“You’ve been unconscious for eighteen hours,” the doctor said. “I gave you a stimulant to wake you up. But it won’t last long, the pain will get worse, and you’ll be better off asleep for a while longer while your body recovers. You’ve been through a lot.”
“Why did you wake me up?” Plath asked Wilkes.
But Wilkes looked pleadingly at Bug Man. “Okay, this is some very bad shit to deal with. But the gray goo, Burnofsky’s babies, we’re not sure … I’m seeing stuff that may be caused by self-replicating nanobots. But very small scale so far. And it could be I’m wrong.”
“And there’s the Floor Thirty-Four virus,” Vincent said. “Maybe it never escaped the Tulip. But maybe it did. The whole final tranche of Lear’s victims have biots. We stopped the process before they were killed off. That’s thousands of people with living biots who would suffer madness if the Floor Thirty-Four virus were to get loose.”
“Not to mention all of us,” Bug Man said.
“Uh-huh.” Plath wanted very badly to go back to sleep, and the doctor was right; the pain from her shattered knee was stalking her.
“The thing is, there’s only one way to stop the gray goo, and to make sure the Floor Thirty-Four virus never escapes,” Vincent said in his dispassionate voice. “Nuclear.”
“What? Wait, um, I’m lost, here. I don’t exactly have an atomic bomb on me, oh, damn—Doctor, can I at least get an ibuprofen or something?”
“If it’s out there and we don’t stop it, the whole world dies,” Wilkes said. She put her hand on Plath’s forehead and held the cup so she could take another sip of water. “Bug Man has an idea.”
Bug Man nodded uncertainly, not quite sure about how Plath would receive what he was about to say. “Listen, we stopped the biot crèches. The madness has stopped, but man, half the world is burning. Millions … you know. Nobody’s in charge. But people know what it means if a window all of a sudden opens up in their head. And we still can control the crèches, we can still, you know …”
“Why would we?” Plath asked. Her head was throbbing. Her mouth felt like flannel, and nausea tickled the bottom of her throat.
“Because we need someone to blow up New York City,” Vincent said. “Lear had good records, good data. We can pinpoint guys with access to nukes. Americans, Russians, French, Brits. And Bug Man realized that when the biots quicken—when they’re born, you know—they see. And they could read. We can bring biots online, and we can show them a message.”
“What message?” Plath asked.
One by one they looked to Bug Man. “Do it, or we kill your biots. Do it, or we take out your family. We explain, as much as you can, you know … the whole thing. But if we don’t stop this, we’re all dead. Us last of all, down here on the ice. But everyone. The whole human race. The whole planet.”
Plath felt tears welling in her eyes. “You woke me up for this? To vote on—”
“Not a vote,” Wilkes said. “We already took a vote. You’re in charge, Plath. Sadie. Suarez will run security, and eventually we’ll unwire some of these people, but right now, it’s on you.”
“Vincent?” Plath pleaded.
He looked away, ashamed. “It’s on you, Plath. Whatever you decide.”
In the end it was a Chinese missile that did it. The Chinese general responsible, once certain that his family was safe, tied a rope to a tree in one of his favorite countryside spots, and hanged himself.
There were very few functioning governments still left to do useful things like tally up the death toll of the Plague of Madness. But later, historical estimates would set the count at two hundred ten million, in thirty-six countries.
Four million of those had come as a consequence of Plath’s order. But, in the end, Burnofsky’s gray goo did not make it off Manhattan. The human race was saved. Life on planet Earth would go on.
In the weeks that followed, Plath drank much more than she should have, sitting in the living room of what had been Lear’s house. She shared the house with Wilkes, Vincent, and Bug Man. She tried not to drink before lunch, but she often failed. She tried to stop, but not very hard. Wilkes made efforts to get her to move on, but the very words died on her lips when she looked into Sadie McLure’s haunted eyes.
Once, and only once, had Plath gone to look at Lear.
Lear sat chained in the dungeon that had once held Suarez. Plath had asked for the door to be opened so that she could see her. See the monster. The mass murderer.
But Lear had not responded to Plath, had seemingly not noticed that she was there.
Plath stopped using that name, and reverted to Sadie. She had tried and mostly succeeded in accepting Noah’s death. But she could not reconcile herself to what had happened, what she had done, to New York City.
Four months on, Wilkes found her on the floor, choking on her own vomit after drinking an entire bottle of Lear’s bourbon. It was terribly clear that Sadie McLure would, sooner or later, manage to kill herself in expiation of her sins.
Wilkes would not allow that. She went to Vincent, and to Bug Man, and slowly, so very gently, the biots went to work. And little by little, Sadie McLure forgot.
TWO YEARS LATER
The woman was probably in her early fifties but looked much older. She was dressed in clean but tattered clothing, layers of it, as if she had to be ready for any sort of weather. In the pocket of her patched coat she carried a crumpled black trash bag to use as an umbrella. London was out of umbrellas.