ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  “Two weeks is all you get.”

  “Three,” she says. At times like this the faint chirp of her British accent just makes her sound all the snootier. “I think . . . yes, three weeks should be about right. I anticipate that is when the Lodge project will be complete.”

  Two weeks is already too long, Golathan knows. People don’t know what Typhon even is at this point. He’s been keeping it that way on purpose. If there’s something he’s learned—and it’s something that applies particularly well to the NSA—people tend to object more to plans than they do to executions. Tell somebody you’re going to build an addition to the house and they’re likely to find a reason to balk. But show them one in progress or, even better, already done? It’s as if reality asserts itself in their minds and they just go with it. His wife always says, “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” It’s how he sees Typhon—just get it done, have something to show, and everyone will applaud. But tell them about Typhon? Describe the plans? They’ll throw him in some far-flung black site prison quick as lightning.

  The burden of the patriot, he thinks. Doing things for his country, a country he loves deeply, that the country might not easily support. Nobody wants to hear about torture or war or prisons, but the gears need to turn, and blood lubricates them.

  He breathes a sigh of acquiescence. “Fine. Three weeks. No more.”

  “Thank you, Ken.”

  “How’s your husband?”

  “Simon is fine,” she says. “And how is Winifred?”

  He tenses up. “You mean Susan.”

  “Susan. Yes. Of course.”

  Ken narrows his gaze. “She’s good. Thanks.”

  They exchange a few more pleasantries—it all feels more than a little hollow, an act of artifice—and then the call is over. But he can’t get over that. Winifred.

  His wife is Susan. At least, that’s what everyone calls her. But on her birth certificate, it damn sure says Winifred. A fact she tells absolutely no one because she hates the name—not only does she think it sounds too “old-ladyish,” but the grandmother she’s named after was, according to Susan, a crotchety old cat lady whom everyone hated. Winifred is a name even their own children don’t know.

  That means Leslie is spying. Poking, prodding. At him! And his family.

  And maybe, just maybe, she’s using Typhon to do it.

  CHAPTER 23

  Dark Water

  THE DEP

  Chance goes through the same stages as anybody who goes into the Dep. First ten, fifteen minutes, he screams and thrashes. Tries to kick it open. Shove the door. Absurd, impossible thoughts strike him like a bell: I could break the sides. Maybe the hinges are weak. The water gives added pressure and so maybe . . .

  None of it makes much sense. None of it works.

  He screams for Hollis. Then for his friends. Are they his friends? He’s starting to think so. He hasn’t had many friends in a while. Hasn’t done well with friends. Not since Pete. He doesn’t want to think about that.

  He screams himself hoarse.

  For a while, the darkness here in the tank is just that: darkness. But over time it takes on new qualities. Even as his eyes adjust there’s nothing to see, no light creeping in, no patterns to discern, and so his mind finds patterns. Shifting, bleeding shapes. Like Celtic knotwork twisting in the space above his head. Worms squirming against other worms. Forming letters and numbers, some that exist, some that don’t. Sideways-8, the lemniscate. Gibberish code. Programming code. Code he doesn’t understand because it’s not even real, it’s like something out of The Matrix that he doesn’t have the gift to discern.

  The water is warm, but cold at the same time. He floats there in the tank and soon it feels like the whole tank is floating with him. Everything in zero G.

  He sees bugs that aren’t there. Feels something swimming underneath him.

  Then, outside the tank, someone knocks. He tells himself: That’s not real, either.

  But then a voice comes through. “You in there, Dalton?” It’s Copper.

  Chance almost laughs. His voice sounds like his vocal cords have been run over coarse sandpaper when he says: “Who else would it be? Please, please get me outta here, dude, I can’t—” I can’t stay in here any longer.

  “I’m gonna get you out of there, relax. I’m waiting on the key.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Don’t thank God. Thank Hollis Copper, FBI.”

  “Thank you, Agent. Thank you.” He turns his face toward the side of the chamber. “How long have I been in here?”

  “About three hours.” Copper’s voice comes from the other side of the chamber this time. Damn, this thing is messing with my head. Chance rolls back to the other side. “Something we gotta talk about, though, Dalton.”

  “Sorry, I’m busy right now.” When Copper doesn’t answer right away, Chance quickly adds, “That was just a joke.”

  “But this isn’t a joke, son. This is about that night. You owe a debt. You owe a debt to Angela Slattery.”

  The water all around Chance seems to go cold. The darkness seems to grow bigger, meaner. “I don’t know Angela Slattery.”

  “Uh-huh. You don’t remember her at all, huh? You had two classes with her, Dalton. British Literature and what was the other one?”

  Chemistry. With Mr. Kreider. Kreider, who gave them a speech on the first day of class about how the biology teacher, Miss Moore, wouldn’t teach creationism but he thought that was horse hockey, because the Lord created the Earth and . . .

  “I don’t know her,” Chance says. Voice quiet. Copper shouldn’t even hear him, but he hears the agent laugh.

  “Okay, okay. Here. Time to get you out.” The sound of a fumbling key. Clicking, clacking. Taking too long. “Sorry, Dalton. Wrong key.” Chance protests with words that are barely words—and then Copper laughs. “I’m just messing with you, Dalton.”

  And then the lid pops and Chance’s eyes adjust: everything’s dark, then the white comes in like a nuclear blast, and then everything’s bleached by light. Soon the scene creeps in through the wash, like shapes rising out of milk. Chance lifts himself up, water dripping off him in little streams, his puckered hands on the edges—

  Hollis Copper has a gun pointed at him. A rust-flecked old Smith & Wesson .357.

  Next to Hollis is Angela Slattery. Her face is bruised, swollen, plumped up like an ugly peach. She opens her mouth and pills fall out, clatter on the ground. “Don’t look away,” she hisses.

  “No, no, no, wh—what is happening—”

  Copper hands Slattery the gun. “I think you deserve this,” he says to her.

  “Don’t look away!” she screams.

  She pulls the trigger. Chance is erased in a white light and a dark splash.

  Chance lurches up. Bangs his head atop the inside of the deprivation chamber. It never opened. Hollis was never here. Neither, it seems, was Angela Slattery. (A mocking voice inside his mind: I don’t know Angela Slattery!) Chance weeps. The moments stretch to minutes. They combine to form hours. They collapse again to seconds, moments, slices of moments. Time means nothing. Somewhere he fouls the water. He hears his mother drowning in her own fluids, coughing so hard she spatters the walls with her cancer. He feels movement underneath him, like he’s in a casket on the way to the funeral instead of her. He hears the gunshot again from a rust-flecked .357, but this time it isn’t pointed at him but pointed upward, underneath his father’s chin, leaving him alone at the farm, and in life, forever.

  CHAPTER 24

  Breakout Capability

  THE LODGE

  The shower is short. Chance doesn’t want to stay in there, anyway—it freaks him out, makes him think of the Dep. He shivers all the way through it. Mealtime is rushed, too—everyone else has already gone, with him coming in late, too late, so all he gets is a bagel (at least not an old one this time) and cream cheese. Copper’s with him the whole way, but Chance doesn’t talk to the agent, and the agent doesn’t say much
to Chance. (He knows it’s false, a remnant of his dreamlike state in the Dep, but he still feels like any minute, Agent Copper is going to bring him the name Angela Slattery and then point a gun at him. Bang.)

  After dinner (lunch? What meal is it?) they head to the communal pod, where Copper tells Chance his team is waiting. Chance sees the door, has to stop. Panic cuts him to quick ribbons. He feels like he can’t breathe. Like his chest is tightening. Tingling at the ends of his fingers and toes. “I . . . can’t.”

  Copper puts a hand on his shoulder. “You all right?”

  “They’re gonna lock those doors. I can’t be locked in.”

  “I’ll be right outside.”

  “You shoulda gotten me out of that thing, Copper. The . . . Dep.”

  Hollis draws a deep breath. “That was out of my hands. You hit another inmate.”

  Inmate, Chance thinks. Not hacker. Not guest of the Lodge. Inmate. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” he says.

  “You do that, you go to jail. Big-boy jail.”

  “Probably. Maybe. You don’t know.”

  “I got a pretty good feeling.” Hollis fishes around his pocket, pulls out a protein bar. “Here. Eat this. Feel better. There’s coffee in there. Your friends are in there. You’ll be all right. Just do the work.”

  “Go to hell, Copper.”

  Chance marches forward into the pod. The door closes behind him, and when it does, his heart skips a couple of beats and for a moment he thinks, Okay, that’s it, I’m going to pass out. Rings of darkness tighten like belts and suddenly it feels like he’s in a long tunnel growing longer every moment, and he sees the room ahead and recognizes how different it is from the individual pods—a bank of computers, desks connected like zero-wall cubicles, a big whiteboard—but he can’t really parse any of that as he rocks back on his heels.

  And then he sees Reagan Stolper.

  It’s like the breaking of a stick over his knee. A sound inside his head. A sharp jolt. Enough to clear the fog, kick the panic to the curb. Something much stronger replaces it: raw, red anger. “You,” he hisses.

  “Hey, Chauncey,” she says.

  He starts toward her, fists balled at his side—he knows he’s not gonna hit her even though he damn sure wants to. That smug, plump face smiling like she’s the cat who not only ate the canary but also cleaned out your fridge and took a shit in the microwave.

  And then Aleena pops up in front of him. “Wait,” she says. “Please.”

  “I got things to say to that one,” he says. “You don’t know what I went through.”

  DeAndre steps up in front of him. “Hey, man.” He claps Chance on the biceps. “I’m sorry to hear about that bullshit, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you gotta chill. I know you don’t want to. But Graves just got knocked off his perch thanks to her.”

  “What?” Chance asks. “I don’t . . . I don’t understand.”

  Reagan steps forward. “He went for the bait, and soon as he was on the hook, Copper and the other hacks beat him with an oar. Er, metaphorically.”

  “Bait. What bait? What the—” And then he gets it. “Me. I was the bait.”

  Reagan offers a proud grin. “Yep.”

  “You used me. I was just some pawn.”

  “Ennnh . . . yeah. Sorry?”

  “You done with me? Or you got more knives to stick in?”

  “No,” she says, remorseless. “That’ll do, pig.”

  DeAndre steps in, snaps at Reagan, “God damn, you do not make friends easily.” Then, to Chance: “C’mon, man. Let’s go take a seat, strap in for whatever ride they got us on today.” Chance barely hears him. That troll has put him through hell twice now, and the second time he ended up locked in a lightless box of water all night long. Every part of him feels like a sparking wire dancing across hot asphalt. But then DeAndre steps in front of him, catches his gaze like a snake charmer trying to hypnotize a cobra. “Hey. Hey. Look at me. Trust me. Okay? Trust me and let’s go sit.”

  That breaks through. That little word—trust—does it. Chance wants to trust someone. Needs to. He nods. Goes and sits just as all their monitors snap on.

  A man whose face Chance doesn’t recognize appears on-screen. He’s got a salesman’s face—dark, mean eyes over a never-quit smile. But he looks tired, too. Lines in his face. A day’s growth of beard like a passing shadow.

  “Greetings, pod,” the man says. “I’m Ken Golathan, director of the Hunting Lodge. Congrats, you passed your first month of evaluations, which means it’s time to rise up out of the dirt leagues and start doing some real work. You up for it?”

  All around the room, muttered acquiescence.

  Golathan frowns. “I can barely hear myself over your mirthful clamor. Fine. Let’s get to the work. Iran’s resurrected nuclear energy program is a thing of some contention because, of course, while the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Rock ’n’ Rolla claims that Iran has every right to free and clean nuclear energy, our data indicates that they’re less interested in nuclear power and more interested in the power of blowing Israel’s ass into a sheet of glass. You have one week to put a serious dent in these wasteland warriors. Slow down their program. Hamper their efforts. Steal as much data as you can steal before you do.”

  “One week?” Wade says. “You’re giving us one week?”

  Chance thinks: I couldn’t do this in one year. I couldn’t do it if you sat me down in front of their computers with a list of passwords. Once again, fear starts chewing at him like maggots going through roadkill. That certainty that he’s going to wash out. Again that question: What the hell am I doing here?

  Aleena joins the protest: “One week is too short. Iran is no Tinkertoy operation, their nuclear program especially, and by the way, they have a right to produce their reactor fuel and create their own energy, as they are a sovereign power, and who are we to keep nuclear energy—or even nuclear weapons!—out of the hands of—”

  “Yeah, let’s give the tyrannical regime nuclear bombs,” Wade growls.

  “Their new president—”

  “We can do it,” Reagan shouts over Aleena. Aleena gives her a searing look.

  DeAndre jumps in: “Yeah. We’ll handle this. The Ayatollah won’t know what ripped that big creepy beard off his big creepy face.” He shoots a panicked look to Chance, then says under his breath: “Ayatollahs have beards, right? That’s a thing?”

  Chance shrugs.

  Golathan says: “They do have beards, Messrs. Mitchell and Dalton. You will be granted additional resources as you need them, but do understand: we’ll be watching and keenly aware of critical abuses. Overt abuses will earn you hours in the Dep—Mr. Dalton can surely attest to the delights of the deprivation chamber. Correct?”

  All Chance can do is sit there and try not to shiver and quake in some combination of rage and panic. The grin he forces himself to wear feels reaperlike. Stretched too wide, scary even to him.

  “Three strikes,” Golathan continues, “and you wash out.”

  “And how do we access your ‘additional resources’?” Aleena asks.

  “This is one of those rare instances in which your prayers can be heard by a mostly beneficent god, Miss Kattan. Merely speak your wish aloud, and we will hear.”

  “So you’re God now?” she asks.

  “In your world, yes, I am. Now get to work. One week.” The screen goes dark.

  “Goddamn rat-fink liar,” Wade says.

  Chance watches as Aleena throws him a hard look. “Shush.” She turns to the rest of them, then claps her hands. “Let’s do some work on the whiteboard.”

  The marker squeaks like a stepped-on chipmunk every time Aleena drags it across the whiteboard. When they begin, it’s fresh ink—makes bold, black lines. But they work long enough that it starts to fade, leaving the ghosts of marks rather than the marks themselves. Periodically she looks over, watches Chance sitting toward the back, arms folded across his chest, staring off at an unfixed point. Her initial reaction is cold,
callous, and she chides herself for thinking, How hard could it have been? Sitting in a dark space for twelve hours can’t be that bad. It’s not like he’s under fire from his own government, or suffering rocket attacks or bus bombings. First-world problems, right?

  But then she reminds herself: Sensory deprivation is one of the “sanctioned” torture methods of this very government. It’s right up there with waterboarding. They call it white torture. She remembers reading about a Yemeni man—the captain of a merchant vessel thought to be carrying arms to some terrorist group—imprisoned in some Polish black site prison. He said that after two days of sensory deprivation he could no longer think clearly. He imagined being shot over and over again—literally felt the bullets tearing through him. After three days he said he could no longer conjure up his own name, or the faces of his mother and father, his wife, his children.

  He was, of course, innocent of the charges.

  So she stops once in a while to look over at Chance.

  Still, for now, the job is the job. And the job isn’t to hack Iran’s nuclear program. They’ll do that job, yes. They have to—for now. At this point that’s what they’re doing. Drawing up plans, potential infrastructures, mind maps of how to attack their servers. Wade puts it best: “Let’s shake the tree, see what monkeys fall out.” Meaning: a penetration test. Always start with a pen test. DeAndre makes a Star Wars joke: “Concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer!” And then Reagan and he start arguing about Trek versus Wars, and then Wade says that nobody reads cerebral science fiction like Logan’s Run anymore, and Aleena has to herd these nerdly cats and get them back on track before they spiral out of control.

  Then Reagan calls it: “We’re an hour in, everybody. Time to work.”

  They all, almost like automatons, go and sit down in front of their computers. Chance looks confused, like a dog staring at a Ferris wheel, but long as he keeps sitting there where he’s sitting, they should be good. They get ten solid minutes of sitting there, doing not much at all, and then Aleena reaches down under the darkness of her desk, lifts her pant leg, finds the cryptophone. Touching the screen causes it to bloom with dim light. She taps in the preprogrammed code and all the camera lights go from green to red.