Free BZRK Reloaded by Michael Grant

chronology.
    Where it didn’t matter, Vincent was young. The other places,
where it mattered, he was old, old, old and sad.
He had touched her that first time. Yes, of course he had targeted
her. She was a scientist at McLure, a biot researcher and designer, and
Vincent had even then been laying out a back door to McLure, anticipating the day.
So he had touched her that first time, and yes his invisibly small
biots had raced up her shivering shoulder and across the neck and
into her through nose or ear or eye.
Into her brain, there to probe and discover and spy and wire her.
To prepare her for a continuing relationship that he needed and she
wanted.
Yes, she had wanted. Yes, that surely was an honest memory. Yes,
that first liquid feeling had been real, that first parting of her lips, that
first animal response to him, that at least had been completely real.
And now she loved him.
Real love? Or wired love? In the end did it matter?
They had made love. Not once, more than once. Had it been
enhanced by busy biots laying wire and transponders in her brain?
He had claimed not. He claimed he wired her only minimally, only
to obtain her …professional …services. He wired the scientist in her,
not the woman.
So he had said.
Did it matter? Did it change the fact that her heart had been a
desperate animal in her chest? Did it change the way he’d made her
breath catch in her throat? Did it change the fact that she had gasped
and made strangling, inarticulate cries into a pillow, and he had
taken the pillow away because he wanted to hear her, needed to hear
her pleasure, needed to experience secondhand at least what pleasure
could be?
Maybe some of it, most of it, all of it, was false.
He had told her that it was not. Vincent had sworn that he only
made her more suggestible to co-operating on the building of new
biots, that he would never …That that sort of thing was not BZRK,
not what they fought for.
Did it matter?
Anya sat in her one chair remembering, and while remembering
thus was unable to work on the formula she’d begun to complete on
the sketch pad, covered like a college chalkboard with obscure symbols.
There was a knock at the door.
Her eyes flew open. She waited a few seconds for the unsteadiness
in her voice to calm. “Yes?”
There was the sound of a lock. The door swung inward, practically halving the room. Nijinsky stepped in.
Anya didn’t like him. He was beautiful and perfect and not
interesting to her. And she knew that his relationship with Vincent
was deeper than her own. She was jealous of him. It annoyed her
somehow that he had chosen a Russian nom de guerre. The Chinese
American model didn’t have a Russian soul, he was not a Nijinsky.
“Dr Violet,” he said politely. He glanced at the sketch pad, quickly
at her, then resumed his usual mask of indifference. “I wanted to talk
to you about …well, whether you’ve had any strange feelings lately.”
Nijinsky raised his eyebrows and made a slight, wry smile.
“Why don’t you tell me what you mean,” Anya said curtly.
“Okay. I mean that Vincent still has a biot inside you.”
She nodded. The idea was not a surprise to her. “So, a little Vincent still crawling around in my hippocampus or wherever. A little
biot controlled by a madman.” She had to laugh. “Wasn’t there a song?
The lunatic is in my head?”
Nijinsky’s brown, almond eyes went cold.
She noticed and shook her head derisively. “Ah, I see, we aren’t
supposed to say that kind of thing about Vincent, are we?”
“He cares about you,” Nijinsky said. “He saved your life.”
“Right after he endangered it,” she snapped. “I’m not sure that
counts as a net plus.”
Nijinsky said nothing.
“Where are the others? His other biots? You used a singular in
describing the one he had in me.”
Nijinsky nodded. “One is dead. One is in a dish, rebuilding,
healing. The other one I’m carrying. It’s right here. He tapped his
forehead lightly.
“And so