Jake Carelli dropped the Pierrot mask on the ground.
“Look,” he said, and kicked Maceo’s hand. A black gun with a silencer fell out of Maceo’s loosening grip. “He was going to shoot you down, Nick. He’s been following you all morning.”
Jake’s speech was halting. He was out of breath.
“You’re lying,” Nick said.
“Look,” Jake said, “The Mill. Casey.” He kicked Maceo’s other hand. Nick looked down and saw: Maceo’s left hand was missing the ring and pinky fingers. The wound was still pink.
Maceo had locked Casey in the cooler? Nick dropped to the ground, breathing hard.
“Maceo,” Nick said. “What’s up man, what’s up?”
“You should have left, Nick. I got you the ticket. They would have left you alone.”
“Oh God, Maceo. Why? Why you?”
Had his best friend really planned to shoot him in the name of a crackpot never-never land?
“You could have come with us, Nick,” Maceo said. “Cybertopia. No more suffering. No more injustice. Level above human, behind the next comet.”
“Maceo, you crazy white motherfucker,” Nick said, as tears welled up in his eyes.
“Blood for oil. We’re all yuppies now.” That was all Maceo could say, and Nick could tell he was dead without taking a pulse. He crawled backwards and sat against the wall..
He looked up to see Jake sliding down the opposite wall, a dazed look on his face.
“I thought I lost you at Devens,” Nick said.
“That was nothing,” Jake said, softly. “But this is bad.” He weakly touched his hand to his belly where, for the first time, Nick noticed blood seeping through the costume. Then Jake seemed to hiccup, and blood poured from his mouth.
Nick jumped up and ran to him.
“Mercy. Hell. Hell.” He had no idea what to do. He was frozen.
“Nick,” Jake whispered through red foam. “You go ahead. I’ve got your back.”
Then he shook once more, and his eyes sprang wide open.
Nick felt as if a spell had been broken, as if he were Merlin stepping out of thralldom in solid rock. Monty Meekman had taken every friend Nick had ever had; here, in this alley, he had taken two at once. Now, at last, Nick knew what Monty had been talking about on that hilltop above Los Altos. He understood what Abraham Maslow had meant by that ability of self-actualized people to bring all their passion and talents to bear on a single goal. Nick was finally, ruthlessly, self-actualized. He was ready to play Rule the Roost. From this moment on, until he saw Monty dead, anything and anybody that got in his way was in for a whole lot of trouble.
He stepped over to Maceo’s body and patted his pockets until he found the Digital MicroSystems employee badge with Maceo’s photo on the front and a magnetic stripe on the reverse. Bingo.
He took the pistol from Jake’s hand, then reached over for the gun that lay in the alley near Maceo. Nick took that and began to trot down the alley with a pistol in each hand. At the far end, before walking out into the street, he stopped to tuck the guns into his pants. He turned left and ran. Within minutes he had ended up at the bank of the river, no longer lost. He knew exactly where he was; he knew exactly where he was going. And this time no quahog from Corporate Security was going to turn him away.
Nick slid Maceo’s card through the card reader and heard the click of the lock opening. As simple as that, he was in. Now to find the Feynman machinery. Nick looked at his watch. 8:30 AM. Alright. He turned left down a hallway that exited off the lobby, with no idea where he was going. It was all ad-lib from here on.
The first person he saw could have been right out of the Mill or the California offices. It was a man of about forty, a little overweight and very unathletic, with a greying beard and black hair in a long ponytail.
Nick approached him.
“Hi, how ya doin’,” he said.
The fellow nodded, didn’t say anything.
“Don’t tell me,” Nick said. “You’re one of those Corporate Fellows!”
“No,” he said. “But I know Monty very well. I have reason to expect— ”
Nick didn’t have time for this loser’s bullshit.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m just in from the States, never been here, I’ve gotta find Monty’s lab. Can you tell me where it is?”
“Which lab?” he said, in a dry, superior tone. “He works in several.”
“Oh you know,” Nick said “The nanolab.”
“You won’t get in,” he said. “You’re not on the project. I don’t know you.”
“Oh, are you on that project?” Nick said.
A nearly imperceptible nod.
“Great! You can let me in.”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” he said.
“Really, you have to,” Nick said. “It’s a matter of some urgency. Monty won’t object, and if he does you can say I made you do it.”
“You should leave your pressure tactics in the States,” Mr. Ponytail said. “Here they’re considered in very poor taste.”
Nick grabbed his shirt.
“You haven’t seen a pressure tactic yet and you don’t want to. Get me in the lab, or I am going to take my gun and shoot off your left big toe.”
“Where do you work, the Mill?” the guy said. “I bet you’re a Miller, one of those hardcore Digital Data guys.”
“Oh goddammit,” Nick said.
He took Maceo’s gun from the waistband of his pants, placed it against the man’s shoe where the big toe would be and pulled the trigger. He felt the kick but heard no sound except a shout of pain. A pink mist settled to the floor.
“Now listen, Stock Option,” Nick said. “You get me into the nanolab before you leave too much blood around here, or I’m going to show you a real pressure tactic.”
It was two doors down. The pony-tailed man pressed some numbers on a keypad and the door swung open.
“Give me your shirt,” Nick said. While pointing the gun at the man’s chest, he ran back and cleaned what he could of the blood trail, leaving it barely visible.
“OK,” Nick said. “Now then. I am going to take off your shoe and bandage your foot with your shirt while I ask a few questions. You will answer them, or I promise you on my brother’s grave that I will put a bullet through your head. OK?”
“OK,” he said. Nick could see the fear on the man’s face, which was rapidly blanching. It would be too bad if the guy died from shock or blood loss, but Nick couldn’t worry about that now.
“Simple answers. Is this where they program the Feynman nanomachines?”
“Yes,” he panted, clearly in pain.
“How many programming machines are there here?”
“Ten.”
“My lucky day. I have four chips that I want you to substitute for the Kali chip. Do you know how to do that?”
“Yes.”
“Five minutes.”
“How long will it take to make me one million Feynman machines with the new chips?”
“Half an hour.”
“What do you put them in?”
“A pressurized tank. I really don’t feel very well,” he said.
“I’m not feeling so hot myself,” Nick said. “Work with me, quickly, and I’ll make sure you don’t bleed to death. Here,” Nick said, reaching into his shirt pocket for the plastic case that contained the chips.
Nick kept the gun trained on the man’s chest as he stood up and began to work on the gleaming metal devices.
Nick hardly noticed what the man was doing. His mind was racing but covering no ground. Throughout the lab there were machines, lasers, glass tubes; it was a blur. He should have tried to watch and understand what Stock Option was doing, but his mind could not handle any more data. It only processed one thought: “Hurry.”
After an eternity the man handed him a canister the size of a can of shaving cream. His face was white, his hands were shaking. Nick looked to the man’s foot. There was a lot of blood, but not as much as there might have been. He would make it.
“Tell me something,” Nick said. “What do you do with all these things?”
“I don’t know what the Fellows do with them. I’m only a technician. A lab rat.”
“Do they use them on human beings?”
“Not here,” he said.
“At Hoff-Zeigy do they?”
A shrug.
“I guess so.”
Nick thought about shooting off his other big toe but decided against it.
“You’re going to give me one hour, Stock Option, or you are going to experience pressure tactics that Amnesty International never even heard of. Lie down and put your foot in the air, you’ll be fine. One hour.”
He ran out the lab door, down the hall to the left, where found an exit on the opposite side of the building and burst onto a sidewalk, canister in hand. Somehow he found a taxi.
“Hoff-Zeigy,” he said. “Building Two. Very quickly.”
“Oaf,” the driver said, in heavily accented English “Fasnacht. Not fast. Many people. Slow.”
“Listen,” Nick said. “Three hundred dollars American.” He waved a handful of dollars in front of the driver’s eyes. “Slow, I pay you the meter. Fast, I pay you this.”
“OK, fast,” he said. In a moment they were hurtling over cobblestone streets, horn honking, as costumed figures and crowds of watchers jumped back out of the way. It took twelve minutes. The taxi pulled up before the door, and the driver turned to Nick with a broad smile.
“Fast,” he said.
“Is this Two?” Nick said, as he handed over the bills. The driver nodded.
Nick got out and ran into the building and up the stairs as fast as he could. At the landing of the second floor he stopped. He ripped off his shirt, tore off the tape, and placed the pack between the handrail and the wall as he sat on the stair, using the banister as a makeshift I-V caddy from which the long clear plastic tube dangled down. He took the rubber cover off the two-inch stainless steel needle and placed it against a vein in his forearm.
“Here goes nuttin,” he said, and he pushed it in.
Whoa, Nellie Bellie. Painful to feel, obscene to contemplate, nauseating to look at, Nick’s brother’s dead cells filled his veins. He pressed against the bag to speed the transfer, a process that took only a minute. After squeezing the last drops through the long clear plastic tube and into his arm, Nick withdrew the needle and let it drop. It swung, a graceless pendulum, and slapped against the stairs, leaving a red splatter. He remained sitting for just a moment, wondering if he would feel it coming. Transfusion shock could happen under the best of conditions, and the conditions under which he had just transfused Paul’s blood into himself were hardly ideal. The liquid that he had just put into his own veins could hardly even be considered blood anymore—it had been frozen, thawed, refrozen, re-thawed until it was a nameless reddish glop. He didn’t want to think about what damage it might be doing inside him right now.
He stood up, already light-headed, nauseated. But he had done the hard part. He patted the handles of the guns protruding from his waistband. “Gary Owen, motherfucker,” he announced to the empty stairwell. He ran up the steps two at a time. Just as Judith had said, the door to the lab was on his left as soon as he exited the stairs. He knew it was the right door by the device mounted chest-high on the wall next to it. It was the size of a submarine sandwich, and had five holes in it, positioned so a person could put fingers in it, like a five-holed bowling ball.
“Bisim’ Allah,” he said, and stuck the thumb and fingers of his right hand into the holes. Something locked around them like and he could feel suction, as if he had just been attacked by a squid. It stayed like that for what seemed an eternity. He was getting more light-headed by the minute. He was on the point of collapse when the his fingers were released and the door swung open.