Zeroes

by Scott Westerfeld

  She stretched like a cat, feeling lazy strength in every limb.

  And then, midstretch, she remembered—that humongous power that had reared up and taken hold of her yesterday, it had opened the cell doors. Those criminals were back on the streets because of her. And what other systems had it messed up? Calls to 911? Officers needing backup?

  She could only imagine.

  All that data gone to confetti. Who knew how many investigations she’d ruined? How many more criminals would go free because of her? Sure, the systems at CCPD had been garbage, kludged together from a dozen different generations of tech. That mess had deserved to be torn down—but it should’ve been backed up first.

  And Chizara had destroyed it all without warning.

  She had released the thing inside her, instead of keeping it caged. Lying there, she wondered if this was how Scam felt every morning.

  The thought made her need a shower. She jumped out of bed, snatched up her robe, and swept along the hall to the bathroom.

  One of her brothers was in there, humming and dressing.

  She knocked. “People gotta work!”

  “People gotta play ball, too.” Ikem’s voice came through the door.

  “Ikemefuna!”

  “Za-raaa!”

  She rattled the handle. It gave, and she opened the door a slit.

  “Go away! Or I might tell Mom what you got up to yesterday.”

  Another jolt of guilt went through her. “Working all morning, lunch with my friends.”

  Ikem laughed. “Oh yeah? All that badness at the police station sure looked like it had your superpower stink all over it.”

  “Nothing to do with me.” This was what she would say if the police came here asking. Not that they’d have any reason to think a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl had erased an entire building’s worth of data. But even if they did, how could anyone prove it?

  You couldn’t go to jail for witchcraft here in America. They didn’t even believe in juju.

  Ikem was smiling. “Can you say that to Mom’s face, when she’s giving you the Look?”

  “Sure I can. Now shoo!” Chizara sang, bustling inside, reaching into the shower stall, and turning on the tap. “I have my robe off. Nightgown’s next!”

  “Nooo!” Ikem darted out, slamming the door behind him. “It burns, it buuuuurns!” he cried as he ran away down the hall.

  Chizara stood with the hot water streaming down her back, her head kinked forward to keep her hair dry, trying to recapture that enormous peace she’d felt yesterday at the station, that glorious quiet while everyone panicked and shouted around her.

  It had been even better than out in the wilderness, where the emptiness was so huge and complete it was scary, one murmurless mountain, one silent tract of forest after another, empty of technology. Buildings full of babbling tech pained her, but complete silence in her mind also freaked her out a little.

  She got out of the shower and wiped the mist off the mirror. She looked untroubled, almost smiling. The shower had washed away all her guilty thoughts, and her bones were purring. She hid her blissed-out expression in a towel, scrubbing her face dry.

  She had to make amends. But her only income was from repairing toasters. How could she fix everything she’d broken yesterday?

  * * *

  “Morning, Mom.”

  “Good morning, Chizara.” Mom’s glance above the Cambria Herald was distinctly suspicious.

  Her other brother, Obinna, straightened from closing the dishwasher. Chizara quickly hugged him in passing, just to annoy him, and he cried out as if her arms were branding irons, dodged around her, and fled upstairs. Ikem threw Chizara a smug look and followed.

  “All this craziness down at the police station yesterday!” Mom said.

  “What happened, exactly?” Not daring to glance at the headlines and photos, Chizara focused on getting her cereal down off the shelf. She and her brothers liked a normal American breakfast, not pap and fried plantain like her parents ate.

  “Escaped prisoners, terrorists, everything breaking down. All those computer systems . . .”

  Chizara turned from the fridge and met her mom’s unwavering gaze.

  “What are you saying, Mom?”

  “What do you think I’m saying, Chizara Adaora Okeke? Where were you yesterday when this . . . ‘complete network failure’ happened?”

  “At the shop, putting CD players back together.” She turned away to sprinkle cereal into her bowl. “And then I was at Nate’s for lunch. With Flick—um, Riley and everyone.”

  “So you’re all friends again? What a coincidence.”

  “Why would we want to mess with the police station? What good would that do anyone?” Though it sure felt like it had done Chizara some good.

  “Enough talk, girl. Show me that phone of yours.”

  “My phone?” Chizara felt sick. The phone was in her back pocket, to take to Bob and ask if he could help her fix it. “What for?”

  “I’m not a fool. Every time you misbehave, you buy a new phone.” She reached across the table, snapping her fingers.

  Chizara stalled, making a show of pouring milk into her bowl. She could feel the insides of the dead, cold device, where the tidal wave of power had melted silicon, warped metal, and scrambled memory. It was like a bomb site in there, all that intricate electronic filigree torn and tangled.

  “Now, Chizara.”

  Reaching into her back pocket, Chizara wondered if dropping the phone would convincingly shatter it.

  But then the happy purring in her bones heightened to a sharp thrill. In the second it took her mother to find the power button, a little zott! went through Chizara’s guts, quite unlike the letting-go feeling of crashing something. It was more like puzzle pieces snapping together.

  The phone gave itself a shake and came to its senses. She could feel everything inside it smoothed and straightened as good as new, all the connections knitted together the way they should be. As the screen lit up, the skin on her arms, face, and chest started to itch. The phone sang its startup song and reached out its eager wifi for a signal. Like it was sharing a joke with her, stepping in to save her.

  But she’d done this herself. She’d uncrashed it.

  Mom’s face relaxed with surprise, and she handed the phone back. The factory settings’ boot-up screen appeared; Chizara’s wallpaper had been erased, along with the rest of her data. But Mom wouldn’t notice that.

  Chizara held her expression steady as the phone squealed and throbbed against her consciousness.

  “If it wasn’t you, maybe your friends?” Mom was giving her the Look, shaking the newspaper at her. She hardly trusted Chizara to restrain her power; a gaggle of spoiled white American teenagers had no chance of self-control.

  Obinna had once described Mom’s Look: She just, like, injects some kinda truth drug in through your eyes.

  But Chizara held strong. “They had nothing to do with this,” she said, not too fast, but without any guilty delay, either, and with a solemn, honest face born of awe at this jolt of new power.

  “Are you sure this wasn’t Nate’s doing? Or that girl, Riley? If you know anything, we should go straight to the authorities.”

  The thought of her mother talking to the police forced Chizara to sit down. Would someone in the station remember an unfamiliar cleaner wandering the halls that day?

  “They have different powers,” Chizara mumbled, and started to crunch on her cereal. “Nothing to do with computers.”

  After an endless pause, her mother went from looking straight into Chizara’s soul to frowning back at the newspaper.

  You have to fix it. Since Chizara was five years old, Mom had been saying that, once she’d admitted to herself what her daughter could do. You’ve got to be responsible about what’s inside you. If you hurt anyone—whether you mean to or not, Chizara—you’ve got to find some way to make it right. Settle with your conscience.

  Little Chizara had nodded sulkily.

 
Square things with the people whose stuff you break. Every time, girl, do you hear me?

  Now maybe she could square things. Could she uncrash everything she’d broken yesterday? It was worth a try.

  She got up and rinsed her bowl and spoon, put them in the dishwasher. She kissed her mom on the top of her head as she passed. Her bones were humming again, wanting to fix something.

  “You’re my good girl?” Mom called out as she left the kitchen.

  “I’m your good girl.” Chizara was better than ever this morning. She couldn’t wait to see how damn good she was.

  CHAPTER 34

  CRASH

  CHIZARA PLUGGED HER PHONE INTO her laptop to restore her blasted data. Over the tech squeal she listened as Obinna and Ikem’s friends arrived and her brothers shouted good-bye to Mom.

  Then she stole into their room. In the bottom of their wardrobe were boxes full of outgrown toys, out-of-season sports equipment. Chizara rummaged right to the bottom of one box, then another.

  Finally from the third she dug out the old handheld gaming console. She found the right kind of batteries in the charger on top of Obinna’s dresser, took everything back to her room, and closed her door.

  Staring at the lifeless console, Chizara flashed back to the endless blooping, gleeping rat-tat-tat that had spilled from its speakers. But worse had been the chatter of its antennae, the pulsing search and grab of wifi and Bluetooth as it interacted with other consoles. Day and night, it had sandpapered the ends of Chizara’s nerves.

  She’d struck while Ikem wasn’t actually playing it, so no one would suspect her. It was her subtlest bit of work up to that point, just frazzling that one chip. And oh, the relief!

  Guy at the shop says it’s toast, Ikem had said the next day. By that time she’d started to feel guilty, watching him drag the little plastic corpse out of his backpack, actual tears creeping down his cheeks.

  That time she’d failed the confrontation with Mom’s Look. Guess you’d better find someone to fix it, Mom had said.

  And that’s when she’d walked into Bob’s restful, low-tech shop for the first time. He’d opened up the console and explained its workings to her, pointing out why it couldn’t be rescued. And she’d seen the way forward. She could learn a bunch of stuff she needed to know from this guy, and at the same time make it up to Ikem.

  Once Bob saw that she was serious and started paying her, her first two paychecks bought Ikem that bike he’d had his eye on.

  So much healthier than a new game, Mom! she’d said.

  Mom had given her the side-eye, but had to admit she was right.

  Now, here in her room, Chizara sat down and took a deep breath. Had the phone thing at breakfast been a fluke?

  She turned on the game console. For an instant its insides flashed, but the light died as soon as the juice hit that tangled mess of circuitry.

  Wow. Chizara had thought she’d hit only the processor chip—but that was a year ago. She’d been a lot clumsier then.

  The strange feeling came again, that pulse in her guts. Just like with fixing the phone, her mind smoothed and combed everything straight. It worked at a microscopic level, calculating which particles to move and where—how did it know that? A month ago she’d needed Bob to remind her whether a positive terminal was red or black.

  But she could see it now, the circuits the way they should be. The map was there in her head already, as if all those pinpricks and itches and pains from e-things and i-things had been teaching her something all along. . . .

  A moment after she saw it, the circuit was whole again, the startup fanfare playing. That tinny music had once made her cringe and weep, but now she glowed along with the microchip. The screen flickered and the silver logo popped up and started to spin.

  She’d really uncrashed it. The game’s home screen arrived, with its awful little zombies. Ikem had been crazy about those zombies. He would imitate their chilling screams as they attacked. Dazedly Chizara watched the tutorial unfold—sitting back and covering one eye as the itching wifi fingers clawed the air.

  But she was Crash; it was her job to break things. The only fixing she ever did was the manual kind that anyone could do, the rewiring, soldering, replacing, screwing-back-together kind.

  She turned the game off, took it back to the boys’ room, and left it on Ikem’s desk. She got her backpack together for work, went down to the kitchen, and put some plantain and some leftover jollof rice into a microwave container for lunch—enough for Bob, too, to make up for abandoning him yesterday. Mom was upstairs getting ready for her work up at the Igbo community center. Dad was in the laundry, humming as he clanked through his toolbox.

  Chizara still felt wonderful, even if the newspapers were calling her a terrorist. Her mind kept throwing accusations at her, about the criminals at large, about all the other damage she’d done yesterday, but her body felt light and agile and strong, rested and ready for anything. This uncrashing business seemed right somehow—it balanced out yesterday’s big destructive storm. She hoped Bob would have something complicated for her to repair today.

  But how would she explain it to him if she willed a laptop back to life? Luck? The weather? The general flakiness of modern technology? Maybe she could just say it out loud: It’s my superpower, Bob. And then she’d shrug, and he’d laugh, not believing her for a second.

  “Good-bye, Mom—good-bye, Dad!” Chizara called, and her parents’ farewells floated out the front door after her, into the fresh summer morning.

  CHAPTER 35

  ANONYMOUS

  ETHAN SAT HUNCHED OVER HIS room service breakfast, watching the video again.

  Had the poor guy slept at all? Thibault wondered. Or just sat there all night, clicking play again and again?

  One viewing had been enough for Thibault.

  When they’d gotten back to the penthouse last night, a search on “guy in the bank video” had gone straight to a pink, jewel-encrusted blog called SoniaSonic. Ethan’s face was right at the top, blurry, cheek to the floor, eyes rolling up into a blink, mouth open. He looked like a zombie. A really easy-to-recognize zombie.

  And when you clicked play, it got much worse.

  “But the cops took her phone!” Ethan said for about the hundredth time. “And Chizara crashed it!”

  “She sent herself the video, or it backed up to the cloud,” Thibault said, also for the hundredth time. Was Ethan forgetting everything again, or was the guy in shock?

  “A quarter million hits now,” Ethan said in a pinched voice, like he was having trouble breathing.

  Every time he refreshed the screen, the video’s view count jumped. It wasn’t every day the internet got to see an amateur video of a bank robbery in progress. Especially one showing a random customer messing with the robbers’ heads.

  “Listen, Jerry. I like you.” Ethan’s voice came from the laptop’s speakers, as cocky as a three-card-monte artist turning over a wrong choice. “You just want what’s best for Kelsie, after all.”

  “No wonder bullets started flying.” Thibault carved out a spoonful of honeydew melon but didn’t eat it. His stomach was too jumpy. “Must’ve freaked poor Jerry out, hearing his daughter’s name.”

  “Poor Jerry?” Ethan cried. “What about poor me? The guy with the gun in his face!”

  “If you were so scared, why start talking at all?”

  Ethan tore his eyes from the screen. “To save that girl, Sonia. She had some stupid ring, and she wasn’t going to give it to the robbers. He was going to shoot her, Tee!”

  Thibault stared at him. “That’s what you’re going with? You were saving a damsel in distress?”

  “Well, there was also . . .” Ethan mumbled the rest into a forkful of home fries.

  “Sorry. Missed that.”

  “Jerry asked me about my duffel bag.”

  Thibault sighed. It figured. For something as meaningless as money, Ethan had managed to get his face in front of a quarter million people, all of whom could help trac
k him down. By now every cop in Cambria must have seen that video, not to mention Ethan’s drug-dealing buddies. And what about Jerry and his gang? They’d be busting heads to find out how some kid knew their names.

  “Guess your mom is now officially the least of your worries.”

  “Don’t remind me. That message I left last night isn’t going to keep her calm, not after she sees this.”

  Ethan stood up and started pacing, feet crunching over spilled corn chips.

  It occurred to Thibault that they should clean the room soon, maybe even vacate. Someone had booked the penthouse for the Fourth of July, less than a week away. The Magnifique had a great view of the fireworks, and of the doomed Parker-Hamilton Hotel down the street. He and Ethan might have to move to another hotel.

  And by the time they hit the street, another million people would know what Ethan looked like.

  Thibault was tempted to use the manager’s password and lose that reservation. But that would not only screw the hotel, but also some poor—well, rich—traveler.

  He’d also gotten an e-mail while he was online. From Flicker, which was a first. No text, just the subject line: How’s it going with the weasel wrangling?

  Thibault grinned to himself as he tidied up, wondering exactly how to reply. Something short and witty? Or should he tell her about all the crazy on the street the night before? Or ask if she’d seen the bank video?

  Of course, she’d probably already forgotten she’d written him.

  It was weird with Flicker. Her awareness wasn’t like anyone else’s. The visual connection didn’t come from her; it bounced through other people’s eyes. And Thibault could always feel the tickle of her listening to his footsteps, or her questing awareness of his scent. He could never quite bring himself to snip off her attention.

  “About to deposit the biggest bag of money I’ve ever seen, and I start talking to some girl!” Ethan muttered, kicking at chip fragments on the floor. “Just because she had that cute haircut. Like I care about Patty Low? I should get my mouth sewn shut!”