ZerOes (25 page)

THE WOODS OUTSIDE THE LODGE

B
etween patches of dead leaves, not far from a tangle of wild blackberry briar, Hollis Copper finds a footprint in the dirt.

He's heard the sounds. Rustling. Once a distant laugh, through the trees, around midnight. When the winds shifted he even thought he smelled body odor. But this is the first time he's found something—
something!
—that proves there's someone out here.

So he follows along. Kicks up leaves, moves them around.

Another footprint. And a broken branch nearby. And a matted patch of creeper ivy. A trail.

Hollis knows he should be back at the Lodge. It's close to lunch—the pod's on the last day of their current assignment, and he knows he should be there to shepherd them through it. If they fail this—and he wonders if they will—it'll be a knock against them. Maybe enough to get one or some or even all of them washed out, sent packing.

But he has the advantage of daylight, and he's onto something. Hollis follows the trail. It's hard—he's no tracker, isn't a wilderness guy. But he does have a good eye for deviations from the status quo. Disruptions. He wanders farther from the Lodge, deeper into the pine
and the oak, past fallen trees taken by wild honeysuckle, past an old deer skeleton whose antlers are broken and gnawed, past spiderwebs glowing like optic filament strung between trees.

Until he finds it. A cave. Small—not some dramatic movie-style cave, not some spelunker's delight. Just a trio of huge boulders and a space in between them—a gap big enough for someone to crawl into on his belly.

In the dirt outside the rocks, he sees footprints. Several of them, different sizes. Some bare feet. Some with boot or sneaker treads.

Hollis looks down at the dark gap between the rocks. Sees the dirt disturbed by the entrance. There he sees not only footprints, but handprints, too. Which means . . .

He sighs, takes off his jacket. Sets it gently atop the boulder. Then he rolls up the sleeves of his white shirt and pulls up the legs of his pants so he can bunch them around his knees.
Here goes nothing
, Hollis thinks, then gets down on the ground and army-crawls his way into the hole.

The smell reaches him—stirred earth, and something else. Something richer, stronger, sickly sweet.
Blood
. Or rot. He pulls his left arm over his nose. The movement stirs something in the air—the tinny buzz of flying things. Something flicks into his forehead. Another pelts his cheek. Flies. Beetles. He doesn't know. He groans, reaching for his back pocket and grabbing his phone with his other arm, hitting the phone's light.

“Jesus H. Christ,” he hisses.

It's not the dead raccoon that does it. Not the smell of its torn belly, or the sight of the carpet of flies feeding on it, or the way the fur—rotten now for what must be days—ripples and moves as if the thing is still breathing. The maggots pushing at the margins of its skin tell him this thing is long dead.

Rather, what takes his breath away is what has been written on the walls in blood. Maybe the animal's blood.

TYPHON STIRS

The flies hum and fuss as Hollis tilts his phone around—other words and phrases have been painted onto the rock, too:

THE GODS WILL FLEE

THE TYPHONIC BEAST

IT WANTS TO BE FREE

WE ARE THE DRAGON

GIVE TO MOTHER

Drawings accompany the sayings—strange cave paintings. Something that looks like a crudely sketched jackal. Another thing that might be a dragon, but has many heads. Stranger still: something that looks to Hollis Copper like programming language—but not in English. Gibberish language—or, at least, a language he damn sure doesn't know—broken apart by parentheticals, by brackets and slashes and numbers.

He turns the light dead ahead. The cave keeps going. Down. The small tunnel descends. Part of him wants to keep crawling, just to see. But he can't. Not now. He has to get back. Tell someone. Tell everyone. Call Golathan. The perimeter has been breached. There's a way out. Or, more important:
a way in
.

He backs out of the cave, that word, that name—
Typhon
—singing in his ears like a terrible song.

THE LODGE, CAFETERIA

R
eagan still hears the song in her head: Quiet Riot's “Cum On Feel the Noize.” It's her victory song. Graves hurt her the other day with that bullshit about her poor baby and she's had her emotional boots stuck in a sucky bleak mire ever since. But today she feels like a fucking queen. She just trolled the Iranian nuclear program, bitches.

They're all feeling pumped up. It's like,
boom
, with that win in their pocket, the band's back together. Smiles all around. Everyone having a good time, laughing. Even Aleena let the hard rebar stuck up her ass bend
just a leetle beet
.

All week, between their own little . . . dalliances, Reagan and the others concocted one lulz-bringing badass plan: Loud noises. Offensive imagery. Sound and fury signifying nothing but brash American immorality. All it took was sending an e-mail to a handful of the administrator accounts on-site at Mount Tochal—enticing readers to click a link to download free Persian hip-hop (Erfan, Zedbazi, Salome MC). All it took was one click—which on their end seemed to do nothing
at all. Oh, but it did something, all right: it installed a backdoor. A hole through which digital rats could crawl. It gave the Zeroes root access. And from there . . .

Cartoons and dick pics and chicks making out and animated GIFs of dogs running into sliding glass doors. All set to a looping mix tape of Quiet Riot and audio distortions that would make Trent Reznor foul his sleek black industrial diaper.

Nobody could stop them. They started pulling everything—every program, every bit of data, every last
digital crumb
anyone could find. The Iranians surely have backups, they will surely be able to pry out every bug and every backdoor they left behind, but it'll take them a while. That was their goal, wasn't it? Slow them down, suck up the data. Done and done.

Reagan takes a bite of a hot dog, watches Chance and Aleena cozy up to each other. Do they even
know
they're doing it? Reagan's a pretty good study of people—you can't fuck with 'em if you don't know 'em—and it seems sometimes that both of them realize it, then back away before whatever gravity they got going on pulls them back together again.

In the far corner of the room, near the video game machines, sits Shane Graves. His pod sits elsewhere, occasionally throwing him shady glances. That gives Reagan no small thrill. If she could go over there and dump some mashed potatoes down his back, a Coke on his head, she would.
Asshole. Bringing up my little girl
.

Across the table, Wade has some printouts that he's scouring so hard he looks like a man scanning the contract he just signed with the Devil in the hopes of finding some loophole to regain his poor soul. Truth is, she'd fuck Wade if he was into it. Something about him kinda gets her going. Some daddy issue, maybe, that she doesn't understand. His barrel shape is pleasing to her. Those curly gray hairs coming off his head—c'mon. Soft, silky. She could use them like handles, right?

But he's busy. And intellectually she knows he could be her father. Maybe her grandfather.

Next to her is the string bean—DeAndre. She sidles up closer. He gives her a sideways look. “Heyyyyyy,” she says. “How
you
doing.”

“Aw, whoa, hey,” he says. “We are not—you and I are not—no, no, no.”

“C'mon. You wanna get laid. I wanna get laid.” She blinks. “Black guys usually dig me. White girl. Big ass. Take a whirl with the swirl.”

He shrugs it off, scoops some peas onto a fork. “Then I'm some kinda freak of nature because I generally like
black
girls with
little
asses. Little athletic asses.”

“Psshh. Thin privilege.”

“Man, you look however you wanna look. I'm sure some brothers think you're hella sexy, but I'm a brother who likes a different cut of meat, is all.”

She scowls. “Women aren't meat, pal. We're thinking, feeling creatures.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—”

She elbows him. “Unless that turns you on. In which case:
barbecue me, big boy
.”

“Man, you are crazy.” He laughs, though. She likes making him laugh.

That's when Reagan looks over, sees Wade staring at her. Or through her. He's got this wide-open nowhere stare. Like a lamp without its shade—just bright, empty, glaring. She waves her hand in front of him. “You in there, Earth Man? Are you having some kind of senior moment? Did you shit yourself?” To DeAndre: “I bet he shit himself.”

Wade says: “Something isn't right.”

“The way you're looking at me sure isn't.”

“Chance,” Wade says. Chance looks over, his conversational spell with Aleena broken. “You said—” Suddenly, Wade lowers his voice. “You said it could be an artificial intelligence.”

“Uhh.” Chance looks around. “I guess. Are we—are we talking about this now?”

Wade taps the pages in front of him with a finger. “One of the nuclear sites is Mount Tochal. It's a ski resort in Iran, but there's an old repurposed military base underneath. IRGC—the Revolutionary Guard. Now, they're doing uranium enrichment—looks like it might just be for energy, not weapons, but there's something else there.”

Aleena looks down at the pages. “This is in Farsi. You read Farsi?”

“You don't?” Wade asks.

“What's your point?” Reagan needles him, suddenly impatient.

“There's a program running behind the scenes here. Something called Verethragna. Operating on a home-cooked OS called Rustam, and working on custom hardware called Surena.”

Aleena leans forward. “Those are all names from myth, or history.
Persian. Surena was a general long ago. Rustam was a mythological hero. He's sometimes associated with Surena—you know, intellectually, thematically.”

“And Verethragna?” Wade asks.

“A god. One of the Yazatas. Some conflate him with Atar, the Divine Fire, who battled the many-headed dragon-demon, Azi Dahaka.”

Even Reagan feels a chill. “Many-headed dragon-demon. That sounds . . . familiar.”

Nobody needs to say it:
Typhon
.

Wade leans forward: “I think Iran was designing their own AI.”

“Why would they name it like that?” Chance asks. “More mythological hoo-haw. Another many-headed dragon?”

Aleena thinks. “They must know about Typhon. Even if only in rumor, or whispers. Verethragna is very clearly their response to this, right?” She hesitates. “This is why we hit them. We were led to this. Typhon is killing her competition.”

“Their AI was new,” Wade says. “Still early code, by the looks of it.”

Reagan whistles. “Like strangling a baby in its crib.”

Wade's about to say something else, but then, from across the room:

“Get the . . . get the
fuck
off of me!”

Reagan looks around. It's Dipesh. He looks unshorn, unshowered, like he hasn't slept since there was a Bush in the White House. One of the hacks—his pod's own babysitter, a pasty, no-necked, meathead ginger named Calum—is dragging him into the cafeteria. Calum is saying: “You're gonna sit. And you're gonna eat.”

That's when the shit hits the fan.

Miranda steps in front, thrusting one of her long Virginia Slim fingers in Calum's face, shrieking at him to let Dipesh go—and for a second, he does. Reagan doesn't know if it's an accident—if Dipesh just slips his grip as the guard is distracted, or if it's intentional, but it doesn't matter. Because soon as Calum turns away Dipesh grabs an empty chair and brings it clumsily against the guard's head.

Calum drops, clipping his chin on a table. Trays bounce and food spatters. Dipesh almost falls, too, and the chair drops out of his hand and bounces away. Dipesh screams: “You can't make us do it anymore. We're not your
hired killers
.” He shrieks those last two words so loudly it makes Reagan's throat hurt. “They didn't deserve what happened to them. Why did you make us
do
that?”

And then he yells one question that quiets the whole room: “What is Typhon?”

The resultant silence and shock on everyone's faces tells Reagan what she needs to know: everyone here has glimpsed Typhon. They don't understand it. They may not want to get close to it. But they've all gotten a taste.

A foot stabs upward, catches Dipesh in the middle. Calum launches himself onto the hacker, grabbing him and flinging him down on the floor. What little hair the guard has ringing his balding head is mussed. He stands there for a second, looking around, seeing if anybody else is coming at him. They're not. So he starts kicking Dipesh. A hard boot to the side. Once. Twice. A third time.

Reagan sees it start to happen. She sees Chance and Aleena stand up. Hero Boy and White Hat Girl. They wanna step in. Save the oppressed. They'll ruin
everything
.

Aleena starts to step forward with Chance following her lead, and Reagan hurries around the table—almost losing her footing and going ass-over-eyebrows in the process—in order to step in front of them.

“Move,” Chance growls.

“Reagan, now isn't the time—”

Reagan hisses: “You got that right. Now
isn't
the time. We are—” They start to step past her and she plants her hands on their chests. She chatters her words so fast she's not even sure they can understand her. “
We are
supremely well positioned to do something about this place. We're close to the end. But we can't fix this if we're all in the drink.”

Chance starts to step forward again. “She's right,” Aleena says. Words Reagan never really expected her to say. “We can save him, or we can shut this whole
place
down. We need to think about the—”

DeAndre is suddenly there. “Guys.
Guys
.”

Chance's eyes go wide. Reagan follows his stare. Aleena's words trail off and she looks, too.

It's Wade. While Reagan was pinning these two to the corkboard, Wade went off half-cocked. He's already across the room.

Reagan calls after him but it's too late. The old man taps Calum on the shoulder. Soon as the guard turns around, Wade pistons a fist right into his nose. The man's head snaps back and he cups his face even as blood starts to stream past his fingers. Wade shouts: “You
goddamn bully. Come here—” He grabs Calum again and hauls his fist back again.

Taser prongs clip into his side. Metzger hurries in, Taser in hand. Wade stiffens. Howls like a mournful hound. Then drops.

Roach and Chen come racing in. From the other direction, Ashbaugh approaches from Metzger's six. Reagan sees her pod's tension. They wanna jump in like each of them is wearing Wonder Woman Underoos. Once again she has to herd the sheep. “Wade'll be in the Dep,” she says. “
We
go to the pod. Now! While they're distracted. C'mon,
c'mon
.” She reaches her arms out, trying to urge them toward the door. To her great surprise, they go.

Now, she thinks, the real work begins.