BZRK Reloaded Read online

  It was in online gaming forums that he had first heard from someone calling himself Lear. Billy had posted some impressive numbers, and he’d let it be known that he was a foster kid, unconnected, sick of where he was, looking for …well, looking.

  Joining the Washington BZRK group had set off an uproar, with some of the others demanding to know what the hell was going on if they were down to recruiting children.

  Well, they were all dead, weren’t they? And he was the one walking around with their credit cards and their phones and their pads. So much for being a child.

  The others had died like newbies. They had barely gotten off a shot, like this was the first time they’d ever really played an FPS game. They’d been surprised and they had panicked.

  Newbies.

  And he was the child?

  Suddenly he saw that house again in memory, the common room

  with the twisted tangle of bodies on the floor and blood all over the walls and the stink of urine and feces. He threw up thinking about it and looked up to realize he was throwing up within sight of the White House. How weird was that? It made him feel …well, something made him feel …strange, sick, like he wanted to be even sicker. But no, he wasn’t having any of that.

  He stopped and sat on a park bench and searched the phones for Lear. Lear was the big boss, right? Well, didn’t Lear owe him now? Who had killed all those phony cops? Not the so-called adults. Billy. Billy the Kid.

  BANG! Hole. Smoke. Blood.

  That was new, that’s what still made him feel wrong: real blood. And real death, which was so much dirtier than the gaming version. A car went past, horn blaring, and he realized he’d stepped into

  traffic, like he had lost consciousness or whatever, like his brain had

  stopped functioning.

  He reached the far curb, shaking. His lungs felt congested. The

  wound in his side burned with fresh pain. He had put some Neosporin and Band-Aids on it and managed to sleep with a couple of Advil.

  But now, walking, walking, the scab that had formed was chafing. He

  looked under his jacket and saw blood staining his shirt. There were tears in Billy’s eyes, and he couldn’t explain why. The

  pain was bad but not that bad.

  The rain started then and he ran to shelter in an office building’s doorway. There were some people there smoking cigarettes.

  He ignored them, and they ignored him. He continued thumbing

  through the calls made and received on the phones but found nothing that looked like it might be either to or from Lear. Then he started

  on messages. Also nothing.

  That first phone had used 1111 as its password, which was just plain dumb, but breaking security on the second phone was more time-consuming. Any time he guessed wrong he was shut out for a while. It was going to take all day. Then, he knew the answer: 2975,

  because on the alphanumeric keypad 2975 spelled out BZRK. “Smart,” he muttered sarcastically.

  Of course no one was going to have “Lear” in their address book,

  that would be too much to hope for. And unless they were complete

  idiots they’d delete calls to or from Lear. But they could be slightly

  less stupid and yet still forget to delete the number from their trash. The rain stopped and he headed off again. There was always the

  fear that some well-meaning adult would begin to wonder what a kid

  was doing standing with the smokers in the shelter of the building. The second phone also yielded nothing.

  He had plenty of cash, so he bought a couple hot dogs and a Pepsi

  and wolfed it all down in a steamy, overheated diner. It was well past

  lunchtime, though you couldn’t tell from the gray-on-gray sky outside. And then, on the third phone, he had something. It was in the

  trash, as he’d expected. A number. He Googled the area code, curious because it had a strange number that began with a plus sign. The

  prefix was a country code, and the country in question was Japan. Time to make a decision. If he was still part of BZRK—and where

  else did he have to turn to—then he had to contact Lear. So he composed a text.

  DC got burned bad. But they didn’t get me. Billy the Kid. He hit Send.

  Then he added, This is not my phone.

  He hit Send again. And waited. Nothing.

  He wanted to cry then because he had halfway convinced himself

  that Lear—if this was really Lear’s number—would instantly respond

  and come to his rescue. But nothing, and the diner was shutting

  down, the cook had begun to clean the grill.

  So Billy went back out onto the darkening street, heading toward

  the big green space on his map app.

  Rock Creek Park, as the name implies, runs along Rock Creek

  at the western edge of the city. He figured he could find a place to

  hide out overnight, think things through. And indeed he came upon

  a stone bridge that crossed the creek.

  Trolls lived under bridges, at least in games. And when he slid

  down the muddy embankment a troll is what he found. A man, large,

  maybe a crazy street person, maybe not.

  “Hey. You,” the man said. “This is my place. Get lost.” The man came closer. His rough, pendulous features brightened

  with avarice as he saw the not-very-large boy. The rain was back, and

  Billy was tired.

  The man made a suggestion for just how Billy could pay for the

  right to stay dry.

  So Billy stuck a nine-millimeter pistol in his face and said, “Go

  away.” It was getting to be a habit.

  The phone chimed.

  The man laughed, thinking the gun was a toy.

  “Get over here and—”

  The explosion lit up the bridge overhead. The bullet, aimed past

  the man’s face, but not much past it, hit the water in the rain-swollen

  creek.

  “Jesus!” the man yelped.

  “I already shot a bunch of people yesterday,” Billy said. “So I can

  shoot you.”

  Billy was alone when he read the text message.

  Stay hidden. Help coming. Lear.

  A few hundred miles north, in New York, Burnofsky watched the data flow on his screen.

  Four Hydras had each made a copy of themselves.

  Eight Hydras had each made a copy of themselves.

  Sixteen Hydras had each made a copy of themselves.

  Thirty-two . . .

  Sixty-four . . .

  One hundred and twenty-eight . . .

  Each round took seven minutes. So in a little over half an hour, the four hydras had become more than a hundred.

  256. 512. 1024. 2048. 4096. 8192. 16,384.

  That was the number after a dozen cycles, requiring eighty-four minutes.

  32,768. 65,536. 131,072. 262,144. 524,288. 1,048,576. It had taken eighteen cycles, two hours and six minutes, for four hydras to become more than a million. And of course that meant at least twenty million MiniMites.

  He had used a live mouse as building material. Burnofsky pulled up video of the mouse, at first indifferent, then agitated, then desperate as tail and legs and ears were chewed away by the hydras and their MiniMites.

  When he sped the video up he could watch the whole sequence as the mouse’s back erupted, as it died, as it grew gruesomely smaller and smaller and nothing but a few bones and shreds of flesh and then all gone, all of it completely gone, replaced by a seething mass of bluetinged nanobots. They looked, he thought, like uncooked egg white, or the stuff that ran from a punctured eyeball.

  Goo, he supposed, for lack of a better word.

  The world would die in agony and panic. And of course Burnofsky would die as well, but last, he hoped. Last and best and floating on an opium cloud.

  But not just yet.

 
NINE

  Farid had never met anyone from Anonymous in the real world. The fact that he’d even been asked for a meeting was extraordinary, and it made him paranoid as hell.

  Since the intrusion into the AFGC system he’d been jumpy. His family was supposedly immune to prosecution thanks to diplomatic immunity, but that immunity would be a pretty thin defense if the American security people came after him. They might not be able to snatch him off a street themselves—Americans were very devoted to the illusion of law—but the city was full of American allies with no such scruples. The Saudis, maybe, or the Israelis.

  Now this request for a face-to-face from d0wnb1anki3. Blankie’s name carried some weight. Even so Farid had been sweating bullets sitting in the Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue. He was trying not to be too obvious in looking for the “black woman carrying a backpack decorated with a picture of Bob Marley.”

  He waited until the appointed time. He waited until ten minutes after the appointed time. Jumpy from too much caffeine and too little sleep, he got up to grab a cigarette outside. And there she was, just as described. An African American woman carrying a Bob Marley backpack. She was hurrying across the street, looking very much like a person late for an appointment.

  Farid sucked hard on his cigarette, assuming he’d have to put it out in a few seconds. But in fact the woman walked right up to him, gave him a dubious look, made a V of her fingers, then a give-me gesture. Farid shook out a Marlboro for her.

  He lit her cigarette with his Marilyn Monroe lighter, and she said, “Let’s walk.”

  She did not give her name, and he didn’t ask. She led the way, south toward Dupont Circle. The sidewalk was busy—it always was—but they were walking slow, and Washingtonians—the most self-important people on Earth—were all rushing past them. Anyone following them at this slow pace would have been instantly obvious, so Farid looked around and convinced himself that things were cool.

  “This is some very dangerous stuff,” the woman said.

  “No shit.”

  They walked on for a block past boutiques, crossing the street through the eternally impatient traffic.

  “You need to wipe it all,” the woman said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Wipe it. Burn it. Bury it in a deep hole and then forget you ever saw it.”

  Farid thought about that. He frowned. “Wait. What? We’re supposed to cover this up?”

  The woman made a cynical face. “It’s Washington, kid. Coverups are what this city’s built on.”

  Farid stopped. After a few steps, so did the woman.

  “Yeah, but we aren’t about cover-ups. We’re about exposing the truth. I mean, this is profound stuff. This is craziness.”

  “You think this is the only time the president has murdered someone? She sends drones out every day to kill people; you’re a Muslim, you should know that. Look, this whole thing needs to go away.” She waved her cigarette, trailing smoke. “And you need to tell me who else is aware of this intrusion.”

  Farid was shaking his head and wishing he had a second cigarette going. “No, no, no. There’s more going on here. I’m all up in the AFGC system now. Those guys are deep into some serious nanotech.”

  He saw a flicker on her face at that.

  “They’re building nano robots. Ever heard of the gray goo?”

  “Sounds like the name of a band.”

  He stared hard at her. What she’d said sounded like a joke, but her eyes weren’t on the same page as her tone. He didn’t know her. She was someone supposedly sent from people up the food chain in Anonymous, but how did he know that for sure?

  Now she was telling him to walk away? Destroy data? Give up names?

  “I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore,” Farid said.

  “What’s the matter? Getting paranoid? Walk another block with me. Let’s get this straightened out.”

  “What’s a block from here?” Farid demanded.

  “Okay, just stay where you are,” she said in a very different voice. A cop voice: ordering and controlling.

  Suddenly Farid was aware of two men moving swiftly up the street behind him. A black sedan roared up and hit its brakes.

  His next move was purely instinctive. He was standing just outside a bookstore and coffee shop. He ran for the door. The woman cursed and leapt after him, but he caught a break, a shopper emerging through the narrow door let him in and unintentionally blocked the woman’s path.

  It was just a few seconds, but it was enough.

  He glanced around frantically, looking for a way out, a weapon, a savior, something. The coffee shop was full of the usual latte-sipping, laptop-tapping crowd.

  “Listen to me! Everyone! My name is Farid Berbera. I’m a Lebanese citizen with diplomatic immunity. That woman is trying to kill me.”

  He pointed a finger at the woman with two men at her back, all now clearly revealed as security types.

  “Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation is creating nano robots. They have video from inside the president’s eyes as she murdered her husband!”

  He didn’t expect to be believed; he barely believed it himself. But he expected to be heard, and Tweeted and texted.

  “They’re trying to stop us from finding out,” Farid yelled. He held his hands up in the air, the universal language of helplessness.

  The black woman no longer carrying the Bob Marley backpack hesitated, nonplussed, and then Farid saw the reason for her hesitation: a Washington DC cop was picking up a coffee to go and holding a small bag of some sort of pastry.

  “Officer! Officer! You have to help me, I have diplomatic immunity!” He fumbled in his pocket and out came the passport, the blessed diplomatic passport with that lovely word, Diplomatic, in big, gold-embossed letters. The policeman would have seen passports like that many times before.

  “People are watching!” Farid warned. “People are watching! Farid Berbera, Lebanese Embassy.” People were watching, but they were not on his side. So he said the thing he would never before have imagined saying. “I’m part of Anonymous. They’re trying to stop me before I can tell what I know.”

  The woman and her two agents moved then, grim-faced, but the policeman was setting down his coffee and pastry and said, “Hold up, just a second there. This is my beat. I’m calling this in.”

  “You are not calling it in,” the woman snapped.

  “What are you, FBI? Let me see your shield,” the policeman said, and a voice in the crowd said, “Hell yeah.”

  Phone cameras were coming out.

  “This man is a dangerous criminal,” the woman said. “We are federal officers. Put down those cameras and—”

  “Show us your badge,” a second voice yelled.

  The policeman was definitely on guard now, torn between his instinctive need to control the rowdiness and an unfamiliar sensation of having people actually take his side.

  “Just show some ID, ma’am. If you’re feds, we’ll work it out.” He was preparing to call it in but a bit perplexed at what code would apply. Was this a 10-31? Or more of a 10-34?

  “We’re with the ETA,” the woman said. She flipped her ID open.

  The policeman frowned. “Sorry, I’m not up on all the—”

  “Emerging Technology Agency.”

  The policeman blinked. Stared. Laughed. “You gotta be pulling my leg.”

  “They’re trying to stop me from telling what I know. AFGC. Nanotech. Video of Falkenhym killing her husband. Gray goo scenario.” Farid was just repeating it over and over, frantically, in a loop, as the cop confronted the feds, and the store denizens blasted the entire scene out over the Internet. “Farid Berbera. Anonymous. Lebanese diplomat.”

  “Lady,” the cop said, “in this city I got to put up with FBI, Secret Service, DEA, but I have surely never heard of an ETA, and you aren’t arresting—”

  BANG!

  It wasn’t until the explosion that Farid even noticed the gun in the woman’s hand.

  The p
olice officer was wearing a Kevlar vest. It did not protect his face. Or stop the bullet from punching a hole out the back of his neck, spraying bits of spine and blood all over the coffee counter.

  “Kill them all,” the woman said. “No witnesses.”

  Three guns began firing.

  Somehow, he would never be able to explain how, Farid ended up on his elbows behind the counter, crawling and whimpering as BANG BANG BANG BANGBANGBANG! The glass display case full of croissants and pre-made sandwiches shattered. People screamed. People yelled nonsense like, “Hey, what are you doing?” Tables were overturned. Smoke filled the air.

  “Stop it, stop it!”

  Steam was venting from the espresso machine through a bullet hole.

  The woman, still with a cigarette in her mouth, was around the counter now and BANG! shot the cringing barista and BANG! fired at Farid and missed as he jumped up and ran, screaming into the stacks, grabbing at handfuls of books and slinging them over his shoulder.

  BANG! and the bullet hit a thick political text and blew it apart in midair, making confetti of the pages.

  The shots and screams from the café were dying down, and now there were sirens too late, way too late, as Farid tripped, fell against a table loaded with books, slipped to the floor, and saw himself staring up at the muzzle of a gun.

  He said, “No!”

  BANG!

  His head jerked. Stabbing pain in his mouth.

  Smoke drifted.

  She was looking right at him, the muzzle no more than two feet away. Ash fell from her cigarette. He could see the way her finger tightened on the trigger. All slow motion now.

  Snap.

  Instantly the ETA agent reached for a new magazine, but Farid was up and scrambling, leaping, sobbing, tasting the blood that filled his mouth, not knowing what had happened just knowing: run. RUN!

  The store had a second entrance, out on Nineteenth Street. He was on the street before he knew it, nearly ran into a passing taxi, raced north up the street and the taxi, amazingly, miraculously, thought he needed a ride, thought he was chasing it.

  The cabdriver stopped.

  Farid ripped open the door and collapsed into the seat. “Go! Just go!”