even without counting the shops in virtually every airport.
“We have not lost, brother,” Charles said softly with what he hoped was an undertone of iron resolve.
“Yet we’re in hiding.”
“We have not lost. We are not beaten . We have the Hounds. We can rebuild the twitcher corps. We can start again. And we have Floor 34.”
“Floor 34’s a losing tactic,” Benjamin snorted. “Defensive. It takes down BZRK. But it does not give us back the president we lost, or the premier we lost, goddammit! God damn it!” He slammed his fist down on the desk, making Charles’s glass of wine jump. “Or Bug Man. Or the Doll Ship.” He moaned. “What we have lost! What we have lost !” He drained the snifter of Cognac in a single long swallow.
“When Floor 34 is ready, we take down BZRK and all they have within weeks. It spreads, brother; it will find them in all their hiding places. And when it has done its work, we will be without enemies, we—”
“Without enemies? You think BZRK is our only enemy? Don’t you know the Chinese are dissecting every body they fish out of Hong Kong harbor? They know. They know ! And if the Americans and Europeans don’t know yet, they will soon.”
“What is it you want, Benjamin? To unleash the gray goo?”
The gray goo, a ridiculous name for a deadly threat: self-replicating nanobots. Nanobots building more nanobots with whatever material they found at hand. Going from thousands to millions and billions and trillions in mere days; consuming every last atom of carbon and a good many other elements as well. Everything that lived or had lived on the surface of planet Earth. Everything that made life possible.
Nanobots were the mechanical answer to biots. Just as small, but without the eerie and inexplicable link that connected a biot to its maker. Nanobots had to be run through a game controller. They were somewhat less capable, but they had a huge advantage: it was nothing to lose a nanobot. But to lose a biot? Well, that way madness lay.
Benjamin gestured at the screen. He happened to be focused on a family at one of the AFGC shops, this one at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. A family. Man, woman, blond child, poring over souvenirs. “I hate them sometimes. I hate them enough to do it.”
Charles intuited which frame his brother was focusing on. “Yes, but imagine them as ours, brother. Imagine them united with us. Imagine them happy to look at us. Imagine what we can make them into with our nanotechnology and our friends from Nexus Humanus.”
“Nexus Humanus,” Benjamin snorted. It was a cult they had financed as a way to recruit twitchers to control nanobots, and other useful folk. But it had lost steam, like bargain-basement Scientology. “We had it, the world we seek. The Doll Ship.” A tear welled in Benjamin’s eye, swelled and went rushing down his cheek.
“Nonsense, brother, it was only a model of the world we seek.”
“A world united,” Benjamin said, bitterly wondering at his own naivety. Weeping, figuratively at least, for the benighted human race that was being deprived of the utopia he saw so clearly. “One vast interconnectedness, with us at the nexus.”
“It can still be. It can. But not if we unleash the SRNs. Not the gray goo, not that final act of Götterdämmerung. The lesser tack, though . . .” Charles was offering a sacrifice to the god of Benjamin’s rage. A step short of apocalypse.
“Massed pre-programmed attack,” Benjamin said, accenting the final word. Nanobots could be programmed to carry out simple commands autonomously. Large numbers of them, so long as the task was simple. Millions of them if necessary. They could be programmed to destroy all in their reach for a certain period of time and then turned off, a sort of localized, small-scale gray goo.
“If it’s true that the intelligence agencies either know or will soon, then we won’t be safe, even here. But if we disrupt . . . If we launch mass releases. Washington. London. Beijing. Give them something to keep them very busy. And at the same time use the Floor 34 weapon to take out BZRK . . .”
“There he goes. Burnofsky. He’s doing it again.” Benjamin had spotted it. He gave the voice command to expand the screen. Burnofsky’s image pushed all the others aside.
In the image—high-def, no grainy monochrome—Burnofsky had lit a cigarette. He took a few puffs. Sat, staring at nothing. Took another drag on the cigarette.
“Here it comes,” Benjamin said.
Burnofsky slid a desk drawer open. He drew out a framed photograph of a young girl.
“The daughter,” Charles said. “He’s never gotten over it.”
Burnofsky looked at the picture and puffed his cigarette so that now the smoke partially obscured the image, swirling up around the hidden camera. They could only see the side of the man’s face, but the smile was huge, ear to ear. The smile and a silent laugh.
“Volume up,” Charles ordered.
Burnofsky was making a chortling sound, a private, gleeful, somehow greedy sound. Like a miser counting his money.
“Bugs in your brain, baby,” he said, laughing happily. “Bugs in your brain.”
“System: zoom in on Burnofsky’s face,” Benjamin ordered. The camera zoomed. “He’s crying as he laughs. Crying and laughing. Here it comes.”
Burnofsky lifted his shirt up off his corpse-white concave belly. They had a poor angle on this, just barely able to see.
Burnofsky sucked hard on the cigarette, and holding the smoke in his lungs, stabbed the lit end of it against his belly.
They heard the sizzle.
He held it there; held it, held it, held it . . . and then, with a cry of pain that caused smoke to explode from his mouth, Burnofsky at last pulled the cigarette away.
“Karl, Karl, Karl,” Charles said.
“Exercising, eating well, no more drugs, far less alcohol.” Benjamin recited the relevant facts. “Seemingly less depressed. And this self-mutilation is the price, somehow. You know it’s BZRK, brother. You must know that. He’s wired. They’ve taken our genius from us.”
Charles sipped his wine. He had to take it slow if Benjamin was going to be swigging brandy. “I don’t know it. But, do I suspect it?”
He let the question hang.
“We must return home. Home to the Tulip.”
“Back to the Tulip?” Charles’s voice was troubled. “Even now that will be dangerous.”
“I’ve spent—we’ve spent—our lives skulking and hiding, brother. Is there not, finally, a time to stand up and be seen and counted?”
Charles didn’t argue. He knew it would be pointless. Benjamin would have his own Götterdämmerung . Charles felt sick inside. He did not want this to end in apocalypse. He had never wanted anything, really, but for all the world to be happy. And to accept him for what he was. And if only he could be allowed to wire the entire human race with his nanobot forces that beautiful vision would be realized. A world of peace.
