BZRK

evaporated into dry air.
    “It’s a reaction to trauma,” she said. “What just happened between us.”
    “We’ve just been yanked way out of reality. Away from our homes . . . violence . . . blood everywhere and scared pissless. And this. Things in my head, I feel them still, even when they’re supposedly asleep, I know they’re there.”
    She nodded.
    “And Jin says that’s it, they’ll be in our thoughts from now on,” Keats said.
    “Our little six-legged children.”
    That brought a completely unexpected laugh from him. She smiled in response.
    “They die, and we go mad,” Keats said. “Maybe . . . Maybe I’m not supposed to tell you, but like you said, I don’t give a damn: my big brother is in a madhouse right now. Chained. Raving.”
    Plath narrowed her eyes. “He was part of this?”
    “They tell me he was very good. I imagine he was. He was the strong one. The brave one. Me, I was . . .” He trailed off, sighed, and sat down beside her.
    Their shoulders touched. That was all, but she wanted so badly to lean her head against him. This boy she didn’t really know.
    “I’m not a vulnerable person,” Plath said.
    “Everyone’s vulnerable. I’ve seen that up close.”
    “I don’t make friends that often,” Plath said. “I think I’m kind of a bitch.”
    He smiled and looked down in an unsuccessful effort to hide the smile from her. “I think that’s maybe not a bad thing when you’re with this crowd. In this situation.”
    “Listen to me,” she said. She looked straight at him until he returned the gaze. Their lips were inches apart. “I don’t fall in love. So don’t expect that.”
    “I guess I do. I have that inside me, I mean, falling in love. I’ve never been. But I feel it inside me. So I guess you’d better expect that from me.”
    She remembered his lips on hers, and they were not tea-stained wax paper. That memory was somewhere else, still there, but this was a new memory and even more real.
    He moved closer and she let him. He surprised her then, because his kiss was not the urgent, charged kiss of before. It was tender and infinitely gentle. He pulled away before she was ready for him to do so.
    Keats stood up. “The idea is not to hope. They want us to be focused. Under control. Maybe Jin and Vincent and the rest are good people. Maybe they’re trying to do what’s right. But they aren’t me, and they aren’t you. And maybe they can press us into this war of theirs, but they can’t tell us how to feel.”
    She locked eyes with him. And as if they were making a sacred pact, they nodded, and smiled sheepishly, and Keats left.

ARTIFACT
    Just hacked Swedish intel. Expected data on blondes in saunas, hah. Mostly looks like unencrypted junk. But there was something weird. I saw a posting by TinyTIMPO2 last week on nanotech and thought this might be interesting.
    So it’s this fragment. It was saved unencrypted then they must have noticed and encrypted it and wiped the original. This fragment survived. Ran it through a Swedish-English translation program. The source is definitely MUST Militära underrättelse-och säkerhetstjänsten, and it’s def an internal memo.
    . . . scenario first advanced by Eric Dexler, a nanotech pioneer. Nanobots capable of self-replication could, due to a simple error in programming, in theory obliterate all life on the Earth.
    Nanotech creatures could be programmed to clean up a chemical spill, perhaps an organic compound like benzene. But benzene contains carbon. All living things likewise contain carbon. An error in programming, even a slight one, could cause nanobots to begin consuming any and all carbon.
    The problem becomes acute if nanobots are built to self-replicate. If you began with your Adam and Eve nanobot reproducing themselves in one minute, and their progeny doing the same in another minute, and so on, the population of nanobots would increase geometrically at an astounding rate. In a matter of hours there would be billions. In days, trillions, enough nanobots to consume all carbon within Sweden, killing every living thing.
    Within a week the nanobots could obliterate all life on Earth.
    Dexler calls this phenomenon, “The gray goo.” It is no more elegant a phrase in English than in Swedish. Obviously this is an unlikely scenario, but given our recent –
    Anyone interested?
    ArmandtheGimp

TWENTY
    There followed days of training for Plath and Keats. Days in which they did not kiss, but thought about it, and