BZRK

filled it with coffee though the pot wasn’t fully done. He added milk and sugar, lots of sugar. “They actually love me at work. I think I’m, like, their best guy. Tester. You know?”
    His mother shook her head slowly, not to what he’d said, but to what she’d seen on the TV. “Kind of person who would do something like that. Savages.”
    For a moment—but just for a fleeting moment—Bug Man almost connected that word
savage
to himself. Almost made a link between the horror on the screen and his own actions. But it passed and left no trace.
    “No, they love me at work,” he repeated, hoping she would hear it this time.
    “Just make sure you remember how lucky you are to have that job. So many people out of work.”
    “Yeah. Well, I’m good at it. That’s why they have me. Because I’m the best.”
    The toast popped up.
    On the screen a man ran trailing fire and smoke, tripped and fell, and died.
    “If you’re having toast, I’ll put some in.”
    Bug Man sipped his coffee.
    He had beaten Vincent. Yeah, he owned that.
    Next time he’d finish it.
    He took his sweetened coffee back to his room, sent Jessica packing, and despite the caffeine, fell asleep.
    *
    Bug Man woke suddenly, knowing he was not alone.
    Four men stood around his bed. They were strong men, all dressed in casual clothing, innocuous pinks and tans and teals.
    “What?” He sat up but only made it part of the way before powerful hands grabbed his biceps and his ankles. They flipped him over onto his belly.
    “What the hell?” he cried.
    “No one’s home,” one of the men said. “Yell all you like.”
    A phone was thrust into his face. A video image appeared. To his horror it was the faces of Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.
    “Anthony,” Charles said in a calm, measured voice. “We are not about ego. We are about peace and unity, bringing all humans together, so that all men are brothers and husbands, all women sisters and wives.”
    “Listen, I’m sorry about—”
    But the video was still running. It wasn’t live; it was recorded. It was a message.
    A sentence.
    “Your pride cost us a victory in that battle, Anthony. Your
pride
.”
    “Let me go!”
    “We love you, Anthony,” Benjamin said.
    They held him, one set of powerful hands for each limb, but then the man holding his left ankle must have managed to have a hand free, mustn’t he? Because that man had a club in his hand. Bug Man could see it, glancing frantically down over his shoulder, a thick, round, polished, dark piece of wood.
    “But punishment is demanded in this case,” Benjamin continued.
    “However much we regret it.”
    “What the hell?” Bug Man cried, and the club smashed down on the back of his thighs.
    The pain was incredible. Unimaginable.
    “We do love you, Anthony.”
    And a second blow landed. He cried out in agony and fear.
    And a third blow and every muscle in his body was twanging tight as he screamed into his pillow and one of the men holding his arms bent low, brought his ugly yellowed eyes close to Bug Man’s tear-streaming, strained face, and said, “That was from the bosses. But we lost good men last night, you little Limey piece of shit. So this last one’s from us.”
    The club came down hard and for a moment Bug Man’s brain just shut down.
    He felt their hands release.
    He heard them leave the room and close his door.

SEVENTEEN
    Plath did not dream of the night’s violence. She dreamed about her brother. In her dream he had grown up. He had a family. Two little girls and Sadie—not Plath, Sadie—was coming over for dinner, and it was all strangely televisionish, not real. The girls were perfectly pretty. Eating a cereal in a bright box: Kellogg’s Nanobots.
    At first that didn’t seem strange to dream-Sadie as she walked through the scene.
    The kitchen was middle American, with a refrigerator covered in children’s drawings and pictures and report cards with straight As! Yay! written in red pen.
    It was nothing like the home Stone would probably have had. In the dream he had a more prosaic life than he’d have had if he had lived and taken over McLure Industries.
    The cereal was coming out of the box now, crawling in a swarm toward the little girls’ bowls, refilling as they spooned up the crunchy nuggets.
    “I didn’t feel a thing,” Stone said.
    “You must have been afraid,” dream-Sadie argued.
    And behind him, back where Stone couldn’t see but Sadie could, the nanobots were crawling up over the