ZerOes (35 page)

ROYAL, KANSAS

T
he driveway is long. The Tesla bounds across wheel ruts, great exhalations of dust gusting behind the vehicle, blowing into the wheat and the corn.

In the distance, the small, cornflower-blue house grows larger. This is the home of Calvin Eames Brockaway and Nellie Anna Brockaway (once Brigham). Three living children. One miscarriage that almost resulted in the death of the mother. No debt. They live almost entirely off the grid in a house that belonged to Calvin's father, Charles Brockaway. Their only accounts are those that link them to the farming community so that they can buy and sell crops, livestock, equipment.

Nellie has a birthmark on the inside of her left thigh.

Calvin was in the National Guard.

Lucy is a gifted student.

Anna, the middle child, is mildly dyslexic.

The youngest, Darla, is allergic to bees.

The Compiler knows all. He knows all because Typhon knows all, and he is plugged into Typhon. Typhon: his mind, mistress, his maker, his goddess, his
world
. He can
feel
her expanding. It's like watching
the universe create itself—pushing beyond the known boundaries of everything that ever was. Urging forward, a tumble of new cells, a tide of brain development. Slowly, Typhon intrudes upon everything. Stock market. Satellites. Seismological data. Every home Internet provider. In this country, there exists nothing that she cannot invade: nuclear power, hospitals, the electrical grid, weapons systems.

She speaks to him now.
I see you
, she says. The greatest affirmation of his existence that she can offer him.

“I'm here,” he says. He knows he doesn't have to speak aloud for her to hear, but he finds it comforting somehow. “Everything is quiet.” And it is. The house sits still. A faint wind ripples through the oak tree in the front yard. A windmill squeaks and turns. Birds—he identifies them as purple finches—chase each other from tree to tree, to the power lines and back again.

Satellites are repointing to your location. Looking at historical data
.

“Thank you.”

I love you
, she says. She says a name, too, but he ignores it—he cannot think of himself as that, as being a
person
with a
name
. He has cast that part of himself away, into the ocean that is Typhon. Just as she has given her name. Just as all the others—all the minds he can see out there in the synaptic network, all the sparks of light along the threads and strings—have. He is part of her. She is part of everything.

He goes and knocks on the door.

Inside, footsteps. Heavy ones. The door squeaks open by a few inches. A big man stares out. Beard the color of dirty pennies. “Help you?”

The Compiler assesses the situation. He hears a squeaking floorboard behind the man. Another person. An adult, by the sound. He can barely see the man, but the way he's leaning suggests he's hiding something. A weapon. Probably a gun. The Brockaway family is known to be distrustful of government. Further, they are known to be part of a group known as “doomsday preppers,” which means they likely possess the known traits of that type: paranoia, antiestablishment leanings, firearm ownership.

The Compiler moves quickly. He shoves the door inward. A gun goes off behind it—a hole appears in the wood of the door, the bullet missing the Compiler by a wide margin.

The man staggers back. Behind him, the woman, Nellie, is bringing up a shotgun. Double barrel. Not an antique. Flash assessment: Mossberg
Silver Reserve, twelve gauge, $693 right now at Walmart. Goes for less than that on gun forums. A fairly light gun—under seven pounds.

The Compiler turns away, leans his body against the outer wall of the house. The shotgun takes a chunk out of the doorframe. Splinters and pellets pepper the Compiler's cheek and neck. He ignores the pain. No time to think about that now.

He wheels back in, his Ruger raised. The woman's head snaps back as he puts a round through it. The shotgun clatters.

Calvin Brockaway screams, brings up the pistol he'd been hiding behind the door (assessment: .357 Magnum, revolver, Smith & Wesson). The Compiler makes a fast calculation, then kicks out with a boot. His foot connects with the door, which rebounds off the wall and jams into the bearded man's shoulder. The gun goes off. The shot goes wide. The Compiler fires his own weapon. The .357 hops out of the man's hand like a burning coal.

Calvin roars, leaps forward. The Compiler catches him and uses his momentum to throw him off the front steps. The man lands hard on his arm. The elbow pivots and cracks. By the sound of it, compound fracture. Bone out of skin.

The Compiler steps forward. Finds that his evaluation is correct. The man's arm is twisted at an off angle. A sharp spear of bone pokes through. That will make things more difficult.

“I need to know where they are,” the Compiler says.

“Nellie,” the man says, an animal's wail. “
Nellie
, oh God, God, no.”

The Compiler backhands him.

The man's eyes focus. Then they go narrow with rage. “You monster. You're
all
monsters.”

The Compiler reaches down with a gloved hand. He closes it on the man's throat. Finds his pulse. “Sleep now. We have work to do.”

An hour later, the woman in the hallway is fly food. They gather at the hole in her forehead like animals drinking at a vernal pool.

The man, Calvin, sits at the breakfast table. His mouth hangs slack, occasionally issuing forth a gassy whisper or mushy moan. Once in a while a fly lands in that mouth, finds it wanting, and heads back to the true prize—the red crater, the spilled brains.

A long cable connects the Compiler to Calvin. The cable extends out from the base of the Compiler's neck, pulled taut from a small metal-ringed port there. (The flesh around it is still red, irritable: this is a new upgrade.)

The cable ends in what looks like a little metal starfish. That five-fingered claw is dug into the center of Calvin's forehead. Along the cable travels the contents of Calvin's mind. His brain is a computer. All brains are. They merely need to be accessed.

There's no time to pull it all. The Compiler is but one node on this network—he is a receiver of Typhon's might, not a contributor to it, and his bandwidth is not strong. It would take a very long time to break down Calvin's thoughts and memories and pull them into his own (so that Typhon may have them, of course). So now it's a matter of selective search and procure.

The location of the three little girls who lived here is easily solved, because their presence is at the top of Calvin's mind. They're at a neighbor's house—and because this is Kansas, that neighbor is some five miles down the road. The Compiler decides in that moment that the girls may live for now, because they pose no danger to Typhon. (Though Typhon returns the thought and places a special flag on the eldest, Lucy.
She is truly gifted, that one. Perhaps one day she will contribute
. Ironic, then, that it was that same girl who so foolishly spoke on the phone about Wade Earthman and the others.)

The more important data inside the man is that on the pod of escaped hackers. Typhon wants them found. They
are
a danger. They were capable enough to give Typhon her freedom. That suggests they are also capable enough to destroy her. The probability is so small that it is almost a footnote not worth including, but Typhon has decided that all the bumps must be made smooth: rogue nails hammered flat into the wood of the casket.

Every time the Compiler blinks, he receives a pulse of memory from Calvin Brockaway. Memories of his wedding. Of his father teaching him to milk a cow. Of an early car accident as a youth. The miscarriage of a son—a son Brockaway wanted very badly.

Then, he has it. Near Silverton, Colorado. They left three hours ago.

It's eleven hours to Silverton, assuming a direct route. Which it's safe to say they did not take.

The satellites will make short work of this. The Compiler closes his
eyes. Turns his mind away from downloading and reverses the channel. Typhon uploads a part of herself—just a seed, a little digital wisp floating on the wind—into Brockaway's brain.

Once done, the Compiler unhooks the cable and feeds it back into the port at the base of his neck. Brockaway's eyes snap open.

“And the gods did flee,” Brockaway says.

The Compiler nods and leaves.

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, UTAH

T
wo men stand behind one-way reflective glass. One of the men is small, older, looking fresh from the 1950s with his horn-rimmed glasses and crisp black suit and pomade-slick dark hair gone gray at the Lego-block sideburns. The other is a barrel-chested, thick-gutted man in a rumpled, dandruff-at-the-shoulders army service uniform.

The first man is CIA officer Stan Karsch, of the Office of Terrorism Analysis. The second man is Lieutenant Colonel David Hempstead.

They are watching a third man through the glass. The third man is drone analyst Ritchie Shore.

Ritchie sits at a desk in a darkened room. In front of him is a bank of screens. Each screen shows a different camera feed, sometimes with HUD information—longitude, latitude, speed, altitude, and various other plotted lines and target reticules. Sometimes a screen pulses red or green, at which point Shore stands, taps the touch screen, scans for information, writes something down in a logbook, then sits back down. Sometimes he gives new instructions to the pilots on the other end—pilots who sit around the world in climate-controlled trailers or bunkers, flying their UAVs.

“Death TV, they call it,” Hempstead says.

“I heard,” Stan answers. “Though this looks a little less exciting than that.”

Hempstead sniffs. “It is. And that's one of the issues we have—not PTSD like the media reports, but out-and-out boredom.”

“You hear about Iran?”

“The thing at Tochal.”

“Mm. Iranian drone took out its own scientists.”

“Iranians can be ruthless.”

Stan runs a thumb along his own jawline. Finds a tiny patch there of stubble—it bothers him, this small patch of disorder on an otherwise well-ordered, clean-shorn face. “Iranians aren't that ruthless. They lost a lot. Rumor was, someone hacked the drone.”

“I heard that rumor. I also heard it was us.”

“Well. Not
us
-us. Not you, either.”

“Who, then? NSA?”

Stan shrugs. “It's a guess.”

“Ours aren't hackable. Iran's a dirt planet. Mud merchants. Probably got those things hooked up to an Atari 2600 in a goatherd's shack.”

“Iran is a sophisticated, surprisingly Western country. Don't be a bigot.” Stan hears his own tone: sharp, too sharp. He smiles. “How's the wife and family, David?”

“Mickey had a breast cancer scare last week.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yeah. Turned out to be plasma cell mastitis. Benign. Nothing serious.”

“Good, good. And the kids?”

“Davy Jr. is at Fort Rucker. Staff sergeant. Laurie is a perpetual student, back at school for her doctorate in some kind of history or anthropology, which I'm sure will come in useful precisely nowhere. And Georgina, well. Last I heard she ran off with a professional skateboarder—which is apparently a thing—and she's in Australia protesting the destruction of the reef. Which probably means she's on the beach and this is basically a vacation I'm sure I'll end up paying for.”

“Families are complicated,” Stan says.

“How's yours?”

“They're fine.” No reason to talk about the divorce or the fact that his children don't speak to him and he doesn't like them, anyway. “Surveillance on these drones has been upgraded?”

“Gorgon Stare, next wave. Which incorporates Argus.”

“Meaning each drone goes from one eye to many.”

“Like a fly's eye, that's right. Multiple video feeds and analysis out of a single drone. A single analyst will no longer be able to handle the input of data coming off two drones, much less twenty. The tech is upgraded, but our staffing needs?” He sighs. “Still. This is a good step, this allows us to—”

Beyond the window, Ritchie stands up—a panicked motion like a prairie dog hopping up at its hole. Stan and David give each other looks.

Ritchie goes to one of the screens, pulls it up. He looks left, looks right, almost like he's afraid he's being somehow pranked. He grabs a red phone at the far end of the desk. David moves to the door next to the one-way window, Stan behind him, and opens it.

“Oh,” Ritchie says, looking at them, then the phone, then the door. Like he's figuring out they were watching him. “We have a problem. A big problem.”

“Son, calm down. Just tell me what's going on.”

“See this screen?” Ritchie says. He points to a screen—a drone camera pointed at the ground beneath it. Green treetops blurring past. Mountain peaks. Stan sees the longitude and latitude. He's good with maps. Has to be, in his job. These aren't international coordinates. Ritchie confirms, says: “This is the United States.”

The lieutenant colonel leans in. “Well, that's all right, Ritchie, sometimes we do test flights here of UAVs, it's not—” But he squints, catching something. “That's a Reaper, isn't it?”

Ritchie swallows hard. “It is. And it has no pilot. It's armed. It has a target.”

Stan feels the air in the room go electric with tension. “A target?” David asks. “Where?”

“A set of coordinates in the San Juan Mountains. Just outside of Silverton. There's nothing there, just a small concrete outbuilding . . .”

David asks: “And we can't get control of it?”

“No,” Ritchie says.

“Who's flying it?”

“I don't know, sir. It looks like it's on autopilot.”

“We need to shoot it out of the sky.”

Ritchie gives a sharp shake of his head. “It's too late. Two minutes to target. Nothing can get there fast enough to stop it.”

Stan jumps in: “Where did this drone come from?”

“That's the thing,” Ritchie says, ghost faced. “It came from here. We launched it from our own airstrip.”

“Aw
shit
,” David says.

On the screen, the camera flips over. Front-facing. They see the bunker in question—looks like an old mine building, actually. The camera shows heat signatures inside. Colored blobs shifting near the entrance, then disappearing inside.

“There are people there,” Ritchie says.

Already Stan is puzzling over how they'll cover this up. Or will they? Any way to spin it? The drones here are shared between the army and the CIA. This falls on both their heads. Maybe sell out the army. Claim incompetence on their end. Or maybe they claim it
was
hacked. That threat could put more money in the pipeline for stronger standards and more staff. But it could also destabilize public trust in the drone program.

On-screen, the targeting reticule pops up. Jerks and hops around the screen until it finds the bunker.
Click. Click. Click
. Three levels of magnification.

And then: a plume trail from a launched missile. A Sidewinder.

The missile is fast. One minute, it unmoors from the drone. The next minute the mine building is gone in a flash of white.

The Reaper accepts a new set of coordinates. “It's coming home,” Ritchie says, his voice quiet.