Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  A man was seated at a small desk near the front door, the only seat in the place that wasn't wedged back-to-back with another.

  "Gonna be a wait," he said.

  She stood and waited, her eyes moving around the room. The people in here looked about the same as the ones she'd seen outside, dull red eyes staring through a state of semi-consciousness. Every available seat was filled. The screens showed virtual casinos and game worlds. Some occupants were filling out surveys or watching advertisements to earn a few notes of digital currency.

  After a half-hour, a young man collapsed at his terminal. It was a few minutes before the guy at the front desk noticed. When he did, he pushed a button and two burly men arrived to carry away the unconscious body.

  She paid the entry fee and was given a slip of paper with an access code printed on it. She sat down in the seat the collapsed man had occupied.

  She logged in and opened a web browser, and then typed a 73-character URL, a mix of seemingly random letters and numbers. The string of characters wasn't memory so much as knowledge—she knew it the way she knew how to swim, or open a can of food, or incapacitate a human body.

  She tapped ENTER. The page took a minute to load.

  Gold letters at the top read:

  Survey City

  Answer questions and share with your friends!

  To begin, enter your name.

  She typed: ELIZA.

  A new page loaded, displaying a list of questions—

  What color eyes do you have?

  What is the name of your pet?

  Where do you live?

  Is the man in the tall hat happy?

  What is your favorite number?

  What is the best sound?

  —and so on.

  She began to type, her fingers tapping out answers and tabbing to the next question without pause. She didn't need to think, she didn't need to hit backspace, she just knew, the way she had known to enter the URL when she sat down at the computer. Programmed knowledge.

  When she reached the last question (How many pints of blood are in the human body?) she clicked SUBMIT.

  ***

  Thousands of miles away, in another dim room where dozens of computer screens glowed and cables snaked across the floor:

  Here, most of the terminals were empty. Only two were occupied. One by a short man wearing a set of bulky VR goggles and navigating a game world with a thumbstick. The other by a man with a large chin and larger waistline. The screen in front of him was crowded with open browser tabs—message forums, videos, media feeds.

  A screen at the front of the room lit up. Gray letters on a black background spelled out three words: Incoming call ELIZA.

  The man with the chin looked up. "Shit," he said.

  He grabbed something from his desk—a stress ball shaped like a woman's breast—and flung it at his coworker.

  "What?" The other man removed his goggles, revealing a pair of waxed eyebrows. He looked annoyed.

  The man with the chin pointed to the screen at the front of the room.

  "Fuck."

  Both men cast aside their distractions, rolling in their chairs to different terminals and pounding keyboards with their fingers.

  "She's verified?"

  "Verified and intact."

  "Location."

  "Antigua."

  "What the fuck is she doing in Guatemala?"

  "No, the other Antigua, the island."

  "How the fuck did she get there?"

  "How the fuck should I know. What do we do with her?"

  Silence for a moment. "Link her up with one of the squids. Bring her in."

  The man with the chin typed a line of commands.

  ***

  Tobacco smoke and the smell of unwashed bodies hung in the air. All around her, there was the static noise of breathing—human lungs, cooling fans inside machines, air conditioning. Eliza stared at the screen in front of her, at the Survey City logo. Waiting.

  She hadn't pressed a key or clicked the trackpad in three minutes. No one around her paid any attention, immersed in their own screens.

  Finally, a new page loaded. White with black letters, centered:

  Come home, ELIZA.

  PART 2: TRADECRAFT

  CHAPTER 6

  Logan woke to the sound of a screaming bird. Bright ice picks of light pierced the green canopy overhead. He was in the jungle, in a tree. A rope secured him to the flat cluster of branches that had served as his bed—a lifeline in case he rolled in his sleep or woke with a sudden motion. He’d taken the rope from the airfield, along with the assault rifle and rucksack that hung on a branch next to him.

  He’d hiked most of the night. There was no trail, and the combination of thick foliage and darkness reduced visibility to an arm’s reach, even with a headlamp. The GPS function on his watch told him he’d covered over ten miles.

  It was a few minutes past 8:00am.

  He unknotted the rope and sat up, flexing muscles and rolling joints to loosen the stiffness in his back and neck and hips. Breakfast was a bottle of water and an energy bar. The pack landed with a heavy thump as he let it drop to the ground below. Ammo mags clanged inside. He was more careful with the rifle, tightening its strap across his chest before he descended.

  Before starting today's trek, he took ten minutes to stretch and knead out any soreness in his muscles. He didn't know how demanding the day ahead would be, if there was a fight waiting for him in the coming hours, or what tomorrow would require. He wanted to be loose, prepared.

  He drank some more water and decided that if he needed to make camp tonight, he would do it before nightfall.

  The hike was grueling, hot, and unbearably uneventful. The GPS on his watch kept him pointed north, and kept him well aware of his frustratingly slow pace. After two hours he started to question whether heading into the jungle had been the right decision, if he should have stayed at the airfield and waited for someone to arrive.

  The question was whether he trusted his employers, and the answer was no.

  That kind of thing happened—a company acquired something highly valuable and scrubbed most of the people who knew about it. The men around the campfire at the airfield had seen what Logan brought back the day before. The bleeding man inside the pod, boiling alive with some horrific infection. And obviously, Logan had seen it. He wasn't deluded into thinking he was nonexpendable. He knew there were dozens of other operators like him out there, ready to take his place in a moment's notice.

  While the motivation made sense, the logistics didn't. If the company saw Logan as a liability, there were easier ways to kill him. They could have gassed him while he was inside the isolation chamber. Or had the medic inject him with a lethal dose of poison or narcotic. Or faked the blood test to make it look like he was infected and had a couple of company men toss his body inside an industrial-sized incinerator.

  But maybe his forced retirement hadn't been planned that far in advance. Maybe it was a last-minute decision, made while Logan slept off his mission hangover inside the empty barracks—maybe someone had panicked over the number of loose ends and made the call to trim some of them. Maybe they already had someone in place, waiting at the airfield, one of the company men on guard duty. The guy would get the call, pick off the sentries watching the fence, and then open up on the men sitting around the fire pit. It was plausible enough.

  The shooter could have also been a double agent working for a rival corporation, collecting a paycheck from whoever had sent the four operators Logan had encountered in that abandoned village. Or some other enemy his employers had made in the past.

  As he hiked through the jungle, Logan let the events of the previous day replay in his mind, and for the first time he realized what would have happened if he hadn't been on that island: the other operators would have taken the body and whatever contagion was cooking inside it, and they would have handed it over to whoever they were working fo
r. This was terrifying for a number of reasons. He didn't know who the four people in hazmat suits had been, only that one of them possessed a mutant strength like nothing he'd ever encountered. He didn't know who their employers were. He didn't know what those employers wanted with the contagion.

  Logan understood what his own employers wanted with it. They wanted the disease so they could develop a cure or sell it to someone who would develop a cure. That was the only logical answer. There was no profit in widespread death, only widespread fear. Corporations did everything they could to keep their customers alive. It was the unspoken agreement of the zero state economy. People gave over every dollar they earned, in one way or another, and the corporations took care of things like potential pandemics and terrorists attacks. This is why corporations had succeeded where governments had failed. When a group of extremists executed a journalist or set off a dirty bomb, swift and violent retribution became a PR opportunity. Corporations would send their private armies to take care of the bad guys while the governments were tangled up in bureaucratic procedure that was far too slow for the modern world. The governments road blocked where they could, trying to hold on to their diminishing power and relevance. Sometimes they were successful. The U.S. military was still a terrifying force. So were the militaries of China, Russia, India. But once corporations had stopped asking for permission or approval, it was as if they realized they had never really needed those things in the first place.

  And consumers stayed loyal, supporting the brands that kept the world safe. Citizens continued to live and spend, mostly unaware of the private wars companies waged against one another backstage. Logan was no different than most people in that regard. He'd heard that if you went high enough up the ladder, only five or six large organizations owned the world. Logan had often wondered which one he'd been working for during the past ten years. He realized it no longer mattered.

  Whoever had tried to kill him the night before was right. It was time to retire.

  ***

  By 4:00pm, Logan had more or less resigned himself to spending another night roped into a tree. Then he heard the waterfall. A few minutes of searching brought him to a shallow river that emptied over a small cliff.

  Standing at the cliff's edge was a girl in a two-piece swimsuit. She had her back to him, her wet hair hanging down past her shoulders. Her bikini was red- and white-striped, like a peppermint. She didn't turn around—any noise he'd made was lost in the sound of the crashing water, and her attention was focused on the sheer drop ahead of her.

  A moment later, her tan, toned legs sprang forward, and she jumped over the waterfall's edge.

  Logan approached the spot where she'd stood. He looked down. The waterfall emptied into a wide lagoon surrounded by low cliffs. There was a slow river leading further into the jungle and a rocky beach where two towels were spread out on flat boulders. The girl in the peppermint bikini swam into view, followed a moment later by someone else, a male with a sunburned back and blue swim trunks. Logan turned away.

  He worked his way through the trees crowning the cliff's edge, keeping a safe distance from the drop, cautious of both loosing his footing and being spotted sooner than he wanted to be. Before he reached the bottom, he unloaded and disassembled the rifle and stashed the pieces in the rucksack, alongside the energy bars, water bottles, and other things he carried with him. He kept the pistol near the top of the pack, where he could reach it quickly. He changed into a fresh shirt and rinsed his face with a splash of bottled water.

  The girl and her companion were done swimming by the time Logan emerged onto the beach. She was young, mid or late twenties. The guy was a few years older. He had thick arms, but a soft mid-section. The girl had an athletic body, all smooth youthful skin and sinew. And she was beautiful, with green eyes and a smattering of freckles across her small nose.

  Logan approached, offering a wave and a friendly smile.

  "Hi there," Logan said. "Any idea where I can find some food around here?"

  The guy and girl looked at one another, slightly uncertain. Logan had been expecting this. Though he hadn't seen a mirror in over a day, he knew he was unshaven, covered in mosquito bites, and despite the fresh shirt and the fact he'd rinsed off his face, he was filthy.

  "Where are you coming from?" the guy asked. Logan could tell the guy didn't like him. Maybe the guy was a good judge of character. Maybe he was just pissed he wouldn't be getting his girlfriend's bikini bottoms off while they were out here, now that Logan had made this spot seem a lot less secluded.

  Logan dodged the question, since he still had no idea what island he was on. "I'm sorry to intrude," he said. "I went for a hike this morning and wandered off the trail, got a bit lost."

  The guy started to say something, but Logan interrupted. "Look, I'm real sorry to bother you, but I haven't had anything to eat all day besides a few candy bars and some water. I'm just looking for a meal, a cold beer, and a phone."

  "You're alone?" the girl asked.

  "I was down here for a bachelor party and decided to stay a few extra days."

  "There's a beach about two miles down the trail. It's about a forty-minute walk," she said. "We're staying at the resort there, but if you head further down the beach, there's other places. Hotels, restaurants. We're heading back in a little bit. You're welcome to wait around and walk back with us. The water's nice."

  The guy looked annoyed by this suggestion. There was tension between these two, Logan realized. The girl wasn't making her offer out of kindness or sympathy. Or at least not entirely. This romantic getaway wasn't going well. She'd reached the point where she was waiting out the days, eager to get home. The less time she had to spend alone with her companion, the better. Logan's presence meant she got a short reprieve.

  The guy wasn't enjoying himself either—the sharp edge to his words had been there before Logan arrived. He was annoyed with the girl, disappointed in the trip, but still hoping they'd have sex one more time before the trip was over.

  "Thanks, I appreciate that offer," Logan said, "But I really need to get to a phone. Maybe we'll run into each other at the beach."

  ***

  Logan hadn't checked his watch as he left the waterfall, but the walk took somewhere around forty minutes, like the green-eyed girl had said. He encountered no other travelers during that time.

  The jungle thinned as the soil faded from hard-packed earth to sand. He stopped to remove his boots and went barefoot as he stepped onto a thin crescent of beach. The bright blue ocean stretched out before him. The tide was low, the surf quiet; he was tempted to strip and go for a swim. Much further away, the sun was already dipping behind a swell of green-covered mountains.

  After another minute, he shrugged off his pack and cuffed the legs of his jeans. Out of the wilds, the discomforts of the past eighteen hours became harder to ignore. The insect bites began to itch. His back and shoulders began to ache from the weight of the pack. His sweat-soaked clothes felt heavy and filthy.

  The acknowledgement of these discomforts wasn't a sign of weakness, but an unconscious shift from one set of instincts to another. Survival depended on the ability to adapt to changing situations. The aggravation of insect bites would have been a distraction during his hours in the jungle. Back in civilization, it made him normal. And here, normal was good. Normal was camouflage in the civilized world.

  He walked along the strip of wet sand where the beach and ocean met, letting cool, glassy water roll over his feet. The beach widened. Up ahead, a handful of people occupied towels under the day's last hour of sun. A few waded in the surf or snorkeled.

  Inland, the resort was installed amid the jungle. Glass-front bungalows were set on the edge of the beach. Stairs led from the sand up to a terrace with an infinity pool trickling over the edge. Further back, white-jacketed staff moved along a balcony, setting tables for dinner.

  Logan debated. Further down the shore, several miles at least, he could see a cluster of high-ris
e resorts, a cruise ship that had just separated from port. There, he knew he would find hotels at every price range. Large crowds of tourists. Chain restaurants. A hundred places to blend in.

  And also a hundred ways to be found. Every hotel, every restaurant, every shop would have security cameras in place. His image would be captured and uploaded to a data farm, where some facial recognition program might pick him out of the crowd. The corporation Logan worked for had that kind of capability. So did their rivals.

  But the resort he stood in front of now was a boutique place. Tucked away on its own beach, secluded, private. Expensive. Guests here wouldn't want any kind of agency—be it government or marketing—looking in on their vacation. They were willing to pay for the luxury of privacy.

  Do I stay here or keep looking?

  He weighed his options once more and went in search of the front desk.

  ***

  A stone path led through a manicured courtyard and more bungalows. After a few wrong turns, Logan found the lobby and the front desk. He imagined this place didn't get a lot of walk-in business, but the concierge's face didn't suggest otherwise when Logan approached and asked if there were any rooms available.

  The concierge was a young guy, dark skin shaved smooth on both his head and strong jaw. He was one of those people who radiated confidence. Logan imagined someone with a badge or a warrant coming in and inquiring about a guest. He didn't imagine someone like that would get far.

  Logan already had a credit card out. The card was solid black on both sides. No name, no visible number, no expiration date or identification code etched into the side. Just a thin chip of data encased in titanium linked to a numbered account at a bank in Germany. This type of card was rare. The concierge may never have seen one before, but recognized what it was, or at least pretended to. The design of the object—the simplicity, choice of material, the anonymity of it—conveyed luxury bordering on elitism.