freedom Tower and knew exactly what she was thinking. Exactly. She was contemplating destruction, yeah, yeah, yeah . Destruction. She was envisioning it already.

That was quick . But then, if you want great results, hire great people. Even if they are a wee bit nuts.

Lystra had a Starbucks latte in her hand. One of the things she would miss, she supposed: convenient and at least somewhat drinkable coffee. There were things about this game space, this paradigm, that she would regret losing. But it was never good to become complacent.

Time for the 2.0. As there was a Grand Theft Auto 6, there must inevitably come a day when GTA 6 was done and a GTA 7 must be born. Even the greatest game was eventually played out. When you had squeezed all the fun out of Portal you needed a Portal 2, 3, 4 . . .

“Yeah. Yeah.”

She shivered—it was cold—and tossed the cup into a trash bin. Her newest tattoo was itching and she scratched her rib cage discreetly. She was just thirty feet or so from Plath. Plath was, what, fifteen years her junior? But they could have been sisters, perhaps, in a different world. Maybe, come to think of it, they would be, in this new game Lystra was creating.

She acknowledged her own loneliness. Emotional honesty did not frighten her. There had been a price to pay for becoming what she was: rich, successful, powerful beyond what anyone would guess. Arguably at this point, the most powerful person on Earth.

No, the truth never scared Lystra.

Lonely? True. Strange? True, yeah. Yeah. Crazy? Well, once upon a time, yeah, but no longer.

She closed her eyes and replayed the memory of seeing madness overtake Sandra Piper. God, that had been intense. The eye-stabbing thing, wow, that was the kind of detail you only got from seeing things first-hand.

She remembered a girl trying to strangle herself with a bedsheet. Crazy people did crazy things. Back in the day, back in the old days, yeah. But never anything to match the weirdness of watching a famous actress stabbing her own eyes. Now that was crazy.

Sad to think that she would have to retreat soon and watch the endgame play out from a distance. But not yet. There would be many rich, visceral experiences to come before she headed south.

And then?

And then she would play the new game and win that as well. Or not. She might not master the new game. She might even lose.

The idea made her smile. Her father had taught her to understand that life was a walk on a tightrope and death was the ground. Sooner or later, no matter how agile you were, the ground would claim you.

He’d been full of gloomy pronouncements back in the old days, sitting in lawn chairs outside their trailer as the carny shut down for the night. They would sit there, the two of them, the man and the child, as the lights went out on the Mad Mouse and the Ferris wheel. They would sit and sip their drinks—bourbon for her father, unsweetened iced tea for her—and acknowledge the nods and the weary greetings as the other carnies headed for their own digs.

The nights had almost always been warm and muggy. The carnival mostly played the south: Baton Rouge, Bogalusa, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg. She’d seldom been cold, which was maybe why the cold attracted her now. Cold was clean. Hot was sweaty and dirty.

Back then, back before the train wreck that was in her future, Lystra had wanted two things. For her mother to come back. And to be able someday to take over a couple of the sideshow games. An old man named Sprinkle operated the coin toss, the dart throw, the water pistol and the ring toss. He let his games get shabby, refusing to spring for so much as a few cans of paint.

Lystra thought she could do better. She could make the games livelier and more profitable. The key was to make them a bit easier. Let the marks take home a teddy bear occasionally; it was good advertising. Run an honest game, attract more players, pay out more in prizes—but offer more levels, more depth, and make more money in the end.

“Yeah!” Lystra said to no one. It made her smile to think how even then, even when she was a lonely seven-year-old, she was ambitious.

But yes, lonely. She had always wanted a younger sister. Someone like Plath, maybe. Someone to look up to her. Someone to talk to and play with.

Even a brother would have been welcome.

Interesting thought.

“A game within a game?” Lystra muttered under her breath.

Would it add spice? Yes. Would it complicate the overall plan? She walked it through step-by-step in her mind and concluded that it would have only a small downside risk.

It would be good to have someone to appreciate what she had accomplished. It would be good to have someone to watch it all play out with her.

“Minions,” she said and laughed. “I need minions. Yeah.”

SIX

“No. Vincent is not ready to resume control.” This was from Anya Violet, and spoken in a whisper. “He may never be ready.”

Plath was making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the kitchen of the new Manhattan safe house. One for herself and one for Keats. And seeing Billy’s level of interest she pulled out two more slices of bread for him.

They were in the kitchen: Plath, Keats, Billy the Kid who really was a kid, and Dr Anya Violet. Anya was of undetermined age—perhaps in her thirties, perhaps she had edged into her forties—but to Plath at least she seemed beautiful, sophisticated and effortlessly sexy in a way that she decided must only come with some age and some experience.

Anya had not yet chosen a nom de guerre. She thought it was a silly affectation. Of course, she understood the thinking behind choosing the name of some mad or at least seriously unbalanced person: it signaled acceptance of the core reality for BZRK members. It signaled a break with the past. It signaled a chin-out acknowledgment of the fact that madness was very likely in their future.

She understood all that, but Dr Anya Violet was not a child and was not interested in following the rules of the clubhouse. Nor was she sure she wanted to accept the authority of a sixteen-year-old girl. Yes, Plath was the daughter of Grey McLure, Anya’s former employer, and Plath had proven herself in battle. And it had become clear that she was a bit more . . . stable . . . than Nijinsky, who had been in charge during Vincent’s recovery.

But Anya was suspicious of money. She could call herself Plath, but Anya knew who Sadie was. She was rich, that’s what she was. Worse yet, she’d always been rich. She’d had life handed to her. Anya would rather have seen Keats in the top job, because there was a boy who had never been handed anything, and Anya instinctively trusted working people. She herself had come from nothing and nowhere to earn a PhD. She shared with Keats an emotional knowledge of hard times and hard choices.

But Keats was totally loyal to Plath.

Billy was a child. Wilkes was . . . well, she was Wilkes. Nijinsky had to a great extent lost the confidence of the group. And that left two people to run things at the New York cell of BZRK: Vincent or Plath.

Plath, who saw a great deal when she paid close attention, saw all this in Anya’s smoky eyes. Vincent might or might not still be damaged, but Anya loved him and would never admit he was ready to take charge again. Not if it meant risking his life and sanity.