BZRK

did not make love, but thought about that, too.
    To no one’s great surprise Keats was the quicker study with biots. With his two uninjured biots Vincent took him down in the meat to stage mock battles. Vincent taught him how meaningless gravity could be, how to avoid immune responses, how to think in three dimensions not two, how to leap, stab, cut, carry weapons, and when all else failed, run away.
    And when Vincent was done with Keats, Ophelia took over and showed him the patient job of hauling Teflon fibers into place and weaving them into the basketwork around Plath’s pulsing aneurysm.
    Plath was not a prodigy, but Nijinsky allowed that she was really not bad, not bad at all. And in one area she beat Keats hands down. She was a born spinner. She easily learned to read the 3D holographic brain maps, to stab the probe and light up the far-flung connections of memory. To make sense of what she saw there.
    Those memories played as video loops, or still photos in Plath’s mind. Sometimes both more and less than that: not an image of anything real but a monster or a saint, glowing figures built by the mind itself to represent feelings.
    There was a core template of the brain that was a sort of overview, showing in general terms which parts had certain functions. She quickly became familiar with the centers of vision, hearing, smell, touch. She knew where to find the controls for hands and feet, fingers and toes, the centers of speech. Those were roughly the same in any human brain.
    But the essential job of a spinner was to rig connections between parts of the brain not normally connected. A spinner had to know how to find a visual image, or a scent, or a sound, or a face, and wire it to a memory that would evoke a certain emotion.
    Pleasure. Pain. Fear. Hatred. They all had their locations. Wire—actually a filament much more complex than simple wire—oozed, spiderlike from the biot’s pseudo-proboscis. Electronic signals that might have found their way slowly from point A to point B along neurons, jumping synapses, now zoomed along the superhighway of the wire.
    “How much difference does it make if every time I see a face I also feel angry?” she asked Nijinsky.
    “The first time? Not much. But brains adapt and add new layers. So if you draw a connection between a face and, let’s say, desire, the brain begins to absorb that. The first connection is by wire, and the next hundred, maybe. But soon the brain builds reinforcing structures. Backup pathways. So soon, you can’t see that face without also feeling desire.”
    “You can make someone want someone.”
    Nijinsky nodded. “We can make someone want someone.”
    “It’s . . . Never mind.”
    “You think it’s wrong.”
    “It is wrong.”
    Nijinsky nodded. “Yes. It’s wrong. We’re doing a very bad thing in what we believe is a very good cause.”
    “And the other side?”
    He made a face that acknowledged the truth of it. “Yes, they think exactly the same thing. That they are doing bad things in a good cause. At least many of them do.”
    “Can we undo what we do?”
    Nijinsky thought about it. He stood with his arms crossed, perfectly clean and pressed as always, the only perfectly neat object in that miserable building. “We can undo some of it. Most of it, if we do it right away. Over time it becomes basically impossible to undo. Although we can layer a whole new connection and alter the brain’s path.”
    “What are you doing to Anya Violet?”
    The question caught Nijinsky off guard, as she’d meant it to. He gave her an approving smile. “I don’t know. She’s . . . Well, Vincent has responsibility for her.”
    “He got to her first,” Plath said. “Right? But somehow the other side guessed his move and they were waiting.”
    “We don’t think she’s been wired by them, if that’s what you’re asking. She was just infested. Vincent—we—got careless.”
    “He’s wiring her now, isn’t he?”
    Nijinsky said, “Let’s get back to your training.”
    So she trained. She sent word to Stern, the McLure security chief, that she was safe, that she was in Switzerland at a mental health spa where she was getting help with grief counseling.
    Did Stern believe that? Probably not. But she was
the
McLure. And as Stern had said, he did what the McLure asked of him, even when it meant pretending to believe a lie.
    The day would come when she would have to meet with the lawyers and hear the will read out, and discover what