BZRK Reloaded (11 page)

Word had gone throughout Benjaminia that the Great Souls were
coming.
The Great Souls!
People with fixed, jawbreaking smiles and wide, glittering eyes
and way too much energy wouldn’t stop talking about it.
Everyone was busy cleaning up the town. In this case it meant
using buckets of a gentle acid wash to scrub the curving nickel alloy
walls with long-handled brushes. The walls were already clean—
cleanliness was part of sustainable happiness—so this was more an
act of devotion than of simple housekeeping.
More immediately noticeable was the touch-up painting on the
great pillar that rose through the center of the sphere, as well as similar work on the entrance to the tunnel that connected Benjaminia
with Charlestown. The most adept artists touched up the painted sky
with its wondrous image of the Great Souls reaching out a hand to
God on their left and Darwin on their right.
It all would have gone much easier but for the storm that raged
outside, producing waves so steep they sent the weak of stomach racing to thoughtfully placed buckets.
Fortunately Minako McGrath did not get seasick.
The nickel steel sphere that defined Benjaminia was forty
meters—131 feet—in diameter. The great pillar rose up through the
middle. A flat, level platform of plywood—also in need of some grassgreen touch-up paint—flattened the bottom of the sphere, providing
a level surface, a sort of lowest floor.
Fourteen-year-old Minako had never been a math whiz, but she
cared to an insane degree about numbers. Forty meters in diameter
was not a good number.
The floor of the sphere, that wooden platform, was also an even,
easily divisible number: twenty-four meters diameter.
Minako was not happy. Not “sustainably happy,” in that obnoxious Nexus Humanus phrase, nor any other kind of happy. She was
sad to the point of desperation. It had been just ten days since she had
been hauled, kicking and punching, aboard this nightmare ship.
Ten, also, was not a good number. It was not prime, nor was it
divisible by either three or seven. There were good numbers and bad
numbers, and the numbers in Benjaminia all seemed to be bad.
Six days earlier Minako had been walking along the beach at
Toguchi. Toguchi wasn’t much of a place, a small town even by Okinawan standards. You couldn’t even brag about the beach. There
were no resort hotels or boardwalk, just vibrant green bushes and
low-slung, wind-chastened trees edging right up against the narrow
strand.
Minako had been thinking, and of course counting her steps—
the number to hit was 701, a prime—and pausing occasionally to
look out to sea and wish the clouds weren’t so thick and low and the
sun could be seen setting. Her OCD—obsessive compulsive disorder—was often worse in the fall and early winter when the days grew
shorter. It was almost as if sunlight banished her compulsions, or at
least lessened their demands, so that she could lie out on this same
beach without quite as many numbers careening around inside her
head. But now, with the sea turned gray to match the sky, her carefree
season was over.
A boat had come ashore, a Zodiac. There were three men in it,
all dressed in rain slickers. Two were white, one Asian. Minako saw
herself as Asian, though her father was an American marine and her
mother Japanese.
The men saw her, stared at her a bit actually, so that it made her
uncomfortable, But then two of them—one of the Caucasians and the
Asian—had gone off across the beach into town.
Three was a good number. One, two, three, five, seven, eleven,
and thirteen: the first seven prime numbers. The one man left behind,
that was okay. The two who left were okay as well.
Which just went to prove that numbers aren’t everything.
This late in both the season and the day there wouldn’t be much
going on in Toguchi town for the two men to do—they might find a
bowl of noodles and some tea, but there was no nightlife. They were a
long way from the lights of Naha.
Minako wondered why she assumed they were hungry. They
looked like men who wanted something. And what else could it be?
She continued walking along the beach, coming closer to the boat
and the man guarding it. He was smoking a cigarette and avoiding
looking at her. He seemed jumpy. Was he a smuggler? A drug smuggler? If so, she should run.
But running away seemed like a strange overreaction. There was
no crime in Toguchi. Someone being picked up by the local police for
public drunkenness was a crime wave by Toguchi standards. Minako
knew: her mother was the only police officer in the area.
Minako curved her path away from the shore and away from the
boat. It would mean a possibly very difficult count adjustment. Her
routine required her to walk from the southern path along the beach,
down to near the high-water line where the driftwood scattered. The
steps from the tree line down to the high-water line didn’t have to be
counted. But once she turned and started walking north she needed
it to be exactly 701 steps. Then, if she had done it properly, she could
turn back toward the town and be able to aim for the path home.
Curving or avoiding made it harder to calibrate. She could end up
having to take some ridiculous mincing steps to get the count just
right. That would work, yes, but it would be unsatisfying.
Out at sea was a ship. The light was poor and it was hard to make
it out, but it looked strange, like a sort of white peapod with four
white domes half-protruding above decks. Four troubling domes.
Had it been three it would have been better.
That’s where the men had come from, that ship. Had to be. In
which case they were not likely to be drug smugglers. Still, Minako
considered for a moment phoning her mother. It was not Minako’s
job to be an informer—as she had repeatedly had to reassure the older
brothers and sisters of her friends when she saw them smoking pot.
Still . . .
She compromised and sent a text. A Zodiac has landed at the
beach with 3 men.
That made her feel better: duty done.
Three hundred and eighty-two . . .
Three hundred and eighty-three . . .
Minako was a pretty girl, with long hair the color of darkest
honey and unnaturally large light brown eyes. The flaw that bothered
her most was that her mouth sometimes looked a little crooked, and
her chin could be pointed when seen in profile. That, and she had a
sprinkling of freckles across her upper cheeks.
Of course, at her school, she was quite a freak. She was not the
only Japanese American—after all, there had been thousands of
U.S. marines on Okinawa since World War II—but unlike many she
looked as white as she did Japanese. Her father had been an Irish
American, and no, her mother had not been a prostitute or some
party girl. Minako’s parents had been married legally. They had been
madly in love.
But Captain McGrath, USMC, had been sent to Afghanistan
when Minako was just three years old, and he had been killed in an
ambush.
Minako had his picture beside her bed. But she did not really
remember anything about him. Just the picture.
She had reached step number six hundred and forty-five when
she saw the two men returning. Each carried two heavily weighted
plastic shopping bags from the grocery store. The bags bulged with
rice wine, French Cognac and cigarettes.
Six hundred and forty-six . . .
Six hundred and forty-seven . . .
Almost there. But now, if she turned to shore, she would walk
directly into the two men. It would look deliberate.
Minako felt a stab of panic. She really needed a good count. It had
been a bad day. And if she didn’t get her number the Unspecified Bad
Thing would happen.
They had come back too quickly.
Sic hundred and fifty-two . . .
Six hundred and fifty-three . . .
Just forty-eight more steps.
“Hey, girly,” the Asian man said. He was speaking accented
English. Minako spoke English fairly well, her mother had insisted,
and of course her school as well.
“She’ll do,” the Caucasian man said. He spoke with a Russian
accent.
The two men moved apart. Their arms spread out a little—awkward with the heavy shopping bags.
Minako’s first reaction was confusion. What were they doing?
She was so close to finishing her steps.
Six hundred and sixty-one . . .
Forty more steps and she would have her 701.
“What’s your name, honey?”
In Japanese she said, “I don’t understand,” and made a shy little
shrug of apology.
They were only twenty yards away now, and she was still thirtyfive steps away, and suddenly they swept toward her. No choice, she
had to break and run, she took one more step—number 678—and
broke stride, started to run, and hit the sand, facedown.
The one from the boat had come up behind her and shoved her.
There was sand in her mouth. She cried out, but her voice was masked
by the sound of the waves.
She tried to roll over but there was a heavy weight on her back.
“Stop fighting,” a man’s voice said, far too near her ear. “No one is
going to hurt you. You’re going to the happiest place on Earth.” There
was something sardonic about that last phrase.
Minako opened her mouth to scream again, but a rag was in her
mouth and a roll of duct tape made a tearing sound as it went around
her head once, twice, tangling in her hair.
A second set of hands had her legs.
“We could have ourselves a time before we take her in,” suggested
the Asian one.
She screamed into her gag.
“No one bothers one of the villagers.” The voice of the one from
the Zodiac. The one who had shoved her down. The one now sitting
astride her back as his mate wound the tape around her ankles. His
cigarette ash fell on her cheek. “Don’t be a stupid boy, KimKim.”
“Zoob, I’m just saying . . .” the one they’d called KimKim said.
They wound the tape efficiently around her wrists. The one
named Zoob searched her pockets, found the cell phone, switched it
off, and stuck it in his jacket pocket.
The Russian laughed. “You’re just saying? Listen, stupid boy: we
grab a villager, that’s what they want, yes? Good. So if the mate finds
out that we also picked up cigarettes and Cognac on the way, well, we
can make him happy, da? ‘Here, Dragoslav, have a bottle, have two
packs.’ No problem, right? But you don’t mess with the villagers.”
Zoob hauled Minako up off the sand as if she weighed nothing.
He casually tossed her over one shoulder and walked to the Zodiac.
He set her in the bottom where water sloshed several inches deep.
“Get this straight, KimKim, before dig your own grave. This
isn’t the merchant marine,” Zoob said as they gunned the outboard
engine. “This is the Doll Ship. There are rules that you can break …
and maybe you get some extra punishment duty. But. But there are
other rules that if you break, you find yourself trying to swim ashore
from twenty miles out with six feet of chain around your ankles.”
The young one thought that over. Then said, “Nah.”
But nevertheless, Minako had made it to the ship unharmed.
What they had done instead was ignore her outraged protests
and pleas. For six days she had been in this place, and all they had
done was show her videos from some group called Nexus Humanus.
And she’d been given reading materials, also from Nexus Humanus.
Mostly she’d been told about her benefactors—Charles and Benjamin
Armstrong, the Great Souls.
And she had been assigned a “lodge” in Benjaminia.
The steel sphere that was Benjaminia had nine levels. Each level
was a steel catwalk that went all the way around the sphere. Level 5
was the largest. The circumference of the sphere was 125 meters at
that point.
But Minako was not assigned to level 5—a prime number. She
was given a lodge on level 4. Four was not a good number for her.
Worse yet, her lodge was one of fourteen lodges on her level. Each
lodge was a slightly wedge-shaped space—wider at the outer edge
where it met the nickel sphere and narrower where it opened onto the
connecting catwalk.
There was a raised metal IKEA bunk bolted down. Beneath that
bunk, a desk and chair. There was the sort of tiny bathroom you
might find on a boat—a toilet, a sink you could barely fit your hands
into, and a shower that used the entire bathroom as a stall.
The bathroom was the only place where there was any privacy.
The rest of the lodge was open metal grille below and above. Minako
could look up and see the soles of the shoes of the man who lived up
there. When she looked down, she saw the girl who lived beneath her
on level 3.
She was not allowed to talk to either. Talking was done only out
on the connecting catwalk or down on the assembly floor. And there
was no point.
Every conversation:
“I’ve been kidnapped. I want to go home. I want my mother!”
“You’ve been liberated, freed! Wait until you see. Wait until you
understand!”
“I don’t want to be here. What is this awful place?”
“We call it the Doll Ship. We’re like the beloved toys of the Great
Souls. It’s so happy here!”
The words would change, but never the conclusion, never the
message, never the smiling acceptance.
They loved her. She was going to be so happy.
The top of the sphere was the big painting, the one that showed
God the Father and Charles Darwin. Between those two was a
disturbing creature that could only be meant as some sort of metaphor. It showed a completely—embarrassingly—nude man with
what amounted to two heads. The two heads were seemingly joined
together, allowing for a third eye.
Minako figured the third eye was meant to evoke wisdom and
knowledge. The possibility that this painting—and that third eye—
was anything other than a metaphor did not occur to her. It simply
never occurred to her that the sky painting was of a real person.
There were seventy-six people in Benjaminia, but there were
lodges for more. The residents of the sphere—the town—ranged in
age from ten or eleven, on up to middle age. And all of them she had
encountered—all of them—were happy.
Very happy.
Consistently, sustainably, happy. It was a madhouse. A floating
insane asylum. A lunatic cult hidden inside a liquefied natural gas
ship.
At the announcement that the Great Souls would be coming for
a visit, the residents were more than happy. Word had come over the
public address system and everyone had come rushing from their
lodges and raced down the spiral staircases to the assembly floor to
hug and cry tears of joy. It reminded Minako in some way of a nightmare version of The Wizard of Oz. No Munchkins or witches, but a
terrible falseness and suppressed hysteria in everything.