ZerOes (49 page)

BLACK RIVER, WEST VIRGINIA

O
n the screen, DeAndre watches the temperature in the room go up, up, up. From fifty to sixty. Seventy, then eighty. He caps it at 110 because—well, shit, there are still
people
in there and he doesn't want to go cooking them and turning their brains to scrambled eggs. He yells into the phone: “Did we do it?”

Chance whoops: “I think so!”

DeAndre claps his hands and cackles. Does a small dance in his chair before he realizes, first that he's in some kind of creepy-ass
Deliverance
house filled with slumbering cultists who might not be too happy that their demonic Techno-Mother just bit the big one, and second that he still doesn't know how the others are doing. Is Reagan still out cold? What happened to Aleena and Wade?

Something flickers in the corner. The cable he spied leading from the hallway ceiling into this room—it comes down out of the corner, and he didn't see it there before because of an old sewing table and some cardboard boxes blocking it.

The fiber optics are flickering with pulses of light. Which is not normal.

Then, the screen on the desktop flashes.

OFF
-
SITE BACKUP PORTAL OPEN
.

“No, no, no,” DeAndre says. “Oh, what the what?”

Typhon didn't die. She just evacuated the Manhattan location. And now she's going—where? Here? Or is this just a portal, shuttling her to some other location? Some other bank of servers, some other meat locker prepped for new bodies? It'll all start over again. Except this time, it'll be harder. Because she'll be ready. She'll create new difficulties. She'll hunt them to the ends of the earth.

Unless.

He grabs Wade's laptop.

And fast as lightning, DeAndre starts typing.

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

W
ade cups Siobhan's hand. She stares out the glass at the rock garden, the cacti, the Apache plumes, the hibiscus. She smiles. She hasn't spoken since they pulled her out of that . . .
machine
six months ago. She's got brain function. But it isn't right. They say her brain waves look like those of someone who's dreaming or hallucinating.

The same fate befell all the original thirteen, all except Leslie Cilicia-Ceto, who was pronounced brain-dead at the scene. Whether her brain had just gone too far (since she was, after all, the first) or whether she just couldn't abide being separated from her creation, none can say.

Those who were connected far later—Ken Golathan and the rest—fared much better. They have problems. PTSD, depression, OCD. Some have difficulty concentrating. Others concentrate too hard. It's like part of them is still with Typhon somewhere. Or like part of Typhon is still with them.

But mostly, they're okay.

Wade doesn't have much of that. Mostly Typhon comes to him in
nightmares. He wakes up at night, feeling his breath caught in his chest, feeling a terrible pressure at his head like something's grabbing him, dragging him up, up, up as a thick cable is forced down his throat and into his guts . . .

Well. He doesn't want to think about that now. He wants to be with Siobhan. Be present with her.

A hand falls to his shoulder. “Hey, Wade,” comes a voice.

He reaches up, clasps the hand. “Hey, Rebecca.” He smiles as he looks up at her. Pretty like her mother. Got some curls in her hair, too, even in this dry heat. That's a little part of him with her. His daughter. She comes here when he does. They sit with Siobhan.

She doesn't know much about what happened. She knows the official story—that the Zeroes were cleared of all wrongdoing, declared innocent (without so much as an apology or a prize check or anything like that, Wade notes). Flight 6757 was brought down by “enemies of the state.” And that these enemies—unspecified terrorists, classified blah-blah-blah—kidnapped their loved ones and tortured them. Which is true, in a distorted way. Further, those victims of Typhon were listed as victims of the unspecified terror act commited by these unspecified enemies—enemies that, Wade figures, will one day be named and used as an excuse to invade some country. Probably one with oil.

Still. Wade wishes the truth could be free. He flirts sometimes with going rogue and telling the world all that he knows. Because they should know. The American people deserve to know the truth: that one of its own agencies sanctioned the creation of a deranged machine intelligence, an intelligence that needed human brains and bodies to do its thing.

Sometimes he gets worked up over it. Blood pressure making his whole body feel like a squeezing fist.

But mostly, he just tries to forget. Because he doesn't want to bring any more hell down on his head. Or, more important, on Rebecca's head.

Besides, Copper asked him to play nice.

And he does.

Mostly.

Mostly
.

He's got a plane to catch soon, but for now, he sits and enjoys being here.

OCEAN CITY, MARYLAND

Hollis Copper stands across from Ken Golathan. Golathan looks like hell. Weak and withered.

“You're blocking my view,” Golathan says.

“I know,” Copper says. To his back, the gray surf of the Atlantic pounds against the beach.

Golathan sits in his wheelchair staring out over the deck. Gulls squawk and shriek in the sky above, fighting over something. Fish, maybe. “Fuck you, then,” he says. But he doesn't move. And neither does Copper.

The ex-NSA man hasn't gotten out of his wheelchair. His nurse says by now he should be able to, physically, that it's depression keeping him saddled there. His hands knit in front of him. He looks small.

“Gonna be trials,” Copper says. Secret trials. They don't put this kind of thing on display.

“Yeah.”

“I'll tell them everything I know.”

A small smile. “Including Fellhurst?”

“I think so. An unburdened soul will feel good.”

“You might go to jail.”

“I doubt it. But if I do, I do. They might hang your ass.”

Ken barks a mirthless laugh. “They should. I wanted to protect this country and ended up giving it over to some . . .” His nostrils flare. They both know what happened, and despite all that, it's hard to describe it, too.

“How's Susan?”

“She's fine. I guess. They . . . fixed her up okay. Bone implant to plug the hole at the back of her head. Healed up fine. She barely has any memory of it. But she's weird, too, sometimes. Sometimes screams in her sleep. Or says . . . things. Who knew they could rewrite the human brain like that? Even a little.”

Hollis shrugs. “What do you think the CIA used to do with LSD? Or electrostimulus? Brain's a computer, even if I don't like to think about it.”
Because
, Hollis thinks,
if the brain's a computer, we can all get hacked
. “By the way, you seen this?” Hollis takes out a photo. Hands it over to Golathan.

As he expected, Ken can't feign proper surprise. Oh, he says the
words, of course: “Sandy Molinari. Dead, huh? Shot in the back of the head? Huh. That's a shame. I hope they find what happened to her. She was a good agent.”

“You don't know anything about it?”

“Why would I?” But there's a gleam in Ken's eyes. A cruel, playful flash. Like the Devil rolling a shiny quarter over his raw, red knuckles.

“Fair enough. I'll see you, Ken. You should really get up out of that chair.”

“Go swim up your own ass, Copperfish.”

LA GUARDIA AIRPORT, NEW YORK CITY

Aleena stands in the airport. All around her data flows. Arrivals. Departures. Advertisements. Fast food places collecting credit card data. People cradling phones, Kindles, iPads. Everybody swimming in the silent, invisible current of wireless Internet. Planes take off. And land. All of it, driven by data. Pushed by complex systems protected far too simply.

Everything is connected. And all of it is vulnerable.

Aleena's own phone chirps. It's Nasir.

Hey, sis!

She types back:
How's it going, college boy?

Not yet. Soon!!!

Ugh. Too many exclamation points from that one. Still—he should be excited. Princeton's a good school. And given all that happened to them—even now, she knows her face on national television will always haunt her. Even though she's been proved innocent, she'll always be a terrorist.

But her family is safe. The pieces were pulled apart and put back together crudely, but together is together. She'll take it.

Another text comes in, this one, from Chance.

See you soon?

She texts back:

Then she pulls her ticket out of her pocket and heads to the gate.

I-70, UTAH

The Plymouth Duster races down a long stretch of Utah highway. Fading light of day paints the sides of stone arches with a bright red brush.

“I forgot to tell you,” DeAndre says. “I like the hair, homie.”

Chance raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, little longer, little shaggier. I think I like it.”

“You got that patchy hobo thing going for your face, too.”

“I'll get there. A good beard is like bonsai. You just gotta groom it.”

“Dude, I think they actually
trim
bonsai trees.” He laughs. “Aleena like it?”

“She hasn't seen it.” Chance hesitates. “This is the first time I'm seeing her since all the shit went down. I dunno what it's gonna be like. How's your mom?”

“Moms is good, man. Things are a lot better between us now that she thinks I'm, like . . . secret agent man.”

“What? You still haven't told her the truth?”

“I can't stand my mother's stare, man. I tell her the truth, she won't have to whip my ass red. She'll just
stare
at me until I'm like a little bawling bitch-baby. It's better this way. Better she thinks I'm, like . . . still working for the government. Besides, I was, kinda. It's not a
total
lie.”

On his lap is an external hard drive. Chance looks at it. “So.”

“So,” DeAndre says.

“That her?”

DeAndre offers a wicked smile.

COLUMBUS, OHIO

Reagan gives Ellie Belle a kiss.

“You gonna be good for Me-Maw?”

“I am,” the little girl says.

“And you're excited to see Grandma and Grampa, too?”

“I am.”

“And remember what I always tell you?”

“Don't take no shit from nobody.”

It sounds so awesome coming out of the little girl's mouth.

Reagan stands. Her own mother is giving her a face.
That
face. The face that says,
I am disgusted in you, you are not my daughter
.

Whatever. She shrugs. Says, “Thanks for taking her.”

“Your father's on the campaign trail and . . . well, this big house is very quiet, and—” Her mother suddenly stops. “Did you just thank me?”

“I did.”

“You don't normally do that.”

“I'm growing as a human being.”

“It sounds so weird when you put it like that.” Her mother's face looks like it's always smelling shit somewhere.

“Love you too, Mom.”

“Glad you're back in our lives, Reagan.”

Reagan gives Ellie Belle one last kiss good-bye. Then she heads out the door. She's got a sick, tight feeling in her gut. They're denying her adoption papers—her grandparents, however sweet, want custody, and right now, it looks like they're going to get it. But Reagan isn't a girl without tricks up her sleeve—one particularly
big
trick, as it turns out, thanks to DeAndre.

The other thing is the nightmares. Sometimes when she sleeps. Sometimes when she wakes. The back of her head is . . . fixed, mostly, though she can feel the ridge of scar tissue there. But the inside of her head is mixed fruit. And the nightmares that come from it are terrible, noisy things. Oppressive. She awakens feeling like . . .

Like she's not herself.

And she really likes herself, so that's jarring as hell.

Still. She'll get it straightened out.

She always does.

COLLBRAN, COLORADO

When they meet again—this time at Wade's home—it's all a lot of hugs and fist bumps, lots of small talk about travel woes, whether they came by plane or car or train. They ask Wade about his daughter, and he tries to play it cool, but he's like a kid with a cookie, he seems so happy. Reagan talks about her little girl, too—and for once she sounds like she might just have a go at being a normal person for once in her life, not some Internet troll popping everybody's balloons just because she can. Aleena and Chance capture stolen glances between each other but nothing more.

Eventually, though, all eyes turn to DeAndre.

“You brought her?” Wade asks.

DeAndre holds up the SSD drive. “You bet your ass I did.”

Typhon. Captured in transit before she could back up to wherever it was she was going. DeAndre wrote quick code that used the data
from the boogeyman's head as bait—like calls to like and all that. An act that worked doubly well because, as it turns out, that creepy dude was once the husband of Leslie Cilicia-Ceto. DeAndre compared it to
Ghostbusters
—said it was like opening a trap underneath a monster and sucking it down into the box. Now, she's theirs. He tells them he's done some tests. Run her through her paces. She's under their control now. Only has about 10 percent of her original power, but hell, that was once a lot of power. And while none of the original minds are still feeding her, she's still got image maps—same way you take an image of a hard drive's contents—of almost three dozen human minds in there.

“Time to go to work?” Aleena asks.

“Hackers gonna hack,” Reagan says.