Element Zero (20 page)

Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo

By the time Penny and I got back to the war room, it was the closest thing to chaos I’d ever seen in front of Ai. She sat there, calm, while voices on the video screens and in the room all tried to talk at the same time.

“ . . . confirmed, it was one of the ICBMs from the defense satellite,” a voice said.

“You get that?” Osterhagen asked.

Ai nodded. “Mr. Vaggot,” she asked, “how long until we regain control of those missiles?”

A window with the man’s face appeared in one corner of Osterhagen’s screen. He looked a little less collected than the last time he’d appeared, but his voice was still strong and confident.

“Not long,” he said. “It’s taking time for the ’bots to chisel through the defenses he set up, but once they do, control will be transferred here through the Stillwell Corps satellite-communications array. I think we can shunt him out in thirty or forty minutes, maybe less.”

“That was a warning shot,” Osterhagen said. “He’s telling us to stand down.”

“A warning shot?” a woman asked, her voice breaking.

“Initial data confirmed all twelve ICBMs were aimed across an even spread of twelve sectors through the city,” he said. “In order for him to drop one out in the bay like that, he’d have to have programmed it with a new target. He intentionally fired it outside the city, where it wouldn’t cause any structural damage, but where we’d see it. It was a warning shot.”

“What about the radiation?” someone asked.

“The explosion created a radioactive cloud of steam and smoke that right now is moving along the shoreline at a distance of ten miles,” Mr. Raphael said. “That could change.”

“The next launch won’t be a warning,” Osterhagen said. “What is the situation at Alto Do Mundo?”

“The detonation of a Leichenesser charge cleared a hole,” someone said. “But he’s streamed in more of them. I’d say we put a weak link in the chain, but it’s reforming.”

Osterhagen looked offscreen for a second, then nodded and cut back in.

“We just got a report that the revivors in the street are being ordered away from the CMC Tower,” he said.

“Why?” Raphael asked. “Moved to where?”

“Outside a five block perimeter around the tower,” Osterhagen said. “We have to assume it’s to protect them, and that it’s a precursor to some kind of strike. Start getting your people out of there.”

“How? We’re surrounded from the ground and the air—”

“Any way you can, Robin!”

“What about the virus?” Ai asked. “Has it been deployed?”

“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “That’s how this information was obtained. Ott was right about Flax. We seeded her revivor matrix and transitioned her onto their network. Fawkes cut her off, but not in time. She received the alert along with the rest to clear the CMC Tower.”

“How long before the virus will take effect?” she asked.

“It should have worked by now,” he said. “It might be taking longer than expected to propagate, but we have to consider the possibility that it failed.”

For the first time that day, I saw something like confusion appear on Ai’s face before it went back to its drugged-out expression.

“Failed how?” she asked. “The tests were successful.”

“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “Assuming the Huma version of Fawkes’s revivors matches the ones we had in custody, then it should have worked. But as of this morning, that version changed. It could have invalidated the virus partially, or even completely.”

“But the virus affects them,” she said. “It reaches them, I’ve seen it.”

I closed my eyes and tried to cut through the anxiousness and pressure that emanated from every consciousness in the room, even those piped through remotely. I took a deep breath and focused on Ai.

She was the elephant in the room; her consciousness hung over her tiny body like a small, broken planet whose pieces were carefully held together by gravity. Tentacles of light stretched out from the fragments and connected to the men and women at the table. More tentacles wove through the room to touch Penny and even me. They floated through the walls, ceiling, and floor, across the city, I figured, to reach Raphael, Osterhagen, and the rest. She was amazingly calm in the face of what was going on, her thoughts ticking away beneath the colors of her mind like the tiny pieces of an incredibly complicated clockwork machine. She was tied into the future model that was displayed on the wall, tuned to the smallest change, and looking for some clue, any clue that might tell her what to do as time ran out.

She didn’t know, though, and that scared me. Underneath it all, she was confused. Things weren’t happening like she expected anymore. With all of her knowledge, she wasn’t sure what to do.

Penny was calm, but was ready to physically act. She spent a lot of time like that, and she almost never relaxed, even when she was drunk, but I’d never felt her so alert before. Part of her mind was turned toward me and I sensed a bond there, a protectiveness I’d never quite noticed before. I’d always known she would kill for me, but somehow I’d never seen the devotion that drove it until that moment.

I reached out, following the connections Ai kept with the others at their remote locations, and found Osterhagen and Raphael. Raphael was worried. He was worried for himself and us, but mostly he was worried for the people on the ground; he was afraid for them, and not just our people but the innocent bystanders about to be caught in Fawkes’s attack. Osterhagen was angry and frustrated. He was confident he could defeat Fawkes—in fact, he was certain of it—but the nukes had tied his hands, and, yes . . . there . . . buried away deep inside, he was scared too.

The people in the room continued to talk in restrained, clipped tones, and as I took the pulse of their thoughts as a whole, I realized that fear had begun to creep into the entire network. It was fear of the unknown. It was the fear that despite all the manipulation and information tracking and careful planning, they were delving into an unknown where they couldn’t see clearly. That scared the hell out of them, all of them.

Even Ai.

They don’t know what to do,
I thought, and even though I felt like that should make me scared too, it didn’t. I thought maybe I knew what they didn’t.

There was someone I needed to communicate with. The person who had stood next to me in my vision and the only one in the room I knew would survive along with me if we failed.

“ . . . the lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it . . . ”

Hans Vaggot was isolated, and I could tell that although Ai was watching him, she wouldn’t touch him. He was being left alone to retake the satellite, and as soon as I entered his mind, I knew he was getting close. There was a relief there, like a cool undercurrent beneath the hot colors of his mind. He’d recently made some kind of breakthrough and was closing in. I couldn’t tell how long it would be, but although he was still focused like a laser, I could sense his hope—he knew he would succeed; he was only worried about the timing. If he knew it and I knew it, then at least Ai and Osterhagen knew it too. Despite their misgivings, they had begun to think that in spite of everything, they still might stop the event from happening.

Except they were wrong.

Mr. Vaggot,
I whispered into the back of his mind. I felt the flow of his thoughts hiccup, and I knew he’d sensed me. In a second, Ai would sense me too, and when she did she’d shut me out again. I only had a short time to communicate with him, to plant, maybe, an idea in his mind. It was an idea that I didn’t totally understand myself yet, but somehow I knew it was the answer. When I thought back to what I’d learned about Noelle, who came before me and before Penny, it suddenly seemed clear. She’d known. She’d known all along; she just couldn’t handle it.

I took a long swallow off the bottle in my hand and wormed my way further into his mind.

When you retake the satellite, don’t shut down the launch,
I told him. I felt anxiousness in him from somewhere deep inside as the command took root.
Don’t shut it down. Wait for my signal. . . .

I felt Ai then, and my eyes snapped open as the connection was broken. When I looked over at her, her large eyes had narrowed and there was a hard glint in them.

“I told you to leave him,” she said in a low voice. “I—”

She stopped short and perked up, as if she’d heard something. The anger went out of her eyes and I felt a spike of alarm from her, licking out of her consciousness like a solar flare.

“Robin, wait,” she said.

“Hold on,” Mr. Raphael said. He checked something offscreen.

In all the activity, no one else saw Ai sit up straight suddenly. Her eyes looked startled as they opened wide and stared into space. The others around the table jerked in their trances, sitting up straight along with her.

“Mr. Raphael,” Ai said, and the voices quieted.

“Yes, Motoko?”

“Abandon the CMC Tower immediately.”

“We’re organizing the evacuation now—”

“Forget the rest,” she snapped. “Use the helipad.”

“Motoko, there are sixteen thousand people in this building,” he said. “Tell me what you saw. . . . ”

On Mr. Raphael’s screen, he turned toward a window behind him where something outside had started to glow in the sky above the electric city lights.

“What is that?” he muttered.

The screen flickered and went out. A second later, all of the screens went out and the room went dark.

Nico Wachalowski—Stillwell Corps Base

From the helicopter, I could see fire in the streets below. A car burned in an intersection, flames spraying cinders as the wind howled through the street. Two blocks down, smoke was pouring from the broken window of a residential building.

Alice, we need to start tracking the bites that occurred since the activation code was sent.

We’ll coordinate with local hospitals. If this is true, though, Wachalowski, our best bet is going to be stemming it at its source, not chasing thousands of leads.

We need to contain the city. No one in or out.

We’re working on it.

The snow began to pick up as the helicopter took us back toward the Stillwell Corps base. Visibility was down and the ride was choppy. The windshield turned black, and a computerized view appeared in its place as the pilot passed between two buildings.

What about you?
she asked.
If this really is true, wouldn’t you be affected?

I’m okay.

But have you been affected?

A notification appeared in front of me as my internal diagnostic finished. My JZI called out my new arm on the system tree with a low-level warning. The necrotic bleed-through had been identified. It was true—the altered nanoblood was leaking into my bloodstream.

No,
I lied.

The chopper hit a patch of turbulence and bucked underneath me. My stomach dropped. The vectors tilted in the windshield display, and through the side window I watched the buildings below as we banked left and veered over one of the main strips. From our position, I could see the Central Media Communications Tower in the distance, and beyond that, nearly lost in the snow, the UAC TransTech Center.

Keep me informed,
she said.
Let me know as soon as you have something we can use against Fawkes.
She broke the connection.

I pulled my collar down to check my shoulder and saw what looked like bruising there. The bleed-through was getting worse. I wondered if the filter was no longer able to screen the altered nanotech at all. I could be running out of time.

I opened a new link over the channel MacReady had provided.

MacReady, this is happening fast. Do you have a revivor I can use?

It’s on its way. I will have it shortly.

Let me know the second you do.

Understood, Agent.

In the meantime, I have a question. Something revivor related.

I’ll help if I can.

You said you continued the Zhang’s Syndrome study?

Yes.

Was the condition ever recorded in a living person?

It’s a condition that occurs during reanimation. No, it does not affect living people.

What about a person experiencing necrotic bleed-through?

It doesn’t work that way, Agent. Even with the M10 series, the synthetic blood is something wholly separate from the revivor nodes that interface with the brain. Synthetic blood leaking into an organic system does not, and cannot, cause reanimation. If the traces of synthetic blood were to make their way into the brain, they would most likely kill the affected person.

Understood.

Do you know someone who is suffering from this condition?
he fished.

What if the nanoblood were altered somehow?
I asked.
Could it be changed to that much of a degree?

You’re referring to Fawkes’s use of the transmitter earlier.

Is it possible?

I don’t know,
he said.
In theory . . . at the molecular level, many of the components are generic. They could be recoded to perform different functions, but not easily.

So it is possible?

I would say yes. Particularly if you had high-ranking scientists like the ones you named on your team. That kind of research would, of course, be highly illegal, but I would say possible, in theory.

Understood.

Are you saying that you’re—

Just get the revivors I asked for. And hurry. There isn’t much time.

I understand. I think you should know this before the time comes, though: you have a relationship to this revivor.

What—

It’s the revivor of Faye Dasalia,
he said.

Even as the storm outside caused the chopper to buck, I felt a pang in my chest. For a minute, I forgot about the rest—Fawkes, the arm, everything.

Faye is part of this,
I said.
She’s with Fawkes now. She’s close to him; you can’t use her.

Trust with revivors doesn’t hold the same connotation as it does for humans. I believe she was the one who compromised Heinlein’s security and allowed Fawkes access,
he said.
But something has happened since then and she’s no longer part of his network.

If she’s not on his network, then—

Trust me, Agent. Fawkes is trying very hard to reconnect her, and I’ll see to it that he succeeds, but only once we’re ready.

She’ll tell him—

She can’t tell him what she doesn’t know, and anyway, at the end of the day, she is a revivor. It doesn’t matter what she did before or why she did it. When I’m finished with her, you’ll have the access you need.

It was still hard for me to swallow. Everything that had happened, all those people dead and dying in the streets, all of it had happened with Faye standing at Fawkes’s side.

Agent?

I’m here,
I said.
Set it up.

Stand by,
he said.
I should have access shortly—

His message clipped off as the helicopter started to descend toward the building tops. On several of them, I could see groups of people bundled in coats and scarves that whipped in the wind. They were looking down at the city, at the streets below.

MacReady?

Down on the street, pedestrians looked up as we approached. Police blues flashed against the white of snowbanks where a group of officers waited, keeping a crowd of people from entering a strip mall whose windows had been smashed in.

The pilot chattered over the radio and was pointing down toward the street, but I didn’t hear him. In the corner of my eye, an FBI alert popped up: