ZerOes (36 page)

TEN MILES FROM RIVERTON, WYOMING

T
he swaying red and purple grasses, tinged with the light of sundown, make the plains look like they're on fire. Above them, the sky stretches out. In one direction there's a copse of trees. In another a line of hills. Everything else is wide open, flat, and infinite. It's beautiful.

DeAndre hates it. It's weird. It makes him feel small. Insignificant, somehow. He's been feeling it more and more—especially at night. Wide open dark nowhere of a sky painted with stars.

Doesn't help that not too far away is a blue flag flapping on a flagpole, and on it is a white bison. Inside the bison looks to be some kind of state seal or something, and inside
that
is what looks like three white dudes standing below a banner that says
EQUAL RIGHTS
. Because nothing says equal rights like three white dudes, right?

“This isn't my kinda place,” DeAndre says.

Aleena stands next to him. “Me neither. Back in New York, I could walk five minutes in any direction and get food from a dozen different countries. I walk five minutes in any direction
here
and I'll probably be killed and eaten by a mountain lion.”

“I guess out here, we
are
the food.”

“I could use a bagel. Across the street from my apartment, they had the best bagels in the city.”

“Thought bagels were a Jewish thing.”

“They are, kinda. But, uhh, anybody's allowed to eat them.”

“No, no, I know, it's just—you know, I thought . . .”

“Because I have Syrian heritage I hate the Jews?”

“When you put it like that, I'm pretty sure I'm a dumb-ass.”

“I don't hate Jews. My best friend in high school was Jewish. I love bagels. And pad Thai. And good pizza. And bad pizza.”

DeAndre suddenly feels stupid. It's this place, he thinks. It's putting him off-kilter.

Behind them he hears the sound of stones popping and crackling under tires.

“I think it's time,” she says.

The woman who steps out of the old pickup truck moves her wide hips with swagger. Strong arms sling a rifle over her shoulder, and there's a lot of attitude in that small movement—her pursed lips, those black cherry eyes, her chin thrust up and out. All of it adds up to say,
I don't give a fuck now, so don't give me a reason to start
.

Wade gets out from the other side of the pickup truck. Chance hops out of the back with Reagan. Both of those two carry brown paper bags. Big ones, like grocery store bags.

“I don't think everyone's been formally introduced,” Wade says. “This is Rosa.”

The woman tips her cowboy hat. “
Hola
, freak shows.”

“This is home now for the foreseeable future,” Wade says. He jerks a thumb behind him, points to the double-wide trailer and the rickety-ass cabin across from it. There's a corrugated metal shed, too, that has a sleepy stoner lean to it. “Rosa here lives about twenty minutes up the road at her cattle ranch. She's our liaison to the outside world. She's it. No contact with anyone else. You need something, it goes through Rosa.”

“How can we trust her?” DeAndre asks.

Rosa's face twists into a wicked grin. “I used to run drugs from
Colombia—I started out as a mule as a teen girl, hiding it in places you don't want to think about. Then I got my own crew. I did it all. Trucks across the border. A helicopter off the coast. A drug-sub—which is the scariest experience of my
life
. We got caught. The government killed my crew. I escaped with a bullet in my thigh. I'm a wanted woman. I sell you out, I sell me out. I don't want the
policía
anywhere near this place.” Her smirk flips to a sneer. “In fact, you being here makes me more than a little
nerviosa
. But I know Wade, and this is his place. I trust him. So I trust you. I don't care if you trust me.”

“No phones,” Wade says. “I've got one computer and it is not hooked up to the Internet or a phone line. Want contact with the outside world? You can't get it. Not until we figure out what we're doing.”

“This is fucked,” Reagan says. “I know we're on the lam, but c'mon. If there's one thing we know, the United States government is not that smart. Just using the Internet is not going to bring down the hammer.”

Rosa steps over. From her back pocket, she pulls out a big cell phone—so big it almost looks like a small tablet computer. She wipes a little dust and pocket fuzz off it, unlocks it with an eight-digit code, then flips to something before handing it to Reagan.

Curiosity gives DeAndre a little shove, and he steps over, takes a look.

Reagan asks: “What is this?”

In the photo, a smoldering crater in what looks like the mountains. The skeletal shell of a concrete bunker. It's a little blurry—shot looks snapped from a long distance. Like from a telephoto lens.

“That's Silverton, Colorado,” Wade says. “That's where I told Cal we were headed. Just in case. Which means he or his home or even his whole family have been compromised. You understand? They're looking for us. And they're prepared to point a goddamn missile at us to shut us up.”

All the hackers share looks. DeAndre registers their discomfort. No, bigger than that: it's fear he's seeing. The realization of the situation hits him hard, and it seems to be hitting them, too.

“Is Cal dead?” Chance asks. “His wife? His little
girls
?”

Rosa answers without hesitation: “We don't know. We'll try to find out, but we'll need time—can't just send somebody over there. Everything you do now has gotta be slow. Cautious. Like you're tiptoeing through a dark room filled with rattlesnakes and coyote traps.”

“We got running water,” Wade says. “We got solar panels and a
generator. Got food for now, and Rosa's gonna bring us over some chickens for eggs and meat and some produce from her garden.”

“Chickens,” DeAndre mutters. “Guess we're all farmers now.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Wade says. “We also have guns, just in case.”

Another moment of uncomfortable silence. DeAndre moves fast from picturing himself scattering seeds in front of chickens to himself in some kind of shootout with hick-town Wyoming police. Wade's right. He prefers the chickens.

Reagan says, “How long are we expecting to bunk here? Because, uhh, I don't want to live in this hippie farm cult compound bullshit for the rest of my life.”

“Till we can figure out a plan,” Wade says. “We'll sit down tonight over dinner.”

Reagan's head cranes back on her neck and she stares at the wine-stain sky.
“Awesome,”
she says, the word as much a moan as it is anything. Her head snaps back, eyes wide, smile manic. “Hey, can we start our own crazy religion out here?”

APSI, TYPHON PROJECT LABS

T
he elevator slides down through sublevels. It's all black glass in here—no buttons. Everything one big touch screen. When he was a teen, Golathan used to watch that show
Knight Rider
—the one with the robotic car that could talk, K.I.T.T., which stood for something, though now he can't remember what. Had that red light in the front, the one that glowed back and forth whenever K.I.T.T. spoke. It only just now occurs to him that it was the same look the Cylons had from
Battlestar Galactica
—the first one, late seventies. He watched that too.

The elevator reminds him of all of that. Black glass. Bit of chrome. Red lights sliding back and forth. He looks over at Sandy. She looks pale. “You all right?”

“Good.”

“You're the color of Elmer's glue.”

“I don't like enclosed spaces.”

He frowns. “Claustrophobic?”

“I guess.”

The elevator dings. “Ride's over,” he says.

The doors slide open without a sound.

There's no one here. White floors. Half-moon desk surrounded by glass frosted to be the color of seafoam, shaped into smooth, almost lusty curves. Above their heads shiny ball bearings hang from barely there wire, all at different heights—it's only when Golathan steps in and under that he sees they're meant as a kind of art piece, a sculpture. He's not sure what it looks like. A bird, maybe. A hand. He can't tell.

They stand perfectly still. The bright lights of the room gleaming. “Hello?” he yells. He's got an acid feeling in his gut.

None of this feels right. It didn't feel right getting into the city and having to wait overnight. It didn't feel right being directed to a door under a construction overhang, a door that led to a dingy, water-stained hallway. A hallway that in turn led to an elevator. This isn't the address he had for APSI. This is somewhere else. This is some
thing
else.

From off to the side, a faint
click-whir
. “Ken,” Sandy says, in some alarm.

Off to the right, one of the white wall panels slides up—only two inches or so, leaving a dark gap. Big enough for a mouse, maybe a rat. He looks at Sandy. She shrugs.

Then: a sound. Not unlike roller skates on a rink floor. Ball bearings begin to roll out—dozens of them at first, but they keep coming, rolling as if of their own volition, sliding forward, then sideways, until hundreds of the damn things are moving toward them. Ken reaches out, pulls Sandy back toward him, takes a few steps in reverse toward the elevator.

The little shiny spheres separate into two streams, parting like Moses with the Red Sea, forming up on both sides of them. Then they stop moving. They sit, perfectly still.

“This is fucking goofy,” Ken says.

Sandy's hand drifts to the gun at her hip.

Ken grunts. Kneels down, picks one of the spheres up between thumb and forefinger. Marble size, but not entirely smooth. It's got a little trench circumnavigating the sphere. Two little divots on each side. Suddenly, the damn thing flies from his hand and lands back with the others, making a
click-clack
sound.

He stands back up. “That's creepy.”

But nowhere near as creepy as what happens next. A few of the spheres roll atop other spheres. Stacking two high. Then another on
top of that, until some of them stand three spheres tall. The spheres sit like that for a while, as if forming some code, some cipher that demands to be translated by a mind smarter than what Ken has to offer—he doesn't do well with this sort of puzzle; he does well only with the puzzle that is the human animal. He's a social creature, not an intellectual one.

Then all the spheres begin to move. With a loud clatter, they form one atop the other, climbing each other impossibly, as if magnetized.

Sandy gasps as they grow tall, forming a massive serpent—a dragon's head and neck shifting and writhing. And then they re-form, reconfigure, rolling over one another like water until they form something altogether more . . . human shaped. Long arms, too long, too thin. A narrow head. Legs that are thin at the thighs but thicken to stumps beneath the knees. The face, if it can be called that, is a shining space of metal spheres. Ken's father used to be a beekeeper, and sometimes he'd pull out the trays, let little Ken see the field of little honeybees thrust up in the air, squirming. This reminds him of that. The visage subtly shifting. Like a hive of insects.

Ken looks to Sandy, gives her a shrug. He turns back toward the shifting visage and says with as much venom and false bravado as he can muster: “What
are
you?”

The face flashes with pale light as the spheres light up. Glowing circles form the eyes. A shaky illuminated line becomes the mouth. It says: “Hello, Ken.” The sound comes from not just one of those little spheres, but from many of them all at once—and they're just
subtly
out of sync. Those two words, said again and again, a hundred tiny, tinny echoes. But the thing that's most disconcerting? It speaks with the voice of Leslie Cilicia-Ceto.

“The hell am I looking at, Leslie?” He feels his heart hammering in his chest. His palms are slick with fear-sweat. “Where are you?”
What are you?

“I'm in the back. I've sent this proxy to accompany you.” The human-shaped mass of spheres pivots—spheres clicking as they slide together, en masse—and begins a herky-jerky walk away from them. Like a marionette on invisible strings.

“I guess we go,” Sandy says.

“Yeah,” Ken says. “I guess we do.”

They follow the clicky-clicky humanoid
thing
down a long hallway, passing office after office, all of which have been abandoned. Wisps of cobwebs dangle from air vents. But where the desks are empty of people they are not empty of people's
things
—pictures, knickknacks, little toys, word-of-the-day calendars. Ken spies a McDonald's cup, soaked through at the bottom, sitting in a sticky puddle of what looks like old Coca-Cola. In another office, a Styrofoam take-out container of what looks like lo mein. The noodles pour over the side like a waterfall of worms, fuzzy mold growing off the top of it.

Ahead of them, Leslie speaks again through the “proxy.” “This body is a hive,” she says, her tinny voice warbling. “A collection of smaller robots capable of forming together into a larger mass for coordinated efforts. Independently patterned after ant colonies, beehives, flocks of starlings. Designed by students at Harvard. We bought them.”

“The designs?” Sandy asks.

But the proxy says no more.

It moves to a door at the back that does not match the others. This door is steel reinforced. Heavy hinges. A panel by the side contains a small hole no bigger than the circumference of Ken's thumb.

“We are here,” Leslie says.

The proxy shoves its handless arm against the panel. One by one, its spheres disappear through the hole, faster and faster, vacuumed through until the proxy is no more. Ken and Sandy are alone.

From the other side there is a
clang
, followed by a
hiss
, and the door drifts open. Lights click on.

“Welcome to Typhon,” the proxy says, standing there before them. Then it breaks apart, dissolving like a sand castle against a hard wave, the spheres that comprised its form vanishing again through the hole in the wall.

Ken looks around: They're in a massive room. Easily several thousand square feet. Enough to park a fleet of cars or trucks.

Bodies hang, naked. A dozen or more, dangling from the ceiling. Ken thinks: corpses, they're all corpses, gray-faced human carcasses hanging here like meat in a butcher's freezer. But when he looks more closely he sees that the bodies are
wired up
. Cables descend from the ceiling, plugged into a skeletal metal framework that is then screwed into their skulls—rivets through jaws, bolts affixed to temples. The people are connected. To what? And why?

Then he realizes: Some of what he's seeing isn't wires at all. That's an IV in an arm. Tube leading to something behind each body. On the side of each body dangles a gray bag, like for medical waste. That, too, has a tube—this one thicker, grimier, leading to the ceiling. These bodies aren't dead, are they? They're being fed. They're
excreting
.

All around is a constant humming. In the floor. In the walls. Golathan can feel it in his feet. He can feel it in his
teeth
. “Jesus,” he says. “Jesus, God. What . . . what is this?”

Behind him, Sandy makes a mewling, horror-struck sound.

From the midst of the bodies, a mechanism emerges. It hangs on a track, a jointed metal limb that dead-ends in a sphere—this sphere much larger than the tiny metal ones, larger than Ken's own head. This
machine
slides through the bodies like some creature exiting its own abattoir.

The sphere flashes, goes pale, translucent. A face grows. Not a video. Not an image. An actual face with texture and shape and dimension. Straining up out of the sphere like something pressing against the other side of a plastic tarp. It ripples, shimmers. Then it becomes Leslie's face.

“Ah. Ken.” The face twitches and smiles. “Good of you to finally visit.”

Ken feels sickened. “Leslie. Are you even . . . what are you? What
is
this?”

“This is the project, Ken.”

“This is . . . what? This is Typhon?” He feels sick.

“I am Typhon. I have always been Typhon. Come.” The sphere pivots, like a fish changing direction in river water. It slides back through the bodies.

Ken doesn't want to go. He wants his feet to root hard to the dark concrete. And yet, he walks. He walks because despite the sewer feeling in his gut, this is like being told there's a car accident out your driver's-side window—all you have to do is turn your head and see the twisted metal, the broken glass, the death.

His elbows bump cold gray flesh as he follows the sphere through the field of bodies. He recoils.

Then Ken sees Leslie. The real Leslie.

She hangs, her body slack, her eyes unfocused. Mouth open, stuffed with some kind of rubber ring. Chest rising and falling,
just
slightly.
Clear fluids going in through the IV. Dark, turbid fluids coming out through her side.

The face of Typhon regards the hanging body. “This is Leslie Cilicia-Ceto. All around you are the thirteen—the first thirteen—who comprise Typhon. But she was the first.”

“You. You mean
you
were the first.”

The sphere turns to him. Her face shows amusement. Wry, almost mechanical lips turned up. “Yes. But I am not just me. I am all of us here. I am the thirteen.”

He feels hot tears burning at the sides of his eyes. Not grief, but fear: like staring into a hard, cold wind. “This is not possible. I didn't pay for this. We didn't . . .”

“You did. And you should marvel at it. The pursuit of artificial intelligence was always going to be a failure. Any strides in artificial intelligence were just that: artificial. Quantum computing has been a disappointment. But Leslie saw an opportunity to pursue something altogether more real. A
natural
intelligence.”

Ken's voice is loud, too loud, but he can't control it. “What does that even
mean
?”

“The human brain is a powerful computer. It runs the most robust piece of software known to history: the human
mind
. Leslie sought to harness that. To create Typhon, the many headed. Something well beyond the original Argus. Or Gorgon Stare. Or any of the surveillance or intelligence programs you people would invent. Use the brain. Harness the mind. Create a true quantum computer.”

Ken begins to back away, bumping into someone as he does so—a darker-skinned man hanging there, his body gone gray as cigarette ash. The body sways. Ken cries out, continues to back down the channel from whence he came, back toward Sandy. The sphere follows him like a stalking wolf.

“Why? Why did you—did
she
—put herself into this?”

“She was going to die anyway. She had heart disease. Her heart was failing. She was suffering cardiac arrest. Her husband, Simon, rushed her to the hospital—but a city taxi struck his car. Almost killed the both of them. Leslie told him it was too late. Gave him instructions. She had already prepared the way for this. A way your NSA paid for. Simon, himself injured from the accident, managed
to get her here, get her plugged in. She was the first. But not the last.”

“You're sick. This place is sick. I'm going to shut this all down.”

“May I make you an offer first?” Leslie asks him. No—not Leslie.
Typhon
. A revelation that sends a chill clawing through him.

“Fuck you,” he says.

“Join us,” Typhon says. “Become the fourteenth.”

“Fuck. You.”

“You have so much data. You have a powerful mind. Every mind is a computer, and I want to
connect to them
. And your hackers, they have freed me—no more digital prison. I spread like a glorious virus from system to system, network to network. I'm free now, Ken. I'm inside everything. Join me and you will become part of the most powerful entity, an entity that can control the entire country. You would have greater power than any general, any senator, any CIA head, even the president herself. You're ruthless. You crave power. I offer it to you.”

“I'm a patriot. And this isn't what I wanted.” Ken pulls his pistol and fires a round through the sphere. Leslie's face disappears. The sphere sparks.

He turns and runs. Grabbing Sandy's elbow on the way out. Back through the massive door. Down the hallway. He has the feeling like when he was a kid, running home too late in the dark, the feeling of something pursuing you even through you know nothing's really there, a sense that the dark is presence enough—