Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  A few people nodded.

  "The people who took control of this facility, are there any more of them?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Are they down here? On another floor? Where are they?"

  A woman answered. She was young, around thirty, wearing a thick sweater that was two sizes too big. "Something happened yesterday. The base was attacked and they sent everyone out but a handful of people. And then after a while the few that were still here went out too. No one came back. We've been alone in here for almost a full day."

  "Have any of you been outside since then?"

  No one stepped forward. A few shook their heads. Logan looked at each person in turn, looking for a tell, a sign that one of them was lying. He was sure that someone in this room was the one who had hauled him out of that crevasse and dragged him to safety.

  "Never mind, then," Logan said. "I need to make a phone call."

  CHAPTER 34

  Holden was next to her, still asleep.

  Nothing had happened. At least nothing physical. They'd shared most of the bottle of whiskey and then they'd shared the couch, slumped into opposite corners. She could have rested her head on Holden's shoulder. She could have let him put his arm around her. It was an appealing thought. He was an attractive man. He had nice arms.

  They were still in his office. The lights were off, but the computer monitors glowed, throwing ghostly light against the walls.

  It was a few seconds of consciousness before Zoe remembered: Logan was still missing. She checked the time and did the math. It had been eighteen hours since he'd disappeared into that crack in the ice. The odds that he was alive were very slim, and getting slimmer with each passing minute.

  There was a small refrigerator near Holden's desk. He'd talked about it earlier. It had been the same small fridge his parents had bought him when he moved into his dorm room in college, the room where he'd written the first lines of code that would become his multibillion-dollar company. Zoe opened the fridge and found a bottle of water. Her head felt heavy and her limbs ached. It had been a long time since she'd had anything resembling a hangover. It felt unfamiliar and awful. Her stomach hurt. She couldn't remember what she'd been dreaming, but if felt like something bad.

  She sipped water and watched Holden sleep. He hadn't tried anything with her. He hadn't been anything less than a gentleman. But a part of her was certain that something was going to happen between them at some point in the near future. Her reasons were too many to think about at the moment.

  Light flickered, drawing Zoe's attention to one of the computer screens. An alert had popped up. An incoming call.

  Zoe reached over and tapped the spacebar to answer.

  "Hello?" she said, already knowing whose voice she would hear on the other end of the line, but not yet believing it.

  "Zoe?"

  "Hello, Logan."

  ***

  A minute later, Holden was by her side and the computer screen was filled with a video feed of Logan sitting at a desk. Behind him there was a bookshelf set against a concrete wall. He was in an office.

  "You're inside?" Holden said. He was grinning ear to ear.

  "I'm inside, down in the labs. There are seventeen other people here, CDC employees. All or most of them are scientists, I think."

  "What about the people who had control of the facility?"

  "Dead."

  "All of them?"

  "If any are alive, I haven't come across them. And the people here say they've been alone for almost a full day. How long since you lost contact with me?"

  "Eighteen hours," Holden said. "The last thing we had was a shaky video of you falling into a chasm while riding on top of a vehicle. I'm so fucking happy you're alive."

  Logan smiled. He rubbed the scruff on his chin with a hand and Zoe could see that his knuckles were a swollen mess, that his forearms were discolored with bruising.

  Zoe said, "Your video feed and comm unit cut out during the fall, and your vitals cut out a few minutes later."

  "All my gear got beat to hell." He recounted the fall and how the armored vehicle had gotten wedged in between the blue walls of ice and the brawl that had followed. Then: being hauled up to the surface on some kind of wire, being dragged across the frozen ground on a sled, waking up in the nearby camp, the bodies he'd found on his way in.

  "A bow and arrow?" Holden asked.

  "Not a bad choice of weapon," Logan said. "The bow and string would be made out of an engineered material, something that stays flexible in the extreme cold. Compared to a gun, there's no lubricants to freeze, no barrel to get clogged with ice, no gunpowder that might get snuffed out before it's done exploding. Arrows are quiet, which makes it a good weapon for stealth."

  Holden nodded.

  The expression on Zoe's face was grave. "Who?" she asked.

  "I think it was one of the CDC people," Logan said. "The gear they left for me matches the stuff I found in the lockers upstairs. The energy bars are the same ones I found in the employee lounge. I asked if anyone had been outside since yesterday, but no one stepped forward."

  "Why would someone keep that a secret?" Holden asked.

  "Fear of reprisal," Zoe said. "They have no way of knowing another army isn't going to show up tomorrow and take control of the place. It's happened twice already, in a month. They don't want to be allied with Logan if that happens. That's one possibility."

  "What's another?" Holden asked.

  "Think back to how this whole thing started."

  Logan said, "The person I recovered from the island. Smith, I think his name was. You're saying whoever infected him is the same person that hauled me out of that crevasse."

  Zoe nodded. "Someone in the staff is a double agent."

  "Who are they working for?" Holden said. "And what's their endgame, why are they helping Logan?"

  Zoe shrugged.

  Logan said, "It's all speculation at this point. First things first, I think we should explain to the people here and the CDC what it is we want to do."

  CHAPTER 35

  Ninety minutes later, Logan stood at the front of a conference room. He was dressed in the same thermal shirt, the same pants, the same flak jacket. He'd locked the submachine gun and the spare clips in a desk outside, but he still had the handgun tucked away at the small of his back.

  In front of him were all seventeen men and women who remained at the CDC facility. Their facial expressions and overall mood was uncertain and nervous.

  Next to Logan, a video feed was being projected onto a white screen. The feed showed Holden and Zoe seated in their own conference room, at a long table surrounded by empty chairs.

  "Thank you for joining us," Logan said, speaking in the same voice he'd used when leading group workouts at the Paradime campus. "Allow me to introduce my boss, Holden, and my colleague, Zoe."

  Holden looked calm, in his element. Zoe looked nervous. Logan noticed she'd retouched her makeup since their last video call, just an hour and a half earlier. He thought of all those years he and Zoe had worked together, all those hours they'd spent talking over a comm line or phone call, and never once had he seen her face. She was camera shy. He hadn't put that together until now.

  "Hi everyone," Holden said. "My name is Holden Fynn, I am the founder and CEO of Paradime." The introduction was a formality. Every single person here recognized Holden. Anyone would. Even before the Paradime job Logan could have picked Holden out of a lineup.

  Murmurs from the crowd.

  Holden said, "I'd like to get started by going around the room, hearing who you are, what your role is. After that, I'm going to explain what Paradime is doing there and answer any questions you have. I'd like you to know that I've already been in contact with your employer, the Corporation for Disease Control. They're aware of the situation and will be reaching out to you sometime in the next few hours."

  "Okay," Logan said. "Let's go around the room and everyone in
troduce themselves. We'll start right here." He pointed with an open hand, palm up, to a woman seated at one end of the front row. She wore a warm-looking sweater that was two sizes too big. The sweater looked like a hand-me-down from a brother or boyfriend. She had on glasses, no makeup, and if Logan had to guess, she was maybe thirty years old. He'd spoken to her briefly when he'd first arrived in the labs.

  She said, "Samantha Greene. Biochemical engineer."

  The woman next to her said, "Lian Xing, Biomedical Engineer."

  "Evan Fields. Lab technician."

  And it went around the room from there. Seventeen names, seventeen job titles. Logan tried to commit as much of it to memory as possible. Occasionally he glanced at the screen behind him. Holden's interest never wandered, it was like a spotlight that shined on each person in the room when it was their turn, and Logan wondered if this was a natural gift or a skill that had been developed with practice. Zoe typed on a screen, taking notes. Logan figured she would be up most of the night gathering information on every person in the room. He thought of Outcome, the computer he'd been hired to steal from Paradime. It tells us things, Holden had said. Logan wondered if it would be able to look at the files on the people in this room and pick out which one had pulled him out of the ice, which one had skulked through the swirling snowfall and picked off the remaining guards with a bow and arrow.

  "Thank you," Holden said when the introductions were over. "First, I'd like to share some good news. Your colleague, Richard Smith, is alive and being treated at a CDC facility."

  A murmured reaction from the crowd. A few people looked relieved, most showed a complete lack of surprise. Logan thought, I was more relieved when I heard the guy was alive, and the only time I met him was when I was dragging his hemorrhaging body from one containment pod into another, then onto a boat. Logan looked at the crowd and wondered which one had infected Smith with Prospero virus. At that moment, judging by the lack of reaction, he would have guessed it was all of them, acting in agreement.

  Someone spoke:

  "We know this already. A few of us have gotten messages from Smith. Through our Paradime accounts, as a matter of fact." It was the man who had stepped forward and asked what the fuck Logan was doing there when Logan first appeared in the lab, two hours ago by this point. His name was Felix, his job title was Senior Research Manager.

  Holden said, "Well then, I guess I can get right into the bad news. Which you also already know. There's an outbreak of Prospero virus in San Francisco."

  Grim expressions all around. Logan scanned the faces in the seats before him. He imagined himself in the position of the person or persons who had given Smith the contagion, what he would be thinking, what he would be feeling. They weren't the ones who had set the disease loose on a city population, but they'd put those events in motion, and now thousands of people were dead because of it.

  But if the people responsible were in this room, Logan couldn't spot them.

  Holden continued. "The treatment Smith was given before he left. How much of it do you have?"

  The people in the crowd eyed one another. Then Samantha, the woman in the bulky sweater, answered. "Two doses."

  "Did you say two?" Logan asked.

  Samantha nodded. "And it's still an experimental treatment. It worked for Smith, but it didn't work perfectly. It worked to a point. Antiviral drugs aren't like antibiotics, they don't destroy the infection, they just stop or slow the virus from replicating inside the body. Smith had this treatment, but he was also give a lot of broad spectrum antivirals—drugs that inhibit any virus, not just a specific one—and he had access to intensive medical care. The point is, the treatment we gave Smith isn't ready. It needs work."

  "How much work?"

  "We had a deadline. First week of December. The start of summer in the southern hemisphere. That's when some of us start rotating out."

  "Is there a way to push it ahead of schedule?"

  Samantha said, "That's not my place to say."

  "Whose place is it?" Holden asked, looking at the room.

  The guy named Felix raised a hand. "Mine. This room full of people is actually three teams, working on three different projects. The treatment you're talking about is only one of those projects. If we were to drop everything and just work on this, all of us working rotating shifts… Yeah, we could get it done ahead of deadline."

  "So once it's done, what do I need to mass produce the treatment?"

  "A schematic. Basically a file with a lot of lines of code that details how to make a specific chemical. You'd need that and a pharmaceutical production lab, like a factory where they'll take the schematic and actually make the stuff. Can I ask what the hell you are thinking?"

  Holden smiled. "You're going to give me the schematic I need. I'm going to buy a pharmaceutical production lab, which is going to make several million doses. Then I'm going to hand it out, free of charge, to the people quarantined inside San Francisco."

  Someone interrupted. A man who looked about a decade younger than Felix. "You're serious? Do you have any idea how much this is going to cost? Have you thought about FDA approval? Or the fact that the CDC owns the patent on this treatment? Or any of the legal implications of distributing a non-FDA approved pharmaceutical on United States soil?"

  Holden said, "I'll worry about all that later. Does anyone have any questions?"

  Someone asked, "The people who've had control over this place for the past month. Who were they?"

  Logan answered. "In the interest of full transparency: they were my former employers, the people I worked with before I started working for Holden. That's how I got involved in this. This company was at war with several other organizations. In the past months, much of their staff had been assassinated. Coming here, taking this place over, they were probably planning on ransoming or selling every treatment or contagion you have in your freezer."

  There was a moment of silence, Logan's admission sinking in. He wondered if anyone was doubting his loyalty, either because he'd worked for the enemy or because he'd already switched sides once. But his battered appearance, and the fact that Holden had sent him here alone, seemed to outweigh any such suspicions.

  Felix raised his hand. "Are we working for you now? For Paradime?"

  Holden smiled. "Technically, you are all my prisoners. When this meeting is over and you check your email, you should see a message from your CEO explaining that you are prisoners of war in an ongoing conflict between the CDC and Paradime. The message will assure you that your release is being negotiated and that situation is expected to be resolved peacefully. The message will also instruct you to fully cooperate with your captors—that's me, and more directly, Logan. We're taking this approach to protect you from any criminal charges or other legal repercussions. I'm planning on manufacturing and distributing an unregulated, unapproved pharmaceutical product. A product that I have more or less acquired by force. I'll likely go to jail over this, and if you were my employees, or if this was a joint venture between myself and the CDC, you'd be coming to jail with me. Luckily, you're my prisoners, and I'm coercing you into working on this project."

  Holden paused a moment, letting the idea sink in. He added, "Unofficially, if this succeeds, I'll make sure each of you get a substantial bonus for your time and hard work."

  CHAPTER 36

  Logan stepped from the dark tunnel and into cold, dull sunlight. A number projected on the inside of his goggles told him it was almost midnight, but the sun would not be setting today or tomorrow or the next day. Another number inside his goggles told him the temperature was thirty below zero. With wind chill that number would be closer to fifty below. Cold enough to freeze exposed skin within a minute's time. Without the proper layers of insulation, he'd shiver uncontrollably as blood abandoned his extremities and then his limbs, pulled inward by a panicked nervous system. After five or ten minutes, the shivering would stop, replaced by numbness. Another five minutes and he'd be unable to m
ove and unable to think. A few minutes beyond that, and the temperature would kill him.

  But inside his spacesuit, he felt none of the cold, just a sense that it was there, on the other side of the multiple layers of insulation encasing his body.

  He reached the top of the ramp and looked back at the massive doors, large enough for a tank but only open wide enough for a person to pass through. Before he’d suited up and come topside, he’d worked out a plan, what to do in case someone sealed those doors while he was out here. The men and women at the facility seemed friendlier after the conference call with Holden. They found Logan an empty dorm room and loaned him one of the spare laptops they had in inventory. But he hadn't yet ruled out the idea that they might try to get rid of him, especially given an easy opportunity. So the insulated pack on his shoulders held a dozen cutting charges and two chemtorches. More than he would need to burn his way in through one of the emergency exits. If he returned and found the doors sealed, he estimated it would take no more than ten minutes to get back inside, at which point he would have a very complicated situation on his hands: how to react to a group with one or more members who had tried to kill him?

  Logan moved away from the ramp, toward a small wooden shed. The door to the shed opened with a snap of breaking ice. Sunlight spilled in and he could see firearms racked along the walls and ammo boxes stacked on the floor. Guns meant for use in the cold, stored out in the cold.

  Logan looked around, the beam from his headlamp moving across the weapons, revealing a variety of rifles and sidearms and something else, a weapon that caught Logan completely off guard.

  Compound bows. Six in total.

  He stood with the beam of his headlamp fixed on the weapons.

  Then he stepped closer and looked at each bow in turn, as if there was a way to discern which one had been used by his unknown ally.