Element Zero r-3

by James Knapp

  It’s me, I thought. I checked the name patch to be sure. It read OTT.

  I stared, stunned, as she crossed the room to the table and dropped an electronic pad down in front of her. She turned it on and started opening programs with a stylus. Her face looked mean, and unlike me, she was stone cold sober. Her eyes were hard, and focused.

  “Hit the lights,” she said. Gein went over to the switchbox and threw the switch.

  The room got dark except for the single light over the man against the wall. It shone dimly, and made shadows under his brow.

  “Starting the scan,” she said.

  A bright red line flickered across the far wall, near the ceiling. I followed it back and saw a small lens mounted in the cinder block that I’d never noticed before. A light fixed on one side began to flash.

  The line began to move down the wall, tracing contours over the man’s face and neck before traveling down the rest of his body.

  “I have a kid,” the man wheezed, as the laser moved down his body. Next to him, I could see divots where bullets had punched into the concrete. I hadn’t noticed them before.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  I looked at the screen and saw an outline of the man displayed there. Information was being called out, but the text was too small for me to read. I moved closer and leaned in; then the screen turned red and flashed.

  “You’ve made a mistake,” the man said. He looked terrified. The red laser went out. The other me tapped the screen in front of her, and it went dark too.

  “I said shut up,” she said. She turned to the uniformed men. “Cover him.”

  Their guns came out and they aimed at the man from halfway down the room. He held up his hands feebly.

  “What are we looking at?” Gein asked.

  “It changed again,” she said. “Goddamn it, it changed again.” She crossed to the silver panel on the wall and swiveled it around to reveal a handset. She picked it up and spoke into it.

  “We need a containment team down here,” she said.

  “You’ve made a mistake,” the man whimpered. “You’ve made a terrible mistake…. ”

  “If he says another word, shoot him,” the other me said. Gein and Vaggot glanced at each other nervously.

  “You can’t stop this,” the man said. The other me slammed down the handset.

  “Gein, shoot—”

  The man seized up all of a sudden, and the cords in his neck stood out. It happened really fast; in a second, the back of his skull melted away under his skin. His neck shriveled and his eye sockets sank until his eyes bugged out of shadows.

  “Shit!” Vaggot shouted. He looked ready to piss himself, but stood his ground. The two men stood there, weapons aimed, but not shooting for some reason.

  The man’s deformed head bobbed at the end of his chicken neck while his clothes draped over a body that wasted away beneath them. He looked around the room like he didn’t recognize anything he saw.

  “You can’t stop this,” he gurgled. It looked like his tongue had split down the middle.

  “Hold him,” the other me said. “The team is on their—”

  “You can’t stop this!” the man shrieked, and shambled forward, toward the two men. He held out his hands and they were like spindly claws.

  The man stumbled, and when the soldiers moved out of the way, he just kept going like they weren’t even there. They followed him with their guns as he reached the table and shoved it aside. It flipped and crashed into the wall as he kicked past the folding chair and came right toward me, the real me. It was like he could see me. I backed away, into the wall, and dropped my phone. It clattered to the floor, and I saw the screen light up as a voice came over its speaker.

  “If anyone is receiving this message, listen carefully,” a woman shouted through the phone, as the thing stopped a few feet from me.

  “Wh-what?” I asked. The men in the room were taking aim, ready to fire. When I looked down at the phone, I could just make out the caller’s name on the LCD.

  NOELLE HYDE

  “If any of this gets through, then listen. The nukes may be your last chance…. ”

  “What?”

  “ …were wrong …the missiles don’t cause the event; they stop it,” she said, her voice rising in pitch. “You have to launch …”

  My heart skipped a beat and I felt the strength go out of my legs as the guns came up in slow motion behind the man. His mouth stretched open, drooling gray spit, and I saw his teeth were stained red around that horrible, divided tongue.

  “ …the detonation overshadowed the rest,” the voice shouted from the phone. “It was all we could see, and we missed the cause behind it…. The lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it…. ”

  Words appeared on the green concrete wall across from me, wet black lines creeping down from the hastily painted letters.

  ELEVEN FROM ZERO

  The deformed thing’s hands grabbed my shoulders, and as the first shot went off behind it, I screamed. The next thing I knew, all I could see was fire swirling all around, throwing hot orange embers up into the night sky like stars. The world was one fire. Everything was burning, and as dark figures lurched blindly through the flames, I heard her voice, low and hoarse, in the back of my head.

  “They were wrong,” she whispered.

  “It was us all along…. ”

  My eyes snapped open and I sat up on the sofa where I’d been lying, knocking something over and sending a metal pan down onto the floor. Penny was there, kneeling next to me, and she reached out to grab me as I started to flail.

  “Easy,” she said. “Take it easy.”

  I looked around and saw two armed men and a man in a bloodstained white shirt standing nearby.

  “He just stitched you up,” Penny said. “You’re okay. Take it easy.”

  Something smelled funny. I looked past them and saw that the sofa I was on was arranged in a big lounge in the middle of a huge condo. Two other sofas and a big love seat all faced in toward a big, heavy wooden table with a thick surface of smoked glass. A bunch of different kinds of glasses, some still half-full, were sitting on the table. There were silver platters of fancy food lined up, half-eaten. Lobster tails and raw oysters on the half shell sat in a crystal serving dish, floating in melted ice. Caviar, pâtés, and leftover hors d’oeuvres were all still sitting out, and it smelled.

  “Sorry,” one of the men said. “There hasn’t been time to clean it up.”

  “We’re all set,” Penny said. “Thanks, guys.”

  My head pounded and my mouth tasted sour. I waited until the nausea passed, then stood up while Penny hovered near me. The room spun a little as I wobbled over to a big serving table where a bunch of food was left out in chafing dishes and serving bowls. I saw ends of rare meat on carving blocks, the edges crusted. Stray flowers of sashimi had shriveled, and raw shrimp lay drowned in a glass bowl of wine. The smell of it all made my stomach turn, but I needed a drink. A bottle of cognac was sitting on the marble tabletop, and I picked it up. I grabbed an empty crystal shot glass from the stack next to it and filled it, my hands shaking so bad I sloshed half of it onto the floor. I gulped it down and poured another one.

  “You look like you saw a ghost,” Penny said. “What happened?”

  I shook my head. Through the cobwebs, I checked my phone to see if Noelle’s name was there, but it wasn’t. The LCD read WACHALOWSKI.

  All at once, my throat burned and my eyes were filled with tears. I half laughed and half cried, spraying spit.

  “Now he calls,” I sniffed. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and took another long pull off the bottle.

  “You probably shouldn’t—” the doctor said, but his voice dribbled off.

  “We’re good,” Penny said again, staring at him. “Thanks. You can go.” She stepped closer, carefully. She wanted to touch me, I could tell, but she didn’t.

  “Zoe, what did you see?”

&nbs
p; “Nothing,” I said. I could barely form the word.

  “That wasn’t nothing,” she said.

  The men left the room, though I noticed the guards stayed outside the door. Penny followed me as I limped over to the wall of glass that looked out over the city below. Off in the distance, a big cloud had risen behind the buildings and begun to lean away from the rush of snow.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Fawkes dropped one of the nukes,” she said. “It might have triggered what you saw.”

  “What?”

  “Fawkes’s army surrounded the three towers: the CMC, TransTech, and here. Osterhagen ordered a Leichenesser charge dropped in the middle of the blockade outside to try to clear a path out.”

  She held up a computer tablet so I could see the screen. A feed from somewhere outside looked out onto the front steps of Alto Do Mundo. From where the camera watched, I could see hundreds of people out there, surging shoulder to shoulder. They all had dirty hair and dirty faces. A lot of them bared bad teeth, and their clothes looked like they came from garbage bins. They were all facing up the huge marble stairs at the entrance to our building, staring with wide eyes that were stained black.

  “That’s when Fawkes dropped the nuke,” she said. “It was a warning, I guess.”

  “There’s so many of them,” I said. There was only one spot that was clear, right down the main steps where sets of clothes and shoes were strewn, deflated and empty. They flapped in the wind, and when it blew, it stirred traces of white smoke that lingered around the remains. It looked like hundreds had been wiped out, but hundreds more were taking their places even while I watched. “We’re in trouble, Zoe.”

  “Something’s wrong,” I said, still staring. The cloud outside was huge. “How long was I out?”

  “Not long,” Penny said. “They’ll have Flax soon if they don’t already. With any luck, we can stop him from dropping the rest.”

  You have to do it. Make sure they launch …

  My head was still spinning. I took my next swig straight from the bottle and swallowed three big mouthfuls before gasping in a breath.

  “What’s the matter?” Penny asked.

  “What if we’re wrong?” I said, looking down at the lights below. Off in the distance, I could see the flashing lights from one of the helicopters as it circled the building.

  “Wrong about what?” Her expression changed then. It turned a little hard, and I thought I sensed suspicion coming from her.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”

  The bottle clinked against the rim of the glass as I poured myself another one and drank it. The hard look in Penny’s eyes softened again.

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  “Thanks, Penny.”

  On shaky legs I stepped away from her, and turned the cell phone over in my hand as I watched that big, deadly cloud lean closer and closer to the shore. At the window, I looked out onto the city below.

  “It was us all along…. ”

  I reached out around me, sensing the others in the room. They had begun to focus on me as something unspoken was passed around between them.

  I took one last drink, then returned Nico’s call. I held the phone to my ear, my breath fogging the window in front of me as it rang. After three rings, he picked up.

  “Wachalowski,” he said. And in spite of myself, I began to cry.

  “It’s me,” I said, soft enough so no one else would hear.

  “Zoe,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “No.” I tried to keep the slur and the shaking out of my voice as I spoke. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”

  “But you are.”

  “She told me you’d call,” I said. I felt dizzy and had to put one hand on the window to steady myself. I leaned forward so that my forehead was on the cool glass, and I was staring down into the sea of lights below.

  “Who told you?”

  I wasn’t sure why, but somehow I knew what Noelle had said to me in the Green Room was true. I knew too that no one would listen to me at this point, no matter what I said. As important as I supposedly was, none of them would ever listen to me say that there was no way to get out of this and still stay on top. I knew all that, and I knew that Noelle was right too. She’d been right all along, right from the start. This whole thing was a big, cosmic joke. The city was going to burn. One way or the other, it was all going to burn.

  “I want you to get out of the city,” I said, wiping my eyes.

  “I can’t, Zoe.”

  “Promise me you’ll leave. Leave tonight. Right now.”

  “I can’t.”

  More attention was focusing my way. Any second now, Ai would snap out of it and realize what I’d done. When she did, she’d make me hang up.

  “This is the last time we’ll talk,” I said.

  “Zoe—”

  “You tried to help me,” I whispered. “Please save yourself.”

  “Why, Zoe?” he asked. “What are they going to do?”

  “Nothing,” I told him. “But I think I am.”

  He was still talking when I felt the presence worm its way into my head, gentle but firm. Some small shard of Ai’s consciousness had turned its attention to me. I wanted to keep talking to Nico. There were things I wanted to tell him but the presence wouldn’t let me.

  That’s enough, Zoe.

  My arm dropped and the phone slid away from my face. I watched his name on the LCD as the phone spun end over end and clattered to the floor.

  Calliope Flax—Stillwell Corps Base

  I woke up to the sound of static, louder than usual. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t see.

  “She’s prepped,” a voice said. “Are you ready to deploy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I tried to move, but I couldn’t. The last thing I remembered, they’d rushed me.

  “What was that before?” the first voice asked.

  “You mean why didn’t she respond to the push?”

  “A ten-year-old could control her. Why didn’t she stay under?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The static in my head cracked. I tried to move again, but my muscles wouldn’t respond. I opened my eyes, but it stayed dark. I tried to call Nico, but my JZI’s comm link was down.

  “It doesn’t matter. Let’s just do this. Stop her heart,” a voice said.

  A needle pricked the back of my neck. I felt a cold metal ring push down on my bare back.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” another voice said.

  “Fawkes eighty-sixed the test subjects, and every time we grab one off the street, he cuts it loose. It’s got to be during the sync-up. She’s our last shot at this.”

  “He just dropped a nuke in the middle of the bay. When he sees what we’ve done—”

  “If this works, he won’t be doing anything.”

  “But if it doesn’t—”

  “Osterhagen says, ‘Risk it.’ Now stop her fucking heart; that’s an order.”

  “She can still hear us,” I heard Singh say under his breath.

  “I don’t give a shit. Is the virus ready to go?”

  Singh sighed. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then do it. Now.”

  A hand touched my face. I felt warm breath in my ear.

  “Sorry, Cal.”

  A circuit lit up on my JZI then. I still couldn’t call out, but someone on the outside was calling in. It was Singh.

  Singh, get me the fuck out of here, or I swear I will—

  Don’t be afraid, Cal, he said.

  I’m not afraid, asshole.

  You need to die just long enough for the Huma nodes to finish forming, but I’ll make sure you can be resuscitated.

  Fuck you. Get me the hell out—

  Pay attention. There’s no time to get into it, Cal, but we have to do this. If we can get you onto the car
riers’ network, we can deploy a virus that will shut them all down. This is happening. It might be our only chance, and we have to stop those things. I know you understand that. Do you trust me?

  I didn’t, but he was right about one thing: I did understand. I was fucked; they knew I was a carrier, and they had me. If there was a way out, Singh was it.

  You’re a fucking asshole, Singh.

  I know. Do you trust me?

  What do I have to do?

  You don’t have to do anything. You’re already part of the mesh; that’s why you can sense them, but you’re not fully synced up. We’re hoping Fawkes won’t interpret this as a new node joining, just an update of an existing one…. If we’re right, then you’ll be off his radar. When the nodes finish forming, the first thing they’ll do is transmit a sync request giving your stats, uptime, location, and so forth. The virus will be attached to the request and propagated. Understand?

  No.

  All you need to know is that your body will die for about a minute, but I’ll bring you back, Cal, I swear. As a human, not a revivor. Are you ready?

  I wasn’t, but they had me. There was nothing I could do, and even though Singh was a prick, he was a smart prick. If he thought this could work, it might work.

  If you fuck up, I told him, and I turn—

  You won’t.

  Don’t leave me like that.

  I won’t.

  I heard a thud, and pain slammed through my chest. It pulsed down my arms and up my neck, but I couldn’t move. The air died in my lungs and every muscle in my body went slack. I heard my vitals tone go flat, then fade out like I’d fallen down a deep tunnel. Everything got quiet. I couldn’t move or see or hear. There was just a big, black nothing.

  Is this it? Am I dead? I never got to say bye to Nico. I didn’t even know where the fuck I was.

  Node formation previously interrupted. Continuing…

  The words popped up in the dark. They came from a JZ implant, so my brain still worked.

  Is it alive, though? Was I alive or dead?

  I got an itch at the back of my neck, like bugs under the skin. I could at least sense my body again. Just barely, I felt my fingers and toes prick with pins and needles.