ZerOes (24 page)

KEN GOLATHAN'S HOUSE, TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA

K
en sleeps like a corpse. He always has. No matter what's going on, when he crashes out, he crashes out hard. He sleeps only four hours a night, but during those four hours you need to hit him with a tire iron to wake him up. Back when they first started dating, Susan had a trick: she'd drape a wet washcloth over his face. Eyes, mouth, nose. He'd wake up in a snap.

She takes a little pleasure in pretending she invented waterboarding.

It's her that wakes him now from sleep. Shaking him so hard that when he lurches upright he's pretty sure the world is ending.

He wakes up. Sees Lucas lying there between him and his wife. Hisses in the darkness: “Why is he here? Thought we were making him stay in his own room for once?”

But Susan doesn't answer. All she does is wave his cell phone around. “Your phone's been ringing.”

“It's on silent.”

“It
vibrates
.”

“Fine, Jesus, all right.” He grabs the phone and heads into the bathroom.
Flips on the lights, sits on the toilet—just the seat, he doesn't have to go or anything—and answers the call.

“Whoever this is,” Ken says, “it better be important because you ticked off my wife and that means I have to hunt you down and beat you to death with my own—”

Leslie's voice interrupts him. “It's almost time,” she says.

“Time for what?”

“The Hunting Lodge to close up.”

“You said three weeks. It hasn't even been one whole week.”

A pause. “My calculations were off. Your people have been exceedingly unpredictable.”

“My people?” He snorts, then stands to fill a glass of water. “They're not my people, Leslie. I was against this all along. Typhon picked these miscreants.” His mouth is tacky with spit and sleep.

“Signs show that the penetration test is almost complete. Typhon's vulnerabilities have been uncovered. The program can be shut down.”

“Hold on a minute,” Ken says. “The Lodge is fruitful. I've been thinking it over—it fucking works. No more of this bullshit of securing hacker assets and having them play in the wild. That always ends poorly for us. Keeping them in one location was brilliant, Leslie. Kudos to you.”

“They're dangerous when together.”

“They're dangerous because you wanted them to have a long leash. Soon as this phase is over, we can tighten things up. Last week we had one pod out this Pakistani hacker cell. Some jokers calling themselves the Cyber-Leets—they'd been hacking banks and other American retailers. The Paki government caught 'em, and thanks to their completely inflexible laws on the matter, the hackers have already been sentenced to death. They're off the table. America is safe.”

“The program needs terminating, Ken. If your hackers talk about Typhon—”

“They won't talk. They think when their time is over they'll go home, but they won't. They'll go to jail. Reduced sentences, maybe, for their good work—so that way, if they spill their guts, their deal goes to shit. It's fine.”

“The program needs terminating,” she says again, her voice colder, deader. “The
hackers
must be terminated as well.”

He laughs. “Terminated? Like—”

“The Pakistani government has the correct idea.”

She's kidding, right? “You're kidding.”

Silence.

She's not kidding.

“This conversation is over, Leslie. You're a defense contractor. You don't make demands of the American government. You don't make demands of the
NSA
. You work for us, we don't work for you.”

“You're making a mistake, Ken.”

“Sweet dreams, Leslie. Oh, and don't forget—I still want that site visit.” He ends the call before she can say anything else.

THE LODGE

T
oday's the day
, Aleena thinks. Guilt chases her like a yappy dog. Guilt over how she still distrusts Chance. Guilt over what they're about to do to a sovereign nation. Guilt over who she's become here: a compromised person.

But today's the last day of this assignment.

And today, she thinks, they're going to find out just what Typhon is.

Today's the day
, Chance thinks, standing in the cabin shower. Soap in his eyes suddenly freaks him out—it's like being back in the Dep again.
Get shut of that, dude. You gotta pack that kind of fear in a suitcase, stick it on a plane, let it fly away without you
. Time to keep it together. Today's the day his pod does what it does: which is, make him look a whole lot better than he really is.
Game face on
, he thinks.
It's time
.

Today's the day
, DeAndre thinks, shoving a forkful of cold eggs in his mouth. Everyone's quiet here in the morning—his kind don't like to be up early. And last night he didn't sleep, and neither did most of his pod pals. It's evident on their faces.

He's scared. He doesn't know why. Something's eating at him. Feels like he should just be doing his work and not ripping off Band-Aids and picking scabs, but all this shit about Typhon and that list of thirteen names, it's got him worked up. It's got him
curious
. Nothing good has ever come from DeAndre getting curious. He remembers when he thought to himself,
Just keep your head down, man, and do your time
. That thought has passed.

Today's the day
, Wade thinks. He feels electrically charged. Alive and awake in a way he hasn't felt in a long time. He keeps seeing Siobhan's face. Then Rebecca's. He has pictures of her from fairly recently. Off her Facebook and Twitter. From Siobhan's e-mail account. He thinks he's gonna find out what happened to her. He has no gods, but he prays to them just the same that she's okay. Whoever hurt her is gonna suffer. If the United States government was involved he's gonna tear the whole thing down, pillar by pillar. He's gonna stick his thumb right in that creepy eye at the top of the pyramid.

Today's the day
, Reagan thinks, and inside she's a tornado of glass and razors, a rain of piss and tears, a storm of lightning and a plague of locusts. Outside, she's stone-faced, ready to play, ready to kick and punch and bite. In the dark of her mind, louder when she blinks, she hears a baby crying. She hears her baby crying. She throws her whole plate in the trash. It's time.

UNDERNEATH MOUNT TOCHAL, IRAN

B
ahram plays Dungeons & Dragons with a robot.

The robot is just a housing unit, really—an extension of the artificial intelligence Verethragna. It is far from sophisticated, mechanically: certainly not as capable as the Japanese ASIMO or the Iranians' own Surena III. It cannot walk, for example. Though it has some movement, of course: the camera that comprises its head has a dozen degrees of freedom; its arms are herky-jerky but can move chess pieces—or, in this case, roll a cup of polyhedral dice.

“The kobolds attack,” Bahram says. He leans forward on his chair, scooting it forward a little so he can look at the battle map in front of them. Miniatures of various fantasy figures populate the octagons of the map. The AI's own miniature is a simple fighter—anything more complex than that seems to occasionally bewilder it.

Beyond the table is Bahram's computer, on an old metal desk left over from the military base that this used to be. Behind all of it is a window—and past the window are banks of servers. Servers that help power this robot and, more important, the machine intelligence that controls it. A few other programmers and scientists work in that
room—some mill about, others hunker down next to screens showing pages of code. Not one of them is a nuclear scientist.

This base—many floors, hundreds of feet below the surface of the mountain—has indeed been repurposed to process and enrich uranium. Not for weapons, but truly, for energy. The only weapon that matters is the one that hides in the middle of it all. The only weapon is right here before him.

Bahram takes a twenty-sided die—a d20—and rolls it. It shows up as 20. A natural 20.

“Could. Be. Critical hit,”
says Verethragna, in hitching Farsi.
“Exceeds Armor Class . . . automatically.”

“Which means what?”

“That means you. Roll again.”

He nods. The AI is correct—though this in and of itself is neither interesting nor particularly special. The intelligence taught itself to play, but ultimately it's just memorizing rules and regurgitating them when the utility calls for it. It's a fancier version of remembering that two plus two equals four.

Bahram rolls the d20 again: another hit. Which means—

“Critical. Hit
.
”

“That's right.” He rolls for damage not once, but twice. He performs all the proper multipliers and adds in all the weapon and situational bonuses and—

The robot shudders suddenly, as if struck.
“The kobolds. Come up on both sides of me, heroic warrior. Rustam. Their forest axes. Sink deep into my ribs. I am felled. To my knees.”
The robot shudders again. Then, with its extensor hand, gently knocks over its own miniature.

Bahram blinks, then laughs.
That
is interesting. This isn't just regurgitating rules. This is contextualizing those rules into story. Into
narrative
.

Behind him footsteps sound. Bahram wheels around in his chair, sees Mahdi walking past. He catches Mahdi by the elbow. “Mahdi, look.
Look
.” He gestures excitedly toward the robot, toward the table.

Mahdi—handsome Mahdi, Mahdi with the chiseled features, Mahdi with the dark smoky eyes underneath the vaulted-arch eyebrows—waves it off. “No time. I'm going to go hiking. Weather's hot, but not too hot.” He sighs. “Wish it were winter. How great would it be if the ski slopes were open?” Then he looks down at Bahram—not a cruel stare, but a dismissive one. “I bet you don't ski.”

Bahram stands. “I don't—you know I don't. My leg, it's stiff.” Car accident when he was younger. Tehran. Soccer in the street—delivery van backed into him. “But listen, Mahdi, this is a breakthrough, a
major
breakthrough—”

“And it'll be here when I get back from the hike.” Mahdi musses his hair like he's a child, then heads to the elevator. Mahdi. Looking so Western. He's a brilliant mind but refuses to apply it. So selfish. Fine. If he doesn't want to know—

Bahram leaps to his desk and reaches over it, banging on the window. Some of the others in the room look over. Fat Jamshad looks up from a server rack, food still in his beard. Next to him, Minoo in her loosely worn (
too
loosely worn, Bahram thinks) hijab gives a quizzical glance. He yells through the glass, but of course they can't hear him, and none of them makes much of an effort to—so he heads to the door, opens it up.

“Everyone! Come see. We've had a breakthrough, a major—”

Click
. The overhead lights go dark.

Bahram looks around as his eyes adjust. The lights from the server rack are still working. Reds, greens. Some blues and whites. Which means the power isn't off. The generators haven't turned on, and his computer is still on, though the monitor is momentarily dark. Did a fuse blow?

Then a high-pitched feedback shriek fills the air. It comes from the computer speaker, from Verethragna's speaker, and worse, from the old audio system installed throughout the base. Bahram winces, covers his ears, tries to yell over it.

The feedback dissolves and then a loud guitar chord plays. Then another. And another after that. A thundering drumbeat starts up. Makes Bahram feel like his heart is stuttering in his chest along with the staggering, stampeding beat. He knows this sound—it's rock, it's
metal
, like Angband or Arsames, the kind of music Mahdi listens to. Is this a prank? A prank by Mahdi? It would figure! But then the music plays and he hears English spoken—Quiet Riot. “Cum On Feel the Noize.”

The lights begin to flicker and strobe, moving in time with the music. Through the strobe, Bahram sees Jamshad with his hands clamped over his cauliflower ears, and Minoo just stands there, arms crossed, scowling at everything—as if she were not a young woman but a mother disgusted with the behavior of her children.

Bahram's monitor pops on. A cartoon figure—Bart Simpson, that cheeky little brat with the zigzag hair—appears on his screen. A still-cap of him with his pants hauled down, his yellow buttocks revealed. The Simpsons have been banned here, so who would—?

Bart Simpson disappears. A movie appears in his place. Two women. One with a . . .
no, no, no
. That's not—no. She's got a strap around her waist and she's behind another woman, a woman bent over a couch, and the hard rock song suddenly dissolves into pornographic sounds—women moaning, wet squishing, skin slapping. Then that breaks apart, too, into loud industrial noises, then sharp beeps and shrill tones, then static, all of it so loud his ears ring.

He hurries over to the computer. Tries to turn off the movie. It begins to flicker like a slide show on fast-forward—glimpses of scenes he doesn't understand. An American cowboy riding a missile. A Jewish-looking man in an orange wig and a sparkly red dress. Pigs rutting. Some American celebrity woman getting out of a limousine and showing off her—Bahram squints, winces, certain he just saw her private parts. He moves the mouse, taps the keys, but nothing stops any of this. He tries to turn the power off, but it doesn't do anything, so he has to rip the power cable out of the back—

But his computer isn't a server. Turning it off doesn't really matter. He sees the same slide show playing in the other rooms. Cartoons. Pornography. Horror films.

It's then he realizes:
We've been hacked
.

This isn't just a prank. This is something far worse.