“No, sir,” a junior officer said. “I am not firing on Royal Marines, sir.”

Gepfner drew a pistol and without warning shot the officer in the chest. As the explosion echoed in the metal box of the bridge, he said, “I’m not ending my career in a Chinese prison waiting for a bullet at sunrise.”

“This is a fight for all we love,” Benjamin shouted into the loudspeaker. “Die if you must. Die for me!”

TWENTY-THREE

For the second time in a very few days Bug Man was shaking. He had run from the club, run straight out the door, raced down the street through crowds of young professionals who now, when they looked at him, did not see a very lucky guy with an amazingly hot girlfriend, but saw instead a scruffy-looking kid who was most likely running from cops.

He forced himself to stop running. Forced himself to walk, but he could not force himself to stop scraping his hand over his head again and again, as if he was trying to scrub something out of his hair.

Jesus, they would kill him for sure this time. They would kill him. But that was only Fact Number Two turning endlessly, endlessly around in his brain. Fact Number One was that she had betrayed him. The bitch! The skank! After all he had done for her, after all he had given her. Gifts and …He was sure he’d given her gifts. A necklace! That’s right, he had given her a necklace once.

And he had given her himself. Had he ever hurt her? No. Had he ever raised a hand to her? No.

Without a backward glance, without a second thought, she had just dumped him. Dumped him. Him! The bitch! Had none of it been real? After all they’d done together, the minute he unwired her she turned on him? The minute!

The outrage built in him, feeding on itself, growing ornate and detailed, and was almost enough to force the thought of what would happen next from his mind.

The bitch. She was going to get him killed. He had shown her the president. He had taken her to the office. What the hell? And now she was with some kind of cop? What were the odds of that happening?

Where was Burnofsky? That was the question, where the hell was he? It was his fault. If Burnofsky had shown up none of this would have happened.

He had to call him. He wasn’t supposed to, it was a security breach, but damn, what wasn’t a security breach now? Jessica was with some kind of cop, and she knew. She knew!

He moved away from the drinking crowd and onto a quieter street. Bug Man ran the conversation in his head. Burnofsky, Jessica has gone rogue. She lost it and ran up to some cop or coplike person.

Burnofsky would ask how the hell that happened. And Bug Man would lie. He’d say nothing about unwiring her, and he definitely wouldn’t talk about the way she’d looked at him suddenly as if he was some kind of lousy insect. Like he was nothing!

And for sure nothing about letting her see the nanobot feed from the president. Why had he done that? Because he thought she cared, that’s why, because he wanted her to see that …Never mind, why wasn’t the question.

Yeah, it was just one of those weird things, Burnofsky. Sometimes, you know, there’s a failure rate with wiring, right?

If you have to kill her, Burnofsky, no problem, man, because she represents a threat. So, do what you gotta do, Burnofsky. The thing is, it wasn’t my fault.

You want to know why was I out in the world? Why was I in some club? Because …because she had run off and I was trying to get her back, that’s why.

Yes, that would all work. Maybe he wouldn’t die. Maybe.

He reached for his phone. He kept it in the back pocket of his pants, but it wasn’t there, nor was it in the front pockets, or the other back pocket, and he checked each again, because maybe he missed it.

She had it. That was it. The bitch had his phone! Or else it fell out in the cab when he was reaching for his wallet, damn, yes, he had accidentally pulled it out and set it on his knee while he was …and now what? Now what? Call from a pay phone? There were no damned pay phones!

The hotel. He had to get a cab and get back to the hotel right now and call Burnofsky. To hell with security, this was an emergency.

He hailed a cab, which drove on by. So did the next three.

Wait, it wasn’t far to the office. He could walk there.

It was a five-minute walk, time that he divided between fearing for his own safety, wishing death and hellfire on Jessica, and feeling terribly alone.

Some new area of consciousness had opened up for Keats. He’d been lost, consumed by the game, and any self-awareness would have fatally distracted him. But this was different. This was an awareness as unreal as the state of the rest of his mind, a new feeling, a new type of consciousness.

He wasn’t Noah Cotton looking at Noah Cotton, he was … someone. Some nameless observer. Some attenuated, thin-stretched, overheated mind watching his own brain from far away.

Look at him go, this new awareness thought. Look at the moves! Hah! Now that’s game.

He remembered the testing he’d undergone what seemed like a long, long time ago under Dr Pound. A chainsaw, the real thing, had been sawing toward his leg. Electrical shock. And yet he had stayed in the game, lost himself in the game.

What he was seeing himself do now was so far beyond that. This wasn’t juggling two balls in the air, playing two games at once, it was a mind-altering expansion of the limits of his brain’s function. It was an acid trip. It was nirvana.

He heard a phone ring. His new distant self was aware of Nijinsky getting up to find the phone and say, “It’s Burnofsky’s phone.”

The hydra targets were fewer now. He was no longer killing in dozens, he was chasing down single individuals, crawling after them as they plunged into fat and blood, ripping through capillaries, plowing through a pustule of tight-packed football-size bacteria.