Zero Sum Game

by SL Huang

  “They’ll want us to turn over the information,” I warned Rio, remembering how thoroughly Steve’s group had dismantled both Courtney’s and Checker’s houses. I thought of Anton and Penny, and wondered how many people would die if we handed over the data. “Whatever you do, don’t agree.”

  “Do not worry,” said Rio. “I am not accustomed to allowing anyone to make requirements of me.”

  That made me quirk a smile. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the other end of his phone call. “Checker, do you have a secure email address we can give them to coordinate through? Something they wouldn’t be able to trace?”

  He grumbled something unintelligible about signing our own death warrants, but wrote one down. I added Steve’s number from memory and handed Rio the paper; he folded it carefully and tucked it in an inside pocket.

  “I shall return in a few hours. Cas, if necessary, I have some armaments on the roof.”

  “Good,” I said, and turned back to Checker, whose face was a funny shade of white. “Okay, let’s finish this.”

  Five hours later, Rio hadn’t gotten back yet, and Checker and I were almost done with our notification algorithm.

  And we were in terrible trouble.

  Chapter 32

  Checker had unearthed the alcohol in Rio’s kitchen. He’d deemed it necessary, after what we had found.

  “What happened to your no food or drink rule?” I asked. Not that I could blame him.

  “Tequila doesn’t count,” he said, taking another swig. “It’s tequila.”

  To be fair, the alcohol didn’t seem to impair his computer skills at all; his fingers hadn’t slowed on the keyboard. “You almost have my alcohol tolerance,” I said.

  “Well, then you should be drinking, too! I need company in my paroxysm of misery here.”

  “I don’t drink on the job,” I said. “I drink more than enough between jobs.”

  “Between jobs, you say?” He took another swig. “You’re on, Cas Russell.”

  “On for what?”

  “You and me. Drinking contest. Once all this is over. I bet I kick your ass.”

  I highly doubted that, but this wasn’t the time for a pissing contest. I snapped my fingers at him. “Hey. Focus, or I’ll cut you off.”

  “I’m focused!” he protested, and to be fair, even my math ability could only detect the barest elision in the words. “I can’t do this without drinking. Too depressing.”

  I couldn’t argue with him there.

  Three hours ago we had realized—well, Checker had realized, with his uncanny savvy about finances and money laundering operations—that the sources of Pithica’s enterprises weren’t merely faceless organizations. To be sure, some were innocuous front businesses, or odd governmental funds, or false charities. But others…

  Once we figured out where some of the money was coming from, we started looking more closely. And then more closely. It turned out the lion’s share of Pithica’s revenue came from…well. From places that would have been on Rio’s target list.

  I stared at the monitor, feeling nauseated. “Dawna said Pithica basically owned the drug cartels,” I murmured. “She wasn’t lying.”

  “Yeah, well, did she mention the human trafficking? Arms dealing? Owning corrupt governments? Holy shit.” Checker’s fingers drummed against the keys, and a few lines of scripting spit out on the screen. He was running his predictive programs again, the same algorithms he’d used on Kingsley’s data to hunt down Pithica in the first place. The same ones we’d been running now for hours, hoping for different results, ever since Checker had become suspicious of what we were looking at. “This is not good, Cas Russell. This is…it’s not good.”

  Pithica’s economic model was ingenious. They wanted to make the world a better place, and they were. They hadn’t chosen to steal from just anybody; their benign-looking accounting was siphoning from and slowly strangling off some of the most extensive crime syndicates in the world. The cartels put up a good front, Dawna had said, but on the whole we’ve defanged them…eventually we’ll phase them out entirely, but for now they provide us with means of accomplishing our objectives—

  No matter how we ran the mathematical models, if we let Pithica’s victims keep their own money, then they got to use it. And the violence, the human slavery, the human suffering…it was going to spike off the charts afterward.

  If we knocked down Pithica this way, we were going to take a whole hell of a lot of innocent people with them.

  “They really are doing good,” said Checker. “They weren’t just saying that. Who knows how much else they’ve been doing? They’re probably using all this money to help people even more.”

  I swallowed.

  “I’m not arguing that they aren’t Evil with a capital E,” said Checker. “But—I guess—are they? Yeah, they manipulate people, and not setting aside that they almost killed you and Arthur, but…it’s not like they’re going around starting wars. More like preventing them.”

  “Preventing them by twisting people’s minds around,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Checker. “But…maybe it’s like what Professor X does, you know? I bet in their eyes they’re the heroes.”

  “What about what they do to children? The children they take?”

  “You mean like Daniela Saio? What about them? We don’t even know—”

  “She was ten,” I said. “We know enough.”

  “Yeah, and what did they do to her? Gave her telepathic superpowers? Dude, I’d go in for that in a heartbeat.”

  I barely restrained myself from clocking him. “Take that back.”

  “Whoa!” He twitched away from me. “Hey, sorry. Uh, that really upsets you, huh.”

  “They’re kids,” I said. “They’re just kids.”

  “I thought those kids were our bad guys.”

  “Maybe now,” I said. “But they didn’t have to be.”

  Checker was quiet for a moment, looking at his computer screens without seeming to see them. “You know, kids get hurt by the drug trade, too. I’m just saying. And human trafficking, a lot of it’s children. Slavery. Child prostitution. Child porn. It’s—it’s not good.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “It’s a zero sum game. We take out one monster, the other rises up.”

  “It’s not zero sum,” I corrected. “If that were true, taking out the drug cartels would increase Pithica’s power, not the other way around.”

  “Stop being accurate when I’m trying to be dramatic,” Checker groused.

  “Well, I’m just saying. If we could find a way to take out all the corruption in the world simultaneously, Pithica would get drained of its resources, not win, which means there is a game theoretic payoff where both monsters die—”

  “Oh, great,” he shot back. “You come up with a way to uproot and eradicate all the crime syndicates and fix all social justice problems everywhere at the same time, you let me know. I’m not sure, but I think there might be a Nobel Peace Prize in it for you, if you need the incentive.”

  I let my head drop into my hands. “So we take down Pithica, and people everywhere suffer. Or we let things stand the way they are.” I felt sick. And I hadn’t even been drinking.

  “I’ve never met Dawna and her mind-mojo, and I’m still doubting doing this,” mumbled Checker, toying with the label on the tequila bottle.

  “Ends justify the means, then?”

  “What? Hey, whoa, trick question!”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not.”

  Checker frowned, considering. “You’re right,” he said finally. “You think you should always say ‘no,’ to that, don’t you? The saying? You say no, the ends don’t justify the means. Except—when you’re actually faced with the choice—”

  “We say they have no right,” I said softly. “Except maybe they do. The math…” Dawna’s words came back to me, about the balance of more innocent lives saved at the expense of so few. The numbers agreed with Pithica, no question. The math was on their side.

>   But what if I was only having that thought because of Dawna’s influence?

  But what if I only wanted to take her down because I wanted to be positive she hadn’t influenced me, so I was overcompensating—at the expense of innocent people?

  But what if she wanted me to think that?

  My head pounded.

  “I’m not going to have a clear conscience no matter which way we choose,” said Checker. He took off his glasses and leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “What about you? Still think we should go ahead with this?”

  I thought about what Rio had said. About free will, and humanity’s freedom to sin, and how nobody should take that away. Rio’s chosen path was clear: he was going after Pithica, and shit, if other villains rose up in their wake, he’d go after them, too.

  Pithica might save people. They might be saving the world. But what they were doing was still wrong.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Would you like to meet Dawna?”

  Checker jerked reflexively.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I agree.”

  He looked away.

  “It doesn’t matter what the results are.” I was certain. I told myself I was certain. “They run the world the way they see fit, and twist around people’s minds to do it, and assassinate anyone who might get in the way. We have to stop them.”

  “I just wish…” Checker murmured. “Darwin help me, I wish this were somebody else’s decision.”

  “Well,” I said, “if it helps, remember that you and Arthur first started this because you were trying to find the people who’d murdered an innocent man.”

  Checker picked up his bottle and contemplated it for a moment, then swirled the dregs and raised it toward me. “To Reginald Kingsley, then.” He sounded like a man at his own execution. “We’re going to destroy the world for you.”

  “And save it,” I said. Save it for those who would ravage it. Checker was right. It was not a decision I wanted to be making.

  I remembered what Dawna had said about the burden of making the choice, once one had the power—the decision of which lives to save, of which gray morality was better. We faced that choice now, too. And we would have to live with the results.

  A tone sounded from the nearest computer. Checker moved over to it. “It’s the email account we gave to He Who Calls Himself Steve,” he told me. “Looks like your boy came through. With…holy shit, this is a lot of detail.” I stood up to look over his shoulder; he was scrolling through pages and pages of instructions, details on every kind of notification and authentication to send to each type of bank, government agency, monetary fund, or business. “They gave us exactly what we need—all we have to do is incorporate it. We’ll be ready to deploy within a few hours.”

  And we’d hit a button, and everything would be out of our hands.

  A crunch on the gravel outside signified Rio’s return; I went out to meet him fully armed, but he was alone and unperturbed. Evening was falling again, streaking the clouds red and pink across the broad Morongo Basin sky.

  “Steve came through,” I informed him. “We just got the email. He give you any trouble?”

  He looked at me.

  “Nice one,” I said.

  “Well. It seems I am capable of inspiring some fear.”

  Considering what I’d gone through to get Arthur and Checker in the same room with him, and the fact that Dawna Polk was jeopardizing her whole organization to turn him, I thought he was making the understatement of the year.

  “How does your work here progress?” Rio asked, following me back inside.

  Most of the time he’d been gone had been spent rehashing our moral quandary—in comparison, the programming had been easy. “It’s done. Pretty much. We just have to set up and format the messages according to what we got from Steve and Company a minute ago. A few hours, tops. Have they deployed alerts to all the right agencies yet?”

  “He said it would be done within two hours of our conversation, which time is now past. Your notifications will be taken seriously.”

  “Hey, Checker,” I called as we came in. “We’re good to go. Steve’s sent out all the alerts. As soon as we’re ready, we can—”

  The lights went out. Simultaneously, all of Checker’s monitors died, their glow an afterimage in the dimness, and the all-pervading hum of the electronics cut off, leaving us in sudden silence.

  Checker yelled something inarticulate and possessive. He started flailing around in the grayness, trying to get his laptops restarted. Rio disappeared from my side as if he had been teleported.

  I raced back outside, my foot hitting a windowsill to gain the roof in one bound. Rio was already crouched on the shingles beside a collection of armaments, peering through a scope to scan the valley.

  “We’re not alone,” he said.

  At first I thought he meant they had found us—I scanned the landscape, the empty desert snapping into a sharp relief of mathematical interactions—before I realized Rio wasn’t reacting as if to an offensive. “What do you mean?”

  He lowered the scope and handed it to me, pointing toward the south. “Pithica didn’t locate us. This attack is widespread.”

  It took me a minute, but I found the gas station and small cluster of buildings just visible in the direction Rio had indicated, tiny even through the scope. People were standing around outside, milling in a way that was not quite normal, some talking, some gesticulating broadly at each other. The twilight was deep enough that some lights should have been on, but everything was dark.

  “What the hell?” I said. “A power outage?”

  Rio pulled the burner cell out of his pocket, reinserted the battery, and hit the power button. Nothing.

  “No,” he said. “Not a power outage.”

  “Then what?”

  He squinted toward the horizon. “EMP attack. Pithica was warned by the alerts going out. It’s protecting itself.”

  Rio swung down off the roof; I followed closely behind him as we burst back into the house. “Explain, Rio!” I demanded. “How the hell did they—”

  “Guys, everything’s fried!” came Checker’s panicked voice. “They must have hit us with an EMP; it’s the only thing that could’ve—”

  “That’s what Rio said!” I interrupted. “Somebody start explaining now!”

  “EMP,” said Checker. “Electromagnetic pulse, it’ll fry any electronics in the radius—”

  “I know that,” I cut in. “I’m not an idiot. Skip to the ‘how’ part.”

  “High-altitude nuclear detonation is probably the easiest way,” said Checker.

  I felt dazed. “Easiest?”

  “Clearly you’re not up on your right-wing nut job blogs,” said Checker. “One high-altitude nuke could take out all the electronics in the United States. The good news is, no loss to human life, except of course for all of the countless people who are depending on medical electronics to keep them kicking—”

  “Cars,” I said. “What about cars?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know. Most cars are computerized these days—older ones might have a better chance? I don’t know—”

  “We need to get out of the radius,” I said. “Checker, you’ve been backing up in the cloud, right? If we can get to a place that’s not fried, will the network be—”

  “Distributed computing, it should be fine, well, depending on how much they took out—what if they have taken out the whole country?” Checker’s voice had gone very high.

  “Would they?” I wondered. “They’re all about helping people. And last they knew we were still in LA. Plus, if they got provoked into this by what Steve’s group did and tracked it back to them—”

  A squealing noise cut me off. Rio had been digging around inside a metal box, and came up with a working radio. Apparently a true survivalist kept emergency electronics inside a Faraday cage.

  Panicked voices overlapped each other on the airwaves. Rio finally found a frequency on which a crisp-voiced woman informed us that, w
hatever “event” had happened…

  “It is unverified whether this is an attack or the result of a natural phenomenon…the President is asking people to help each other out in this time of crisis and to avoid panic…we now have reports FEMA and the National Guard are being deployed to affected areas…”

  …was at least localized to Southern California and parts of Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.

  “This is not their endgame,” said Rio.

  “You’re right.” Shit. I saw it too. “This is a stalling tactic. They’re giving themselves enough time to hunt us down and stop us.”

  “They will have some plan of escalation,” said Rio. “They are very efficient when they pool their resources.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Checker.

  “We don’t do anything,” I said. “You get out of here. I’m going back to LA.”

  “Cas,” said Rio.

  “We have to bait them,” I insisted. “They have to believe they’ve got our scent until we can get the notifications out. That’s all that matters right now.”

  “Abort,” said Rio.

  “No.” I turned on him, talking very fast. “What’s going to happen if we do? If we run? What will their next step be? Bombing the LA metropolitan area into the ground and hoping they’ll kill us somewhere in there? As long as we’re a threat, they won’t stop coming after us. Which means we’ve got only two options—either we come to them and save them the trouble, or we make good on our threat, or we do both before they mow down anyone else in their way.”

  I paused, out of breath.

  “Do you have a plan?” said Rio, his baritone quiet in the shadowy darkness.

  One was forming in my head even as we spoke. It was dangerous. Scratch that, it was insane. And it very well might not work. But I already knew I was going to go for it anyway.

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. And I think—I think we’ve got a chance to take down Dawna Polk at the same time.” I took a deep breath. “But I’m warning you. You’re not going to like it.”