Burnofsky had a Post-it note. He wrote on it: Floor 34. Viral research.
He held this note up in front of his eyes. Held it there for far longer than it should take to read it. But he guessed that whoever was running the biot in his head—and he believed it was Nijinsky—would not be focused on his every moment.
He was careful in the way he did this because Burnofsky knew perfectly well that his lab was under surveillance. He had come to accept that fact. Privacy was dead, anyway, particularly if you worked for the Armstrongs. But he knew the camera locations and angles. Sometimes he forgot—he had a worrying sense that his little self-inflicted wound of the other day might have been observed.
Well, the Twins had seen worse, hadn’t they? They’d seen him puking his guts out. He was morally certain that they’d been watching one dark night months earlier, back before he’d been wired, when he had sat for twenty minutes with a loaded pistol in his hand trying to get up the nerve to put the barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger.
So what was a little cigarette burn, eh? Better than the opium pipe, right? Better than the vodka bottle. He wasn’t drinking now, not that he’d made some lifelong decision to quit; he just wasn’t drinking right now. Or snorting coke. Or smoking opium.
No, he was all cleaned up. He laid the Post-it note down in the ashtray in front of him, shielding it with his body from the hidden camera. Then he began to light a cigarette and in the process burned the note to ashes.
He drew in the smoke of his cigarette and wondered if he would get to the end of it without burning himself.
The burning was—
“Shit,” he muttered. Nijinsky would think it was a reference to a computer virus. He wouldn’t understand that Floor 34 was a crash program involving actual viruses. Biological viruses.
Burnofsky had only stumbled upon the information by chance. He was hiring a new engineer and happened to speak to one of the people in human resources, who smiled, told him he had plenty of available engineers, and thank God at least Burnofsky wasn’t looking for a virologist.
Virologist. A scientist specializing in viruses, of course. And why was anyone at Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation working on biologicals of any kind?
It had to be Floor 34. Burnofsky knew most of what AFGC was into, he should have known about a biological nano program of any sort. Were they working on their own version of biots? Were they preparing to toss his nanobots aside? The possibility worried Burnofsky a bit.
As always when he was anxious, his thoughts went to opium, and then to his work, and then to Carla. And from there to the Great Forbidden Memory.
Burnofsky knew exactly what they had done to his brain. He knew. He was a scientist; he had wired many a person, done to others what had now been done unto him. He knew that tiny wires in his brain had been used to create shortcuts—sending thoughts around the usual circuitous neural pathways to hook into the most intense sensations.
In other words, he knew that Nijinsky had connected memories of his daughter’s death to pleasure centers. He knew Nijinsky had made his greatest guilt into a sick and disturbing fantasy. He knew that. He could picture the wire in his own brain. He could imagine just how Nijinsky had done it.
But that changed nothing. It did not stop the physical reaction when he thought of that most awful of days.
I killed her.
And I’m thrilled.
At first he had thought of using his own nanobots to go in and rewire himself. But of course Nijinksy would see him. Burnofsky could take Nijinsky’s biot—Burnofsky wasn’t quite Bug Man or Vincent when it came to nano warfare, but he was confident that he could outfight Nijinsky.
But somehow … No.
Somehow the will to fight back always seemed to dissipate.
Was this still more wiring? Probably. If so, it was effective. He would form the desire, formulate a plan, start to get his resources in order, and then, then, then something.… It would all just leak away.
The answer was no. He would not finish this cigarette by putting it out in the ashtray.
He took one long, final pull on the cigarette butt—it was down to the last inch—lifted his shirt, and stabbed it into his stomach.
The pain was staggering. The smell of burned flesh was like opium, somehow, a narcotic that turned the pain into a dream, a swirling unreality.
And most of all, it took his mind off Carla. Because despite all of Nijinsky’s careful work, Burnofsky felt that if he had to endure that horror-excitement one more time, he would find his gun and finally do it.
The HNDS—hover-capable nanobot deployment system—or “Hounds” were roughly triangular in shape and no bigger than a paper airplane.
The original drone architecture was under development for the U.S. military and the CIA. Stealthy, relatively quiet, wonderfully maneuverable, their only real drawback was that their range was limited to twenty miles. The military wanted a seventy-five-mile range, and the CIA weren’t interested unless they could be flown at distances up to five hundred miles.
So the drones—once designated the hover-capable surveillance system (HOSS)—had been repurposed. Twenty miles might not quite be the thing for the soldiers or the spies, but it was perfectly adequate for use in massed preprogrammed attack by nanobots.
The Hounds came for Mr. Stern as he was picking up his morning bagel at Montague Street Bagels in Brooklyn. It was a short walk from his home, and the McLure Security car and driver would be waiting across the street.
There were twenty thousand self-replicating nanobots aboard the Hound piloted remotely by a tech in the bowels of the Tulip. The Twins watched on their eternal monitor. The nanobots themselves were of course not twitcher run. They had been programmed by the Twins via the app. These nanobots had been given a simple set of instructions: to multiply as soon as they encountered a source of carbon. To continue to do so for exactly forty minutes. Then to commit mechanical suicide and stop.