She was so close to telling him. Sadie. That’s my name. But with an effort she stopped herself. “They want us close. But they don’t ever want us to forget.”
Ophelia showed them to a room they had not seen before. It was up a ridiculously narrow interior staircase. It was like a shabby parody of the lab from McLure. Someone had hammered together a plywood table shoved against narrow, greasy windows that let in the gray gloom of New York. On the table a couple of mismatched microscopes, something that looked like a very expensive Crock-Pot, a small stainless-steel freezer.
But the focal point of the room was a massive piece of glowing, white machinery with which Plath was all too familiar.
“Is that an MRI machine?”
Ophelia nodded. “With some very customized add-ons. Yes. I’m told it’s worth about five million dollars. So don’t put your coffee cups on it.”
It was a bizarre anomaly. It was possible to accept the junky attic lab or the massive, humming hulk of technology, but the two didn’t seem as if they should share the same reality.
“We usually take more time with training,” Ophelia said. “But time is short. The enemy is planning a major strike. It’s a winning move if they pull it off. So we have to stop them.”
“What is the plan?” Keats asked.
“United Nations General Assembly. Most of the world’s heads of state—our President Morales, your Prime Minister Bowen, Keats. AFGC is going to try to place nanobots in them and others. China. Japan. India. Maybe more.”
Keats shot a look at Plath.
“AFGC. What is that, anyway?” Plath asked.
“The Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.”
“That doesn’t sound like an evil organization setting out to dominate the world,” Plath said.
“That’s the idea,” Ophelia said. “If you try telling someone the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation is taking over the world, they’ll think you’re crazy.”
“Would they be wrong?” Keats muttered under his breath.
Ophelia leaned close to him. She had a smile for this occasion, too, and it was solid steel. “It’s good to have a sense of humor, Keats. But don’t be flip. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a game.”
“No, miss,” he said, because Ophelia suddenly seemed much older than he.
Ophelia tapped an oblong plastic case on the cluttered table. “Your babies are in here. They’re warming to room temperature. When I open this box, they’ll see light, which means you’ll see through their eyes.”
Both Sadie and Keats looked nervously at the box.
“Each of you has two biots. Each of those biots has two types of eye. A compound insect eye that is very good at detecting motion, and a quasi-human eye that is somewhat better at color and definition. But the human brain is not well suited for making sense of these disparate visuals. So each of you has been altered.”
“Say what?” Keats snapped.
“When we sent our biots in, we brought a package of altered stem cells and planted them in your visual cortexes. It’s not strictly necessary—a biot runner can see without them—but they’ll see the actual, not the enhanced, visuals. See, down at the nano level there’s no real color. Pigmentation is too spread out, not sufficiently concentrated to be seen. So with bare visual you’ll see shapes and edges, but all gray scale. With enhanced visual you get color as well.”
“Do we want to see what’s down there in color?” Plath asked.
“In a battle it’s very, very helpful.”
“I guess we’ll just move right past the fact that you have no right to be planting anything in our brains,” Plath snapped.
“Yes, we will,” Ophelia said. “We don’t have a lot of time. So let’s get to it, shall we? We’re going to activate one biot for each of you, and then place them. Down in the meat, as we say. I’ll have one of my own biots accompany yours, Keats. A guide.”
“Wait. What? Now?” Keats asked.
“Plath, you have the simpler task. Yours is a simple tour. But our friend Keats here is needed to take on an important job almost immediately.”
“Important job? What job?” Keats demanded, as Plath tried to avoid feeling like she was being slighted.
“Plath,” Ophelia said. “I have three biots working at the site of your aneurysm. The Teflon weave was dangerously weakened by multiple traumas last night. I’m like the boy in the story, the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. I’m holding it together, but I have other duties. And we need someone who can remain close to you.”
Plath hated the look of shocked concern on Keats’s face. It looked a lot like pity.
“And Wilkes will walk you through your own tour, Plath,” Ophelia said. “If she ever gets here.”
“I’m here.” Wilkes climbed out from a dark corner, rubbed sleep from her eyes, did a simultaneous smile and yawn, stretched and said, “Just have to pee first.” They heard her clattering down the stairs.
“Now listen to me, both of you,” Ophelia said, leaning in to them, clasping her hands like she was considering a prayer. “You’re going into a very, very strange world. What you see can be quite disturbing.”
“I’m already disturbed,” Plath said. “I can feel that … that thing … in my head again.” Then seeing that Keats had misinterpreted her, she snapped, “No, not the damned aneurysm. The biot. Mine. My biot.”