BZRK

Chattopadhyay—Dr Chat to her patient—swiveled the screen to show her.
    “There are the biots in the first image.” She tapped the keyboard to change pictures. “And here they are half an hour later.”
    “They haven’t moved.”
    “Yes, they are immobile. Presumably dead.” Dr Chat was in her fifties, heavy, dark-skinned, skeptical of eye and immaculate in her lab coat over sari. “You know of course that I and my whole family mourn for your father and brother.”
    Sadie nodded. She didn’t intend to be curt or dismissive. She just couldn’t hear any more condolences. She was suffocating in condolences and concern.
    Over the last twenty-four hours she had absorbed the deaths. Absorbed, not coped with, accepted, gotten over, or properly mourned. Just absorbed. And somehow seeing those tiny dead biots was one step too far.
    What her father had created was a revolution in medicine. It had taken him years. He had thrown more than a billion dollars into it, which had required him to buy back his own company from stockholders just so he could spend that kind of money without having to explain himself.
    He had worked himself half to death, he and Sadie’s mother. Then, the cancer, and he was even more desperate to finish the work, to send his tiny minions in to kill cancer cells and save his wife.
    The pressure he had endured.
    But the biot project was too late for Sadie and Stone’s mother, Grey’s wife.
    For three months after Birgid McLure’s death Grey was virtually invisible. He lived at work. And then . . . the miracle.
    The biot. A biological creature, not a machine. A thing made of a grab bag of DNA bits and pieces. Spider, cobra, jellyfish. But above all, for the control mechanism that allowed a single mind to see through the eyes of a biot and run with a biot’s legs and cut with a biot’s blades, for that, human DNA.
    The biot was not a robot. It was a limb. It was linked directly to the mind of its creator. It was a part of its creator.
    Grey McLure’s biots had been injected as close to the aneurysm as was safe. They had set up a supply chain that ran through her ear canal to shuttle in the tiny Teflon fibers. And then they began to weave, a sort of macro-actual tiny, but micro-subjective huge, basket around the aneurysm.
    “You’re lucky the overpressure from the explosion didn’t cause a rupture,” Dr Chat said. “There’s some bleeding, but it seems to have stopped. Lucky.”
    Sadie wanted to say something mean and sarcastic about her luck—luck that had left her an orphan—but stopped herself.
    “Did it do anything at all to the aneurysm?”
    “It seems mostly unchanged. But as you know, the weave needs constant tending to remain strong. And in any case it was only sixty percent done. So I have to prescribe the blood pressure medications to lower your BP.”
    “I had an allergic reaction,” Sadie said.
    “There are other medications we can try. There’s a whole range of—”
    “Whatever,” Sadie snapped. “I can read Google as well as you. I know that I already have excellent blood pressure, and that these meds won’t have much effect, and they’re really only there to make me feel like I’m doing something. I don’t need a placebo, Doctor.”
    Dr Chat sighed and looked at her from under disapproving eyebrows. “You have a responsibility now, you know.”
    “Yeah. I know.”
    “This company employs almost a thousand people in six countries.”
    “Seven,” Sadie said. “Dad opened a lab in Singapore. That’s where he and Stone were headed.”
    Dr Chat sighed. “Is there anyone we can call to come be with you? Friends? Your grandmother?”
    Sadie shot her a defiant look. “Not really, no. Not the kind of friends I want to see right now.”
    So the doctor left, and Sadie was alone. It was a luxurious room. The bed might be hospital style, but there was a forty-two-inch plasma screen on the wall, sleek Jasper Morrison chairs, a pad, lovely orchids in crystal vases, soft lighting, a view through a floor-to-ceiling window of the McLure Industries main New Jersey campus. And through a side door was a marble bathroom that could have graced a suite at a Ritz-Carlton.
    If you had to be sick, this was the place in which to do it.
    Sadie felt her gaze drawn to the image of the tiny dead biots. The last little bits of her father.
    She wondered why she didn’t cry more. She had cried, but in sniffles and single sobs. She had cried so long, so much for her mother. Maybe