Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  Barnes opened fire.

  The ants fired back. Bullets swarmed the air around his head, punched the ground at his feet, stung his body armor. His boots pivoted in the mud as he changed direction, reloaded, kept firing.

  The ants scattered, fleeing the disabled vehicle. Barnes screamed after them, emptying his magazine, his mind flooded with adrenaline and painkillers and triumph.

  And then the vehicle exploded.

  It was like the breath of a dragon, an orange column of fire that rose into the sky.

  Barnes stumbled to a walk, blind from the sudden brightness.

  His vision returned and he saw the vehicle. Fire burned inside an open hatch on top. They'd cut through the locks and tossed grenades inside.

  Shapes emerged from the polluted air around him. People. Some were painted black with ash and charcoal. Others were covered in mud and grass.

  One stepped forward. A female with dull, brutish features. Two others fell into step alongside her. All three held flamethrowers.

  Barnes thought about raising his rifle, thought about forcing them to kill him where he stood. The thought of being burned alive stopped him.

  Live to fight another day, he thought, as the female's fist rose toward his face and knocked his world black.

  PART 3: Internecine

  CHAPTER 17

  The room was concrete. One door, no windows. Barnes squatted at the center. He'd been stripped naked. His wrists and ankles had been tied with rope and then tied to a metal grate in the floor. Then the knots and his hands had been wrapped in tape, making the use of his fingers impossible. More tape covered his mouth.

  Barnes had worked on crews that transported prisoners before. Terrorists. Insurgents. Privateers. This was how they did it. Whoever had tied him up knew what they were doing.

  Multiple layers of redundancy. A basic rule of security. Even if he could chew through the tape on his mouth, his teeth wouldn't reach the tape on his hands. Even if he managed to free his fingers, he'd have to untie the knots binding his wrists. Even if he managed to do that, his legs would be so cramped and numb from the hours spent in this awkward position that he'd be unable to run, unable to launch an effective attack on his captors.

  He thought about rocking back and forth, about using his weight to pull the grate out of the floor. A useless road to go down, he decided. If he was successful, he'd still be tied to the damn thing, only he'd be on his back.

  He closed his eyes and took stock of his body. His fractured sternum ached. His muscles were knotted with cramps. His head throbbed like the worst hangover he'd ever had. His balls felt ice cold. Numbness was creeping up his back. His bladder was painfully full.

  That last part gave him an idea.

  He looked down, adjusted his hips, and started to pee. He stopped after a second. The stream of urine had splashed on his wrists, wetting the tape and the rope. He worked his arms. The restraints felt a little looser than they had a few seconds ago.

  Or was that just wishful thinking?

  He emptied his bladder a little more. Worked his arms a little more.

  It wasn't wishful thinking. It was working.

  Barnes smiled. His bladder ached. His urethra burned. Little by little, he drained himself onto the ropes. The tape started to pull away from his skin. He wiggled his fingers. Flexed his fists. He started to believe he could get free, and started to think about what he would do once he did: get blood moving to his limbs; lift the grate out of the floor and use it to brain the first person that walked into the room; pay back the fucks that had burned his men alive.

  He didn't get much further than loosening the tape around his wrists.

  Rusted hinges screeched and the door opened.

  It was the female, the one who'd knocked him out. She'd cleaned off the soot and char she'd been camouflaged with on the battlefield. She was wearing boots, cargo pants, a black shirt with no sleeves. Her hair was buzzcut. One of her ears was fucked up, cauliflowered like a boxer's.

  Two others followed behind her, both male. They were tall, with broad shoulders and thick limbs.

  All three had the same dull, brutish features. They had faces he'd seen before, on the video footage Logan and Zoe had brought back from the island.

  The female looked at his urine-soaked restraints with a curious expression.

  After a moment, she asked. "Does it hurt to stop and go like that?"

  "Stings a little."

  She nodded.

  "Your name is Barnes," she said.

  He felt his pulse climb. He'd brought no ID with him. None of his men had. Standard procedure on a job like this.

  Whatever these things were, they were part of something bigger than a few people hiding out in a field with guns and flamethrowers.

  "My name is Eliza."

  Eliza pulled a piece of paper from a pocket and unfolded it. It was a computer printout, a photograph of Logan, his head covered in the hood of a hazmat suit. Probably a screenshot taken from bodycam footage.

  "Do you know this man?"

  Barnes said nothing.

  "Can you tell me where he is?"

  Barnes continued to say nothing.

  "We know you work for the same employer as this man."

  "How about you answer one of my questions?"

  "Okay," she said. "What is your question, Barnes?"

  "What the fuck are you?"

  She held his gaze for a long moment. "I'm only just starting to figure that out."

  She brought his attention back to the picture of Logan. "This man killed three of us. He killed someone very important to me."

  Barnes looked up, looked into her dark eyes. "This is about payback, revenge?"

  "It's about war." She pulled the paper away, stepped back. "What about the contagion? From the island. The man in the plastic bubble. From the plane crash. Where did you take it?"

  "We destroyed it. Burned the body to ash, like you did to those people outside."

  "We know that's not true."

  "Fuck you!" Barnes screamed, his voice filling the small room. The situation was getting to him—the inability to move, to fight back, to exert some influence over what was happening.

  He forced himself to breathe, to calm down. "If you're gonna torture me, torture me. If you're going to kill me, kill me. If you're going to burn me, burn me. I'm done talking."

  Eliza started to say something else. Barnes cut her off. "I SAID I'M DONE TALKING!"

  He lowered his head, looked at the floor. In his peripheral vision he saw two pairs of legs move. The men. They moved closer to him. He braced himself for what was coming.

  Powerful hands and arms seized him in a headlock and pulled his vision to the far wall. He caught a glimpse of Eliza—staring, watching, emotionless.

  Something cold and thin and metal pierced the side of his neck. He felt pressure in the vein as it was flooded with an injection.

  Then the needle was withdrawn, and the arms released him.

  His vision clouded and his thoughts followed. After a minute, the pain in his sternum faded. The ache in his half-full bladder lessened.

  His eyes focused on a fixed point on the floor. A hand on his chin raised his head. Eliza's face was inches away.

  "What was in that needle?" he asked.

  "The people who used to run this facility used it for the squids."

  He had no idea what this meant. He tried to ask her but the question fell apart in his mouth.

  "Tell me about the contagion, Barnes. The man in the plastic bubble. Where did you take him?"

  They'd transported him to a remote facility. A research lab in a desert. She asked him if he knew how to get there, and he gave her the coordinates. He hadn't known he remembered them until she'd asked.

  "Thank you, Barnes."

  She let go of his chin. He continued to look up at her. She unfolded the piece of paper, the printout of Logan.

  "And this man, who is
he?"

  "That's Logan," he said.

  "Who is Logan?"

  "He's a freelancer. A thief, a mercenary."

  "Where can we find him?"

  CHAPTER 18

  With all the advances in exercise science that had emerged over the past half century—new techniques, new equipment, new ways to measure effort and capacity—there were still few things as effective as taking something heavy and moving it from one point to another. It worked even better if it was something heavy and cumbersome. Something like a truck tire. Or an oil drum. Or, in the case of the strength and conditioning class Logan was teaching, sandbags.

  Logan had trained like this before, first during his time in special forces, then in the private military camps run by his employers, and then on his own. The sandbags he'd used in the army had been the green canvas variety. These were the same sandbags they would stack into walls to block floodwater or provide cover from enemy fire. Each weighed fifty pounds, and if you wanted more weight than that, you picked up another one.

  The sandbags his students were using resembled high-tech gym bags. They were made of reinforced nylon and webbed with a dozen different straps and grips. They were filled with multiple sand-filled rubber tubes that weighed either ten pounds or twenty pounds. This meant the weight of each bag could be adjusted to accommodate the strength of the person using it. Each bag could hold as little as ten pounds or as much as a hundred and ten.

  There were sixteen people in the class, which had started at midnight and was held inside a simple rectangular room. The walls were concrete, painted white. The floors were covered in squares of thin black padding. Pull-up bars were anchored across the back wall. Weights and barbells were stacked on metal racks. Kettlebells were lined up in neat rows, arranged by weight. It was basically a larger, slightly more elaborate version of the gym Logan had built inside his apartment.

  This was his fourth night working at Paradime, and the class was pretty much the same group of people who had been there the past three nights. There was an even split between males and females. Everyone was in their twenties or thirties. Most were from the customer support team, one of the largest departments at Paradime, which was staffed twenty-four hours a day. Another was a short-order cook whose shift had ended at 11:30. Another was a project manager who had just gotten back from vacation and was putting in a late night to catch up on work.

  The atmosphere in the class was friendly, comfortable, and encouraging.

  And everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, even as Logan put them through a punishing circuit of sandbag squats, single-leg lifts, cleans, and carries, mixed in with planks and dynamic stretches.

  Logan was enjoying himself too. This was a new experience for him. Throughout his career, he'd spent countless hours training, but he'd never been an instructor. As it turned out, he was good at it.

  At 12:45, he had his students trade sandbags for foam rollers, and led them through a ten-minute cool down. Class ended at 1:00am.

  By 1:05, everyone had said goodbye and Logan was alone.

  His next class was scheduled for 4:30am. The students there would be a mix of people arriving early for the workday and others who were leaving after the graveyard shift. With a billion users spread out across all continents and time zones, Paradime needed employees working day and night. And those who worked off hours were entitled to all the same perks that were available during normal business hours—hot meals, good coffee, exercise classes, professional development workshops, and anything else that would keep them healthy, happy, and productive.

  This schedule was extremely helpful to Logan, because it gave him a legitimate reason to be at Paradime all night. And if you wanted to steal something, the middle of the night was usually the best time to do it.

  ***

  Up until a few days ago, Logan hadn't known much about Paradime, aside from what he'd occasionally read in the news. He hadn't had a social media account since college, almost twenty years ago, which he had deactivated when his application to special forces had been accepted and he'd systematically eliminated the distractions in his life to focus on training. The social networks he'd used back then still existed, though their user base had been depleted as everyone migrated over to Paradime. There were endless pages of literature online, analyzing why this had happened, but it all boiled down to the fact that Paradime offered a product that people wanted more, and attention spans were a finite resource.

  This product that people liked so much had been built by a kid named Holden Fynn, who'd coded the first version of Paradime in his dorm room during his senior year at UCLA. He'd shared it with people, people had liked it. Then more people saw it, and some of them invested money. And then it grew. Exponentially.

  Holden had been a C student who'd worked part-time in the electronics section of a department store between classes. The computer he'd used to write the first version of Paradime was a refurbished display model that had cost him two hundred dollars. Now, eight years after he'd sat in his dorm room typing out code on that two-hundred dollar computer, Holden was one of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world. He dated models and Hollywood actresses. He'd bought houses for every member of his immediate and extended family. He gave tens of millions of dollars to charity.

  And he was evolving his company. At it's core, Paradime was still a social network, a place for people to publish and share content, and a place for advertisers to bid on people's attention. But its interests had expanded to things like implantable technology, artificial intelligence, and smart drugs.

  ***

  Logan went for a run.

  At a relaxed pace it took him eleven minutes to travel the circumference of the campus.

  Campus was the best word to describe Paradime's headquarters. It was exactly like a college, only with workspaces instead of classrooms. There were even dormitories, which provided a place to crash for employees who were putting in long hours, and a permanent home for employees who found little or no reason to ever leave.

  Logan finished one lap and started another. Halfway through the second lap, he stopped at a bench and took his time retying his shoes.

  The building in front of him was three stories high. The exterior was synthetic gray stone. The windows weren't traditional glass but transparent solar panels; during the day, the panes would become opaque, like sunglasses. And at night, or if it was overcast, they would become clear, like they were now. Through the glass doors in front, Logan could see a single security guard and an empty reception desk.

  Getting inside the building would be easy. Logan's Paradime ID wouldn't unlock any of the doors, but he had a second ID that would. It had been acquired by Logan's predecessor and passed on through Barnes. Logan didn't know how the ID had been acquired, but he knew it worked. He'd tested it the night before.

  Once inside the building, the challenge would be getting inside the labs on the third floor, where the thing called Outcome was kept. Access to the labs was guarded with multiple layers of security. Anyone entering had to scan their thumbprint, key in a six-digit passcode, and offer their wrist for electrocardiograph identification.

  Getting past these would be difficult, but not impossible. It would require careful timing, a few expensive and difficult-to-acquire gadgets, and technological understanding of how all three security mechanisms worked.

  Logan could locate a list of Paradime employees who had access, follow one on campus, and lift a thumbprint. A medical-grade 3D printer, the kind hospitals used for skin grafts, could be used to fabricate a thin covering that could be worn over his thumb to fool the scanner. The six-digit passcode could be brute-forced with thirty minutes' time and a laptop running a codebreaking application. And enough Paradime employees used wearable or implanted health trackers that someone with access to that lab had uploaded electrocardiograph data into the cloud. Getting past the third mechanism would be a matter of locating that data and duplicating it. These methods were
complicated, and the gear to pull them off was expensive, but they were doable. Other thieves had used these methods before.

  Logan, however, wasn't going to do any of this. He was taking a much simpler approach.

  He was going to use the stolen ID to get inside the building. He was going to take the stairs to the second floor and find the storage closet on the north-facing side. Then he was going to use a chemtorch to cut a hole in the ceiling. According to the blueprints he'd studied, he would be able to climb up through that hole and into the labs on the third floor. Once he was there, he would take Outcome. He would leave the same way he'd come in. He would disable any security guards he encountered by nonlethal means. Once outside the building, he would smuggle the device off campus the same way he'd smuggled in the chemtorch—inside one of the sandbags he'd had his class training with earlier.

  And if any part of this plan failed, he would improvise.

  CHAPTER 19

  His hand beat against the inside of the pod, smearing bloody prints across the transparent window and blotting out the view of the bright, empty sky above.

  He was on his back, drenched in blood and the other fluids that were abandoning his body at an alarming rate. The pod was slightly larger than a coffin and designed to be nearly indestructible. Beating against it with his hand was useless, and that simple effort was probably killing him faster by increasing the speed at which he was losing blood and other fluids, or pushing his weakened body toward a cardiac event.

  But there was a comfort in the repeated action. A sense of control, however minor.

  So he hit the lid of the pod again.

  And again.

  And again.

  ***

  Smith opened his eyes.

  His heart was pounding in that tumbling, uneven way that had become familiar during the past week. A monitor somewhere to his right was beeping furiously.