ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  Every time the Compiler blinks, he receives a pulse of memory from Calvin Brockaway. Memories of his wedding. Of his father teaching him to milk a cow. Of an early car accident as a youth. The miscarriage of a son—a son Brockaway wanted very badly.

  Then, he has it. Near Silverton, Colorado. They left three hours ago.

  It’s eleven hours to Silverton, assuming a direct route. Which it’s safe to say they did not take.

  The satellites will make short work of this. The Compiler closes his eyes. Turns his mind away from downloading and reverses the channel. Typhon uploads a part of herself—just a seed, a little digital wisp floating on the wind—into Brockaway’s brain.

  Once done, the Compiler unhooks the cable and feeds it back into the port at the base of his neck. Brockaway’s eyes snap open.

  “And the gods did flee,” Brockaway says.

  The Compiler nods and leaves.

  CHAPTER 46

  Death TV

  DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, UTAH

  Two men stand behind one-way reflective glass. One of the men is small, older, looking fresh from the 1950s with his horn-rimmed glasses and crisp black suit and pomade-slick dark hair gone gray at the Lego-block sideburns. The other is a barrel-chested, thick-gutted man in a rumpled, dandruff-at-the-shoulders army service uniform.

  The first man is CIA officer Stan Karsch, of the Office of Terrorism Analysis. The second man is Lieutenant Colonel David Hempstead.

  They are watching a third man through the glass. The third man is drone analyst Ritchie Shore.

  Ritchie sits at a desk in a darkened room. In front of him is a bank of screens. Each screen shows a different camera feed, sometimes with HUD information—longitude, latitude, speed, altitude, and various other plotted lines and target reticules. Sometimes a screen pulses red or green, at which point Shore stands, taps the touch screen, scans for information, writes something down in a logbook, then sits back down. Sometimes he gives new instructions to the pilots on the other end—pilots who sit around the world in climate-controlled trailers or bunkers, flying their UAVs.

  “Death TV, they call it,” Hempstead says.

  “I heard,” Stan answers. “Though this looks a little less exciting than that.”

  Hempstead sniffs. “It is. And that’s one of the issues we have—not PTSD like the media reports, but out-and-out boredom.”

  “You hear about Iran?”

  “The thing at Tochal.”

  “Mm. Iranian drone took out its own scientists.”

  “Iranians can be ruthless.”

  Stan runs a thumb along his own jawline. Finds a tiny patch there of stubble—it bothers him, this small patch of disorder on an otherwise well-ordered, clean-shorn face. “Iranians aren’t that ruthless. They lost a lot. Rumor was, someone hacked the drone.”

  “I heard that rumor. I also heard it was us.”

  “Well. Not us-us. Not you, either.”

  “Who, then? NSA?”

  Stan shrugs. “It’s a guess.”

  “Ours aren’t hackable. Iran’s a dirt planet. Mud merchants. Probably got those things hooked up to an Atari 2600 in a goatherd’s shack.”

  “Iran is a sophisticated, surprisingly Western country. Don’t be a bigot.” Stan hears his own tone: sharp, too sharp. He smiles. “How’s the wife and family, David?”

  “Mickey had a breast cancer scare last week.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Oh yeah. Turned out to be plasma cell mastitis. Benign. Nothing serious.”

  “Good, good. And the kids?”

  “Davy Jr. is at Fort Rucker. Staff sergeant. Laurie is a perpetual student, back at school for her doctorate in some kind of history or anthropology, which I’m sure will come in useful precisely nowhere. And Georgina, well. Last I heard she ran off with a professional skateboarder—which is apparently a thing—and she’s in Australia protesting the destruction of the reef. Which probably means she’s on the beach and this is basically a vacation I’m sure I’ll end up paying for.”

  “Families are complicated,” Stan says.

  “How’s yours?”

  “They’re fine.” No reason to talk about the divorce or the fact that his children don’t speak to him and he doesn’t like them, anyway. “Surveillance on these drones has been upgraded?”

  “Gorgon Stare, next wave. Which incorporates Argus.”

  “Meaning each drone goes from one eye to many.”

  “Like a fly’s eye, that’s right. Multiple video feeds and analysis out of a single drone. A single analyst will no longer be able to handle the input of data coming off two drones, much less twenty. The tech is upgraded, but our staffing needs?” He sighs. “Still. This is a good step, this allows us to—”

  Beyond the window, Ritchie stands up—a panicked motion like a prairie dog hopping up at its hole. Stan and David give each other looks.

  Ritchie goes to one of the screens, pulls it up. He looks left, looks right, almost like he’s afraid he’s being somehow pranked. He grabs a red phone at the far end of the desk. David moves to the door next to the one-way window, Stan behind him, and opens it.

  “Oh,” Ritchie says, looking at them, then the phone, then the door. Like he’s figuring out they were watching him. “We have a problem. A big problem.”

  “Son, calm down. Just tell me what’s going on.”

  “See this screen?” Ritchie says. He points to a screen—a drone camera pointed at the ground beneath it. Green treetops blurring past. Mountain peaks. Stan sees the longitude and latitude. He’s good with maps. Has to be, in his job. These aren’t international coordinates. Ritchie confirms, says: “This is the United States.”

  The lieutenant colonel leans in. “Well, that’s all right, Ritchie, sometimes we do test flights here of UAVs, it’s not—” But he squints, catching something. “That’s a Reaper, isn’t it?”

  Ritchie swallows hard. “It is. And it has no pilot. It’s armed. It has a target.”

  Stan feels the air in the room go electric with tension. “A target?” David asks. “Where?”

  “A set of coordinates in the San Juan Mountains. Just outside of Silverton. There’s nothing there, just a small concrete outbuilding . . .”

  David asks: “And we can’t get control of it?”

  “No,” Ritchie says.

  “Who’s flying it?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It looks like it’s on autopilot.”

  “We need to shoot it out of the sky.”

  Ritchie gives a sharp shake of his head. “It’s too late. Two minutes to target. Nothing can get there fast enough to stop it.”

  Stan jumps in: “Where did this drone come from?”

  “That’s the thing,” Ritchie says, ghost faced. “It came from here. We launched it from our own airstrip.”

  “Aw shit,” David says.

  On the screen, the camera flips over. Front-facing. They see the bunker in question—looks like an old mine building, actually. The camera shows heat signatures inside. Colored blobs shifting near the entrance, then disappearing inside.

  “There are people there,” Ritchie says.

  Already Stan is puzzling over how they’ll cover this up. Or will they? Any way to spin it? The drones here are shared between the army and the CIA. This falls on both their heads. Maybe sell out the army. Claim incompetence on their end. Or maybe they claim it was hacked. That threat could put more money in the pipeline for stronger standards and more staff. But it could also destabilize public trust in the drone program.

  On-screen, the targeting reticule pops up. Jerks and hops around the screen until it finds the bunker. Click. Click. Click. Three levels of magnification.

  And then: a plume trail from a launched missile. A Sidewinder.

  The missile is fast. One minute, it unmoors from the drone. The next minute the mine building is gone in a flash of white.

  The Reaper accepts a new set of coordinates. “It’s coming home,” Ritchie says, his voice quiet.

  CHAP
TER 47

  White Bison Country

  TEN MILES FROM RIVERTON, WYOMING

  The swaying red and purple grasses, tinged with the light of sundown, make the plains look like they’re on fire. Above them, the sky stretches out. In one direction there’s a copse of trees. In another a line of hills. Everything else is wide open, flat, and infinite. It’s beautiful.

  DeAndre hates it. It’s weird. It makes him feel small. Insignificant, somehow. He’s been feeling it more and more—especially at night. Wide open dark nowhere of a sky painted with stars.

  Doesn’t help that not too far away is a blue flag flapping on a flagpole, and on it is a white bison. Inside the bison looks to be some kind of state seal or something, and inside that is what looks like three white dudes standing below a banner that says EQUAL RIGHTS. Because nothing says equal rights like three white dudes, right?

  “This isn’t my kinda place,” DeAndre says.

  Aleena stands next to him. “Me neither. Back in New York, I could walk five minutes in any direction and get food from a dozen different countries. I walk five minutes in any direction here and I’ll probably be killed and eaten by a mountain lion.”

  “I guess out here, we are the food.”

  “I could use a bagel. Across the street from my apartment, they had the best bagels in the city.”

  “Thought bagels were a Jewish thing.”

  “They are, kinda. But, uhh, anybody’s allowed to eat them.”

  “No, no, I know, it’s just—you know, I thought . . .”

  “Because I have Syrian heritage I hate the Jews?”

  “When you put it like that, I’m pretty sure I’m a dumb-ass.”

  “I don’t hate Jews. My best friend in high school was Jewish. I love bagels. And pad Thai. And good pizza. And bad pizza.”

  DeAndre suddenly feels stupid. It’s this place, he thinks. It’s putting him off-kilter.

  Behind them he hears the sound of stones popping and crackling under tires.

  “I think it’s time,” she says.

  The woman who steps out of the old pickup truck moves her wide hips with swagger. Strong arms sling a rifle over her shoulder, and there’s a lot of attitude in that small movement—her pursed lips, those black cherry eyes, her chin thrust up and out. All of it adds up to say, I don’t give a fuck now, so don’t give me a reason to start.

  Wade gets out from the other side of the pickup truck. Chance hops out of the back with Reagan. Both of those two carry brown paper bags. Big ones, like grocery store bags.

  “I don’t think everyone’s been formally introduced,” Wade says. “This is Rosa.”

  The woman tips her cowboy hat. “Hola, freak shows.”

  “This is home now for the foreseeable future,” Wade says. He jerks a thumb behind him, points to the double-wide trailer and the rickety-ass cabin across from it. There’s a corrugated metal shed, too, that has a sleepy stoner lean to it. “Rosa here lives about twenty minutes up the road at her cattle ranch. She’s our liaison to the outside world. She’s it. No contact with anyone else. You need something, it goes through Rosa.”

  “How can we trust her?” DeAndre asks.

  Rosa’s face twists into a wicked grin. “I used to run drugs from Colombia—I started out as a mule as a teen girl, hiding it in places you don’t want to think about. Then I got my own crew. I did it all. Trucks across the border. A helicopter off the coast. A drug-sub—which is the scariest experience of my life. We got caught. The government killed my crew. I escaped with a bullet in my thigh. I’m a wanted woman. I sell you out, I sell me out. I don’t want the policía anywhere near this place.” Her smirk flips to a sneer. “In fact, you being here makes me more than a little nerviosa. But I know Wade, and this is his place. I trust him. So I trust you. I don’t care if you trust me.”

  “No phones,” Wade says. “I’ve got one computer and it is not hooked up to the Internet or a phone line. Want contact with the outside world? You can’t get it. Not until we figure out what we’re doing.”

  “This is fucked,” Reagan says. “I know we’re on the lam, but c’mon. If there’s one thing we know, the United States government is not that smart. Just using the Internet is not going to bring down the hammer.”

  Rosa steps over. From her back pocket, she pulls out a big cell phone—so big it almost looks like a small tablet computer. She wipes a little dust and pocket fuzz off it, unlocks it with an eight-digit code, then flips to something before handing it to Reagan.

  Curiosity gives DeAndre a little shove, and he steps over, takes a look.

  Reagan asks: “What is this?”

  In the photo, a smoldering crater in what looks like the mountains. The skeletal shell of a concrete bunker. It’s a little blurry—shot looks snapped from a long distance. Like from a telephoto lens.

  “That’s Silverton, Colorado,” Wade says. “That’s where I told Cal we were headed. Just in case. Which means he or his home or even his whole family have been compromised. You understand? They’re looking for us. And they’re prepared to point a goddamn missile at us to shut us up.”

  All the hackers share looks. DeAndre registers their discomfort. No, bigger than that: it’s fear he’s seeing. The realization of the situation hits him hard, and it seems to be hitting them, too.

  “Is Cal dead?” Chance asks. “His wife? His little girls?”

  Rosa answers without hesitation: “We don’t know. We’ll try to find out, but we’ll need time—can’t just send somebody over there. Everything you do now has gotta be slow. Cautious. Like you’re tiptoeing through a dark room filled with rattlesnakes and coyote traps.”

  “We got running water,” Wade says. “We got solar panels and a generator. Got food for now, and Rosa’s gonna bring us over some chickens for eggs and meat and some produce from her garden.”

  “Chickens,” DeAndre mutters. “Guess we’re all farmers now.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Wade says. “We also have guns, just in case.”

  Another moment of uncomfortable silence. DeAndre moves fast from picturing himself scattering seeds in front of chickens to himself in some kind of shootout with hick-town Wyoming police. Wade’s right. He prefers the chickens.

  Reagan says, “How long are we expecting to bunk here? Because, uhh, I don’t want to live in this hippie farm cult compound bullshit for the rest of my life.”

  “Till we can figure out a plan,” Wade says. “We’ll sit down tonight over dinner.”

  Reagan’s head cranes back on her neck and she stares at the wine-stain sky. “Awesome,” she says, the word as much a moan as it is anything. Her head snaps back, eyes wide, smile manic. “Hey, can we start our own crazy religion out here?”

  CHAPTER 48

  Number Fourteen

  APSI, TYPHON PROJECT LABS

  The elevator slides down through sublevels. It’s all black glass in here—no buttons. Everything one big touch screen. When he was a teen, Golathan used to watch that show Knight Rider—the one with the robotic car that could talk, K.I.T.T., which stood for something, though now he can’t remember what. Had that red light in the front, the one that glowed back and forth whenever K.I.T.T. spoke. It only just now occurs to him that it was the same look the Cylons had from Battlestar Galactica—the first one, late seventies. He watched that too.

  The elevator reminds him of all of that. Black glass. Bit of chrome. Red lights sliding back and forth. He looks over at Sandy. She looks pale. “You all right?”

  “Good.”

  “You’re the color of Elmer’s glue.”

  “I don’t like enclosed spaces.”

  He frowns. “Claustrophobic?”

  “I guess.”

  The elevator dings. “Ride’s over,” he says.

  The doors slide open without a sound.

  There’s no one here. White floors. Half-moon desk surrounded by glass frosted to be the color of seafoam, shaped into smooth, almost lusty curves. Above their heads shiny ball bearings hang
from barely there wire, all at different heights—it’s only when Golathan steps in and under that he sees they’re meant as a kind of art piece, a sculpture. He’s not sure what it looks like. A bird, maybe. A hand. He can’t tell.

  They stand perfectly still. The bright lights of the room gleaming. “Hello?” he yells. He’s got an acid feeling in his gut.

  None of this feels right. It didn’t feel right getting into the city and having to wait overnight. It didn’t feel right being directed to a door under a construction overhang, a door that led to a dingy, water-stained hallway. A hallway that in turn led to an elevator. This isn’t the address he had for APSI. This is somewhere else. This is something else.

  From off to the side, a faint click-whir. “Ken,” Sandy says, in some alarm.

  Off to the right, one of the white wall panels slides up—only two inches or so, leaving a dark gap. Big enough for a mouse, maybe a rat. He looks at Sandy. She shrugs.

  Then: a sound. Not unlike roller skates on a rink floor. Ball bearings begin to roll out—dozens of them at first, but they keep coming, rolling as if of their own volition, sliding forward, then sideways, until hundreds of the damn things are moving toward them. Ken reaches out, pulls Sandy back toward him, takes a few steps in reverse toward the elevator.

  The little shiny spheres separate into two streams, parting like Moses with the Red Sea, forming up on both sides of them. Then they stop moving. They sit, perfectly still.

  “This is fucking goofy,” Ken says.

  Sandy’s hand drifts to the gun at her hip.

  Ken grunts. Kneels down, picks one of the spheres up between thumb and forefinger. Marble size, but not entirely smooth. It’s got a little trench circumnavigating the sphere. Two little divots on each side. Suddenly, the damn thing flies from his hand and lands back with the others, making a click-clack sound.

  He stands back up. “That’s creepy.”

  But nowhere near as creepy as what happens next. A few of the spheres roll atop other spheres. Stacking two high. Then another on top of that, until some of them stand three spheres tall. The spheres sit like that for a while, as if forming some code, some cipher that demands to be translated by a mind smarter than what Ken has to offer—he doesn’t do well with this sort of puzzle; he does well only with the puzzle that is the human animal. He’s a social creature, not an intellectual one.