They looked at each other, and Keats knew that a vast distance had opened up between them. He had wanted nothing so much as to close the much smaller distance that had persisted, even during the idyll on Île Sainte-Marie. Instead, he had dug the Grand Canyon and now looked at her across it.
She had not raged at him. She seemed too tired to be very angry that he had unwired her without permission, in fact in direct rejection of her wishes. The temperature of their conversation was cold, not hot. She stood with her hands down at her sides. Her eyes were as big as ever, but now they seemed to be looking just past him, refusing to make eye contact.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No. You did the right thing,” she said. There was no reassurance in her tone.
“Brains are complicated,” Keats said pointlessly.
“Mmm. Yeah. Complicated.”
“I have to ask …”
“What?” She frowned, wishing he would go away and let her adjust to this feeling of emptiness. She felt nauseous. She felt as if she might at some point throw up. She felt not herself, like this was not her body, like she was a head transplant attached to some new torso. Alien.
“I have to ask what you told Caligula.”
“Caligula? Nothing. I can’t text him or call him.”
Keats wanted to heave a sigh of relief, but it might have seemed as if he hadn’t trusted her. Then …
“I told Lear.”
His blue eyes snapped up to hers, and his brows lowered. “Told Lear what?”
“That Caligula should do it.”
“What?” He grabbed her shoulders. “You gave the go-ahead to blow up the Tulip?”
She nodded. No emotion. Yes, she had ordered up an atrocity. No emotion. Yes, she had ordered mass murder. Nothing.
“Jesus, Sadie,” he said, and his voice broke.
She blinked, taken aback by his reaction. “It’s okay,” she said.
He released her, and now he was no longer looking at her, he was staring into the window in his mind where his biot’s visual flow would be. But the images were grainy and indistinct. The distance was too great. The biot he had in Caligula’s head was too far out of range for useful input.
“We have to stop him,” Keats said.
“Uh-huh,” she said indifferently.
What happened next was pure instinct, and he regretted it even as his hand was flying through the air, even as the flat of his palm connected with the side of her face with enough force to snap her head around and start the tears in her eyes.
When her eyes came back around there was emotion. Anger. Finally, anger.
“Listen to me,” he said, regretful but determined, too. “We have to stop him.”
“Don’t you fucking hit me,” she snarled.
“Good. You’re not dead yet, are you? I’m sorry about the slap, but you sound like you’re in a coma.”
“And who put me there?” she demanded.
“Lear put you there!” he said. “This has all been a game for him. We wanted to stop one evil, so we never even asked questions about whether the man we served was just as bad. Or worse.” He felt her attention slipping away and wanted to grab her but knew that would be wrong. So he leaned closer to her, bending down so that she could not avoid looking at him. “Madness like a bloody plague. All over. It’s all Lear. It’s Lear making biots and then killing them to drive people mad. Hundreds of dead already. The Pope went mad and attacked little children. Sadie, that’s his game.”
“The Pope?”
“Lear. Lear! And we have to stop him. We have to stop Lear!”
“The Twins,” she said, sounding vague.
“Yeah, them, too,” Keats said. “Come on.”
He grabbed her hand and yanked her along with him.
Wilkes stood up as they burst into the living room. Billy was absorbed in his phone.
“Caligula’s going to blow up the Tulip,” Keats said. “We have to stop him.”
“Blow up the Tulip?” Wilkes said. “I thought that—”
“Yeah, well, it’s back on.”
“You’re going to stop Caligula?” Wilkes demanded skeptically. “You and what army, pretty blue eyes? You’ve seen him in action. This won’t be biot war; this will be kill or get killed, with a dude who is a genius at killing!”
“We have a gun. Just one. It’s—”
“It’s in the drawer in the kitchen, below the silverware.” This from Billy. Casual, as though it was no big thing that he knew where they’d hidden a gun. Then, “It’s a Colt forty-five. Seven-round clip. One spare clip. We have a total of fourteen bullets.”
“I’ll do the best I can with it,” Keats said, knowing in his heart that it wouldn’t work, knowing—because, yes, he had seen Caligula work—that Caligula would kill him before he fired a shot.
Wilkes, seeing that despair, shook her head and said, “Keats, you aren’t a gunman. Neither am I.” She looked pointedly at Billy.
“Yeah,” the young boy said. “I can do it.”
“No,” Keats said. He shook his head. “No. That’s wrong. That’s over the line.”
“It is over the line.” They stopped, looking back almost guiltily, to see Plath.
“This doesn’t involve you,” Keats said. He didn’t mean it to sound angry, but it did.
Plath shook her head. “Of course it involves me, Noah. I gave the order to Caligula.”
“Can you just take back the order?” Billy asked.
Plath shook her head. “That was all part of the game. Lear’s game. For whatever sick reason he wanted me to choose to do it. But that doesn’t mean he’ll stop just because I change my mind.”
She looked around at them, defiant, defying her own shame. “I …” She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know … how my brain is …” She sighed again. “I don’t know anything, I guess. I was used. I was controlled, but then, even after you guys …” She made a gesture with her hand, as if she was pulling something out of her head. “I still wanted revenge, and the wiring played into that. I still wanted revenge. I guess I do even now. But yeah, what Mr. Stern told me … There has to be a line.”
Keats saw tears flowing and his heart yearned to touch her, to take her in his arms and protect her. But that felt impossible now.
“I thought of what my dad would say,” Plath said, dejectedly. “My dad, my brother … there still has to be some kind of limit. A line drawn.” She wiped away the tears, then, resolute, said, “So we stop Caligula. But. But we give the gun to the kid.”
Caligula disliked disguise, but he knew how to use it. There were two approaches. You could either become part of the background and therefore be ignored—like a janitor. Or you could pass yourself off more boldly, pretending to be someone in authority, someone who would compel obedience. For example, pretending to be a cop.
And Caligula understood diversion. He’d spent a part of his life working the carnival as a trick shooter and knife thrower, and he’d met his share of magicians. Sleight of hand was all about misdirection: look over there, not over here.
Finally he understood simple brutality.
All three were required to gain access to the subfloors of the Tulip.
He dressed as a janitor, having first determined what the AFGC janitors wore and when they worked and through which entrance they came. He gathered his long gray hair into a bun and pushed it up under a do-rag, slipped into gray-blue overalls, and, crucially, applied just enough dark makeup to be arguably Mexican. In the world as it was, a dark-skinned older man dressed as a janitor was as close to invisible as it was possible to be. It wasn’t just that people didn’t notice you; it was that they actively avoided making eye contact with you or noting any feature.
But timed to coincide with his fraught passage through the security station on the first subfloor, Caligula arranged a distraction in the form of a call to NYPD claiming to have seen a homeless white woman waving a knife and threatening people on the street in front of the Tulip.
> The choice of a fictional white woman was important, because it in no way pointed to a theoretically Hispanic janitor. And, as well, there actually was a homeless white woman with a shopping cart on the sidewalk. Five bucks and a secret message from “aliens” in the person of Caligula had ensured her presence.
The police duly came roaring up. The security guards at the entrance duly ran to see what was happening. And the sublevel security guards duly glued themselves to their monitors and muttered jealously about those guys upstairs who at least have something going on.
Caligula dragged a heavy floor cleaner past without notice.
Down the stairs. One level. Two. The door was locked but was easily defeated with a six-inch segment of metal venetian blind.
The temperature went up ten degrees from stairwell to mechanical room. As mechanical rooms went it was a nice one, three stories from grated floor to pipe-crossed ceiling, with catwalks offering access to massive blowers, electrical boxes, alarm systems, and telephone and cable panels.
Everything was color coded, so it was easy to pick out the natural gas pipes from the water lines and cable conduits. Red. An interesting choice, Caligula thought. He might have gone with lilac. He liked lilac.
The first job was to make sure no one was down here. He walked around, looking lost with his floor cleaner until he located the engineer on duty. He was a middle-aged man, staring at an iPad propped in front of the readouts he was meant to be watching.
Caligula gave him a hello wave and a hatchet in the neck, stepping nimbly out of the way of the blood spray.
He squeezed fast-drying epoxy around the edges of the doors. He looked around, spotted a metal table, dragged it over to the door, tipped it on its side, and epoxied it across the door. Once the epoxy had hardened in twenty minutes, it would take a tank to break through. He would leave via the freight elevators, which he’d be able to watch more easily.
The next thing was to eliminate any source of spark. It wouldn’t do to have the gas ignite too soon. He turned off the heating system. He decided to accept the risk of a random spark from one of the electrical panels—unlikely, given the pristine newness of the building.
Then he located the safety shutoffs that would choke off the gas in the event that the computers decided a pipe had ruptured. He jammed that useful piece of equipment with a wrench.
Which left only the last three phases: opening the flow, setting the timer on the igniting explosive, and getting the hell out of the place before it blew up.
About twenty floors above Caligula, Burnofsky worked. The beautiful thing about nanotech, he thought, was the whole nano thing itself. Nano: small. Tiny. Invisible to the human eye.
He could begin growing self-replicating nanobots within full view of the hidden cameras. A million of them looked like a couple of handfuls of dust. Blue dust, in this case, because in a moment of wracking guilt back before—before the new Burnofsky—he had given them the color of his daughter’s eyes. He’d done that as a strange expiation. An homage? Was that the right word?
He was still secretive about drinking the booze. He rolled his wheeled office chair back into a blind spot, poured into an empty soda can, then rolled back into view.
Were the Twins watching? He didn’t really care, so long as they didn’t try to stop him.
He had ten million SRNs so far. SRNs with no limits. SRNs that would replicate and replicate, doubling in number and doubling again and again and again until there were not millions but billions, trillions, as many as there were grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.
What was the famous quote from 1984? He Googled it. He wanted to get it right. Ah, there.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
Well, no, Mr. Orwell, Burnofsky thought. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a world scoured clean of every living thing. And more. Imagine that having taken and used all the easiest forms of carbon the SRNs keep going. They eat the steel out of buildings, the coal and oil and diamond out of the earth itself. They wouldn’t just destroy all life, they would relentlessly remove all possibility that life would ever again arise to trouble an empty planet.
His eye scanned down the page of quotes from Orwell and came to rest on this: Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Hah. Well, the Twins had tried it. The Twins, with their mad plan to unite all of humanity into one vast interconnectedness. A new world where they would be accepted. And more than accepted: esteemed, loved.
And Lear? What was young Lystra Reid’s motive?
Burnofsky’s own motive was clear to him now. He had done evil for ambition’s sake. He had tortured himself for that evil and sought to close the eyes of the world to his shame.
Then he had been rewired so that the evil gave him pleasure. And now he would close the eyes of the world because it would bring him pleasure.
He would wait for a few more doublings. Then he would drop the force fields that held the SRNs contained and unleash the gray goo.
Then? Well, then he would go back to his old haunt, back to the China Bone. There would be time for them to prepare him a pipe. He would float on a cloud of purple opium haze and wait for the end of the world. When the nanobots reached him, well, that’s when he would take a last drink and fire the heroin into his veins and leave the world behind, dying with two raised middle fingers to humanity.
Suarez wished she had music, but the cockpit was not large enough to allow her to reach for her headphones. It was just that the mad rush of sheer speed demanded some propulsive music to go along with it.
It was crazy. It was also crazy fun.
The sleigh was a dream to drive. Computer-assists and automated systems made it more like a video game than a craft moving at a hundred and fifty miles an hour. The little icon that was the sleigh on the GPS display was zooming along past … well, past nothing, really. This was Antarctica. There were no towns, houses, roads, or any feature, really, aside from the blur of ice and the gray blanket of hazy, overcast sky. The target was coming closer very fast, and she didn’t really have much of a plan for how to approach it.
Most likely roaring in at three times freeway speeds—with jet engines screaming and ice crystals trailing a plume—was a bad idea. The smart move would probably be to park the sleigh a few miles away from the target and walk in on foot. Much more subtle that way. But on the ice one did not casually decide to abandon a vehicle that provided shelter and warmth. Not to mention a vehicle with an impressive array of weapons.
So she would try to bluff it out. Whoever she encountered would probably suspect her cover story was nonsense, but what could they do about it, really?
“People who buy illegal missiles and smuggle them onto the ice?” she said aloud. “Plenty. That’s what they can do: plenty.”
On the other hand, Suarez was only the third woman ever to qualify for SEALs, so she was no weakling. She was formidable.
“That’s right, talk yourself into it,” she muttered.
It was a good thing she had the computer navigating, because she would never have seen the dry valley. It was a rift in the ice, which at this point was a relatively sparse two hundred meters thick.
Part of her just wanted to keep shooting across the ice, but she slowed reluctantly and nosed the sleigh closer to the edge of the valley. Still she could see nothing ahead of her but ice and more ice.
“On foot it is, then,” she muttered. With great reluctance she raised the canopy, unwedged herself, and managed to climb rather ungracefully out. The wind was doing thirty knots—gentle by local standards—just enough to push cold stilettos through every seam, every zipper, every opening in her parka. She pulled on her bear claw mittens, cinched the neck strap a bit tighter, and leaned into the wind to walk what seemed to be the last hundred yards.
She didn’t see the edge of the precipice until she was practically on top of it.
“Whoa.” Antarctica had millions of square miles of same-old, same-old, but hidden here and there in the largely unexplored continent there were features that would take your breath away. This was one of those times.
The ice fell away in a sheer cliff just beyond the toes of her boots. Spread out below her was a narrow valley shaped like a boat hull—pointed at the near end, rounded at the far end. Suarez’s position would correspond to just off the starboard bow.
The topography was not complicated; it was effectively a big, oblong hole in the ice, maybe two kilometers long, a quarter that in width at the widest point. The floor of the valley was reddish gravel and looked like an abandoned quarry. About where the cabin would be on a yacht was a series of structures—four buildings, one quite large by polar standards, and, sure enough, under a plastic dome there was unmistakably a swimming pool.
Somebody really liked to swim.
Suarez carefully absorbed the layout. The structure with the two stubby towers would be the power plant. The largest building was some sort of hangar or factory space, unmistakably utilitarian. The third, a two-story L-shape, would be a barracks. Room for, what, fourteen, sixteen rooms plus a common space? So not a huge contingent.
And finally what looked very much like a private home, done with a reckless disregard for energy conservation, a three-story, ultra-modern, Scandinavian-looking thing with the kind of floor-to-ceiling windows you just didn’t see in Antarctica, and a plastic tunnel running to the pool.
Instead of the inevitable Sno-Cats there was a pair of Audi SUVs parked outside the house, as though the occupant might have kids and pets who needed transportation to the nearest soccer field or dog park.
Craziness. Suarez had to laugh. It was nuts. And whoever had built it was nuts. They were hundreds of miles from the coast, which was to say a whole long way from even the thinnest edge of civilization. This might easily be the most isolated house on planet Earth. Sure as hell the furthest from a Starbucks.
Two helicopters lay all tied down and shipshape on a well-marked pad. One was an EC130, a species of chopper found all over the ice. But the other was an Apache, with missile pods on the stubby wings and a swivel-mounted thirty-millimeter cannon.