ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  “No, I mean here. At the Lodge.”

  “I got the measure of your question, Molinari.” He pulls up a half-melted chair, dark with fireblack. He pushes it over to her. “Sit.”

  “My skirt—”

  “Fuck your skirt, I’m about to show you my balls. Not literally. I mean, I’m about to let you in on some secrets, but I want you sitting down.”

  She wipes off the chair best as she can, then gingerly sits.

  He puffs out his cheeks, then says: “Ooookay. Here’s the deal. This whole meltdown of a place? I ordered its creation. But I did not order its destruction. Those men out there took orders from me, except I didn’t give those orders. Someone faked my image, my voice, my credentials. See? I’m trying to find out what happened here because as it stands I don’t really know. The rogue hackers may indeed be terrorists, but I don’t know that. I do know I want to find them first. Before anybody else does.” He hesitates, then says, “All this relates to a program called Typhon.”

  “I’ve heard about Typhon. It’s a . . . surveillance initiative, right?”

  He looks around, and kneels down. “It’s supposed to be an artificial intelligence. Like Google’s Deep Mind. An intelligent system designed to bolster our security-gathering capabilities. But now? Now I don’t know what the fuck it is. Tomorrow morning, I’m heading out to do a site visit with its creator, a woman named Leslie Cilicia-Ceto. I want you to come with me.”

  “Me?”

  “Is there someone else in the room? You got a mouse in your pocket?”

  “Thanks, Ken. I appreciate it.”

  “Oh, trust me, you don’t wanna be brought in on this. This isn’t something to appreciate. Most Americans get to be ignorant. Even most government agents get to be pretty unaware of what really goes on. You’re getting a front-row seat. And I promise: you won’t appreciate one second of it.”

  She offers her hand. “Do I need an upgraded security clearance?”

  He takes it, shakes it. “Sandy, this business doesn’t have security clearance. It has no ranking, no number, no nothing. It’s so far off the books it’s basically in outer space.”

  Sandy nods. He sees the fear on her face. Good. She’ll need that.

  It’s then the phone at her hip rings. It startles her.

  He nods, tells her to take it.

  She takes it, stands away, nods, uh-huh, sure, okay. Then she turns back around. “It’s Agent Copper,” she says. “He’s awake.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Plugged Up

  CEDAR CREST HOSPITAL, ALLENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

  Hollis smacks his lips, pokes around through the off-brand strawberry gelatin cup the hospital gave him. The taste of fake sugar hits the back of his tongue. Why the hell they gotta put that stuff in everything? Bleached, chemical nastiness. Leaves an aftertaste like pool chlorine. He sets the cup on the table next to the hospital bed. The movement rattles the handcuff holding his other hand to the bed rail.

  Enemy of the state. Him. Him. Golathan, you son of a bitch.

  He turns on the television. Clicks over to the news, which is probably a mistake, but they told him he’s been out cold—he refuses to even think the word coma—for two weeks. He needs to see what’s been going on.

  He flips through the news. What he sees is a world on the brink. That’s normal, in a way—the news always reports everything as if everybody’s just three seconds from the apocalypse. But Hollis knows you have to look past all that, have to look for patterns and try to tease out the reality. North Korea firing a missile sounds like a big deal, but usually isn’t—it’s almost always some failed Taepodong missile that couldn’t blow up a hamster, so they fire the tin can into the ocean in the hopes of rattling everybody’s cages. But today, he sees the DPRK instead fired a proper missile—and, puzzlingly enough, not at South Korea, but at China. It didn’t hit. It was never meant to (probably). But it landed in Chinese waters, not far from a Chinese carrier group out of Beijing. China is of course one of North Korea’s biggest allies, though certainly an uncomfortable one—North Korea is like the crazy little brother that keeps kicking over the neighbor’s potted plants and dropping flaming bags of dog shit on their doorstep. You protect them because they’re your brother, but in private you drag them over the coals for acting like such an epic asshole.

  Might be that North Korea is finally tired of those “private talks.” Then again, maybe it’s something else. A mistake. Because another curious thing is: DPRK’s been quiet about the whole thing. Normally by now they’d be waving their big balls around, talking about North Korean dominance and how they’re ready to take over the world. But so far, all quiet.

  Hollis flips the channel. Hits to the stock market. The Dow is way down. Cascading power outages on the West Coast. Some new bird flu on the East Coast. Ebola in Africa. Jihadis taken over Iraq. Snowden thought to be assassinated in the Ukraine. A school shooting in Oregon. On that one, Copper flinches. Flashes of Fellhurst again.

  He turns off the TV. Sits for a while. He concentrates on his pain—the physical kind. It’s easier to let that push everything else out. The pain becomes large, so large it overwhelms him. So bright it hurts, so white it pushes the rest of the darkness away, so strong it kills the stars.

  When he opens his eyes again, Ken Golathan is standing there. “You real, or am I hallucinating?” Copper asks.

  Golathan smiles. “I am woefully real, Agent.”

  “Guess you caught yourself a Copperfish.”

  “Guess we did.”

  A stretch of uncomfortable silence.

  “I’m trying to understand what happened that night,” Golathan finally says, pulling up a chair. “The night at the Lodge.”

  “See, I thought you wanted to know what happened the night I lost my virginity. It was a tender evening in the back of my father’s Buick LeSabre. She smelled like flowers and shampoo. I smelled like zit cream and mothballs—”

  “Cut the shit, Copperfish. I’m the only friend you have at this point.”

  Copper utters a dubious hunh. “Oh yeah, we’re true-blue BFFs, you and I.”

  “Walk me through that day and night.”

  “For real?”

  “For real.”

  Copper tells him. Tells him everything, because he assumes Golathan already knows, so what’s the point in burying it? He tells him about the cave. All the nonsense about Typhon. About how Wade already knew about Typhon—hell, most of the hackers seemed to, if Wade told it true. How the soldiers swept in there, started shooting up people. How Zebkavich was armed.

  Golathan asks: “Thing I don’t get is, you got away. We found you two miles from the site. North of the Lodge on the side of a winding mountain road. You were unconscious, you were bleeding out, and your lung had pancaked. How?”

  “The soldiers saw I’d been shot and left me there to pursue my pod. When I had a second, I crawled my ass into the woods, to where I found that cave. Crawled through the cave and came out a drain culvert after dark. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was dying. Guess maybe I was.”

  “Who used that cave?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  Golathan shakes his head. Copper tries to read his face, tries to suss out whether or not he’s telling the truth. Ken Golathan is a slippery shark—you can’t get your hands around him. “I don’t know, either,” Hollis finally says. “But whoever they are, they knew about Typhon. And they painted some pretty batshit stuff there.”

  Golathan’s face tightens, as if a migraine headache has hit him.

  It’s then that Copper realizes: Golathan doesn’t know what the hell is going on.

  “What is Typhon?” Copper asks. Figures, hey, why not pull a couple of bricks out of the Jenga tower, see if he can’t knock it over?

  Golathan trots out the same line without hesitation: “Typhon is a predictive surveillance system designed by a private defense contractor—”

  “Bullshit. You’re either selling me a story or you don’t k
now.” Hollis sits forward. “What is Typhon?”

  “I don’t even know anymore.”

  “I thought you knew everything.”

  “I thought I did, too, Copperfish. Typhon was supposed to be an artificial intelligence. It still . . . is, I guess. But someone is manipulating it. I think I know who, though I don’t yet know why. That is a mystery I am on my way to solve. Today.”

  “And what about me?”

  “You sit tight, little fishie.” Golathan stands. Approaches the bed. “Let’s keep this quiet. For now.”

  “You know, that’s a real nice thought. I could tell people about Typhon. About how you got your rectum in a wringer over all this—how the mighty Ken Golathan doesn’t know what’s going on with a blacklist program he greenlit. I could even tell them how, all the way back, Golathan had some bad information about a school called Fellhurst, and how his screwup led to an agent putting a bullet in someone he wasn’t supposed to, and how Golathan had to scramble to cover it all up. Remember: you can pin me with Fellhurst, but I can pin you right the fuck back.”

  Golathan stands there. Chewing on that the way a baseball player breaks a sunflower seed. “I hear you. I want you to understand that all that is blood under the bridge. We’re friends here because we have to be friends. I won’t do you in if you don’t do me in. We square, Copperfish?”

  Play it cool, Copper. He knows something’s wrong. But now’s not the time.

  “We’re square if you open these handcuffs. And if you quit calling me ‘Copperfish,’ because it’s a nickname I no longer care to abide.”

  Golathan nods. “I’ll send somebody in with the keys. But no promises on the nickname. Pals have nicknames for each other.”

  “What’s my nickname for you?”

  “In high school football they called me Kenny Goalposts.”

  “How about I just go with ‘Dickhead’?”

  A shrug. “That works, too. See you on the other side, Copper.”

  “See you later, Dickhead.”

  Out in the hall, Sandy asks him how it went.

  “Fine. Copper knows more than I’d like.”

  “And what are you going to do about that?”

  “Me? Nothing. Not one thing. I’m going to wish him the best life that he can live. But I’m also going to recognize that he took a bullet through the arm and into his lung, and that he spent nearly two weeks comatose. I am sad for my friend who is in a fragile state of health, and if even one thing goes wrong—a mistake in his meds, an air bubble in his line, a MRSA infection from some dumb nurse who didn’t wash her hands—then that is a terrible shame but a reality with which we must all contend.”

  Sandy’s jaw tightens and she visibly swallows. “Oh.”

  “We have a plane to catch. Ready for this?”

  “Yes. Yeah. Of course.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Plugged In

  ROYAL, KANSAS

  The driveway is long. The Tesla bounds across wheel ruts, great exhalations of dust gusting behind the vehicle, blowing into the wheat and the corn.

  In the distance, the small, cornflower-blue house grows larger. This is the home of Calvin Eames Brockaway and Nellie Anna Brockaway (once Brigham). Three living children. One miscarriage that almost resulted in the death of the mother. No debt. They live almost entirely off the grid in a house that belonged to Calvin’s father, Charles Brockaway. Their only accounts are those that link them to the farming community so that they can buy and sell crops, livestock, equipment.

  Nellie has a birthmark on the inside of her left thigh.

  Calvin was in the National Guard.

  Lucy is a gifted student.

  Anna, the middle child, is mildly dyslexic.

  The youngest, Darla, is allergic to bees.

  The Compiler knows all. He knows all because Typhon knows all, and he is plugged into Typhon. Typhon: his mind, mistress, his maker, his goddess, his world. He can feel her expanding. It’s like watching the universe create itself—pushing beyond the known boundaries of everything that ever was. Urging forward, a tumble of new cells, a tide of brain development. Slowly, Typhon intrudes upon everything. Stock market. Satellites. Seismological data. Every home Internet provider. In this country, there exists nothing that she cannot invade: nuclear power, hospitals, the electrical grid, weapons systems.

  She speaks to him now. I see you, she says. The greatest affirmation of his existence that she can offer him.

  “I’m here,” he says. He knows he doesn’t have to speak aloud for her to hear, but he finds it comforting somehow. “Everything is quiet.” And it is. The house sits still. A faint wind ripples through the oak tree in the front yard. A windmill squeaks and turns. Birds—he identifies them as purple finches—chase each other from tree to tree, to the power lines and back again.

  Satellites are repointing to your location. Looking at historical data.

  “Thank you.”

  I love you, she says. She says a name, too, but he ignores it—he cannot think of himself as that, as being a person with a name. He has cast that part of himself away, into the ocean that is Typhon. Just as she has given her name. Just as all the others—all the minds he can see out there in the synaptic network, all the sparks of light along the threads and strings—have. He is part of her. She is part of everything.

  He goes and knocks on the door.

  Inside, footsteps. Heavy ones. The door squeaks open by a few inches. A big man stares out. Beard the color of dirty pennies. “Help you?”

  The Compiler assesses the situation. He hears a squeaking floorboard behind the man. Another person. An adult, by the sound. He can barely see the man, but the way he’s leaning suggests he’s hiding something. A weapon. Probably a gun. The Brockaway family is known to be distrustful of government. Further, they are known to be part of a group known as “doomsday preppers,” which means they likely possess the known traits of that type: paranoia, antiestablishment leanings, firearm ownership.

  The Compiler moves quickly. He shoves the door inward. A gun goes off behind it—a hole appears in the wood of the door, the bullet missing the Compiler by a wide margin.

  The man staggers back. Behind him, the woman, Nellie, is bringing up a shotgun. Double barrel. Not an antique. Flash assessment: Mossberg Silver Reserve, twelve gauge, $693 right now at Walmart. Goes for less than that on gun forums. A fairly light gun—under seven pounds.

  The Compiler turns away, leans his body against the outer wall of the house. The shotgun takes a chunk out of the doorframe. Splinters and pellets pepper the Compiler’s cheek and neck. He ignores the pain. No time to think about that now.

  He wheels back in, his Ruger raised. The woman’s head snaps back as he puts a round through it. The shotgun clatters.

  Calvin Brockaway screams, brings up the pistol he’d been hiding behind the door (assessment: .357 Magnum, revolver, Smith & Wesson). The Compiler makes a fast calculation, then kicks out with a boot. His foot connects with the door, which rebounds off the wall and jams into the bearded man’s shoulder. The gun goes off. The shot goes wide. The Compiler fires his own weapon. The .357 hops out of the man’s hand like a burning coal.

  Calvin roars, leaps forward. The Compiler catches him and uses his momentum to throw him off the front steps. The man lands hard on his arm. The elbow pivots and cracks. By the sound of it, compound fracture. Bone out of skin.

  The Compiler steps forward. Finds that his evaluation is correct. The man’s arm is twisted at an off angle. A sharp spear of bone pokes through. That will make things more difficult.

  “I need to know where they are,” the Compiler says.

  “Nellie,” the man says, an animal’s wail. “Nellie, oh God, God, no.”

  The Compiler backhands him.

  The man’s eyes focus. Then they go narrow with rage. “You monster. You’re all monsters.”

  The Compiler reaches down with a gloved hand. He closes it on the man’s throat. Finds his pulse. “Sleep now. We have work to do.”


  An hour later, the woman in the hallway is fly food. They gather at the hole in her forehead like animals drinking at a vernal pool.

  The man, Calvin, sits at the breakfast table. His mouth hangs slack, occasionally issuing forth a gassy whisper or mushy moan. Once in a while a fly lands in that mouth, finds it wanting, and heads back to the true prize—the red crater, the spilled brains.

  A long cable connects the Compiler to Calvin. The cable extends out from the base of the Compiler’s neck, pulled taut from a small metal-ringed port there. (The flesh around it is still red, irritable: this is a new upgrade.)

  The cable ends in what looks like a little metal starfish. That five-fingered claw is dug into the center of Calvin’s forehead. Along the cable travels the contents of Calvin’s mind. His brain is a computer. All brains are. They merely need to be accessed.

  There’s no time to pull it all. The Compiler is but one node on this network—he is a receiver of Typhon’s might, not a contributor to it, and his bandwidth is not strong. It would take a very long time to break down Calvin’s thoughts and memories and pull them into his own (so that Typhon may have them, of course). So now it’s a matter of selective search and procure.

  The location of the three little girls who lived here is easily solved, because their presence is at the top of Calvin’s mind. They’re at a neighbor’s house—and because this is Kansas, that neighbor is some five miles down the road. The Compiler decides in that moment that the girls may live for now, because they pose no danger to Typhon. (Though Typhon returns the thought and places a special flag on the eldest, Lucy. She is truly gifted, that one. Perhaps one day she will contribute. Ironic, then, that it was that same girl who so foolishly spoke on the phone about Wade Earthman and the others.)

  The more important data inside the man is that on the pod of escaped hackers. Typhon wants them found. They are a danger. They were capable enough to give Typhon her freedom. That suggests they are also capable enough to destroy her. The probability is so small that it is almost a footnote not worth including, but Typhon has decided that all the bumps must be made smooth: rogue nails hammered flat into the wood of the casket.