Version Zero

by David Yoon

  AUTHENTICATE

  Easy. Max typed in the password: noellephant. The window dismissed itself.

  But another window appeared.

  ADDITIONAL SECURITY REQUIRED

  PLEASE PROVIDE FINGERPRINT ID

  Fuck.

  Max looked at Pilot. He slid the laptop under Pilot’s bound hand. He wiped his hands on his pants and gripped the ax.

  “Pilot, I’m gonna need your fingerprint now.”

  3.8

  Pilot liked how this arena had turned out.

  It had taken a full year to renovate the whole facility. It was a fine facility, and kept the elements out with an easy strength.

  Now, with the window blown open above, it would take only a day or so to fill with snow. After that, nature would most likely move in to reclaim it.

  Pilot pictured the arena as a cozy den for wolves to raise their young in, and warmed at the thought. How one little breach could change everything.

  Max looked furious, holding his ax like that. It saddened Pilot. Of all things, he had not expected to infuriate Max. He had imagined the opposite happening in his mind so many times: revealing the big surprise endgame, Max hugging him and high-fiving him and telling him it was just what he wanted, too, but had been too nervous to explicitly suggest something so audacious.

  They would return home, victorious and vindicated, and Max would perhaps move in—Pilot had plenty of room to spare, maybe Noelle’s old room even, for by then Pilot would finally have the courage to clean it out and start fresh.

  A brand-new start. A clean slate. A friend to trust until his dying day.

  Things were not going that way.

  He did not know how to make Max happy. He was not sure if he ever could again. His hunch about Max turned out to be a total failure of intuition.

  How could my instincts have been so wrong? thought Pilot.

  How could I not have seen this coming?

  How could anyone?

  That left only one thing to do, really.

  Pilot turned to gaze at the laptop camera and addressed the world.

  “Men like me are the cause of all the problems ever in the history of this country. Men like me always choose the path of greed and cruelty. The path of evil.”

  Max slammed the butt of the ax into the ground with a loud king.

  “Pilot, unlock the laptop.”

  Pilot ignored him and shut his fist tight around his thumb.

  “Men like me,” continued Pilot, “are responsible for slavery, exploitation, genocide, rape, more than any other group in American history. For our thievery, we get statues in our name. We are the nation’s worst terrorists, and we could stop it all tomorrow if we wanted to. But we do not. I, Pilot Markham, am one of those men.”

  “Pilot.” Max tried to wrench his fist open, but Pilot held firm.

  “We had a chance with the internet,” said Pilot. He discovered tears flowing out of his eye ducts and savored the release. “A perfect utopia! And yet: we chose again the path of evil, this time unhampered by physical distance or time or visible identifiers—just anonymous, pure evil flowing freely to all corners of the world.”

  “Unlock it or I swear I will do it for you,” said Max, shouting now. His sweat-slicked hands slipped and fumbled to no avail around Pilot’s unyielding fist.

  Pilot decided he had better wrap things up.

  “Oh, what a glorious, gorgeous mess I have made,” said Pilot through his tears. It felt so good to say all this. “Every invention unto a perversion, every touch unto blood, every daughter unto a lamb for slaughter. But now it is time to wipe the slate clean. Now it is time for you to place all your blame onto me, so that when I finally die that blame dies, too. Then you can rebuild, all together this time, as one.”

  It felt so good, to release like this before the whole world. Pilot could not wipe his tears, nor did he want to. His cheeks shone with wet.

  Three years of planning in secret were coming to an end. The bombs would detonate; Pilot’s soul would descend into the oblivion, where he would confront Noelle’s killers forever, if such a thing as oblivion even existed.

  The world—awakened by Pilot’s death—will build it all new, build it smart, build it fair the next time around, and Pilot wished he could be there to see it.

  But he accepted that he deserved no such privilege.

  “This must end with my death,” he said to Max. “If you have a shred of friendship remaining for me you will give me that.”

  Max raised the ax. He swung. Pilot closed his eyes to receive the blow.

  King.

  “I will never give you what you want,” said Max.

  At first Pilot thought Max had cut his hand free from its bonds, but when he looked down he saw that he had split it in half; the blade of the ax separated his index finger and thumb at a rude angle. Max worked the blade back and forth until the thumb came free.

  The pain was unlike anything Pilot had felt before. Every cell in his body erupted in a chorus of red and juicy violet. Every pore opened as wide as it could and spewed all of it: fear, sweat, bile, blood.

  Pilot screamed in pain, and it felt like singing.

  Max wiped the thumb clean on his shirt.

  “Kill me,” said Pilot, screaming at the ceiling.

  But Max dropped the ax. He muttered:

  “You’re not dying anytime soon, fucker.”

  Max headed for the laptop. He opened it. He put Pilot’s thumb on the pad and watched the interface awaken.

  “I’m stopping this countdown, and then I’m getting out of here, and the cops are gonna find you, and you’re gonna go to jail forever,” said Max. He stared at Pilot’s laptop. “They’ll make a movie out of your stupid story. It’ll probably entertain some people for a while, but then you’ll be gone, just nothing.”

  Why was Max being so relentlessly cruel?

  He was so hard to read with that damn Black Halo mask covering his face.

  “You taught me so much,” said Pilot, pleading now. “I want to teach the world, too.”

  “What the fuck are these menus?” muttered Max, clicking around.

  Max was really going to do it. He was smart; it would take him no time to figure out how to stop it. Why?

  “Please reconsider,” screamed Pilot.

  “Pipe the fuck down,” said Max, not looking at him.

  Pilot watched as Max found the main window. The one with the names of the data exchanges in cities across the globe. Compromise Status. Charge State.

  Max’s eyes widened at the sight of the timecode numbers. Only two minutes left. Away they ticked.

  Max bore into the laptop screen and seemed to forget all about Pilot, which hurt.

  “Just let it happen,” said Pilot. “It will fix everything. You will see.”

  A calm overcame Pilot now. All pain had vanished. He saw things clearly: his hand was almost half its normal width now, well lubricated with blood, and so simple to draw through the crude knot of cable restraining it.

  It was a tricky, messy affair untying the other hand without the benefit of a thumb, but he managed it, and after that it took mere seconds to free his feet.

  Pilot rose and stood tall.

  “My beloved friend Maximilian Portillo,” he said.

  Max stopped at the sound of his name spoken out loud for the entire world to hear. He looked at Pilot through his mask. Max looked and looked as if God himself were addressing him.

  Oh, quit being so full of yourself, thought Pilot. You are no god.

  Just make sure this life at least meant something.

  “In the name of all that I have desecrated,” said Pilot, “I now sacrifice myself for the sake of humanity. Let me become an eternal flame of remorse, and let Maximilian Portillo be forever known as the hero brave enough to carry this lig
ht out into the dark.”

  Pilot had written and rewritten these lines many times in his mind and hoped they were not too melodramatic. But a big moment deserved a big statement. He decided it was perfect.

  Pilot positioned himself. He was framed correctly in the camera.

  Good.

  He raised his wristbands to his throat and struck his fists together thrice in a special gesture to ignite the sparks and send a torrent of blood whipping forth like a scarf in a gale—so curious the lack of pain, so thrilling the way his field of vision turned upside down, as his head no doubt flopped to one side like a broken stuffed animal billowing from a torn neck, never mended.

  3.9

  When Shane opened his eyes he found himself on his back, staring up at the sky through a bent window lined with ice.

  Not ice. Safety glass. It was pretty.

  A hand rested on Shane’s neck. He held it, but it was cold, and it moved wrong.

  Shane bolted upright and flung the severed hand out into the snow.

  “Baby,” said Akiko. Where was she? Shane wheeled around and saw her, rising from underneath a leather seat that had come unmoored from the undulating floor.

  “Baby,” he said. “Oh God, you’re okay. Oh, baby bear, baby bear.”

  He examined her from every angle, touching and prodding and smoothing as he went. Finally he crushed her in his arms.

  “Oh, my baby bear,” he kept saying. “I almost lost you.”

  “I’m right here,” she said. She hoisted her arms to embrace him, and her hands found their familiar purchase on his shoulder blades. She cupped her hands and clung. And the strength and ease of all their years were there waiting for him.

  At their feet lay the men, all dead. Cody was dead, bled out from his neck gone ragged. Jonas Friend, River Askew. They lay covered by a blanket of glittering glass cubes.

  “Baby?” said Akiko, full of worry. Shane realized he had been breathing hard, as if he were trying not to throw up.

  She led him away from the bodies and into the blinding, serene snowscape, where the air was cold and dry and clean. Shane took huge gulps of it, then exhaled in long frosty jets. He did this ten times.

  The helicopter had carved a gash a mile long. Shane gave silent thanks to Cody. A pilot’s pilot, right up until the end. Executing a textbook crash landing even as the life gushed out of him.

  “We have to go back for Max,” said Shane.

  “Baby, it’s miles away.”

  “He’s stuck there with that psycho. We have to get him before he does what he did to Brayden.”

  Shane began trudging up the slope, where the snow grew deeper and deeper until he was wading with his arms.

  “Baby,” said Akiko. “Hey.”

  Shane stopped. His face felt hot, so hot. He took two handfuls of the snow and pressed them to his steaming face.

  “We have to get him,” said Shane, weeping.

  Arms reached to hold him from behind. Shane wheeled about and grasped Akiko.

  “I thought I lost you,” he said. “I thought I lost you.”

  “You never lost me. You saved me.”

  “You saved me,” said Shane.

  “I guess I owed you,” said Akiko.

  Shane squared his eyes. “Do you love me?”

  Something in Akiko’s face broke, and tears began trailing down. “I do.”

  There was guilt there. Shane saw it. Seeing it was enough. He did not need to hear an apology.

  “And you’re never going to leave me for someone else?”

  “Never.”

  “Never ever?”

  “Never ever ever.”

  Akiko nodded fast, shaking the tears free.

  He kissed her, and it was the only warm spot in the world.

  “We have to find help or something,” said Akiko.

  “Oh, baby,” said Shane. “How do we do that without giving ourselves up?”

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  She suddenly seemed to remember something. She showed him her fingernails: two of them had tape on them, and under the tape were tiny handwritten numbers. She made a fist to protect them.

  “What is that?” said Shane.

  “We got paid,” said Akiko. “Remember?”

  Shane stared and stared at her fist. He opened her fingers and examined the numbers. And his heart convulsed with hope. For no one knew they were here. The only people who saw them without their masks lay dead behind them.

  They would use the money slowly. Expand the pool business, buy a modest house, then upgrade to something bigger. Have two kids, a boy and a girl. Take five or ten years to do it.

  There would be no rush.

  Friends and family would come visit, congratulate him on his success, perhaps ask him how he did all this. Shane would have answers for that. Hard work and patience. A little bit of luck.

  Perhaps people would ask him about his good friend Max, and he could honestly answer that he did not know, perhaps he was traveling, perhaps he was on a boat circling the globe.

  For now, Shane prayed to God that, please, Max needed to live; that Shane did not care if anything had ever happened between him and Akiko; that none of that mattered anymore.

  Please, God, just let Max finish whatever he needed to do and get away from Pilot alive and then please let everything be all right.

  Shane couldn’t wait to hear why Max had stayed behind. Akiko whispered something about a cyberattack. If it was as big as all that, that meant Max would be one of the biggest heroes ever.

  Shane couldn’t wait to see Max again.

  Akiko shivered. It was freezing in the shade but hot in the sun—one of those types of days—and they moved to the sunny side of the wreck, where they discovered a back storage section spilling with emergency equipment: parkas, gloves, first aid kits, flares.

  Shane held up a radio with a question on his face, but they both knew it was off-limits. The last thing Shane wanted was police swarming their position, asking questions. Akiko shook her head at it. He tossed the radio back into the metal cabinet with a clank.

  They suited up. The days were longer in this part of the world. That would be advantageous.

  Before him Shane saw the clear long slope of a piedmont, ten or so miles of white melting into black and then rows of green and russet brown, where a tiny thread of smoke rose from a building set among a little copse of trees. It was a walk they could make in a few hours. They filled their parka pockets with water pouches and ration bars.

  Shane turned to take in the view. When he turned back to Akiko, he found her staring at something in her hands. A small, round, black thing, attached to a belt loop on her jeans.

  The magic eight ball.

  Together, they peered at its result:

  outlook good

  Then Akiko unhooked the magic eight ball, gave it a squeeze, and let it fall into the snow. It bore a perfectly round, perfectly blue hole six inches deep.

  “Let’s drag our feet single file,” said Shane. “So they don’t know how many of us made it.”

  “Okay,” said Akiko.

  She took a step, and the dry snow barked in response.

  Shane stretched his arm out behind him, and Akiko grasped it, and he led her carefully down the slope, step by step.

  3.10

  It was the smell.

  Max stared at what once was Pilot Markham. His open neck had stopped bubbling. Its fringes were charred, like steak tips, and they smelled like steak tips. With equal parts fascination and revulsion Max realized he had not eaten anything substantial in hours. Anything that had been in his stomach he had vomited up long before he hacked Pilot’s hand in half.

  Pilot’s hand in half.

  Pilot’s hand in half.

  Max looked at his own hands. Opened and close
d his fingers. His fingernails had tiny numbers on them. These numbers were protected by bits of tape.

  Max blinked. He turned away from the body. The bodies.

  Just a few hours ago Max had woken up alone in bed with an infinite view of heaven, dreaming of a girl. He had no idea what time it was. The days were long in this part of the world.

  Pilot convulsed slowly six times, like a broken clockwork doll, and finally released his body with a long sigh.

  Pilot was dead.

  All the way from I witnessed your moment musicaux, and I say bravo to dead.

  The world had just seen his mentor, the legendary Pilot Markham, eviscerate himself. Mom and Dad had seen it, too. Moments after Pilot had said his name out loud: My beloved friend Maximilian Portillo.

  There was no explaining this. Max had wanted to change the world. He had wanted to open its eyes, to empower people to the forces that controlled them, and to realize they had the power, quite literally in the palms of their hands, to demand better.

  Instead, he had delivered this.

  This blood spectacle.

  What in God’s name was this that lay before him? A body, leaking red with its head dangling at a hellish angle, and no time to cover it up or anything. A man full of promises that turned out to be lies.

  The king of all liars, deluded until the very end.

  But was it a lie if you believed? Max had believed in Pilot. Pilot had believed in Max. What did that mean? Did it mean Max had a thin foul green vein of psychopathic malice threaded within his body, to match Pilot’s?

  Which led to the other question:

  If Max had never met Pilot, would that thin green vein remain safely unexposed to air, forever, where it belonged?

  Max did not get it.

  He never would. He did not even have the bearings to feel betrayed by his mentor, so dizzy with shock was he. All he felt was that his life had just now become some kind of legendary mistake. He had just now written himself into the book of history with finger-blood on pages shaved from human skin. And his kidneys, his intestines, and his heart all flooded cold with a nauseating premonition: