ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  Leaving a meeting, she’ll draw attention. She looks up, makes sure nobody sees her texting. Sends the message: Can’t right now find someone else. It has to be someone else. They have others like her. She knows they do, even if she doesn’t know who they are.

  Qasim texts back: Nobody else—only you—get to a computer!

  Then a second text: Please Aleena

  Before she knows what she’s doing, she’s standing. The chair stutters and groans against the floor as she pushes it back. Everybody in the room—and the entire department is here—turns to look at her. Melanie stops speaking. She has a look on her face like she smells something dead.

  “Is there something wrong, Aleena?”

  “No,” Aleena blurts. “Yes. I . . . have to use the bathroom.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. What is she, in fourth grade?

  Melanie echoes the sentiment. “We’re not in kindergarten, Aleena. You’re supposed to go before you get here. Uh, hello.”

  A quiet murmur of uncomfortable laughs from those gathered.

  “I don’t feel well.” Aleena holds her hand over her stomach. Her brother Nas always said, You want to get out of a day’s work, just tell them you have diarrhea. Nobody will ask you to come in if you’ve got the shits.

  “Go,” Melanie says, her look of disgust deepening.

  Aleena hurries toward the door, ignoring all the looks that follow her out.

  She texts as she walks, all of it in Arabic.

  What do you need from me?

  Qasim returns: We can’t get into the station without Khalid you need to shut down their broadcast

  She texts back: How am I supposed to do that?

  Qasim sends four texts in rapid succession.

  You’re the one with the bag of tricks Aleena

  They’re broadcasting lies and we can stop them we can show the truth

  Please Aleena

  Others have been shot—we are pinned down

  Aleena responds: I’m working on it

  She jogs down the hallway.

  This would have been her plan all along. To hack the broadcast. That’s the power of what she does. Nobody needs to die. Nobody needs to step in the way of a sniper’s bullet. But some of her people over there, they want to make a show of it. Qasim and Khalid said they needed the people to see them doing it—masks and homemade flash-bangs and AKs chattering. So that when they took over the state media, other media around the world would show images of them storming the stations.

  They don’t understand what she does. Not really. Not yet. But her fingerprints and those of her fellow “hacktivists” were all over the Arab Spring. Helping protesters kick through firewalls, setting up wireless hot spots or dial-up access, running direct denial-of-service attacks on government websites, hacking the sites to deface them, spreading restricted images and videos across social media, leaking secret documents.

  She threads her way through the cubicle farm. There’s been some talk about moving to an open floor plan, which would be terrible for what she does. These fuzzy gray cubicle walls give her all the privacy she needs.

  She navigates the grid, turns right at the copier, left at the paper cutter—

  Someone is sitting in her cubicle. Right in front of her computer.

  He’s government. She can see that by the way he sits, the dark suit, the earpiece nesting in his ear. Though she wonders about those muttonchops: an unusual style. He’s opening her drawers. Rifling through files. Humming.

  She has to go. She’s busted. Aleena knows the stakes—if they catch her, she’ll end up in a dark hole in some desert. Her and every Muslim goatherd suspected of terrorism, lorded over by soldiers with high-powered weapons.

  But she also knows the stakes in what’s happening right now. She needs to help Qasim. She can’t keep anyone from dying today. But maybe by ending the government broadcast, she can get the rebels—her rebels—international attention. She can save people going forward.

  The truth can save people.

  And that means she has to work.

  Aleena pivots before the government man can see her. She hates leaving her computer behind, but everything there was done through a proxy—she has no evidence on that system. And while she has items in the desk she would otherwise want to keep (lip balm, snacks, an appointment book), none of it is meaningful, nor does it point to her activities in any actionable way.

  She stops in the break room. Kay Weldon is there—one of the executive secretaries. Red hair like a helmet, shellacked with so much hair spray it reminds Aleena of her brother’s Lego figurines, like you could pop the hair on and off with ease.

  “Aren’t you in Melanie’s meeting right now?” Kay asks. Kay knows everyone’s schedule. Kay called Aleena “Lana” for two months straight, then “Leena” for two more.

  “Over early,” Aleena says. She tries to make it chirpy but knows it comes out bitchy. Fine. Whatever.

  “Where is everyone, then? The cubes are still empty.”

  Aleena looks at the snack machine. She needs Kay out of here. Now. “They’re still talking about Cruiseapalooza.”

  “Shouldn’t you be talking about it, too, Aleena?”

  Aleena tenses up, hears the words come out of her mouth before she can yank them back in. “Shouldn’t you be keeping your piggy nose out of everyone’s ass, Kay?” The acid in her words is regrettable, but it does the trick. Kay’s face puckers like a stress ball squeezed in a heavy hand.

  “Well, then.” She bustles past Aleena and out of the break room.

  Time to hurry. Aleena goes to the snack machine. Reaches under it. Finds the cell phone taped there along with the USB key containing her suite of hacker tools: port scanners, portalware, worms, Trojans, keyloggers. She’s no script kiddie. She designed these all herself. They have her signature.

  She heads to the elevators. Outside, in the cubicle farm, are two men in suits. One woman, too. Just as the woman looks in Aleena’s direction, Aleena drops down behind the fax machine table.

  When the woman looks away, Aleena hurries to the elevator.

  White floors. White ceilings. Bold humming fluorescents.

  And beneath them, row after row of black boxes and blue lights winking. It’s quiet down here. Calm. Just the vibrations in the floor, the hum of the cooling fans, the little chirp and whir of hard drives running.

  One of Firesign’s many server farms. For hosting. For directing traffic. For the company intranet. Aleena’s not supposed to be down here. But a hacked key card made it easy.

  She grabs the cell she plucked from under the snack machine, unspools a cable, plugs the USB right into a random server—doesn’t matter which one, she just needs the connection to the Firesign pipe. Down here it’s pure bandwidth—useful for the encrypted video she’s about to send and receive, but not strictly necessary. No, why it’s important to be in this building is because most connections in America are loaded with speed bumps meant to slow the connection down. It’s all monitored, as if every line has a little virtual bug clamped to it. But here, at the source, it’s all open. A screaming, streaming river of unburdened data.

  She fires up the phone. Opens a telnet port. Some privileged hackers think cracking computers in the Arab world is easy, like Arabs are all a bunch of dirt merchants with wireless signals coming in through a Pringles can to shitty old ten-pound laptops with security as sophisticated as a password that’s someone’s birthday. It was that way once, and still is in some places, but that world caught up fast. With the combination of DIY, get-it-done attitude, and a sudden flood of high-tech gear coming in from the UAR or Qatar, everything has changed. That’s true across the whole Middle East—maybe more so in Iran.

  Translation: they’ve gotten good at protecting themselves.

  But she’s better.

  She opens up her port scanner, uses her own breach-map software to find the vulnerabilities. It doesn’t take long before she’s digitally kicked open a backdoor into the Syrian state television station. This is bare-bon
es stuff: a command prompt. She starts sniffing for the ports of the consoles filming, mixing, and broadcasting the feeds.

  There—

  And then her phone’s screen goes dark.

  What the— Aleena looks up. The server to which she’s attached is dark, too. No blue lights. No hum. Still as an alien obelisk.

  She unplugs, starts to plug into the next one.

  The phone rings. Which is odd, because it has no cell service. Doesn’t even have a SIM card. It’s rigged. Jailbroken to be used only for data.

  The name on the call is “PROTECTED.”

  Don’t answer it.

  But she’s a curious girl. Always has been. Aleena curses under her breath and answers.

  “Aleena,” says the voice. A gruff voice. Short. Sharp. Gravel rattling in a cup.

  “Wrong number,” she says.

  “This is Hollis Copper, Aleena. I’d like to speak with you.”

  “Gotta go,” she says, and hangs up.

  The entire server bank goes dark. One at a time, like a series of lights going out down a long hallway. It seems so simple a thing, but she knows what it means. You turn off a bank of boxes like this, the ISP grinds to a halt. Firesign would never consent to that. Someone’s got a finger on a very big switch. She’s compromised.

  She races back to the elevator. She stabs the button. It lights up, but doesn’t ding. Then the button goes dark. She hits it again. It lights up. Goes dark.

  They’ve cut off access to the server room.

  The phone rings. She pops the back of the case, pulls the battery, flings it away from her like it’s a scorpion found inside a boot.

  All the lights on the floor go out. For a moment, all is dark, and Aleena is left with her own breathing, her own rushing blood in her ears. But then the backup lighting flicks on, and everything is cast in a red emergency glow.

  She thinks fast. On the ground floor, they’ll be waiting. Garage floor, too. So—where? She could hide. Duck into a janitorial closet.

  Wait. The old skybridge. Runs across to the ISP’s second building—which they sold last year to a developer who diced it up into smaller offices. They closed the skybridge, but it’s still there. Sixth floor? Seventh? She doesn’t remember. She’ll figure it out. She throws open the stairwell door—

  And there stands the man with the muttonchops. In one hand, he’s got a Taser. In the other, a foil-bubble pack of gum. He pinches the pack, pops what looks like a Chiclet into his mouth. He grinds it between his back teeth and smiles. “Hey there,” he says.

  Aleena just stares. Feral. A cornered animal.

  “Aleena, I take it. Nice to finally meet you.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong. People are getting hurt. I have work to do.”

  “I got work to do, too,” he says. “So let’s get right to it. Are you going to make me Taser you, or will you join me of your own accord?”

  She thinks about it. “You’re going to have to Taser me,” she says. “And you’ll have to carry me up several flights of stairs by yourself. You’re older. In your fifties. It won’t be pleasant. My sincerest hope is that it takes a few weeks off your life.”

  He sighs. “At least I’m told you don’t have a heart condition,” he says. “So let’s hope your medical records are right.”

  Then he fires the Taser into her stomach.

  CHAPTER 4

  Reagan Stolper

  PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

  Courtney Gurwich is in love.

  She never expected it. Not like this. Not . . . online. But dating’s hard. She doesn’t have a lot of time in her life these days, and the last thing she wants to do is go to a bar because she already manages an awful chain restaurant called McGlinchey’s. It has a bar, one that comes stocked full of slacker staff and rude customers. Whenever she’s there she hears all the cheap, crappy, toxic come-on lines the guys at those places say to try to get in a girl’s pants. It’s all very pathetic.

  Courtney’s not like that. She hasn’t had many boyfriends. She’s almost thirty, and it’s not like she’s a virgin or anything, but—most guys, they just want to get right into it. All that pawing and panting and fumbling to get the bra off and then it’s another ride on the Amateur Hour Express, where they hitch and grunt and she lies there staring at the ceiling fan and then it’s all over but for the shower swiftly after.

  Then she met Dave. She decided to try online dating, and it wasn’t even a week after putting up her profile that she met him. He e-mailed her and was sweet and polite. Handsome, but not too handsome. Cleanshaven. A little heavy but not so much that it bothered her. In fact, she likes a man who has some heft to him. He was Christian, too—that was a good sign. It’s not like she’s a Bible-thumper or anything, but she goes to church once a month and wants someone who believes in something bigger than himself.

  One problem: Dave lives in Portland. Oregon, not Maine. Still. He made her laugh. They started e-mailing. He asked her lots of questions, responding with compassion and kindness and, above all else, wit. He even wrote to her, “Lot of girls say they want a sense of humor but never seem to mean it, but I’m glad you do.”

  She did like it. She liked him. She started dreaming of Portland.

  Now it’s been three months. They’ve e-mailed on and off. They’ve spoken on the phone a few times. Skype, too, though only through headphones—his camera’s busted.

  Today’s the day. He’s flying in. She’s going to meet him down at Frick Park. Then they’re going to go to dinner—and she thinks she’ll bring him back here. He said he’d stay at a motel but she told him he could stay here. He was playful about it but not rude. “Why would I come to your house?” he asked.

  She danced around it but eventually typed: “So we can have some fun together.”

  HIM: Whatever do you mean?

  HER: ;)

  HIM: You’re naughty.

  HER: For you, maybe.

  HIM: How about a preview?

  She didn’t know what he meant but he said her camera was working so maybe she could do a little routine for him. Like a striptease or something. She’d never done that, and she balked a little. But then she admitted she’d imagined what it would be like and so she decided to oblige him, thinking it would make a nice preview for what was to come.

  Courtney turned on the camera. Did a dance as sexy as she could. She maybe rushed it a little bit—took off her clothes too fast—and it was hard to know how much he could see and how much he couldn’t. She tried to push her breasts together to make them look bigger. She kissed the air. Bent over, waggled her beehive. Hiked her panties down as she did it—slow and seductive, or so she hoped.

  Then she lost it and started laughing and he laughed too and told her he had to go get packed. Because he’d see her tomorrow.

  Now it’s tomorrow.

  Dave does not exist.

  Courtney Gurwich gave Dave explicit instructions where to meet her in Frick Park. She told him there’s a bench that faces an overlook of trees, and nobody ever seems to sit on it. The bench has a little plaque attached that says DONATION: JAMES AND ANN TROXEL and she always says a little thank-you to those two even though she doesn’t know who they are. Because she loves that bench.

  Courtney shows up right on time. She is not the type of person to be late.

  But Dave is not sitting on the bench. What sits there is a laptop. And playing—looping—on that laptop screen is Courtney’s striptease. Her awkward, unsexy, graceless striptease. Someone has edited the sound so that whenever she moves, the laptop speakers belch out bold, realistic fart noises.

  Courtney tries very hard not to cry. She sees a Post-it note stuck just below the laptop’s keyboard. With a hesitant hand she snatches it up. Then she sees it’s not one Post-it, but several layered on top of one another. She reads them one by one, each message like an arrow fired into her quaking, clammy flesh.

  Courtney

  You crabby stuck up beeyotch

  suck a thousand dongs in Hell


  I sent this video to all the McGlinchey employees

  also uploaded it to your FB page and sent a link to all the contacts in your e-mail using your e-mail address so they think it came from you

  FUCK YOU you fucking twat

  Love, Dave Who Doesn’t Exist You Dummy

  P.S. you should’ve never fired Carlos you racist ho

  And that’s when Courtney loses it. She screams. And sobs. And takes the laptop and wings it off the overlook.

  Then she collapses in a heap and cries, pulling at her hair until clumps of it come out in her hands.

  Dave is a construct of Reagan Stolper.

  He is one of her many constructs. She created him months ago for the sole purpose of fucking with Courtney Gurwich. Courtney the McGlinchey’s Dictator. Courtney the Whitebread Half-Christian Assbitch. Courtney, who once referred to Carlos the line cook as a “wetback.” Courtney, who once told Reagan she was fat.

  Reagan decided that Courtney’s firing Carlos—because she said he was “leering” at her—was the last straw, and so she started spying on Courtney, even hacking her MasterCard account. (So not hard, what with the password being her dog’s name.) She saw a line item for an online dating site and that’s when the idea hit her, like a magical meteor cast from the heavens.

  Now Reagan sits a quarter mile away, in Frick Park, at a picnic table not far from the Reynolds Street Gatehouse. She does a few quick finger-swiping video edits on her Android phone. Like tying a child’s shoelaces, it’s that easy. She takes the brand-new video—the laptop’s webcam was on and so it recorded a reaction video of Courtney seeing herself galumphing about nude—and uploads that online. She’s not sure which one is her favorite, really. The awkward Courtney slut-dance, or the one where she cries a lot and flips shit before flinging the laptop into the woods.

  That was a pretty good laptop, but Reagan’s glad to lose it. Sometimes sacrifices must be made in the search for sweet lulz.