Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  ***

  The pistol the man had been carrying was an oddity, a variety of weapon she had never seen. There were two metal prongs underneath the barrel. She ejected the ammo mag and saw that it was loaded not with bullets but some kind of dart. There were two triggers. She dry-fired the gun. One trigger activated the slide, to fire a round and chamber the next. When she pulled the other trigger, blue light arced between the prongs under the barrel. She understood: the weapon was designed to stun, not kill. The prongs were meant to be used up close, pressed against an enemy's body. The darts were charged to deliver an incapacitating jolt of electricity.

  ***

  Eventually she could stand, and she paced the room, working out the last of the tingling numbness in her legs. Every muscle in her body ached. There was an emptiness in the pit of her stomach, like she hadn't had food in weeks. She realized she hadn't.

  Safety from immediate danger.

  Water.

  Food.

  Shelter.

  Clothing.

  The hierarchy of self-preservation. Written into her mind even before she came out of the printer, when she was nothing more than long strings of code in a computer file.

  Most of the bottle of water the man had been handing her had spilled out onto the floor. She drank what was left.

  She searched his pockets and found a phone, keys, a wallet, a spare ammo mag for the pistol.

  She tested her legs with another lap around the small room. She went out into the hall.

  ***

  At first, she opened the door an inch, pulling it into the room, giving herself just enough space to peer through with her one remaining eye and the barrel of the gun. Outside the hospital room: a checkerboard floor covered in scuff marks, florescent light glowing from dirty glass tubes in the ceiling, walls with white paint that had aged to a pale yellow. She looked down one end of the hall and then down the other. She could hear a TV on at one end. She waited. The TV continued to play. The hallway remained empty.

  Eliza slipped through the door. She was dressed in a hospital gown and nothing else, naked except for a thin sheet of disposable fabric. Her bare feet padded on the scuffed floor, silent. The ache in her legs was subsiding, but her muscles were still heavy and stiff. Her arms stung in the places where the tubes and wires had been stuck, and there was a burning in her groin from the catheter, like she needed to urinate even though her bladder was empty.

  She moved toward the sound of the TV.

  Which wasn't a TV, but a laptop. Two people sat in front of it. One male, one female, dressed in dark clothing, their white coats hung on pegs on the nearest wall. They sat in office chairs inside an area cordoned by a waist-high counter. Desk space ran along the inside of the counter. There were bundles of wires and pale spots where computers had been removed. There were boxes of medical supplies stacked on the floor.

  The female turned, maybe hearing Eliza's breath, maybe sensing the presence of another person, maybe turning to see if her coworker had returned.

  Eliza shot her in the side of the neck.

  The female's body spasmed. Her chair tipped and she slammed hard against the floor.

  The male jumped from his seat, turning, taking three darts to the chest. Each dart fired with a pop of compressed air. The kick was a fraction of that of a normal firearm, but in Eliza's weakened state, it felt like a hand cannon.

  The male went rigid and tipped over like a felled tree. Eliza aimed down, fired two more shots into each semiconscious body.

  Each had a pistol holstered at their waist. She took the guns, patted them for other weapons, found only keys, wallets, phones. She bound their wrists and ankles with a roll of medical tape. She knelt down and pressed the pistol against the female's cheek.

  "Is anyone else here?"

  "No," the woman said, groggy from the darts.

  Eliza held out a phone so the female could look at it.

  "Is this your phone?"

  "Yes."

  "What's the code to unlock it?"

  The woman said a six-digit code. Eliza keyed in the numbers. The phone unlocked.

  "Do you have a bag? Extra clothes?"

  "In the car outside. There's a bag in the backseat."

  "Do not follow me."

  "We won't."

  There was a backpack on the floor. Eliza emptied it out, then filled it with the guns, extra ammo mags, the wallets and keys, and left through a set of double doors that led out into an empty lobby. Then through another set of doors, and outside.

  It was night. There were three street lamps in the parking lot, but only one was lit. From the outside, the building was a single level, shaped like an L, a plain exterior with nothing remarkable about it. It was neighbored by similarly unremarkable buildings that showed no signs of being occupied.

  Parked near the front door were an SUV and a sedan, both black. Eliza found a gym bag in the backseat of the sedan. Inside were black tights, a t-shirt, a sports bra, a sweatshirt with a hood, running sneakers. Eliza tore off the gown. The cool night air on her bare skin felt wonderful. She put on everything but the sports bra. The tights were a size too small, the shoes a size too big, but everything fit.

  She dropped the backpack into the passenger seat and drove. There was a half-empty bottle of water tucked into the cup holder. She drank it.

  An hour later Eliza went through the drive-thru of a fast food restaurant. She ordered a crispy chicken sandwich, two cheeseburgers, two large orders of french fries, a large iced coffee. She paid with cash from the wallets she'd taken from the three people at the medical center and parked in the lot behind the restaurant.

  She ate half the food, then unlocked the phone she'd taken from the female. She opened the keypad and typed in a long string of numbers and thumbed CALL.

  A male voice answered on the second ring. "Eliza?"

  "Adam?" she said. Her pulse quickened by a few beats per minute.

  "You're alive."

  "I was in a hospital. I was shot in the head."

  "Are the others with you?"

  "They were killed. By Logan."

  A few seconds of silence. "That means we are the last two."

  "What about the others, at The Farm."

  "They've been killed. The same people Barnes and Logan were working for. They killed everyone, took the printer, the secondminds, the technician."

  Eliza closed her eyes, rested her head against the steering wheel.

  "You still have the secondmind? Number thirteen?"

  "I'm with it right now."

  "I need you to connect me."

  Adam said nothing. Eliza listened to the sound of breathing, the canned silence of an empty room. She heard fingers tap a keyboard. And then a feeling like she was falling. Backward, out from her own skull and then somehow back into it.

  This had been her backup, her failsafe. Adam and one of the secondminds, hidden somewhere away from The Farm, in case it came under attack.

  Information flash-baked into her brain. She knew she was a hundred and three miles outside of San Francisco. She knew that San Francisco was besieged by a plague, a plague she'd started when she set Barnes loose in that crowd.

  "Eliza?" Adam asked, interrupting her thoughts.

  "Yes," she said.

  "What do we do?"

  Eliza said nothing. She looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror. Half her face was still covered in a mask of bandages. She pulled the bandages loose and peeled them away. Underneath, her left eye was gone. A chunk of bone was missing from the socket, like a chipped coffee mug. The place where her eyeball had been was marked with a thick X-shaped scar, from skin that had been pulled from four different directions and stitched together.

  She was going to kill the person who had done this to her. The person who had killed Daniel and the rest of her siblings.

  She was going to kill Logan.

  PART 5: White Continent

  CHAPTER 38r />
  "What the fuck is that?" Logan asked, genuine horror in his voice.

  "Those are what we will be testing on," Sam said.

  "What happened to testing on mice or chimps?"

  "They still do that at most labs. But out here, keeping animals is too much work. These are low effort. They can live off an intravenous feed. Most of the care they require is automated. We only have to go down into the kennels once a week, once every ten days."

  Logan stared at a bank of monitors mounted to the wall. Multiple video feeds were tiled across the screens, showing a three-person squad in hazmat suits. The people inside the hazmat suits were: Felix, the forty-something Research Manager with the salt-and-pepper beard; Jaclyn, or Jackie as she liked to be called, the youngest member of the staff, less than a year out of her doctorate program, which she'd graduated at age 22; and Lian, a Chinese-American biomedical engineer, age 35.

  The three moved through a room bathed in bluish light, through what looked like a cabbage patch of flesh—football-sized lumps of quivering tissue arranged in rows. It reminded Logan of a meat locker stocked with frozen poultry. Some of the video feeds were bodycams strapped to the hazmat suits, offering a point-of-view look at the strange organisms.

  "You still haven't answered my questions," Logan said. "What the fuck are they?"

  "Genetically-designed lifeforms, grown in a lab, each containing a miniaturized human immune system."

  "What do you call them?"

  "We call them 'eggs,'" Sam said.

  Logan asked, "Do they hatch?"

  "No. Their technical name is some acronym none of us could remember. And someone thought they looked like the eggs from the Alien movies, so that name stuck."

  "I think they should call them balls, because they look like balls." That was Devin, a scruffy thirty-year-old lab technician, one of half a dozen other people gathered in the lab to watch the test.

  A voice laughed from a speaker. "You want me to bring one upstairs, Logan?" That was Felix. There was an open comm line between the upper lab and the helmets of the hazmat suits.

  More laughter over the speakers.

  Onscreen, the three-person squad knelt beside the eggs. Bodycam footage showed closeups of the lifeforms. Logan could see veins beneath the skin and fine blond hair on the surface. Hands encased in slash-proof gloves rolled the eggs over and disconnected needles and wires.

  "Just when you think you've seen it all," Logan said.

  It had been thirty days since his arrival at the facility. The staff had worked around the clock in those thirty days, three teams rotating through eight-hour shifts. All effort was directed into improving the schematic, the code that detailed the chemical composition of the treatment and how all its various parts fit together—basically a DNA sequence written from scratch with a programming language. The engineers had spent two weeks testing the code and now they were ready to test the serum on something living. The schematic had been run through a printer that assembled the serum one cluster of molecules at a time, a much smaller-scale version of what would happen at the production laboratory once the treatment was ready for mass production.

  Onscreen, six of the eggs were loaded into baskets and carried into a sealed glass vault. Felix set each on a tray. Jackie attached sensors, and vital signs for each egg appeared on another screen. Lian prepped the contagion, and the eggs were infected with an injection gun and then left alone in the vault.

  Everyone settled in for the wait.

  A timer counted down from one hour.

  Onscreen, half the video feeds showed Lian, Jackie, and Felix moving around a section of the lower labs. They were doing an inventory count, trying to make use of their time because they'd already gone through the process of putting on hazmat suits and rinsing off in the chemical showers.

  In the upper lab, Devin and Sam played a card game while Logan leaned against a table and chewed on the same question he'd been chewing on for the past month: Which one of the staff had pulled him out of the ice? Who had picked off a half-dozen armed sentries with a bow and arrow and a knife?

  He and Zoe had tried to solve this mystery using Outcome, Paradime's predictive technology that they had originally been hired to steal. Zoe had gathered every piece of information she could find on all seventeen staff members—work experience, academic records, hobbies, purchase histories, social media posts, travel records, height, weight, and a hundred other data points. Outcome had returned a report that listed seventeen names in descending order, from most likely to least likely. But the rankings were garbage. Separated by fractions of percentage points. If you rounded the numbers up or down, you ended up with a seventeen-way tie. Every person at the facility was both the most and least likely suspect.

  So Logan played detective on his own. With only a skeleton crew left at the facility there was no shortage of chores to go around, and Logan volunteered wherever he could—mopping floors, washing dishes, cooking, doing laundry. It helped him build up some goodwill, helped him feel like less of an outsider. And it was a chance to get to know the people around him. He'd spent his entire career around soldiers, mercenaries, and thieves, he thought he'd be able to identify one of his own among a group of scientists and engineers.

  But after thirty days, his list of suspects wasn't any better than what Outcome had delivered.

  No one on the staff looked the part of a trained killer, but this meant very little. During his time in the military, Logan had known dozens of men and women who looked like they'd be worthless in a fight, who'd proven themselves far more lethal than any muscled athlete or inked-up tough guy. They were the people who kept their heads and shot straight no matter how hot the world burned around them. The people who turned utterly savage the instant a fistfight started. The people who had been granted some unnatural gift to suffer: through cold, exhaustion, blood loss, or whatever other misery the day brought.

  And in the private sector, he'd known operators who put a lot of thought and effort into crafting an outward appearance that made themselves seem weak, timid, nonthreatening. Trained killers who purposely softened their bodies with added pounds. Guys who over-groomed and wore effeminate clothing. Women who perfected that mousy librarian look or went the other way, styling themselves like party girls with nothing on their minds but the next nail appointment. The goal was to be judged at first glance and dismissed. To be a bomb hidden in plain sight. To be Superman dressed as Clark Kent. There were whole agencies staffed with operators like this.

  With the staff here, it could be anyone. It could be no one. And as his stay at the facility stretched on, from one week, to two weeks, to three, to a month, it became less and less of a concern. Whoever it was, he or she or they had saved his life. He owed them. Maybe the least he could do was respect their wish for anonymity.

  A timer chimed the end of an hour.

  Sam and Devin put away the card game and everyone's attention went back to the video feeds. The squad in the lower labs moved back into the glass vault. The eggs were each lying in a pool of blood. Vital signs were distressed.

  Logan watched the bodycam footage as hands encased in slash-proof gloves moved from egg to egg, spreading apart nostril-like orifices and delivering the serum with an aerosol spray that would be absorbed into soft tissue.

  "Now what?" Logan asked.

  Felix answered the question, speaking through the comm line:

  "Now we wait and see if the treatment works."

  CHAPTER 39

  "We're doing a good thing here," Zoe said. They were talking over a video call. Her image was in focus on his computer screen, but she sounded far away. "I feel like this makes up for some of the bad stuff we've done. The laws we've broken, the people we've killed."

  Her eyes made contact with the camera on her laptop so she stared right at him. He was in his room with the door shut. She was in her office at Paradime.

  "You there, Logan?" she said.

  "Yeah, sorry. Just thinki
ng."

  Her hair was different. She'd buzzed the pixie cut on one side. It was at once less traditional but more professional. It suited her. She was a legitimate Paradime employee by this point. It made sense. She had the skill set to handle a dozen different jobs at the company, everything from programming to logistics to business strategy. Another year of exposure and she'd be qualified for an executive role.

  "What are you thinking about?"

  Logan smiled. "How you've changed."

  She laughed. "Says the man who is transforming into a yeti."

  His hair was long enough that he could rubber-band it into a samurai-style ponytail. He'd also grown a beard. And he'd put on ten pounds, a mixture of muscle and fat, the result of hours of strength training and eating five thousand calories a day. He figured he'd need the weight if he had to hike out of here.

  "You don't like it?" he asked. "I think I look like a viking."

  "You look like you live in Brooklyn and work in advertising," she said.

  "That doesn't sound too bad."

  She was no longer making eye contact with the camera. She was looking at his image on her screen. "How have I changed?"

  "There's a confidence in your voice I haven't heard before. Not in the years we worked together, not in the times we talked in person."

  She blushed.

  "Holden is good for you," Logan said, and her expression changed. She looked guilty, like she'd been caught doing something wrong.

  "Hey," he said. "That wasn't an accusation."

  She looked at the camera. "I wanted to talk to you in person. When you got back. You have so much on your mind down there, you're so far away… I didn't want to distract you. Are you upset?"

  "A little jealous. But I saw this coming a month ago. And I thought about it, and I think that you two are good for one another."

  Zoe had tears in her eyes, and this surprised him for some reason.