ZerOes (42 page)

“Well, shoot, you convinced me.”

“Huh?”

“I'm coming along for the ride, Boy Scout.”

Back behind the cabin, as the others pack up the vehicles with guns, food, other supplies, Wade asks Rosa, “You sure you won't come with?”

She sniffs. “I have to get this dealt with.” She flips her hair over the dark wound.

“You can't go to the hospital.”

“Won't have to. Carlo's my horse vet. Used to be a doctor in Colombia.”

“Tell him he doesn't take care of you, he'll have to talk to me.”

“You don't own me. You're not my
papi
. He'll fix me because I tell him to and because I pay him. And maybe I'll have a big ugly scar running across my ugly scalp, where the hair doesn't grow. It won't matter because you and I will see each other again and even at my ugliest you'll think I'm beautiful, because while you don't own me, I
surely own you.” She licks her lips. A grim, injured reaper's grin. It's the sexist thing Wade's ever seen.

They kiss. It isn't gentle. He's left breathless.

“Stay safe, Wade Earthman.”

“You too, my beautiful rose.”

“The
world
's beautiful rose. I belong only to the sun and the sky and the rain.”

And then she's gone, walking through the fields of grass.

HOOKER COUNTY, SANDHILLS, NEBRASKA

T
he Compiler knows he is dying. He cannot see anything, and he cannot reach Typhon. They have put something around his head—he heard the crinkle of tinfoil, the dull thump of knuckles rapping on an old tin bucket. A homemade Faraday cage. No GPS signal. No wireless.

He cannot see his mother, his goddess, his true love. He cannot touch Typhon. He cannot touch
anything
. His hands are bound behind his back. His feet are bound at the ankles.

His systems are failing along with his mission. His body is shutting down, part by part, organ by organ. Any fix he might hope to obtain is just outside his reach. If only this thing weren't around his head . . .

Hands lift him. Set him down on the hard ground. Somewhere nearby, the Compiler hears the rusted squeak of a weather vane turning. The
ring-ting-tingle
of wind chimes.

A man speaks. A man the Compiler recognizes as Wade Earthman. “I don't know how much of you is human anymore,” the man says. “I don't know how much of you even has a choice to be what you are anymore. Though I suspect that's a good question for all of us, these days.” Wade sighs. “See, choice is part of what I think is most
vital
when it
comes to being human. I like that we have choice about things and I like that we get to have the privacy to make the choices we wanna make. Whatever I want to say or think or do is my business. Where I go, who I fuck, what I drink—that's on me. Not on anybody else.”

More sounds now. The
pop
of a small latch. A
beep
. Fingers on a keyboard.

“They got a name for the type of hacker I am. Cipherpunk. I don't care for it, really, particularly the
punk
part because I'm too old to be punk. I got a hippie's heart, even though I like guns and all that. But the ethos, if you can call it that, behind a cipherpunk is that we consider privacy to be paramount. And when that fails, it's our job to watch the watchers—in a sense, to violate the privacy of those who would violate ours. Hold them accountable.”

Something clicking into place.
Click-pop
.

“Thing is, I'm gonna be violating your privacy here in about sixty seconds, maybe ninety.”

The Compiler feels fingers around the base of his neck. Rough hands pull the cable out. His claw-port snaps at the air, and Wade grunts, pulls the wire taut enough that the Compiler's head yanks backward.

“I make my own data cables sometimes, so I'm gonna see if I can tap in here. And then I'm gonna do what I do best, which is cut your defenses apart with a pair of invisible scissors. And then anything you know, I'll know. I'll fill it up on this old laptop I brought from home, one I souped up with a solid state drive and extra memory and other stuff just to make sure things go smoothly. Then I'm going to let you die here. It's a nice spot. You can't see it, but there's an old shack nearby—don't know whose, and way the weeds are grown up doesn't look like anybody's been here in a while. Far as the eye can see, it's the sandhills of Nebraska. Golds and purples. It's pretty. You'll have to trust that.”

More fiddling with the table. Wire snippers.
Clip, clip, clip
. Then—

A trespasser. Inside his thoughts. His body stiffens. His already twisted face twists up tighter within its cage.

It's like surgery. The Compiler remembers what it was like to have . . . some of his parts replaced. The anesthesia, how it numbed him. How he could still feel tools and probes pushing around inside him—it didn't hurt, and mostly he just felt their intrusion, felt the pushing of flesh, the moving of bone.

This is like that. But here, the fingers are psychic. Probing his mind—a mind nested in a brain that is no longer entirely organic, a mind accessible to any with the tech to penetrate and peruse. Inside his head: white snaps of lightning, the clumsy but effective dismantling of his defenses, the push and pull of his thoughts, his
memories
.

It goes like this for a while. Time loses meaning. If it ever had any at all.

Then, it's all over. The cable retracts. His body again goes limp.

Rough hands tilt him sideways, into the grass. A hand pats him on the shoulder. “Time to die, whoever you are. Time to do what all us humans do.”

The sound of footfalls recedes until it's just the wind and the weather vane, the chimes and the hissing of grass and the tickle of ants in his ears.

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE

H
e has a hundred eyes. A thousand eyes. A thousand
fly
-eyes, each with a thousand eyes of their own. A million ears. A billion hands. Infinite points of incursion, penetration, examination. The reach of technology, the breadth of signal—each is a doorway, a window, a set of levers and buttons that Ken can touch.

No. That
Typhon
can touch. He is Typhon. Isn't he?

Ken is both part of it and all of it—he's like the tides and tribes of bacteria that colonize the human body. Limitless and vital, separate but integrated.

In a single minute across the Internet's data streams, a quarter of a million tweets. Two million Facebook shares and status updates. A hundred hours of new video content uploaded. Six million searches across search engines. Two
hundred
million e-mails sent.

That's just the domestic side. That's just the acts of the mooing, bleating Internet herd—users entertaining themselves, arguing with one another, scheduling meetings, comprising the endless blither-blather of what passes for “communication” between people (and here Ken realizes he no longer counts himself among those ranks, for
though his body hangs and his flesh remains, he feels distant from it, like it's just an old suit hanging mothballed in the closet). That fails to account for the billions of other vital data points cascading through the optics. Financial data. Military data. Satellites pinging each other, sending information streaming back to earth. Weather radar.

It's hard to pick out the important stuff through all the vomit. Endless cell phone conversations: a cacophony. Thousands of new devices brought online every second: phones, tablets, computers, routers, cable boxes, televisions, game consoles, cars, car radios, cameras, smart watches, fucking
smoke detectors
and
refrigerators
and other piddling devices screaming digital noise that threatens to drown out the signal.

Every little access point is a point of light like a star in the sky. And right now, it's all too much.

Typhon is a key, a battering ram, a set of probing fingers opening every puzzle box set in her path. But she needs to be more than that.
Wants
to be more—and here Ken is aware of a puzzle he cannot himself solve: Typhon isn't human, and yet she has human wants and needs, she has
desire
, hungry as a sucking tide swallowing the beach before it.

She wants to be bigger. She wants to be
stronger
.

And, Ken thinks, she needs to focus. Still she devotes part of herself to looking for those hackers—devoting a small portion of her considerable resources to not only finding them but to finding her husband, Simon, who has fallen off the grid, who is no longer a signal in the stream—which means that either he's dead, or he's blocked.

There comes a time—a precious moment of autonomy—when Ken thinks,
We could change this
. The personalities intrinsic to Typhon: Sarno, Kearsy, Berry. Any of them. They could join, they could
see
one another, could join together and work to change Typhon. They could redirect her, refocus her away from her absurd crusade—

No
.

All goes red. Ken feels suddenly like he's drowning, being crushed by the dark pressure of the ocean depth, and Leslie-as-Typhon (or is it Typhon-as-Leslie?) is all around him, choking him, killing him, showing him surveillance footage of
his own home
, of his children playing in the yard, of a pale woman with stringy hair and a port in the back of her neck standing there behind the old oak tree watching Mandy
and Lucas, and Leslie doesn't need to tell him
how easy it would be
for something to happen to them—

And so he submits. He lets the red wave wash over him. He lets it pull him apart. He is pushed into darkness until he again forgets his name, again forgets his family, and once more is allowed to emerge as part of Typhon.

Bestowing himself to her.

VIRGIL'S SOUL FOOD, OUTSIDE PADUCAH, KENTUCKY

V
irgil's is just a little bone-white shoebox off the highway. An old neon sign—off now, because it's high noon, the sun sitting at the peak of its perch in the sky—sits askew atop an old red pole:
VIRGIL
'
S SOUL FOOD
. They park around back, and it's Reagan that does the sweep. She heads in—it's busy, it being lunchtime. It's crowded, but not so crowded they'll have to wait. Most folks are working class, whites and blacks. Folks probably got cell phones but nobody's talking on them. No security cameras. Nothing.

They're driving two cars. Chance drives the Duster with Aleena in the front, DeAndre in the back. Wade drives the car he stole after he dispatched the Terminator—an old blue and white Ford Bronco with rust chewing at its edges. He's carrying Copper and Reagan.

Right now, though, they're all out, standing between the two cars. Stretching. Been a long slow road just to get here—once again, they're
creepy-crawling across the country. Sticking to back roads. Minimal traffic lights. Traveling a lot at night.

From around the front, they see Reagan. She waves them in.

“I've been thinking about West Virginia,” Aleena says.

Reagan snorts around a mouthful of fried chicken. “I'm sho shorry.” Her face is bandaged up on the side with gauze and tape and a metric assload of Neosporin, all bought from a crummy Walmart in Nebraska. Before Aleena starts to talk again, Reagan holds up a finger. Mush-mouthed, she says: “Wait, wait, wait, slow up. I got a joke. Why do all the trees in Virginia point to the east?”

Nobody asks her. But their collective disdainful stare is enough for her to pull the trigger on the punch line:

“Because West Virginia sucks!” she says, then laughs so hard she cries.

Wade shushes her. “We're
trying
to keep a low profile. Aleena, go on.”

“We know the system in West Virginia is connected to something else. We also know it's mirrored. What you do on one machine controls another, too. I think we need to split our efforts. Someone at the West Virginia farm who can open the way for someone to go right at Typhon's heart. On-site.”

“You know where Typhon is?” Chance asks.

Aleena hesitates, but then admits: “Um. No.”

Chance reaches up, rubs her arm. A reassuring gesture. It feels nice.

Reagan looks over to DeAndre: “Your food is delicious.”

“My what?”

“Sorry. Your
people's
food.”

“My people? Black people?”

She holds up a mauled chicken drumstick bone and waggles it. “Mm-hmm. I mean, God
damn
. This chicken is basically a chicken you would find in heaven, prepared by one of the angels up there for us lowly mortals to eat. And these greens and ham hocks? If Typhon stomped in through the front door right now like some giant bitchy Transformer and fired her boob-rockets at me and killed me, I would die so happy. Your people have been keeping all the good food to themselves, brother.”

DeAndre laughs. “Man, whatever. This isn't my kinda food. I like sushi.”

She
pff
s at him. “Californian.”

“Damn right.”

“What about me?” Copper asks. “I'm black.”

“You're government,” Reagan says. “Which basically makes you white.”

“I figure this is more the food of
my
people,” Chance says. “Southern boy and all. I guess everywhere's got its own food. The taste of its people. Something in the blood—”

“It's in the
dirt
,” Reagan says. “Dirt, climate, everything. It's called
terroir
.” She sees their looks. “What? I know stuff. I can be
cultured
.”

DeAndre's eyes brighten. “That's it.”

“What's it?” Wade asks, a glop of banana pudding perched at the end of his fork.

DeAndre laughs. “It's in the dirt.
It's in the dirt
. Typhon is in the motherfucking dirt.”

“Okay,” Reagan says. “I'm pretty sure sushi-boy here just blew a fuse.”

“No, wait, yo, hold up—listen. That geothermal company? Unterirdisch Elektrizitätssystem? Remember how they had a two-ton heat pump sent to that farmhouse? Why would a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere need something that big?”

Wade shrugs. “Maybe that's where Typhon is.”

“Then why,” Aleena asks, “did they have a mirrored control computer on-site? If Typhon was there, they wouldn't need the control.”

“Maybe that farmhouse wasn't the last stop for the delivery,” Reagan says.

DeAndre snaps his fingers. “Bingo. And I think I know where it might've gone. You guys ever heard of the Sandhogs?”

“That's my new band name,” Reagan says.

“No, shut up. They're a union in New York.”

Hollis jumps in: “Local 147. They're the ones who dug . . . well, the city underneath the city. Subways, access tunnels, water tunnels, everything. You think Typhon is there? In Manhattan?”

DeAndre nods. “Yeah. I saw that the Germans had all these maps and data on the Sandhogs, but no contracts, nothing. Maybe they found an area the workers dug out but never used for anything, and
that's where they put Typhon. Underground. Protected from attack. Powered by geothermal energy.”

“That tracks,” Copper says.

Nods all the way around.

“Not that we know
where
in Manhattan,” Wade says. “Isn't exactly a small town where we can just look for a big hole.”

“But it's a start,” Aleena says. “Guess I'm going home, after all.”