BZRK Reloaded Read online

  The driver looked skeptical until he heard the gunshot from behind. The driver had not survived the waves of war in Sudan just to die here in Washington, DC.

  He floored it.

  The cab sped away. It was then that Farid realized the bullet had gone in his mouth and out through his cheek. It had taken the top off a molar in the process, but he was alive.

  Jessica gazed longingly out of the window at the city, Washington, DC, as she sat astride Bug Man and rubbed his narrow back with long, steady strokes.

  The sun had gone down and painted the Washington monument orange. Then the rain came, and the landscape disappeared in gloom. It was depressing. Surely over there, somewhere, was a club, a night spot. Something.

  It was right there, across the river. All that history. And probably shopping as well. Restaurants. Boutiques. And the White House and all that.

  It was a curiously squat city, more like Brooklyn, where both Jessica and Bug Man—she knew him as Anthony—lived, than like Manhattan. It didn’t look to be such an important place.

  “Can’t we go out tonight?” she asked. To ask the question she leaned down, flattening herself against him, and tickled the back of his neck with her lips.

  “We can’t go out,” he muttered. “I’ve told you that about nine times.”

  She pouted. He failed to notice.

  “Couldn’t we at least go downstairs to one of the restaurants?” No answer.

  She had known Anthony for much longer than she had loved him. At first he’d been nothing to her, just a boy two years her junior, not especially handsome, definitely not tough or rich or exciting.

  But over a very short time she had come to first notice him, and then to like him, and then to want and need him almost desperately. She would do anything for him.

  And yet he still wasn’t objectively attractive in any way.

  It puzzled her sometimes. She puzzled herself sometimes. She still remembered what she had found attractive in other boys and men. She still found hard muscles—which Anthony lacked—and long muscular legs—which he also lacked—and a quick wit—ditto—to be the things that turned her on.

  Yet Anthony—too short, too weak, too sullen—had a devastating effect on her. She worshipped him. What he asked for he got, and if he failed to ask, she gave it anyway.

  Well, Jessica thought, life is a mystery, isn’t it?

  “It’s boring here,” Jessica said, resuming the massage. He was always tense. But more so since yesterday. He was so tight, it was almost as if he worked out and had muscle tone.

  “It’s a boring place,” he agreed.

  “At least you get to go out,” she said.

  “I go to work.”

  “How long is this so-called temporary assignment? We had more fun in New York,” she said. She knew the answer, but he hadn’t told her to shut up, yet. When he did she would, of course, shut up. But he hadn’t said it yet, so she asked.

  “Don’t know,” he said into the mattress.

  “I can’t just stay in a hotel room forever,” she protested.

  He reached back blindly, fumbling with one hand until he touched her thigh. “Hey, you’ve got me, right?”

  “Mmm. Yes, I do.”

  “Okay, then shut up.”

  And she did.

  But as she pressed her lips together she remembered a dream. She almost told him about it, but he had told her to shut up.

  In the dream she had been somehow buried up to her neck. Just her head stuck up above the ground. She couldn’t move. She had wanted to put her hands to her head, had wanted to press her palms against the side of her head and squeeze, really hard. She didn’t know why.

  Jessica had been very angry in the dream. That’s mostly what she remembered. That she was very, very angry, because she didn’t want to be buried in the ground and someone had done that to her.

  Sometimes she could almost see who it was. But she couldn’t turn her head far enough to make him out. She rolled her eyes back and forth but she couldn’t see him because he kept scuttling out of sight.

  Even now, recalling the dream, she was angry. It rose up in her, that anger, like boiling oil rushing through her veins.

  But Anthony didn’t like her to be angry. So she wasn’t. And the boiling oil turned slow and sluggish as it cooled. It became thick, like jelly.

  Jessica breathed for the first time since the memory of the dream had come to her. Her hands were kneading the back of his neck. From where she sat it looked almost as if she was choking him.

  Bug Man opened his eyes and stared at the sheet beneath his face. He hadn’t meant to do that, to tell her to shut up. It made her seem like a robot. Like a machine. Any other girl would have argued, but no other girl had quite as much “wire” in her brain as Jessica.

  She was in many ways his greatest accomplishment, second only to taking down Vincent and Kerouac. She was so beautiful, a tall, elegant African beauty with amazing eyes and a perfect body, and a mouth that, oh God, and even now it hurt him to think about how much he had wanted her. She was so beautiful, she could silence a whole noisy restaurant just by walking in the front door. And she was his, all his, 100 percent his.

  She was amazing. When she was on his arm, she made him a king. Men looked at him with baffled respect. Women looked at him wondering just what it was about him that could command a girl like Jessica.

  But Jessica didn’t really have much to say. When they watched movies together, she would wait until he had expressed an opinion and then parrot him. He could see she hadn’t really liked Tron 2 until, as the credits rolled, he’d said he loved it. And then, so had she.

  When a minute later he said that the truth was it kind of sucked, she agreed.

  And agreed again when he changed his mind and praised it.

  That could have gone on for hours.

  It was creepy. It was boring. She would say what he wanted her to say. She would do what he wanted her to do. She was, he realized sadly, like a game you’ve already mastered completely. She was Portal 2 in a Portal 3 world.

  He eased her off him, stood up, and went to the window. “It’s a boring town, anyway,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much to do.”

  She was about to agree with him, and the prospect made him cringe. “On the other hand, maybe we could sneak out for a little bit, right? Maybe just to my place where I work. Whatever.”

  She agreed with him. It seemed sincere.

  Go limp, Burnofsky had told him. Do nothing for now. So he would do nothing. But he could still watch, right?

  (ARTIFACT)

  Preliminary investigation of suicides and psychotic breaks. Notes of Dr Nigel Blankenthorpe, Chief Medical Officer, Doll Ship. I have sufficient data to confirm what I have suspected: the suicide rate among wired subjects is almost six times higher on average than would be predicted by standard models. The rate of sudden psychotic break is almost as high.

  There were seventeen suicides between January 1 and June 1. Given the ages, backgrounds, and mental histories of the population, no more than three suicides should have occurred.

  In that same period five individuals out of the combined populations of Benjaminia and Charlestown attacked staff or fellow townsfolk with sufficient violence that injuries resulted. One death occurred.

  The question that had to be answered is whether these rates are a result of the unique conditions aboard the Doll Ship—separation from family, a constrained environment, etc. Or whether these suicides and psychotic breaks are some sort of reaction to the wiring process itself.

  At my request Dr Aliyah Suleiman at AFGC New York sent me additional data that confirm that what I am seeing here on the Doll Ship is

  part of a pattern associated with wiring. I have thus far performed three autopsies—two of suicides, one of a patient who became so violent staff had to resort to deadly force—and my preliminary observations suggest that in these cases the brains began a sort of counterwiring. Dense clusters of new brain cells that grew alm
ost like cancers, or as if in mimicry of the wires, formed in the hippocampus, in the nucleus accumbens, even in the frontal cortex.

  The sample size is too small to reach conclusions. But my hypothesis is that some brains grow fresh tissue spurred by the wire. In the cases observed, this new growth can predispose toward depression and thus suicide, or incoherent rage.

  Fortunately this appears in only a minority of cases. Though when it is extended to the entire human race I would expect to see tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of suicides and violent psychotic outbursts.

  Recommend that AFGC begin a much wider investigation of this phenomenon.

  Tables and charts attached.

  TEN

  Word had gone throughout Benjaminia that the Great Souls were coming.

  The Great Souls!

  People with fixed, jawbreaking smiles and wide, glittering eyes and way too much energy wouldn’t stop talking about it.

  Everyone was busy cleaning up the town. In this case it meant using buckets of a gentle acid wash to scrub the curving nickel alloy walls with long-handled brushes. The walls were already clean— cleanliness was part of sustainable happiness—so this was more an act of devotion than of simple housekeeping.

  More immediately noticeable was the touch-up painting on the great pillar that rose through the center of the sphere, as well as similar work on the entrance to the tunnel that connected Benjaminia with Charlestown. The most adept artists touched up the painted sky with its wondrous image of the Great Souls reaching out a hand to God on their left and Darwin on their right.

  It all would have gone much easier but for the storm that raged outside, producing waves so steep they sent the weak of stomach racing to thoughtfully placed buckets.

  Fortunately Minako McGrath did not get seasick.

  The nickel steel sphere that defined Benjaminia was forty meters—131 feet—in diameter. The great pillar rose up through the middle. A flat, level platform of plywood—also in need of some grassgreen touch-up paint—flattened the bottom of the sphere, providing a level surface, a sort of lowest floor.

  Fourteen-year-old Minako had never been a math whiz, but she cared to an insane degree about numbers. Forty meters in diameter was not a good number.

  The floor of the sphere, that wooden platform, was also an even, easily divisible number: twenty-four meters diameter.

  Minako was not happy. Not “sustainably happy,” in that obnoxious Nexus Humanus phrase, nor any other kind of happy. She was sad to the point of desperation. It had been just ten days since she had been hauled, kicking and punching, aboard this nightmare ship.

  Ten, also, was not a good number. It was not prime, nor was it divisible by either three or seven. There were good numbers and bad numbers, and the numbers in Benjaminia all seemed to be bad.

  Six days earlier Minako had been walking along the beach at Toguchi. Toguchi wasn’t much of a place, a small town even by Okinawan standards. You couldn’t even brag about the beach. There were no resort hotels or boardwalk, just vibrant green bushes and low-slung, wind-chastened trees edging right up against the narrow strand.

  Minako had been thinking, and of course counting her steps— the number to hit was 701, a prime—and pausing occasionally to look out to sea and wish the clouds weren’t so thick and low and the sun could be seen setting. Her OCD—obsessive compulsive disorder—was often worse in the fall and early winter when the days grew shorter. It was almost as if sunlight banished her compulsions, or at least lessened their demands, so that she could lie out on this same beach without quite as many numbers careening around inside her head. But now, with the sea turned gray to match the sky, her carefree season was over.

  A boat had come ashore, a Zodiac. There were three men in it, all dressed in rain slickers. Two were white, one Asian. Minako saw herself as Asian, though her father was an American marine and her mother Japanese.

  The men saw her, stared at her a bit actually, so that it made her uncomfortable, But then two of them—one of the Caucasians and the Asian—had gone off across the beach into town.

  Three was a good number. One, two, three, five, seven, eleven, and thirteen: the first seven prime numbers. The one man left behind, that was okay. The two who left were okay as well.

  Which just went to prove that numbers aren’t everything.

  This late in both the season and the day there wouldn’t be much going on in Toguchi town for the two men to do—they might find a bowl of noodles and some tea, but there was no nightlife. They were a long way from the lights of Naha.

  Minako wondered why she assumed they were hungry. They looked like men who wanted something. And what else could it be?

  She continued walking along the beach, coming closer to the boat and the man guarding it. He was smoking a cigarette and avoiding looking at her. He seemed jumpy. Was he a smuggler? A drug smuggler? If so, she should run.

  But running away seemed like a strange overreaction. There was no crime in Toguchi. Someone being picked up by the local police for public drunkenness was a crime wave by Toguchi standards. Minako knew: her mother was the only police officer in the area.

  Minako curved her path away from the shore and away from the boat. It would mean a possibly very difficult count adjustment. Her routine required her to walk from the southern path along the beach, down to near the high-water line where the driftwood scattered. The steps from the tree line down to the high-water line didn’t have to be counted. But once she turned and started walking north she needed it to be exactly 701 steps. Then, if she had done it properly, she could turn back toward the town and be able to aim for the path home. Curving or avoiding made it harder to calibrate. She could end up having to take some ridiculous mincing steps to get the count just right. That would work, yes, but it would be unsatisfying.

  Out at sea was a ship. The light was poor and it was hard to make it out, but it looked strange, like a sort of white peapod with four white domes half-protruding above decks. Four troubling domes.

  Had it been three it would have been better.

  That’s where the men had come from, that ship. Had to be. In which case they were not likely to be drug smugglers. Still, Minako considered for a moment phoning her mother. It was not Minako’s job to be an informer—as she had repeatedly had to reassure the older brothers and sisters of her friends when she saw them smoking pot.

  Still . . .

  She compromised and sent a text. A Zodiac has landed at the beach with 3 men.

  That made her feel better: duty done.

  Three hundred and eighty-two . . .

  Three hundred and eighty-three . . .

  Minako was a pretty girl, with long hair the color of darkest honey and unnaturally large light brown eyes. The flaw that bothered her most was that her mouth sometimes looked a little crooked, and her chin could be pointed when seen in profile. That, and she had a sprinkling of freckles across her upper cheeks.

  Of course, at her school, she was quite a freak. She was not the only Japanese American—after all, there had been thousands of U.S. marines on Okinawa since World War II—but unlike many she looked as white as she did Japanese. Her father had been an Irish American, and no, her mother had not been a prostitute or some party girl. Minako’s parents had been married legally. They had been madly in love.

  But Captain McGrath, USMC, had been sent to Afghanistan when Minako was just three years old, and he had been killed in an ambush.

  Minako had his picture beside her bed. But she did not really remember anything about him. Just the picture.

  She had reached step number six hundred and forty-five when she saw the two men returning. Each carried two heavily weighted plastic shopping bags from the grocery store. The bags bulged with rice wine, French Cognac and cigarettes.

  Six hundred and forty-six . . .

  Six hundred and forty-seven . . .

  Almost there. But now, if she turned to shore, she would walk directly into the two men. It would look deliberate.
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  Minako felt a stab of panic. She really needed a good count. It had been a bad day. And if she didn’t get her number the Unspecified Bad Thing would happen.

  They had come back too quickly.

  Sic hundred and fifty-two . . .

  Six hundred and fifty-three . . .

  Just forty-eight more steps.

  “Hey, girly,” the Asian man said. He was speaking accented English. Minako spoke English fairly well, her mother had insisted, and of course her school as well.

  “She’ll do,” the Caucasian man said. He spoke with a Russian accent.

  The two men moved apart. Their arms spread out a little—awkward with the heavy shopping bags.

  Minako’s first reaction was confusion. What were they doing? She was so close to finishing her steps.

  Six hundred and sixty-one . . .

  Forty more steps and she would have her 701.

  “What’s your name, honey?”

  In Japanese she said, “I don’t understand,” and made a shy little shrug of apology.

  They were only twenty yards away now, and she was still thirtyfive steps away, and suddenly they swept toward her. No choice, she had to break and run, she took one more step—number 678—and broke stride, started to run, and hit the sand, facedown.

  The one from the boat had come up behind her and shoved her. There was sand in her mouth. She cried out, but her voice was masked by the sound of the waves.

  She tried to roll over but there was a heavy weight on her back.

  “Stop fighting,” a man’s voice said, far too near her ear. “No one is going to hurt you. You’re going to the happiest place on Earth.” There was something sardonic about that last phrase.

  Minako opened her mouth to scream again, but a rag was in her mouth and a roll of duct tape made a tearing sound as it went around her head once, twice, tangling in her hair.

  A second set of hands had her legs.

  “We could have ourselves a time before we take her in,” suggested the Asian one.

  She screamed into her gag.

  “No one bothers one of the villagers.” The voice of the one from the Zodiac. The one who had shoved her down. The one now sitting astride her back as his mate wound the tape around her ankles. His cigarette ash fell on her cheek. “Don’t be a stupid boy, KimKim.”