ZerOes (38 page)

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

F
acial match. They have a hit.

Recognition: Chance Dalton.

Location: Riverton, Wyoming—Black Saddle trailer park.

The Compiler awakens and heads to the airport.

WADE'S RANCH, OUTSIDE RIVERTON, WYOMING

S
iobhan sleeps soundlessly next to him. Eyes closed. Pale cheek turned toward the moonlight coming in through the window. The gentle rise and fall of her shoulder as she breathes. Wade reaches out, touches her cheek—

Her eyes snap open. Her mouth cranes wide.
Find me
, she hisses.

A black knot of something wormlike—
wires
, he realizes,
black goddamn wires
—pushes out of her mouth, a hard, squirming clot—

Suddenly, Siobhan sits up, grabs his wrist, gives it a hard twist. A gun presses against his forehead.

The bedside light clicks on. Rosa. It's Rosa. She's been sleeping next to him. Siobhan—that was a dream. Rosa sits up in bed, her hair all a-tangle, the pearl-handled .45 she keeps under her pillow in her hand and
in his face
.

Wade shows his palms. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

“The fuck are you doing?” she says, tucking the gun back under the pillow. She adjusts herself, and the sheets fall away, exposing her naked breasts.

“Jesus, I was just—I was just touching your cheek.”

“Don't do that. I was sleeping. I need my
sueño reparador
.” There, a cheeky tug at the corners of her mouth. The hint of mirth, a glimpse of sass.

“You don't need that. You get any more beautiful and I'll have to fight other men off with baseball bats.”

She slaps him. Not hard. But hard enough. “You don't own me,” she says. Before he can say anything else, she adds: “Tonight, I own you.” Then she kisses him. Hard. Her tongue pushing into his mouth. Along his teeth. Battling his own tongue. Her hand slides under the covers, down his hirsute chest, across the roundness of his belly. “You ready for another go, old man?” she whispers.

“I don't know, but I'm willing to find out.”

Her hand wraps around him.

The door to his bedroom flings open and before Wade can blink Rosa's up—once more moving fast as spilled lightning, pointing her fancy-ass pistol at the door. At the Chance-shaped silhouette standing there.

“It's me, it's just—it's just Chance.” He suddenly shades his face. “Shit. Sorry. But there's a problem.” And his voice, Wade hears it—a cold fear, a croaked seriousness.

Wade sighs. “All right, all right,” he says, stepping out of bed and hiking on his pants.

Everyone listens as Chance and Reagan tell their story. Nobody's happy about either of them sneaking out without saying anything, but all that washes away when they hear about the plane crash. Specifically, the crash falsely
claimed
by them.

They all stand around inside the cabin. In the far corner, a bobcat is mounted on a rock, its glassy dead eyes watching them, its mouth open in a perpetual hiss. A pellet stove hangs in the other corner. Beneath them is a ratty, dust-caked rug.

“This is Typhon,” Reagan says, wagging a finger. “This is that
bitch
intelligence.”

“That means it knows we're not dead,” DeAndre adds.

Chance shakes his head. “I don't get it. I don't get her obsession with us. We're nobody. We're . . . bugs. Why go so far out of your way to crush a couple bugs?”

Wade says, “You ever get a fly in your house? It's not bothering anybody but me, I'll hunt that thing down for hours. After a while it's just a thing you gotta do.”

“I don't buy it.” Aleena shakes her head. “It's because we're
good
. Because we're the ones who released it. Maybe it thinks we can stop it, too.”

“So, it just . . . it just brings down a plane and puts our name on it?” Chance can't unsee those images on the screen. The pockets of fire. The shadows of broken plane scattered across a quarter mile. The shapes of bodies. “That's messed up, y'all. Even though we didn't do it, I can't help but feel like—” His words catch in his throat like a bird in a net.

Aleena reaches out and touches his shoulder. Then she says: “Our family and friends are now in danger. Officially. Even if they don't end up a target of Typhon, they'll now be a target of the media.” To Chance, she asks: “Our names are definitely out there?”

He nods. “Yeah.”

“It's time to jump up the schedule,” Reagan says. “We gotta go our separate ways. Now. Not in a week, not in a month.”

“Uh-uh,” Rosa says, stepping in. “That's what they want. How you think the FBI caught a lot of the big Colombian cartel leaders? They put bounties on their heads. Big bounties. Two million. Three.
Five
. Then they wait for the leaders to panic. For someone to betray the others. For someone to break ranks and run. They want them to
make mistakes
. The rat peeks out of its hole and the cat catches it.”

“Rosa's right,” Wade starts to say, but DeAndre interrupts.

“No, nuh-uh, bullshit. That's drug cartel shit, but this is
hacker
logic. Hacker logic says duck and run. Don't stay in one place for too long. It's like that shell game—always gotta move the cups so nobody finds the stone underneath. I agree with Reagan. We gotta
go
.”

“They think we brought down a
plane
,” Wade says. “That means they're gonna be on the hunt. We had a window open before, maybe, to head for the hills, but that window just slammed shut and locked, kids.”

“I'm not your fucking kid,” Reagan says.

“Reagan, c'mon—” Chance says.

“Shut up, Chauncey. Jesus. You're not smart enough to have an opinion here. And besides, you're just going to follow the bouncing ball—either this one, because you're hot for her despite her not being hot for you—” Here she jerks a thumb toward Aleena. “
Or
, you'll follow
this one, because he's your
best bro
, who doesn't judge you for getting that girl suicided, who doesn't care that you're a lazy thinker and the weakest gear in our machine.”

“Yo,” DeAndre says. “My man Chance here knows his shit when it comes to
real-world
stuff, like, do you remember the part where he drove our asses away from the Hunting Lodge like he was Steve Motherfucking McQueen?”

“It's all right,” Chance says. “She's right. It's fine.” He feels gutted, like a tree hollowed out by rot. He collapses back into an old rocking chair and leans back. Doesn't want to close his eyes because he sees bad stuff back there, in the dark behind his lenses.

“We go on the offensive,” Aleena says.

“Yeah, that'll work,” DeAndre says sarcastically.

“It's afraid of us. Let's remind it why.”

Reagan laughs—big, angry, a mirthless laugh from inside her chest. “Yeah.
Okay
. Because that'll go really well for us. Reality check: we go at this thing, it dismantles us like a praying mantis pulling apart a butterfly. Even
if
we manage to make a dent and . . . and hurt whatever this thing is, what then? We go on with our lives? We just got
marked
. We're not hackers. We're terrorists.
Enemies of the state
. There's an airliner down with scores of dead people strewn across a fucking Nebraskan field and, what? People are just going to forget us? We'll be magically exonerated by taking down a government program? We'll be able to go traipsing through our old lives, la-la-la? Typhon is
the good guy
here. Typhon is a natural extension of the government doing what the government does: locking shit down, sacrificing privacy, and killing people in the name of safety. People don't care about us. They care about their
pumpkin lattes
. They care about fast Netflix speeds. They care about clever fucking Facebook memes. They don't care about Snowden. Or NSA spying. WikiLeaks was interesting until it wasn't. We blow up kids in Pakistan. We bomb terrorists this year we armed last year. Nobody says ‘boo' as long as they can get the new iPhone, right?” Her fists are balled up at her sides, and her chest is heaving. She says finally, quieting down: “We can't go home. We can't have our lives back because we're the bad guys.”

For a moment, everyone is left reeling, speechless. Chance had no idea about the depth of her anger. He can't quite look at her, can't quite look away.

Then Aleena says: “If we're the bad guys, then maybe it's time we act like it. Reagan, you're a Grade A troll. So let's troll Typhon.”

“Aleena,” Reagan says. “You're not the rallying-cry type. And I'm not that girl anymore. I just wanna go. I just wanna hide. By sunrise, I'm out of here. You should all think about doing the same thing.”

She turns, hurries out of the room.

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

H
is margins—the ends of who he is—are gone. Ken never really thought of himself as a limited being with
edges
, with
walls
, but now that those barriers have been torn away, he realizes just how restrictive the human meat really is. His mind—his soul!—stretches in all directions, almost infinitely. (Though even there, out in the expanse, he detects more edges, more walls, and the desire to push past them or eradicate them entirely is nearly overwhelming—think of how much bigger, stronger, more
infinite
he could become.)

And to think he resisted this.

The memory of what they did—Sandy shooting her pistol into his leg, her and that “proxy” dragging him back to the room of corpses, hooking his head up to one of those clamps, a little drill boring a hole through his skull wall (and with it, the smell of burning bone, cooking skin, charring hair)—remains, but the memory is no longer his, not really. He shares it with the memories of all who are in here with him.

He feels the pacemaker seize of Gordon Berry.

The tranquilizer used to abduct Alan Sarno from his brother's office.

The Taser that fixed Siobhan Kearsy to the spot as she walked across that empty lot in Santa Fe, thinking she was going to save people's lives instead of give up her own.

Their minds are his mind. Separate but together.
And they know me, too
.

He can see glimpses of his family. Through the webcam on the computer. Through the security cameras he has installed in the house. Traffic lights, ATM cameras, satellite footage. Typhon is many eyed, and he is part of Typhon, and so he can watch Susan, his wife. His children, Lucas and Mandy. Susan looks worried. The kids don't understand. He scans their faces—they have an increased tension, a tightness born of fear (a 13 percent increase), but it's unlikely they know why. They're responding, more likely, to their mother's stress factor (67 percent). He's missing. They want him back. They don't know where he's gone. Or why. It's likely a matter of national security.

He wants to laugh. Wants to tell them:
It's okay
. Because it is. He's protecting them now in a way he never could before.

Typhon is everywhere now. At least here, in the United States, she has cascaded throughout all connected systems. Ken can
feel
it all. Can feel her tendrils in anything. Something as simple as the common car stereo is within her reach. Because many such stereos are connected through Bluetooth. Some electric cars, like Teslas, are tied right into the network—and when one thing ties to the network it ties to
all
the other things, and that means all paths lead to Typhon. Typhon, Mother of Monsters. Typhon, she who controls all.
And the gods did flee
.

Ken can feel traffic lights, most of which are now wirelessly connected to one another. He can feel police band traffic, financial data, Facebook pages, digital thermostats in houses, security camera footage, hundreds of millions of computers and phones and tablets, nuclear power plants, the power grid, ATM machines, banking data, medical records, air traffic control, even the airliners themselves. It's all connected now: the Internet of Things. Refrigerators that know when your milk is low, televisions that always listen so they know what channel you want to watch, positioning devices so that you never lose your keys. All of it, bound together: manufacturing, energy, security, transportation, automation.

Everything talks to each other. Infinite handshakes. Links in the digital chain that connect to the real world beyond.

He can feel
minds
out there, too. Brains hooked up to Typhon, tethered by invisible tentacles.

Ken knows now that there are two kinds who join with Typhon—the Bestowers and the Bestowed. He is of the former: minds who are important enough to contribute to Typhon, to be tied into the network and made a
part
of it. The Bestowed do not have the privilege or the genius necessary to give themselves to Typhon. They are receivers. Ken, and the thirteen, are transmitters.

There are many receivers out there in the world. Ken can feel them. Some used to work here. Others were hackers at the Hunting Lodge who washed out. (And there again he is reminded how little of that was under his control. Typhon had it in her grip all along.) All are cultists now of Typhon: servants of the many minded, worshippers of the dragon. They've been plugged in. The virus has been uploaded into their minds—forced into their programming. Their number grows every day.

The first among them is the one known as the Compiler. The one who gathered the thirteen. Leslie Cilicia-Ceto's most beloved subject. Her husband: Simon. Ken can see the man's memory of it—all the crumpled steel and glittering glass. His own face a mask of blood. Taking her back to the lab at her command. Hooking her up as the first of Typhon, the first mind to give itself to the algorithm, to become part of the program. For Simon, weeks became months became two years as he sat and helped her gather all the tools and technology necessary to sustain Typhon. Simon—brain damaged from the accident, plugged into Typhon not to be a part of his wife but just to connect with her in some way, again—going madder and madder until she has to wipe him like a bad hard drive. Freezing all those bad sectors, locking them away, crushing part of his identity. Bolstering the damage to his brain with her own processing power. And in that . . . giving him a mission.

The hunter-gatherer. The Compiler of new code.

He's out there now. Ken can feel him. Can trace his path as a streak of light—from here to a small airport in Maryland. Planes aren't flying right now—the FAA has grounded all air travel—but Typhon controls what can be seen and what cannot, and so the Compiler boards a small private jet piloted by one of the Bestowed, and then the streak of light takes him, an arc over the midland, flying over the flyover states, landing finally in Laramie, Wyoming. He is just now exiting the plane in the early morning . . .

Ken sees glimpses of the hackers. Chance. Reagan. He can see them walking past a trailer park. Just last night. They don't understand. Nobody understands. Not yet.

Ken didn't. At first, he didn't grasp why it was necessary—why, if Typhon was designed to protect America, she must first invoke chaos. Plane crashes. Market crashes. Gas spikes.

Because they have to be willing to accept us
, she said.
Because sometimes the child has to touch the hot stove to learn why he shouldn't do it again. Because in chaos, there is opportunity
.

He asks her, why do we care about these hackers?

They can hurt us. So we must hurt them first. And that can work to our advantage
. And he sees the plan, clear as a cloudless sky: the Zeroes are being set up to be the bad guys. Able to manipulate things well beyond their ken. They will expose the vulnerabilities of the system.

And the masses will cry for a solution. They will cry for Typhon.