Element Zero r-3

by James Knapp

  “Of course,” Penny said. “What’s bugging you?”

  “Whatever is going to happen, it’s going to happen soon,” he said.

  “What makes you say that?” she asked. She asked it like she wasn’t sure she believed him, but Ai had said the same thing to us. We’d figured out that no one ever saw anything that occurred after their lifetime—that’s what made that big, blank spot so scary—but aside from that, it did mean that one way or another, time was running out.

  “You think we can still change this thing?” he asked over his shoulder. “That one day, something we do will make that big, empty space light up like the rest of the map, and the bright spot fade away?”

  “That’s the point, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes ma’am. That’s the point.”

  I was worried before, but now he had me really worried. I’d never heard him like that before. He usually got on my back for talking like that; he was more of a winat-all-costs kind of guy. He didn’t like what he called my defeatist attitude.

  “Does this mean you weren’t able to make the virus work?” I asked.

  Everyone knew by now that Fawkes had stolen Heinlein Industries’ prototype revivor model, Huma, three years back, and that he’d been using it ever since. No one really believed we’d ever find all the people infected with the Huma prototype before Fawkes finally activated them. The virus was somehow supposed to get on to their network and shut all of those infected back down again once they all came back to life. Test subjects were hard to find, though, and with them all still inactive, it was slow going. Sometimes I wondered if they’d be able to pull it off at all, but the more time that passed, the more hope was pinned on that solution. If the virus didn’t work, we were in big trouble.

  “It works,” he said.

  “Then—”

  “Cell phones and other personal electronics off, please,” he said. We were standing at an unmarked door with a badge scanner mounted next to it.

  “Is this it?” Penny asked.

  “Yes.”

  We shut off our gadgets, and Osterhagen waved his badge at the scanner, which turned green and made a heavy bolt pop behind the thick metal. He opened it and waved us inside.

  The lab wasn’t anything like what I expected, and from the look on Penny’s face, it seemed like she felt the same way. I thought there would be rows and rows of computer equipment and guys in white lab coats, but mostly I thought I’d see revivors. I expected to see lots of them, but I didn’t see any. The scientists, if that’s what they were, looked more like soldiers, and none of them wore white lab coats. They all worked behind thick, clear plastic sheets that hung from the ceiling, and they all had on hazmat suits. They walked up and down metal walkways where heavy metal hatches were fixed to the wall. Each hatch had a thick panel of glass in the middle so you could see in, but all I saw was darkness.

  I thought it would be sterile and high-tech, but it was dirty and looked more like a prison than a lab. I could see dried blood spatter on some of the plastic sheeting. The air smelled a little like rot.

  “There are an estimated ten to eleven thousand carriers of the Huma prototype out there right now,” Osterhagen said. “We’ve managed to find less than four hundred of them, in a little over three years. That’s using aggressive tactics.”

  “He has a limited supply of the proto—” Penny began.

  “That’s an assumption,” he said, cutting her off. “We can’t afford to make that assumption here. Here, we have to prepare for the worst-case scenario, and even if the carriers number half of what we estimate, the amount of carnage those things will be able to cause is not something you could imagine, I don’t think.”

  “I don’t have to imagine it,” I said. “I’ve seen it, remember?”

  He signaled, and two of the soldier-scientists approached one of the hatches, each one flashing their badge at a separate scanner. LEDs on the scanners lit up green as something thudded through the floor, and I saw a black man’s hand, fingers splayed wide, press against the glass port in the door. It left a streak of something greasy and brown as it pawed at the smooth surface.

  “What you’re going to see is a demonstration of the virus,” Osterhagen said. “I want you to see it for yourselves so you can let Ai know what you saw.”

  The soldiers opened the hatch, and one of them stuck a cattle prod through the opening. Sparks lit up the inside and threw shadows of a body as it jerked and fell to the floor. Two more men dragged a dirty, naked man out from inside and hauled him up between them. His head lolled against a thick leather collar around his neck. The front of the collar had a heavy metal ring attached.

  His toes dragged on the floor behind him as they carried him to a metal post that was about two feet high and dropped him in front of it. The one with the cattle prod came back and used a short chain to hitch the man’s collar to the post. A few rows down, more soldiers dragged out three more captives, two women and one man. All of their bodies were covered in bruises, mostly down the front of them.

  “That’s lividity,” Osterhagen said offhand, “in case you were wondering.”

  I wasn’t. They chained up the other three to posts facing the first one. I counted more than twenty posts total.

  “In order for the nodes to form, death has to occur,” he said. “Huma stays dormant in a living system and doesn’t begin to initialize until after death. Once the reanimation is complete, they join a common network. They also join a command network, if one exists. Currently one doesn’t, but that’s okay. The full-mesh connection between them is the one we want.”

  I remembered hearing some of what he said before. That’s part of what made the new revivors different from the old ones; the old ones had command connections back to whoever was controlling them, but not to each other. The new ones all had a connection to every other one, plus the control connection. I wasn’t completely sure why that was important, but as long as this worked, I didn’t care.

  “Subjects secured,” a voice said over the intercom.

  “Roger that,” another voice answered. “Implanting virus.”

  “Transfer successful.”

  A big screen lit up along the far wall down where the soldiers were, and a countdown started to tick off from twenty-one seconds.

  “It takes twenty-one seconds for the virus to initialize and spread,” Osterhagen said.

  “That’s kind of a long time,” Penny said. It didn’t sound like very long to me, but the general nodded.

  “Too long. We need to get it down.”

  The timer fell to zero, and then, just like that, all four of the test subjects went facedown against the metal posts they were chained to. None of them moved.

  “Test complete,” a voice said.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “That’s it,” the general said. “The engineering behind this was massive, even with Heinlein’s help. But at the end of the day, yes, that’s it. The virus was implanted in the single subject by accessing its communication node, then spread to the others on its network, causing full shutdown of all four subjects.”

  I looked down through the window as soldiers approached the bodies. I saw one of them stick a big needle into the back of the first subject’s neck, and check something on a small screen.

  “Complete deanimation in all subjects,” a voice said. “Test successful.”

  “If we didn’t keep them isolated,” Osterhagen said, “that would have shut every last one of them down.”

  “That’s …good, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Twenty seconds is still too long,” he said. “When Fawkes makes his move, he’ll have a command spoke in place to each one of them. When there’s this big an intrusion into the systems of any one of them, he’ll get an alert for sure. Twenty seconds is more than long enough for him to cut the source of the virus off the network.”

  “How long has this been ready?” Penny asked.

  “We got a confirmed reaction four months ago. In
another four, if we get four, we’ll have the init time down low enough that even Fawkes won’t be able to react fast enough.”

  “That’s …good, then, isn’t it?” I asked again. It sounded like he was saying all he had to do was put the virus in any one of the carriers and he’d wipe out Fawkes’s whole army. He only needed one, and he had hundreds of them.

  “No,” he said. “That’s what you need to tell Ai.”

  He looked back down at the bodies lying on the floor, their necks bent at sharp angles as they hung from the chains.

  “What I said before about the map,” he said, “I believed it too, just like you.”

  “Believed what?” Penny asked.

  “That at some point we’d find some keystone, some strategy that would erase the event from the system and light up the void at its center. I believed that, but now we’re coming down to the wire, and I don’t know anymore.”

  “Changes in the database don’t happen overnight,” Penny said. “You know that. Give it time for new entries to have some kind of impact.”

  “We can agree, I think,” Osterhagen said, “that there are only three ways to stop these things. The first is to issue the shutdown code from the command source, but since that’s Fawkes and he assigned that code, it’s a safe bet that’s not going to happen. The second is to use this virus, or something like it, to infect their network. The third is to slug it out with them on the ground. Can we agree on that?”

  “Sure,” Penny said.

  “Until four months ago, option three was the only one we had…. But four months ago, the second option became a reality. That’s four months that it’s existed at least in some form. That’s long enough for new entries to impact the database.”

  I got it then, finally. Penny got it too.

  “It didn’t change,” I said. “Over the four months, it didn’t change.”

  “It changed,” Osterhagen said. “The creation of the virus did alter the outcome. Several chains of possibility fell off, while others disappeared completely.”

  On a screen beside him, he brought up two views of the map, and at first glance, the nebulae pictured in both looked identical. He started zooming in to different areas, and Penny watched with a lot of interest as he started explaining what exactly changed and why, and what he thought it meant. As usual, when he did this, the two of them kind of shut me out. But to be fair, I usually didn’t follow them.

  I got everything I needed from what he said and the way the colors coursed behind that thin white halo when he said it. The problem wasn’t that the change was smaller than they’d hoped for or expected.

  The problem was that things hadn’t gotten better; they’d gotten worse.

  Calliope Flax—Pyt-Yahk District, Bullrich Heights

  If Bullrich was the ass end of the city, Pyt-Yahk District was the ass end of Bullrich. No one in their right mind who wasn’t stuck there ever went into the Pit, not even the cops. No one gave a shit about that place or anyone in it.

  I took my bike down a back alley, over frozen trash and slush. It was cold, but I smelled smoke, and when wind blew down the street, a pocket of warm air hit me. A group of them were holed up somewhere close.

  The alley came out in an open lot where fires burned in metal drums. The dregs sat in groups, hunkered down in layers of old clothes, coats, and blankets. Bloodshot eyes and hairy faces looked up and watched me pass. They were off the grid—no IDs, no homes, no names, nothing. As far as the rest of the world cared, they didn’t exist. They were nobodies. It’s why Fawkes picked them.

  I cruised through the drum fires and slapped-up shelters. Over the wind, in the back of my head the static changed. Part of it got a little louder. At least one of them was around somewhere.

  The GPS was useless that deep inside. The streets were overrun. Shacks were set up, sheet metal and plastic tied with wire. Side streets were blocked off with plywood and chain-link fence. I switched to the locator. As long as Yavlinski kept his phone on, I’d find him.

  Hey, Wachalowski. He usually wanted a tip when I found one, but he didn’t answer.

  Nico, pick up. Nothing.

  Asshole.

  I didn’t work for him, but I kept him in the loop even though it was behind Stillwell’s back. If it wasn’t for Nico, I’d probably be holed up with those hobos right now. Five years back, he jumped into a real fire to save my ass. A year back, he did it again. If he told me to drag every last one of those dregs out of there and drop them on his doorstep, I’d do it—for free.

  My front tire nicked an empty can and spun it into the leg of an old trash bin as I turned down a narrow alley. The signal source was from down there. I ducked a rusted fire escape and came out the other side into another lot that they’d turned into a back-alley shelter. A bunch of bums looked over when I brought the bike in. The engine backfired when I cut it, and the pop put them on edge. Yavlinski was somewhere in there.

  Yavlinski, I’m here, I texted. Where are you?

  He stepped out of the crowd from over near a wall covered in spray paint, wrapped in that huge coat of his. He was older, maybe Nico’s age, but there were more miles on him. There were three other guys with him, all scrawny with bad teeth.

  “About time,” he said.

  “You got three?” I asked. One of the three guys opened his mouth, but Yavlinski cut him off.

  “Four,” he said.

  “Let’s see them.”

  “Let’s see the stuff first,” the third bum said. Yavlinski reached into his coat and pulled out a plastic bag. He held it up so the guy could see the Zombie Maker. When he reached for it, I snatched it away and held it in my fist.

  “That’s mine. Show me what I came here for, and it’s yours.”

  “Fucking slut,” he muttered under his breath.

  “In there,” Yavlinski said. He pointed to a rusted metal door at the far end of the alley, and I walked the bike down after him. At the end, he shoved open the door for me.

  “You first,” I said.

  I held the door and the four of them went in. There was light from a fire inside. It came from a doorway on the other side of what used to be a diner. The tables and chairs were gone, and the floor was covered in grime. Anything worth shit got stripped a long time ago.

  From the light spilling through the doorway, I saw a shadow move. Yavlinski headed toward it. I parked the bike, armed it, and followed him.

  Nico, pick up. When I sent the message, the link bounced, then cut out.

  Goddamn it. What the fuck was he doing?

  The four walked past a guy who stood guard next to an electric lamp, to a heavy metal door with chipped blue paint. Yavlinski banged on it twice with his fist, and a bolt turned from inside.

  He opened the door and we went in. As soon as I was through the door, the static picked up. At least one of the guys they were holding was for real. To my right, a big ape sat on a stool with a shotgun across his lap. There were four guys on the floor against the far wall. At least one was a junkie, and two of them looked sick. One of them looked up when we came in. The rest just stared at the floor.

  “Now you give me the bag, you ugly slut,” Yavlinski’s guy said.

  “You’ll get paid when I say you get paid.”

  His eyes flashed and his lip curled. The rest glared over at me as I walked up to the first guy in the row and nudged him with the toe of my boot.

  “You, get up.”

  It took him a second, but he got on his feet and leaned back against the wall. His breath reeked.

  “Hold out your arm. Either one.”

  He put out his right one. His dirty hand shook as I pushed the sleeve back from his wrist. There were needle tracks there. I took the tester out of my jacket and flipped the guard off.

  He didn’t flinch when I stuck him. The tester sucked in a drop of blood and the screen lit up. The strip at the base turned red. He was a carrier. I pointed to the corner of the room.

  “Over there.” He shuffled over and sat back
down while I popped out the sample and stowed it in my pocket. I swapped the needle and moved to the next one. When I was done, I had three on one side of the room, and one on the other.

  Singh, pick up.

  I’m here. What did you find?

  Three total. You got my position?

  I see you. We’re sending in a retrieval squad now. Ten minutes.

  I cut the link, then turned to Yavlinski and the rest.

  “I got hits on these three. Not that one. That one can go.”

  The one who was clean looked around the room. He took a step toward the door, but the guy with the shotgun tensed up.

  “Not so fast,” he said.

  “I said, he’s clean. Let him go.” Yavlinski’s guys got twitchy. The one that did the talking looked pissed.

  “What the fuck?”

  “You got three. You get paid for three.”

  “We got four.”

  “You got three. That one came up green. Now let him the fuck out.”

  “Hey, fuck you. This is what you wanted, right? Pay up.”

  “You’ll get your shit once the pickup is done. That’s the deal.”

  He looked at Yavlinski, then back at me. He was trouble. I could tell by his eyes. I stowed the tester inside my jacket and curled my fingers through the brass knuckles there.

  “How about I kill them and you, and fucking take the shi—”

  I turned around and threw a right cross. The brass slammed into his jaw and broke it. A mouthful of blood and spit hit the wall next to him, and he went down like a rock. The rest of them jumped back, but none of them came at me. The guy with the shotgun didn’t point it at me—yet.

  “Goddamn it …” the guy on the floor growled. He got up on his hands and knees, blood dripping out of his mouth and nose. I stomped my boot down on his ear and he went down in the dust and stayed down.

  “You guys take it easy and everyone gets paid,” I said. “You want to fuck around? I tagged all your mugs when I came in, and a Stillwell unit is on its way here right now. You keep this shit up, and if I don’t bury you assholes, then they’ll come in here and kill your fucking grandkids. You get me?”