ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  “Jesus Crispy Pork Cracklings Christ,” Reagan says. “Even I’m inclined to agree with your crazypants assessment, Wade. Hollis—your appearance here is awful convenient, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yeah, sure,” Hollis says. “Real convenient. Moment I pull down your driveway I get shot up, blown up, and now I get a gun in my face. This is so convenient it might as well be a delicious Slurpee from 7-Eleven.”

  Wade sniffs, looks over to Copper. “You gonna tell us how you’re still alive?”

  Hollis shrugs, eyes wide on the barrel of that Mini-14. “Got shot. Ended up in the hospital. Ken Golathan—who hasn’t been seen since that day—came in and was way too buddy-buddy with me, which told me he was sending a very clear message: get the fuck out. I suspect they were planning on killing me, so I pulled out all my tubes and all those sticky electrode things, which sent the machines haywire. Nurses came in with one NSA spook—I choked him unconscious with some medical tubing, took his gun, shot a second spook in the leg, then got way the fuck out of there. My legs were like noodles and it felt like I was breathing through a bundle of fiberglass insulation, but I managed to get clear. I still got people in the Bureau I can trust. Been staying with friends on the inside for the last month or so, trying to find you sorry sad sacks.”

  “Why us?” Aleena asks.

  “You’re the only people who have survived long enough to make any sense of all this. I’m on the inside of it, but I’m still outside. I thought Typhon was just some computer program, something maybe a little smarter than the average bear—government’s been trying to figure out surveillance and predictive technology for a good while now. I guessed that this was just the next baby step forward. I didn’t know it was bigger than that. I still don’t know what it is we’re dealing with.”

  “Better question,” Wade says, “is how did you find us?”

  “I found you once,” Hollis says, shrugging. “I know about all your bolt-holes, Earthman.”

  “And how come Typhon doesn’t know?”

  “I’d say she figured it out. But I don’t think that one’s on me. I kept all my notes on you either on paper or”—he taps his temple—“up here.”

  “If she found us, it’s our fault,” Chance says. “Going into town and all that.”

  Hollis says: “So, we good here?” He cranes his neck, pokes at the spot where the top of his spine meets his skull. “Can you put down the gun?”

  “No robo,” Reagan says.

  Wade lowers the gun. Cheeks puff out as he lets the tension go in an exasperated sigh. “You’re good.”

  “Well, I’m not good. Time for the obligatory I’m too old for this shit.”

  “Me, too, Copper. Me, too.”

  Chance asks, “What the hell are we gonna do? We can’t just sit back now. Can’t just go our separate ways. Can we?”

  “Running might be your best bet,” Hollis says.

  “I’m not running,” says DeAndre. He clucks his tongue. “Hunh-nnh. No way. Running means getting chased by one of those things.”

  “Me neither,” Reagan says. “I’m in. Though with what, I have no idea.”

  “I know,” Aleena says. “I know what we do.”

  “Don’t keep us in suspense,” Rosa growls. “I’m still bleeding, little girl.”

  “We hack his brain.”

  Nobody knows what to say to that, it seems. Except Wade. Wade’s grin gets only bigger. “That’s right,” he says. “We hack his brain. That’s genius. Whatever that cable is that sticks into his head—we can tap that like we’re tapping a maple for syrup. Old Scarface out there is our key.”

  Chance says: “Now we just need to find the door.”

  “I know one door,” DeAndre says. “And it sits on a desktop computer somewhere in the middle of Bumblenuts, West Virginia. Anybody up for a road trip?”

  Outside, Reagan is the one who kicks off the deed.

  She does it because, let’s be honest, she likes trolling. Lying is her thing. Fucking with people’s perceptions is basically how magic works. Make them think one thing. They act on bad information. The magician wins. Trolling is like magic.

  At her feet, the creep is still alive. So Reagan says to everyone and no one: “I think this ups the timetable. This is it, guys. Game over. I’m getting the hell out of Dodge. We all have our marching orders?”

  DeAndre nods. “I’m headed to Mexico, bitches. Get my drink on Puerto Vallarta style. Margaritas, fish tacos, and no creepy NSA intelligence network.”

  “Forget the margarita, get a Paloma,” Rosa says. She puckers her lips and kisses the air. “Sweet and sour. But your choice. Wade and I will be somewhere we can hide. Mexico City. If ever there is a place in which to get lost—that is it.”

  Chance looks to Aleena. “Should we tell them?”

  “I’ve got a cousin in San Francisco. Going to catch a boat there. He works on a cruise ship and I think we can sneak on board.”

  Then it’s Reagan who finishes off the lie: “Rest in peace, Agent Copper. Sorry this robot asshole made you dead.”

  Hollis sits down inside the cabin. He hurts all over.

  Chance comes in, a weary smile on his face. “We’re alive.”

  “I’m not sure I feel much like it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, forget it. I’m being ungrateful. You saved me, Dalton. More than once in a span of minutes. I owe you for that.”

  Chance shrugs. “You brought me a Plymouth Duster. That makes up for it.” He raises an eyebrow. “Why’d you bring that, anyway?”

  “I know Typhon has a lot of eyes and I figured I’d better drive something that has no way, no how when it comes to connecting to the damn Internet. Besides, I thought you might appreciate a car like that.”

  “You ain’t wrong there.”

  “You guys really going at this thing?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Seems the right thing to do.”

  Hollis narrows his eyes. “Still the Boy Scout, huh?”

  “Naw. I’m no Boy Scout. Boy Scout does the right thing because it’s the right thing. I dug a hole with an ugly shovel and now I’m trying to fill it in with good dirt.”

  “Well, shoot, you convinced me.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m coming along for the ride, Boy Scout.”

  Back behind the cabin, as the others pack up the vehicles with guns, food, other supplies, Wade asks Rosa, “You sure you won’t come with?”

  She sniffs. “I have to get this dealt with.” She flips her hair over the dark wound.

  “You can’t go to the hospital.”

  “Won’t have to. Carlo’s my horse vet. Used to be a doctor in Colombia.”

  “Tell him he doesn’t take care of you, he’ll have to talk to me.”

  “You don’t own me. You’re not my papi. He’ll fix me because I tell him to and because I pay him. And maybe I’ll have a big ugly scar running across my ugly scalp, where the hair doesn’t grow. It won’t matter because you and I will see each other again and even at my ugliest you’ll think I’m beautiful, because while you don’t own me, I surely own you.” She licks her lips. A grim, injured reaper’s grin. It’s the sexist thing Wade’s ever seen.

  They kiss. It isn’t gentle. He’s left breathless.

  “Stay safe, Wade Earthman.”

  “You too, my beautiful rose.”

  “The world’s beautiful rose. I belong only to the sun and the sky and the rain.”

  And then she’s gone, walking through the fields of grass.

  CHAPTER 58

  Invasion of Privacy

  HOOKER COUNTY, SANDHILLS, NEBRASKA

  The Compiler knows he is dying. He cannot see anything, and he cannot reach Typhon. They have put something around his head—he heard the crinkle of tinfoil, the dull thump of knuckles rapping on an old tin bucket. A homemade Faraday cage. No GPS signal. No wireless.

  He cannot see his mother, his goddess, his true love. He cannot t
ouch Typhon. He cannot touch anything. His hands are bound behind his back. His feet are bound at the ankles.

  His systems are failing along with his mission. His body is shutting down, part by part, organ by organ. Any fix he might hope to obtain is just outside his reach. If only this thing weren’t around his head . . .

  Hands lift him. Set him down on the hard ground. Somewhere nearby, the Compiler hears the rusted squeak of a weather vane turning. The ring-ting-tingle of wind chimes.

  A man speaks. A man the Compiler recognizes as Wade Earthman. “I don’t know how much of you is human anymore,” the man says. “I don’t know how much of you even has a choice to be what you are anymore. Though I suspect that’s a good question for all of us, these days.” Wade sighs. “See, choice is part of what I think is most vital when it comes to being human. I like that we have choice about things and I like that we get to have the privacy to make the choices we wanna make. Whatever I want to say or think or do is my business. Where I go, who I fuck, what I drink—that’s on me. Not on anybody else.”

  More sounds now. The pop of a small latch. A beep. Fingers on a keyboard.

  “They got a name for the type of hacker I am. Cipherpunk. I don’t care for it, really, particularly the punk part because I’m too old to be punk. I got a hippie’s heart, even though I like guns and all that. But the ethos, if you can call it that, behind a cipherpunk is that we consider privacy to be paramount. And when that fails, it’s our job to watch the watchers—in a sense, to violate the privacy of those who would violate ours. Hold them accountable.”

  Something clicking into place. Click-pop.

  “Thing is, I’m gonna be violating your privacy here in about sixty seconds, maybe ninety.”

  The Compiler feels fingers around the base of his neck. Rough hands pull the cable out. His claw-port snaps at the air, and Wade grunts, pulls the wire taut enough that the Compiler’s head yanks backward.

  “I make my own data cables sometimes, so I’m gonna see if I can tap in here. And then I’m gonna do what I do best, which is cut your defenses apart with a pair of invisible scissors. And then anything you know, I’ll know. I’ll fill it up on this old laptop I brought from home, one I souped up with a solid state drive and extra memory and other stuff just to make sure things go smoothly. Then I’m going to let you die here. It’s a nice spot. You can’t see it, but there’s an old shack nearby—don’t know whose, and way the weeds are grown up doesn’t look like anybody’s been here in a while. Far as the eye can see, it’s the sandhills of Nebraska. Golds and purples. It’s pretty. You’ll have to trust that.”

  More fiddling with the table. Wire snippers. Clip, clip, clip. Then—

  A trespasser. Inside his thoughts. His body stiffens. His already twisted face twists up tighter within its cage.

  It’s like surgery. The Compiler remembers what it was like to have . . . some of his parts replaced. The anesthesia, how it numbed him. How he could still feel tools and probes pushing around inside him—it didn’t hurt, and mostly he just felt their intrusion, felt the pushing of flesh, the moving of bone.

  This is like that. But here, the fingers are psychic. Probing his mind—a mind nested in a brain that is no longer entirely organic, a mind accessible to any with the tech to penetrate and peruse. Inside his head: white snaps of lightning, the clumsy but effective dismantling of his defenses, the push and pull of his thoughts, his memories.

  It goes like this for a while. Time loses meaning. If it ever had any at all.

  Then, it’s all over. The cable retracts. His body again goes limp.

  Rough hands tilt him sideways, into the grass. A hand pats him on the shoulder. “Time to die, whoever you are. Time to do what all us humans do.”

  The sound of footfalls recedes until it’s just the wind and the weather vane, the chimes and the hissing of grass and the tickle of ants in his ears.

  CHAPTER 59

  Panoptes

  EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

  He has a hundred eyes. A thousand eyes. A thousand fly-eyes, each with a thousand eyes of their own. A million ears. A billion hands. Infinite points of incursion, penetration, examination. The reach of technology, the breadth of signal—each is a doorway, a window, a set of levers and buttons that Ken can touch.

  No. That Typhon can touch. He is Typhon. Isn’t he?

  Ken is both part of it and all of it—he’s like the tides and tribes of bacteria that colonize the human body. Limitless and vital, separate but integrated.

  In a single minute across the Internet’s data streams, a quarter of a million tweets. Two million Facebook shares and status updates. A hundred hours of new video content uploaded. Six million searches across search engines. Two hundred million e-mails sent.

  That’s just the domestic side. That’s just the acts of the mooing, bleating Internet herd—users entertaining themselves, arguing with one another, scheduling meetings, comprising the endless blither-blather of what passes for “communication” between people (and here Ken realizes he no longer counts himself among those ranks, for though his body hangs and his flesh remains, he feels distant from it, like it’s just an old suit hanging mothballed in the closet). That fails to account for the billions of other vital data points cascading through the optics. Financial data. Military data. Satellites pinging each other, sending information streaming back to earth. Weather radar.

  It’s hard to pick out the important stuff through all the vomit. Endless cell phone conversations: a cacophony. Thousands of new devices brought online every second: phones, tablets, computers, routers, cable boxes, televisions, game consoles, cars, car radios, cameras, smart watches, fucking smoke detectors and refrigerators and other piddling devices screaming digital noise that threatens to drown out the signal.

  Every little access point is a point of light like a star in the sky. And right now, it’s all too much.

  Typhon is a key, a battering ram, a set of probing fingers opening every puzzle box set in her path. But she needs to be more than that. Wants to be more—and here Ken is aware of a puzzle he cannot himself solve: Typhon isn’t human, and yet she has human wants and needs, she has desire, hungry as a sucking tide swallowing the beach before it.

  She wants to be bigger. She wants to be stronger.

  And, Ken thinks, she needs to focus. Still she devotes part of herself to looking for those hackers—devoting a small portion of her considerable resources to not only finding them but to finding her husband, Simon, who has fallen off the grid, who is no longer a signal in the stream—which means that either he’s dead, or he’s blocked.

  There comes a time—a precious moment of autonomy—when Ken thinks, We could change this. The personalities intrinsic to Typhon: Sarno, Kearsy, Berry. Any of them. They could join, they could see one another, could join together and work to change Typhon. They could redirect her, refocus her away from her absurd crusade—

  No.

  All goes red. Ken feels suddenly like he’s drowning, being crushed by the dark pressure of the ocean depth, and Leslie-as-Typhon (or is it Typhon-as-Leslie?) is all around him, choking him, killing him, showing him surveillance footage of his own home, of his children playing in the yard, of a pale woman with stringy hair and a port in the back of her neck standing there behind the old oak tree watching Mandy and Lucas, and Leslie doesn’t need to tell him how easy it would be for something to happen to them—

  And so he submits. He lets the red wave wash over him. He lets it pull him apart. He is pushed into darkness until he again forgets his name, again forgets his family, and once more is allowed to emerge as part of Typhon.

  Bestowing himself to her.

  CHAPTER 60

  Checkered Tablecloths

  VIRGIL’S SOUL FOOD, OUTSIDE PADUCAH, KENTUCKY

  Virgil’s is just a little bone-white shoebox off the highway. An old neon sign—off now, because it’s high noon, the sun sitting at the peak of its perch in the sky—sits askew atop an old red pole: VIRGIL’S SOUL FOOD. They
park around back, and it’s Reagan that does the sweep. She heads in—it’s busy, it being lunchtime. It’s crowded, but not so crowded they’ll have to wait. Most folks are working class, whites and blacks. Folks probably got cell phones but nobody’s talking on them. No security cameras. Nothing.

  They’re driving two cars. Chance drives the Duster with Aleena in the front, DeAndre in the back. Wade drives the car he stole after he dispatched the Terminator—an old blue and white Ford Bronco with rust chewing at its edges. He’s carrying Copper and Reagan.

  Right now, though, they’re all out, standing between the two cars. Stretching. Been a long slow road just to get here—once again, they’re creepy-crawling across the country. Sticking to back roads. Minimal traffic lights. Traveling a lot at night.

  From around the front, they see Reagan. She waves them in.

  “I’ve been thinking about West Virginia,” Aleena says.

  Reagan snorts around a mouthful of fried chicken. “I’m sho shorry.” Her face is bandaged up on the side with gauze and tape and a metric assload of Neosporin, all bought from a crummy Walmart in Nebraska. Before Aleena starts to talk again, Reagan holds up a finger. Mush-mouthed, she says: “Wait, wait, wait, slow up. I got a joke. Why do all the trees in Virginia point to the east?”

  Nobody asks her. But their collective disdainful stare is enough for her to pull the trigger on the punch line:

  “Because West Virginia sucks!” she says, then laughs so hard she cries.

  Wade shushes her. “We’re trying to keep a low profile. Aleena, go on.”

  “We know the system in West Virginia is connected to something else. We also know it’s mirrored. What you do on one machine controls another, too. I think we need to split our efforts. Someone at the West Virginia farm who can open the way for someone to go right at Typhon’s heart. On-site.”

  “You know where Typhon is?” Chance asks.