had been real.
She had found him interesting. And sad. Sadness was not a terrible thing to her. She was Russian by birth, from Samara, located in the middle of nowhere. She was not an American raised on the idea that happiness was the natural human condition. She tired quickly of smiling people. Have a nice day. Hey, honey, smile.
She had seen wariness in Vincent, lessons learned, pain endured, limitations accepted. He was perhaps ten years younger than she, but that was only chronology.
Where it didn’t matter, Vincent was young. The other places, where it mattered, he was old, old, old and sad.
He had touched her that first time. Yes, of course he had targeted her. She was a scientist at McLure, a biot researcher and designer, and Vincent had even then been laying out a back door to McLure, anticipating the day.
So he had touched her that first time, and yes his invisibly small biots had raced up her shivering shoulder and across the neck and into her through nose or ear or eye.
Into her brain, there to probe and discover and spy and wire her. To prepare her for a continuing relationship that he needed and she wanted.
Yes, she had wanted. Yes, that surely was an honest memory. Yes, that first liquid feeling had been real, that first parting of her lips, that first animal response to him, that at least had been completely real.
And now she loved him.
Real love? Or wired love? In the end did it matter?
They had made love. Not once, more than once. Had it been enhanced by busy biots laying wire and transponders in her brain? He had claimed not. He claimed he wired her only minimally, only to obtain her . . . professional . . . services. He wired the scientist in her, not the woman.
So he had said.
Did it matter? Did it change the fact that her heart had been a desperate animal in her chest? Did it change the way he’d made her breath catch in her throat? Did it change the fact that she had gasped and made strangling, inarticulate cries into a pillow, and he had taken the pillow away because he wanted to hear her, needed to hear her pleasure, needed to experience second-hand at least what pleasure could be?
Maybe some of it, most of it, all of it, was false.
He had told her that it was not. Vincent had sworn that he only made her more suggestible to co-operating on the building of new biots, that he would never . . . That that sort of thing was not BZRK, not what they fought for.
Did it matter?
Anya sat in her one chair remembering, and while remembering thus was unable to work on the formula she’d begun to complete on the sketch pad, covered like a college chalkboard with obscure symbols.
There was a knock at the door.
Her eyes flew open. She waited a few seconds for the unsteadiness in her voice to calm. “Yes?”
There was the sound of a lock. The door swung inward, practically halving the room. Nijinsky stepped in.
Anya didn’t like him. He was beautiful and perfect and not interesting to her. And she knew that his relationship with Vincent was deeper than her own. She was jealous of him. It annoyed her somehow that he had chosen a Russian nom de guerre. The Chinese American model didn’t have a Russian soul, he was not a Nijinsky.
“Dr Violet,” he said politely. He glanced at the sketch pad, quickly at her, then resumed his usual mask of indifference. “I wanted to talk to you about . . . well, whether you’ve had any strange feelings lately.” Nijinsky raised his eyebrows and made a slight, wry smile.
“Why don’t you tell me what you mean,” Anya said curtly.
“Okay. I mean that Vincent still has a biot inside you.”
She nodded. The idea was not a surprise to her. “So, a little Vincent still crawling around in my hippocampus or wherever. A little biot controlled by a madman.” She had to laugh. “Wasn’t there a song? The lunatic is in my head?”
Nijinsky’s brown, almond eyes went cold.
She noticed and shook her head derisively. “Ah, I see, we aren’t supposed to say that kind of thing about Vincent, are we?”
“He cares about you,” Nijinsky said. “He saved your life.”
“Right after he endangered it,” she snapped. “I’m not sure that counts as a net plus.”
Nijinsky said nothing.
“Where are the others? His other biots? You used a singular in describing the one he had in me.”
Nijinsky nodded. “One is dead. One is in a dish, rebuilding, healing. The other one I’m carrying. It’s right here. He tapped his forehead lightly.
“And so you and I both get to keep a little piece of him.” Anya was tired of sparring. “No. I haven’t noticed anything. If anyone is wiring me I’m not noticing it, and if a . . . mentally unbalanced . . . twitcher were doing it, it would be clumsy enough for me to notice. So, I very much doubt that Vincent is even aware of the biot inside me. If he is, it’s as a series of hallucinatory images that probably mean little or nothing to him.”
Nijinsky nodded. “I haven’t seen any activity at all from his biot.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed, his knee almost touching hers. In a straight man she would have suspected a flirtation.
“What’s on the pad?” he asked bluntly.
“I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know you have surveillance in here. I know you’ve already seen and investigated.”
He shook his head. Then he hung his head down and shook it again. “No, actually. We don’t have the manpower for that, I’m afraid. I mean, yes, we have a camera in here, but aside from making sure you haven’t hanged yourself or tried to dig a hole through the wall . . .”
“It’s what I was working on before you and your charming crew decided to destroy my life,” she said, but the bitterness was false and sounded it. Vincent was not something she could regret.
“Biot?” he asked.
“Biot version four,” she said. “Fourth generation. What you use now is version three. Or threes with various upgrades.”
“Okay,” he said cautiously. “Do you want to tell me?”
“It’s faster. It can jump. It has an improved rack for add-on weaponry. The legs are stronger.”
“Yes?” he asked, not nearly as cool as he wanted to sound.
“And it has a rather interesting penetrating proboscis, hollow of course, with a bladder. Mosquito-derived.”
“So it can suck blood?” He was puzzled.
“It goes the other way. The bladder can be filled with any number of interesting agents—chemical, bacteriological, viral—and injected. No more carrying sacks of germs with you if you want to plant something deadly.”
“We don’t do that,” Nijinsky said.
“Ah. Of course. I forgot: you’re the good guys,” she mocked. “Not for you, planting a bit of flesh-eating bacteria in some enemy’s brain.”
“There are limits,” he said.
“Just like you don’t wire people.”
He raised his head and looked at her. “Dr Violet, we will endeavor to remove any alterations made in your brain.”
She swallowed in a suddenly dry throat.
“We do things out of extreme necessity,” he went on, sounding sanctimonious even to himself. “Vincent wired you, as little as he could, just enough to—”
“I’m in love with him,” she said, and now her voice was no longer tight and controlled. “And your solution is