BZRK

seconds later.
    The world was spinning around, and he was a scrap of nothing caught in a whirlpool.
    “What you’re experiencing now is normal,” Vincent said.
    It didn’t feel normal. Keats heaved again and this time missed the bowl. He fell forward. Vincent caught him before he could hit the floor.
    Renfield stepped in to do the same for Plath, who was cursing in between retching sounds, a very unhappy-sounding girl.
    “We call it childbirth,” Vincent said. His voice was matter-of-fact, calm, not like he was trying to soothe Noah’s panic but doing it anyway. “It’s a kind of inside joke. Because what’s happening is that your biots are quickening. Becoming alive. You’re feeling the disorientation of being in your own bodies while simultaneously being somewhere else.”
    Keats had a sudden flash of a dark, flat plain stretching out beyond view.
    A flash of lightning.
    A series of flashbulb pops.
Pop!Pop!Pop!
    An elephant. Crippled.
    No, a spider. Legs forming. But as big as an elephant.
    Forming as he watched. Writhing. Almost as if it was in pain. Crying out with the writhing of still-forming limbs since it lacked a mouth to scream.
    Beams of brilliant green light.
    A spray of mist.
    And suddenly a different view. A close-up in a flash of grainy light: a second creature, like the first, jerky movements, legs that ended in lobster claws, thrashing.
    Then, “Oh, God!” Plath cried. “I saw its face.”
    She tried to bolt from her seat, but Renfield held her in place with hands on her shoulders.
    “Biots often have a sort of eerie resemblance to the donor of their human DNA,” Dr Violet said. “Each of you has two biots growing. You’re seeing one of them through the still-forming eyes of the other.”
    “Okay, okay, I don’t . . .” Keats said, and then whatever he’d been about to say was blown away by an image in flashing strobe light of the monstrous spider, turning, turning, and oh, God, oh, God, he was seeing through both sets of eyes, seeing himself seeing himself seeing himself as a sort of vile spider with no, no, noooo! Eyes! Blue eyes like his own eyes, oh God.
    “It can be disturbing,” Vincent said from a million miles away.
    What were they doing to him?
    Keats saw his brother, shackled, screaming, screaming, and now his own head was filled with lunatic visions.
    He whimpered. He didn’t care that he whimpered.
    He didn’t care that he was crying aloud, howling like a mad thing. Howling. Like his poor, mad brother.
    *
    Vincent felt sick inside. This was a dirty trick he was playing. They’d had no preparation. No training. He at least had seen films; he had seen micrographs. He’d been shown what to expect. By that cold bastard Caligula, yes, but shown anyway. Better than the nightmare Keats and Plath were entering.
    These two, these straining, shrieking, sobbing teenagers were taking it all in one awful jolt of disorientation.
    He hadn’t just thrown them off the deep end and told them to swim. He’d thrown them into the ocean and told them to outswim the sharks.
    He closed his eyes, and the memories came rushing back. The violent nausea. The feeling of being twisted out of reality, like the hand of some malicious god had reached down to rip him out of the fabric of time and space.
    And they still had no idea. No
idea
. No way to understand that this transformation was permanent. No way to really understand that they had just bet their sanity. Their lives.
    But Lear needed them. Lear was right. No time for the usual niceties; here you are, kids: welcome to the asylum.
    Wait till they see the demodex. Wait until they see their first mite. Wait until they see the blood cells rushing around them like Frisbees.
    Wait until they stare out through another man’s eye.
    And wait . . . Vincent froze.
    All the while, V1 and V2 had been making their way along Dr Violet’s optic nerve.
    Something. What was it? He’d seen something, something that made the hairs on the back of his head stand up, twitched by tiny muscles, a signal of fear. What did he have to fear?
    He backed V1 up.
    Sent V2 ahead cautiously.
    What had he seen and not seen?
    And there it was. Just a few cells torn from the optic nerve when someone disconnected too quickly.
    Trap.

FOURTEEN
    “They’ve got the new repeater in place, Anthony.”
    Bug Man glared at Burnofsky, enjoying watching him sweat. Bloody old fart. He looked like that aging rocker who had just died. The old junkie. Bug Man would hate ever to