BZRK

for myself so they chose “Keats” for the boy with the blue eyes. That was deliberate: they want us to be a team.
    My arm hurts like hell, can I get an Advil or six?
    What next?
    *
    Across town, in the Tulip, Charles and Benjamin Armstrong used very old-fashioned tools to organize their thoughts: 3 x 5 cards.
    Coordination, fine motor skills—and gross motor skills, too, for that matter—had always been difficult for them. Each had an eye. But a single eye does not allow for depth perception.
    Each had an arm. But writing sometimes requires two arms, one to hold the paper in place.
    The Twins had struggled to master writing. Keyboards and pads were easier. But Charles and Benjamin valued the pain of overcoming difficulty. Life had always been hard for them. Anything physical had been difficult and sometimes humiliating. On the day many years earlier when the seventeen-year-old Twins had smothered their grandfather with a pillow, they’d had great difficulty coordinating the action.
    Old Arthur Armstrong had raised the boys on a diet of paranoia and reckless self-indulgence. They had loved him in a way, and he had been proud of them.
    He had asked them to end his pain-wracked life, and they had agreed, but only on condition that they immediately inherit Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.
    Arthur had beamed with pride. He had raised them right: if they were to kill him then, by God, they had a right to demand a payment.
    Still, when the time had come, it had been hard to manage. The old man was near death, but still some panicky instinct drove his body to spend its last energy struggling. And with two uncoordinated hands, it wasn’t easy to hold the pillow down long enough, hard enough, to complete the suffocation.
    The cards now before them bore carefully handwritten notes in felt-tip block letters:
    POTUS
    PM of UK
    PM of Japan
    Chancellor of Germany
    President of China
    PM of India
    It would be a global strike. The six most powerful political leaders on Earth. Taken together they ruled half the human population. Three quarters of the world’s wealth. Virtually all of the world’s technology.
    An argument could be made for including Russia, France, and South Korea. Indeed those three cards were set aside for future use.
    “Ambitious,” Charles said.
    “Too ambitious?” Benjamin asked.
    “Burnofsky made good arguments for a more incremental approach,” Charles said. “And with McLure dead maybe he is right. BZRK will be crippled without access to McLure money and facilities. Perhaps we have more time.”
    Twin monitors moved on robotic arms, keyed to their movement. Each monitor had its own camera, and each camera focused on one side of that too-broad face. It allowed them to see each other’s face, to speak not just beside each other, but to each other—eye to eye to eye.
    The surface of the desk was a touch screen with identical menus to left and right. From here they could call up cameras everywhere. The fifty-ninth floor, where the twitchers worked. The twelve floors of laboratories, the testing facilities on the twentieth and twenty-first, the business offices on the lower floors, the model gift shop at ground level, the subterranean garage, the dedicated elevators that serviced the Tulip.
    They could also call up sight and sound from the main offices of Nexus Humanus in Hollywood, and the satellite offices in Washington, London, Berlin, Moscow, Buenos Aires, and just blocks away in Manhattan.
    And, too, they could see the hundreds of Armstrong Fancy Gift shops in airports and train stations and on tourist streets around much of the world.
    And they could watch the homes of key employees, see who came to visit, observe their families, watch as they fought or showered or cooked dinner or made love.
    Their empire came to them through a thousand hidden cameras, a system for them and for them alone. Charles and Benjamin Armstrong, who could not go out into the world, watched unseen and unsuspected.
    But for now they watched each other. Watching his twin’s eye, Benjamin could see that Charles was not very serious, that he was playing devil’s advocate. Benjamin smiled tolerantly.
    “The longer we wait, the greater the chance of discovery,” Benjamin said, walking back through their decision making. Reiterating. Like it was a liturgy. It was reassuring. “We’ve had several close calls.”
    “At any moment the technology might be discovered,” Charles agreed.
    “We know the FBI had