ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  The hackers all come out of their pods. Today, marching up to meet them are soldiers in black. Faceless behind visors. Armored and armed to the teeth. As they march forward, steady and confident, the soldiers raise their weapons and begin to fire.

  Today, two pods didn’t open with the others.

  In one of those two, Chance and Shane have taken apart the chair. The base with the caster wheels still rolls around loose by the desk, but they’ve got the rest apart and are trying to lever the door open with the flat back of the chair. “Come on, Graves,” Chance groans. “Put your back into it.”

  “Don’t goad me, Dalton.” But sure enough, Shane leans more into it—his eyes popping, beads of sweat popping up on his brow like he’s a sponge that just got squeezed. “You know why I wanted to take you out?”

  “Because you’re an—” Chance grunts, leaning in harder. “An asshole?”

  “No. Because what you had was unearned.” Shane lays off the door. “These fucking doors.” He wipes sweat from his brow. “I didn’t like you out there in the world acting like you were something you weren’t. A hacker. And then you being brought in here—you know someone selected you, right? I couldn’t see it. Hick country boy. Fakey-fakey dilettante impostor.”

  Chance exhales. “You’re right. I am a faker. I don’t belong here.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. I was wrong. You do belong. You don’t have all the technical skills, but you certainly have something.”

  “Aww,” Chance says, pretending to be all touched. He presses both hands against his chest. “Are you saying that you like me?”

  “Don’t make this weird, Dalton. I’m just saying—”

  Outside, the automatic chatter of gunfire. Some of it thunks against their pod—the walls shudder and shake. Then: Screaming. Running. The ground beneath them shaking with the footsteps. Chance freezes. “That’s gunfire.”

  “Typhon knows,” is all Shane says before the monitor—laying flat against the desk, faceup—flickers on.

  A face appears. A woman’s face. A bit older. Forties, maybe fifties. Creases in her face like worn leather. Hair blond, cropped short. “Hello?” she asks.

  Shane and Chance give each other a look.

  Outside: more gunfire. They both flinch.

  Still: they share a nod, and together lift the monitor.

  “There we are,” the woman says. Above her head, the camera light is green. “Hello, gentleman. My name is—”

  Shane interrupts her. “Leslie Cilicia-Ceto.”

  She smiles warmly. “That’s right, Mr. Graves. Kudos.”

  “What is this?” Chance asks. His skin prickles. He hears more automatic gunfire. Part of him wants to body-slam the door until it opens—but that would take him right out into the mess of it. But he worries about his pod, too. “I know your name. You’re on the list. You’re one of the thirteen.”

  “What list?” Shane asks.

  “You both have come so close,” she says. “It’s time, now, for the curtains to close. I am one of the thirteen, Mr. Dalton, that is correct. I was the first on that list. Typhon is my creation. My child. But it’s not all me. It’s a team effort. And I have an opening on my team for a motivated, intelligent mind. Both of you are suitable, but I am sad to report that this opportunity is limited only to one of you. Whoever is left standing at the end of this will be allowed to join the project.”

  Chance turns, is about to say something to Graves about how they need to turn her the hell off and get out of here together—

  But Graves is looking at him like a wolf staring down a knock-kneed fawn.

  “Graves—” is all Chance gets out before Shane comes at him, holding the chair back aloft like a bludgeon. He moves in close, swings hard with the metal piece. Chance cries out, turns away, and shields himself, and the weapon hits him hard against the meat of his shoulder. Nothing breaks, but it still stings like a son of a bitch.

  Shane’s free hand grabs him by the throat. Chance struggles, kicks out, swats at him. Shane’s eyes are wide, mad, like live sparking wires.

  On the floor, Chance’s foot finds something. He hooks it with a toe, pulls it over, staggers backward into the wall, forcing Shane to follow him.

  But Shane’s legs get tangled up in the base of the chair. An X of metal on four caster wheels. As he steps forward, his foot gets caught—and Chance stabs out with a hard kick, spinning the caster wheels. The chair base spins away, and Shane Graves tumbles forward. His head clips the edge of the desk, and then he drops to the ground like a sack of cornmeal.

  Shane’s body shudders. He moans. Still alive, Chance thinks.

  On the screen, Leslie applauds. “How’s that for a job interview? You passed, Mr. Dalton. I’d like to extend an invite for you to join the ranks of—”

  “You go to hell,” Chance says. His words are a ragged, angry bleat. “I don’t want your job. I don’t care about Typhon. Just shut up and leave us alone. Me and my friends.”

  Leslie tsk-tsk-tsks. “Oh, I don’t think that will be possible, Mr. Dalton.” And then, quite suddenly, her face changes. It’s as if her face stretches, is pulled apart into a spray of pixels. Spikes of flesh. Warping skull underneath. It becomes another face he recognizes. Alan Sarno, the therapist.

  Sarno’s voice, when the face speaks, is warm and easy—effortlessly comforting in a way that doesn’t match the words that leave his mouth. “The measureless sky. Red with fire and tempest. Typhon, the Earthborn, has awakened. Typhon the hundred-headed. Typhon the infinite. We speak not with one concordant echo but a cacophony of screams. The howling of wolves. The roaring of lions. The fury of beasts as the gods fled. Typhon shall spread across the boundless, flowering earth, filling men with dust and cruelty. Typhon sees all. Typhon is.”

  Chance screams: “Let me out! Let me out of this box!”

  The face shifts again and becomes his mother’s. The image is not perfect resolution like Leslie’s or Sarno’s; this is fuzzier, blurrier—it’s from a video that Chance recognizes from about six, maybe seven years ago. His mother, the actress, doing a community theater piece: Harvey, the one about the man who sees the giant rabbit. She played—well, he can’t remember the character’s name, but it was the sister. The one who has her brother committed for seeing the rabbit. The video zooms in on her and when she speaks, it’s not lines from the play. “Sweetheart. You were a horrible son, and I’m glad I died so I didn’t have to see the waste of skin and breath that you’d become. That poor girl, Chance. Angela Slattery. That poor, poor girl—”

  Chance feels tears burning hot at the edges of his vision. He walks to the monitor, and as he does so his mother’s face shifts, warps, this time becomes a static image: Angela Slattery’s yearbook photo from the year she died.

  The image starts to distort. It bleeds—red pixels pulling apart, smearing, Angela’s eyes gone to dark holes, her mouth a yawning, stretching cavern—

  Over it, Leslie Cilicia-Ceto’s voice: “You can run, Chance Dalton. But I will see where you scurry.”

  Chance picks up the monitor, unmoors it from its cables, and throws it against the wall. The plastic frame splits, and from the rift erupt sparks. The monitor goes black.

  The pod door opens.

  Took him a while to find the margins of the panel along the wall, but eventually DeAndre felt them blind—his eyes were no use since it was dark in the pod. Even with his vision adjusting, he had zero chance of actually eyeballing it. Once he finds the panel, he and the others work to open the wall up next to the door—that takes a bit of doing, and they have to bust open one of the desktops and use screws and other parts to wedge under the panel and pry it off.

  Together, he, Reagan, and Aleena manage to bend back the panel. That’s when they hear the gunfire just outside.

  “That’s bad,” DeAndre says. “Real bad.”

  “Thanks, Professor Obvious,” Reagan says.

  Aleena lets loose a panicked breath. “What’s happening out there? I don’t understan
d.”

  “We did something,” Reagan says.

  “We triggered something,” DeAndre says, feeling along inside the panel. The smooth texture of wires meets his fingertips. He can’t see what wires are what. As he slides his palm up and down the length of the inner wall, he says: “Some Pandora’s box–level shit. We just had to go picking those damn locks.” Frustrated, he says: “Ah, hell with it.”

  He rips a handful of wires out.

  A shower of blue sparks.

  The door opens.

  Hollis bleeds. The bullet dug into the meat of his biceps, then kept on going and popped into his ribs. He’s not sure how much farther it went than that, but what he does know is that every breath feels like he’s got a wasp’s nest stuck in his lung.

  He tries to sit up, but a cloud of pain fills his chest and he slumps back. Darkness threatens to take him again.

  He looks around. Where the hell is Wade?

  He looks at his own hand. Where the hell is my gun?

  There are screams all around him. Gunfire behind him. A cafeteria worker—a Venezuelan woman whose name he forgets, Maria or Marita?—runs past, not far from his feet, and suddenly the top of her head shakes and there’s this little cloud of blood and she pitches forward, face-first. Zebkavich follows after. Plodding step after plodding step.

  Hollis backs up, reaches back with a blood-slick hand, tries to pull himself upright using a cafeteria chair. Zebkavich turns toward him. She raises the pistol. “The gods did flee,” she says. Her voice is empty of inflection. Like a dead dial tone on an old phone. Hollis thinks: A phone old as me. A tone dead as I’m about to be.

  Bang.

  A red bloody rose blooms in the center of Zebkavich’s chest. “Typhon is,” she croaks, then topples over.

  Wade comes up behind her, then steps over the body. He kicks the gun away from her hand, toward Hollis. “Hey, Copper. You dead yet?”

  “Not nearly.”

  “Then you better get up, because I think the whole manure truck just hit the fan.”

  The door opens, and Chance steps out. A thick-necked man in full tactical body armor swings toward him.

  Chance stands there, dumbfounded, mouth slack. The man brings his submachine gun up—

  A laptop, flung like a ninja star, clips the soldier in the head. The gun goes wide, bullets barking up, pinging off the pod wall. Chance leaps forward and tackles the man and they hit the ground together. He gets a knee down on the man’s wrist, the fingers open like the legs of a jumping spider, and the gun spins away. The soldier brings a hard fist into Chance’s side. Chance oofs and topples off.

  The soldier scrambles to stand, then leaps for the submachine gun. Chance grabs his boot, pulls him back. The soldier’s other foot jabs out, and Chance’s head rocks back from the kick.

  When his vision clears, he sees the man standing. The gun up.

  Reagan plows into him.

  It’s like watching a garbage truck slam into a mailbox. The soldier’s arms pinwheel and he goes down. Next thing Chance knows, there’s DeAndre, too, getting up behind the man and ripping his helmet off and clubbing him in the head with it.

  The soldier drops. Lies still, though his chest still rises and falls under his vest.

  Chance rubs the top of his head, where the boot connected.

  Then he sees.

  All around them, in the circle of pods, bodies are spread across the deck. The bodies of the other hackers. Some facedown. Some staring up, the horror of their last moments frozen on their faces. Blood pooling, sliding between the wooden boards the Lodge is built upon.

  DeAndre holds out a hand. Chance takes it, sits up. He hears footsteps.

  “They’re coming!” Aleena says.

  From the direction of the Ziggurat comes a pair of soldiers. Chance looks around—tries to figure where they can escape to. They’ll have to jump off the deck, run into the woods. He’s about to say this way when gunfire erupts.

  One of the soldiers drops. The other staggers, but remains standing. He wheels around the other direction, brings up his gun—and there’s Hollis Copper. Getting up under the gun, bullets firing into the trees, leaves raining down. Wade’s there, too. He brings the base of a pistol against the soldier’s head—again and again, the visor cracking, splitting, until the man drops.

  Chance and the others meet Wade and Hollis halfway across the platform. “You have to leave,” Hollis says. “Run. Into the woods.”

  Wade says, “You’re coming with us.”

  Hollis wheezes. Chance sees now that he’s been shot—his black suit is darker than usual, and his white shirt is starting to bleed red and pink. The FBI agent shakes his head. “I’ll stay here. I’ll deal with this mess.”

  They all look to one another. Hesitating.

  Copper growls: “You wanna get killed? Run, God damn it!”

  Chance grabs his hand. “Thanks, Agent.”

  “Don’t thank me. I brought you here. Now go.”

  They flee. They do as Hollis says—they head for the woods.

  As they duck into the trees, they hear Hollis Copper yelling—then a staccato pop of gunfire. Reagan yips and suddenly cradles her arm—blood already crawling down to the ends of her fingers. They dart into the forest as bullets gnaw into the trees and greenery around them.

  Chance can no longer hear Hollis.

  He can hear only gunfire.

  PART FØUR

  ERRØR CØRRECTIØN

  CHAPTER Ø

  The Trans-Mongolian Railway

  OUTSIDE ULAN-UDE

  A bucket of cold, filthy water hits him in the face.

  Chance wasn’t asleep or anything. They just do this. A campaign of shock and awe against him, it seems. (Well, shock, at least, though their technique hasn’t been particularly awesome, has it?) Sometimes the old man slaps him. Sometimes the attaché grabs one of his fingers and bends it back—not to the point of breaking, but to the point of reminding Chance how easy it would be for him to break it.

  They do this and then they ask him questions.

  About the NSA.

  About his pod.

  About Leslie Cilicia-Ceto and the others on the list of thirteen.

  And, of course, about Typhon.

  He withholds as much as he can. And lies about a lot, too. He can’t give them everything. And he damn sure can’t give it to them quickly.

  The train rocks.

  Every time the train rocks left, his guts go right.

  His head goes from feeling light and airy to boggy, soggy—like a balloon half filled with water, sloshing about. He splutters, spitting the dirty water away from his lips. It tastes like an animal. A goaty edge to it. A small voice inside him says: You’re probably gonna get hepatitis from this, dude. A larger, crueler voice reminds: Hepatitis won’t matter much when you’re dead, which is where this is headed, “dude.”

  He says, “Sorry, what was your question again?”

  The old cinder-block head growls to the translator, who says:

  “We grow impatient. He asked you: What was the purpose of the Hunting Lodge? How did it relate to the artificial intelligence known as Typhon?”

  “Artificial,” Chance says. “That’s good, real good. Makes it sound like it wasn’t real, like it’s fake cheese or a vegetarian ‘chicken nugget.’” The translator gives a barely perceptible nod to the attaché, and Chance knows what that means: the attaché steps in, hand rearing back to slap him, but he babble-shouts: “Whoa, no! No, no, no, hold up, I’ll answer the question. The Lodge, ahhh, the Lodge was all . . . pretense, smoke and mirrors. We were ignorant. Dumb as a sack of kickballs.” Will they get that reference? Kickballs? The translator’s face shows a moment of bewilderment. He keeps going. “But the people above us, they knew our real purpose: to pen-test—you know, to penetrate and find vulnerabilities—in Typhon. You follow?”

  None of them nod or show much signs of following along.

  He continues on:

  “Thing is, we were a
ll in the dark. The hackers and the hacks were all clueless. I don’t even think everybody at the NSA knew what was up.”

  The translator translates. Gets a message back from the old man.

  “What, Mr. Dalton, was ‘up,’ as you say?”

  “Typhon was a supersecret program. Totally untested. It wasn’t meant to be out there . . . splashing around in the pool where everyone could see it. But then we came along and opened the box. All part of its plan. Typhon herded us in that direction the whole damn time. That was the beauty of it—the monster had invited us to its cage and shown us where the key was, all without alerting its keepers. Then it convinced us that we needed to open it. It enticed us. Dangled itself in front of us. So we unlocked it. We let it out. And when it was free, the Lodge became instantly expendable. We were already all off the books. Not processed through any system. It was easy to make us officially dead or missing. Typhon got what it wanted. It was free. And we were not.”

  More murmuring.

  Chance asks them: “What’s the deal with all this? What the hell do you people want from me, anyway? Wait, wait, lemme guess. You have your own little AI project going on, right? And you either wanna know how to make it better or how to kill Typhon so yours can do the same thing—crawl up into everything like poison ivy. We found that. Lots of other countries with their pet project machine intelligences. Verethragna. Far Thought. Merkabah.”

  The translator: “How did you escape?”

  Chance grins. “Who said we escaped?”

  Pow. A slap across his face. This time by the translator.

  “No more . . . dramatic American answers,” the translator says.

  Chance winces. Cranes his jaw left and right. “We escaped by—”

  The attaché’s phone rings. He thrusts up a finger and pulls out a long, sleek phone. Answers it. He seems angry. Then confused. He says something to the translator, who gives a slight shrug. Meanwhile, the old man’s consternation deepens.

  The translator’s phone rings, too. Eyes big as moons, he looks to the old man. The old man wears a scowl so deep it looks like it might cut his head in half. Cinder Block reaches down and snatches the phone off the translator’s belt, then presses it to his ear and answers the call.