He screamed and tore at his vestments.

The world was swirling colors, all zooming crazily around him, faces suddenly coming into focus, distorted, demonic faces.

Only when he grabbed an elderly woman’s walker and began attacking the children with it did anyone try to stop him.

In the end he was hauled away by Rome police and his own plainclothes Swiss Guards.

TWENTY-ONE

The sense of approaching doom was rising now. The country was scared. The world was scared. Glances were shielded. Heads were lowered. Shoulders hunched. Jaws tight. Voices too high or too low, too loud or whispering like a scared child.

Not as scared yet as it should be, no, not yet. But when people figured it out, the true panic would begin.

The Twins had pulled the trigger on massed preprogrammed attacks: Burnofsky had seen the footage of Stern. There would be more of that. Benjamin was in the driver’s seat increasingly, and Benjamin would have his apocalypse.

But that was nothing compared to what Lear was doing.

“Of course it’s Lear!” Burnofsky cried aloud, as though someone was arguing with him, as though he was fighting someone to make them understand.

Lear. What a clever, clever fellow he had turned out to be. Burnofsky saw it all now, saw the games, saw the ultimate destructive power that flowed from Grey McLure’s little lifesaving creatures.

Poor old Grey. They’d been friends, he and Burnofsky. The last friend Burnofsky had had. Poor old Grey, who had gotten his panties all in a twist when he learned Burnofsky was weaponizing nanobots for the Armstrongs. A lovely idealist, old Grey. A good man who just wanted to save his sick, dying wife.

Had he ever realized the destructive potential in his creatures? Had he even an inkling of what they could do in the wrong hands?

Fucking idealists. They were ever so useful to those with evil minds.

It was all coming down, Burnofsky thought. And when it did, the Twins were going to kill him. Kill him or rewire him.

That second thing made his stomach turn. He had endured it once, was still enduring it. But like many traumas, the threat of a repeat performance was even worse. He could not be used this way; he couldn’t be turned into some computer made of meat, rewrite, delete, up-arrow, down-arrow, parentheses, backslash.…

He had in some way accepted the first wiring as a sort of penance. He was a sinner, a terrible sinner, and he had deserved the punishment of having his mind crudely twisted this way and that. But not again. Not again. He had paid. Paid enough.

Not again.

Death? Death was nothing. Death was relief of pain.

That’s what he had told himself while sitting in his grim apartment with a gun in his mouth. He had lacked the courage to do it. But he would die before he would let them treat him like nothing. Like nothing.

“I paid,” he told the camera he knew was watching him. His lip curled into a vicious sneer. “I paid!”

His mind went inevitably to Carla, and the sickening result of that thought, the excitement, the pleasure of it. And with it the awful need to hurt himself.

He lit a cigarette. He watched the end burn a bright orange. The smoke curling, teasing the end of his nose, making his watery eyes water still more. Not tears, though. Not tears.

The Pope—that would push the Twins over the edge. They would have to realize that they were no longer the masterminds, just two more suckers playing Lear’s game. And then? Benjamin wouldn’t stand for it, oh, no. Lear would not take Benjamin’s Götterdämmerung from him. Benjamin would lose it, lash out, and at last unleash the gray goo.

He would use Burnofsky for that. Yes, of course. Burnofsky would serve the Twins one last time and destroy the world before Lear could do it.

It was funny, really—despite the way his eyes watered—it was funny, funny to think that in the end it would not be a race between destruction and salvation for humanity, but a race between two different lunatics, Benjamin and Lear, both bent on annihilation.

Well. Maybe not two.

Nanobots were his creation, not Benjamin’s. Poor old Grey had died in a fiery crash, lucky bastard, and his creations had become Lear’s. But Burnofsky still lived. Would go on living, probably, until the Twins decided they had squeezed the last from him.

“They’re mine,” he muttered, looking at a schematic of a nanobot. “I deserve a fucking prize. Hah! I deserve the fucking Nobel, hah!” Well, that was over, wasn’t it. Lear had sort of killed that whole thing, hadn’t he?

There was a bottle in the desk of one of his assistants. He had seen it, but he’d never said anything about it. It wasn’t his job to preach abstinence.

“It’s all coming down, anyway,” he muttered. “Twist me this way, twist me that way; in the end it’s all death.”

He watched the thoughts in his own mind, tracked them like the scientist he was. Not so easy, really, to predict the outcome of wiring, eh, Nijinsky? Poor dumb Bug Man had learned that when the president went off the rails. Not so easy.

Five minutes later the alcohol was raw in his throat and warm in his belly.

“I paid,” he said. And hurt himself again with a deep, deep swig.

“Hah!” Burnofsky said. “Fuck it. Fuck it all.”

His phone lay on the desk. He blinked at it. The icon for messages showed a three.

No one texted Burnofsky. In fact, he couldn’t recall the last time he’d had a text.

He almost didn’t look, but even carried off on a happy wave of blessed alcohol, he was still a servant to his own curiosity.