ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  “Hold on a minute,” Ken says. “The Lodge is fruitful. I’ve been thinking it over—it fucking works. No more of this bullshit of securing hacker assets and having them play in the wild. That always ends poorly for us. Keeping them in one location was brilliant, Leslie. Kudos to you.”

  “They’re dangerous when together.”

  “They’re dangerous because you wanted them to have a long leash. Soon as this phase is over, we can tighten things up. Last week we had one pod out this Pakistani hacker cell. Some jokers calling themselves the Cyber-Leets—they’d been hacking banks and other American retailers. The Paki government caught ’em, and thanks to their completely inflexible laws on the matter, the hackers have already been sentenced to death. They’re off the table. America is safe.”

  “The program needs terminating, Ken. If your hackers talk about Typhon—”

  “They won’t talk. They think when their time is over they’ll go home, but they won’t. They’ll go to jail. Reduced sentences, maybe, for their good work—so that way, if they spill their guts, their deal goes to shit. It’s fine.”

  “The program needs terminating,” she says again, her voice colder, deader. “The hackers must be terminated as well.”

  He laughs. “Terminated? Like—”

  “The Pakistani government has the correct idea.”

  She’s kidding, right? “You’re kidding.”

  Silence.

  She’s not kidding.

  “This conversation is over, Leslie. You’re a defense contractor. You don’t make demands of the American government. You don’t make demands of the NSA. You work for us, we don’t work for you.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Ken.”

  “Sweet dreams, Leslie. Oh, and don’t forget—I still want that site visit.” He ends the call before she can say anything else.

  CHAPTER 29

  Today Is the Day

  THE LODGE

  Today’s the day, Aleena thinks. Guilt chases her like a yappy dog. Guilt over how she still distrusts Chance. Guilt over what they’re about to do to a sovereign nation. Guilt over who she’s become here: a compromised person.

  But today’s the last day of this assignment.

  And today, she thinks, they’re going to find out just what Typhon is.

  Today’s the day, Chance thinks, standing in the cabin shower. Soap in his eyes suddenly freaks him out—it’s like being back in the Dep again. Get shut of that, dude. You gotta pack that kind of fear in a suitcase, stick it on a plane, let it fly away without you. Time to keep it together. Today’s the day his pod does what it does: which is, make him look a whole lot better than he really is. Game face on, he thinks. It’s time.

  Today’s the day, DeAndre thinks, shoving a forkful of cold eggs in his mouth. Everyone’s quiet here in the morning—his kind don’t like to be up early. And last night he didn’t sleep, and neither did most of his pod pals. It’s evident on their faces.

  He’s scared. He doesn’t know why. Something’s eating at him. Feels like he should just be doing his work and not ripping off Band-Aids and picking scabs, but all this shit about Typhon and that list of thirteen names, it’s got him worked up. It’s got him curious. Nothing good has ever come from DeAndre getting curious. He remembers when he thought to himself, Just keep your head down, man, and do your time. That thought has passed.

  Today’s the day, Wade thinks. He feels electrically charged. Alive and awake in a way he hasn’t felt in a long time. He keeps seeing Siobhan’s face. Then Rebecca’s. He has pictures of her from fairly recently. Off her Facebook and Twitter. From Siobhan’s e-mail account. He thinks he’s gonna find out what happened to her. He has no gods, but he prays to them just the same that she’s okay. Whoever hurt her is gonna suffer. If the United States government was involved he’s gonna tear the whole thing down, pillar by pillar. He’s gonna stick his thumb right in that creepy eye at the top of the pyramid.

  Today’s the day, Reagan thinks, and inside she’s a tornado of glass and razors, a rain of piss and tears, a storm of lightning and a plague of locusts. Outside, she’s stone-faced, ready to play, ready to kick and punch and bite. In the dark of her mind, louder when she blinks, she hears a baby crying. She hears her baby crying. She throws her whole plate in the trash. It’s time.

  CHAPTER 30

  The Nuclear Option

  UNDERNEATH MOUNT TOCHAL, IRAN

  Bahram plays Dungeons & Dragons with a robot.

  The robot is just a housing unit, really—an extension of the artificial intelligence Verethragna. It is far from sophisticated, mechanically: certainly not as capable as the Japanese ASIMO or the Iranians’ own Surena III. It cannot walk, for example. Though it has some movement, of course: the camera that comprises its head has a dozen degrees of freedom; its arms are herky-jerky but can move chess pieces—or, in this case, roll a cup of polyhedral dice.

  “The kobolds attack,” Bahram says. He leans forward on his chair, scooting it forward a little so he can look at the battle map in front of them. Miniatures of various fantasy figures populate the octagons of the map. The AI’s own miniature is a simple fighter—anything more complex than that seems to occasionally bewilder it.

  Beyond the table is Bahram’s computer, on an old metal desk left over from the military base that this used to be. Behind all of it is a window—and past the window are banks of servers. Servers that help power this robot and, more important, the machine intelligence that controls it. A few other programmers and scientists work in that room—some mill about, others hunker down next to screens showing pages of code. Not one of them is a nuclear scientist.

  This base—many floors, hundreds of feet below the surface of the mountain—has indeed been repurposed to process and enrich uranium. Not for weapons, but truly, for energy. The only weapon that matters is the one that hides in the middle of it all. The only weapon is right here before him.

  Bahram takes a twenty-sided die—a d20—and rolls it. It shows up as 20. A natural 20.

  “Could. Be. Critical hit,” says Verethragna, in hitching Farsi. “Exceeds Armor Class . . . automatically.”

  “Which means what?”

  “That means you. Roll again.”

  He nods. The AI is correct—though this in and of itself is neither interesting nor particularly special. The intelligence taught itself to play, but ultimately it’s just memorizing rules and regurgitating them when the utility calls for it. It’s a fancier version of remembering that two plus two equals four.

  Bahram rolls the d20 again: another hit. Which means—

  “Critical. Hit.”

  “That’s right.” He rolls for damage not once, but twice. He performs all the proper multipliers and adds in all the weapon and situational bonuses and—

  The robot shudders suddenly, as if struck. “The kobolds. Come up on both sides of me, heroic warrior. Rustam. Their forest axes. Sink deep into my ribs. I am felled. To my knees.” The robot shudders again. Then, with its extensor hand, gently knocks over its own miniature.

  Bahram blinks, then laughs. That is interesting. This isn’t just regurgitating rules. This is contextualizing those rules into story. Into narrative.

  Behind him footsteps sound. Bahram wheels around in his chair, sees Mahdi walking past. He catches Mahdi by the elbow. “Mahdi, look. Look.” He gestures excitedly toward the robot, toward the table.

  Mahdi—handsome Mahdi, Mahdi with the chiseled features, Mahdi with the dark smoky eyes underneath the vaulted-arch eyebrows—waves it off. “No time. I’m going to go hiking. Weather’s hot, but not too hot.” He sighs. “Wish it were winter. How great would it be if the ski slopes were open?” Then he looks down at Bahram—not a cruel stare, but a dismissive one. “I bet you don’t ski.”

  Bahram stands. “I don’t—you know I don’t. My leg, it’s stiff.” Car accident when he was younger. Tehran. Soccer in the street—delivery van backed into him. “But listen, Mahdi, this is a breakthrough, a major breakthrough—”

>   “And it’ll be here when I get back from the hike.” Mahdi musses his hair like he’s a child, then heads to the elevator. Mahdi. Looking so Western. He’s a brilliant mind but refuses to apply it. So selfish. Fine. If he doesn’t want to know—

  Bahram leaps to his desk and reaches over it, banging on the window. Some of the others in the room look over. Fat Jamshad looks up from a server rack, food still in his beard. Next to him, Minoo in her loosely worn (too loosely worn, Bahram thinks) hijab gives a quizzical glance. He yells through the glass, but of course they can’t hear him, and none of them makes much of an effort to—so he heads to the door, opens it up.

  “Everyone! Come see. We’ve had a breakthrough, a major—”

  Click. The overhead lights go dark.

  Bahram looks around as his eyes adjust. The lights from the server rack are still working. Reds, greens. Some blues and whites. Which means the power isn’t off. The generators haven’t turned on, and his computer is still on, though the monitor is momentarily dark. Did a fuse blow?

  Then a high-pitched feedback shriek fills the air. It comes from the computer speaker, from Verethragna’s speaker, and worse, from the old audio system installed throughout the base. Bahram winces, covers his ears, tries to yell over it.

  The feedback dissolves and then a loud guitar chord plays. Then another. And another after that. A thundering drumbeat starts up. Makes Bahram feel like his heart is stuttering in his chest along with the staggering, stampeding beat. He knows this sound—it’s rock, it’s metal, like Angband or Arsames, the kind of music Mahdi listens to. Is this a prank? A prank by Mahdi? It would figure! But then the music plays and he hears English spoken—Quiet Riot. “Cum On Feel the Noize.”

  The lights begin to flicker and strobe, moving in time with the music. Through the strobe, Bahram sees Jamshad with his hands clamped over his cauliflower ears, and Minoo just stands there, arms crossed, scowling at everything—as if she were not a young woman but a mother disgusted with the behavior of her children.

  Bahram’s monitor pops on. A cartoon figure—Bart Simpson, that cheeky little brat with the zigzag hair—appears on his screen. A still-cap of him with his pants hauled down, his yellow buttocks revealed. The Simpsons have been banned here, so who would—?

  Bart Simpson disappears. A movie appears in his place. Two women. One with a . . . no, no, no. That’s not—no. She’s got a strap around her waist and she’s behind another woman, a woman bent over a couch, and the hard rock song suddenly dissolves into pornographic sounds—women moaning, wet squishing, skin slapping. Then that breaks apart, too, into loud industrial noises, then sharp beeps and shrill tones, then static, all of it so loud his ears ring.

  He hurries over to the computer. Tries to turn off the movie. It begins to flicker like a slide show on fast-forward—glimpses of scenes he doesn’t understand. An American cowboy riding a missile. A Jewish-looking man in an orange wig and a sparkly red dress. Pigs rutting. Some American celebrity woman getting out of a limousine and showing off her—Bahram squints, winces, certain he just saw her private parts. He moves the mouse, taps the keys, but nothing stops any of this. He tries to turn the power off, but it doesn’t do anything, so he has to rip the power cable out of the back—

  But his computer isn’t a server. Turning it off doesn’t really matter. He sees the same slide show playing in the other rooms. Cartoons. Pornography. Horror films.

  It’s then he realizes: We’ve been hacked.

  This isn’t just a prank. This is something far worse.

  CHAPTER 31

  Into the Woods

  THE WOODS OUTSIDE THE LODGE

  Between patches of dead leaves, not far from a tangle of wild blackberry briar, Hollis Copper finds a footprint in the dirt.

  He’s heard the sounds. Rustling. Once a distant laugh, through the trees, around midnight. When the winds shifted he even thought he smelled body odor. But this is the first time he’s found something—something!—that proves there’s someone out here.

  So he follows along. Kicks up leaves, moves them around.

  Another footprint. And a broken branch nearby. And a matted patch of creeper ivy. A trail.

  Hollis knows he should be back at the Lodge. It’s close to lunch—the pod’s on the last day of their current assignment, and he knows he should be there to shepherd them through it. If they fail this—and he wonders if they will—it’ll be a knock against them. Maybe enough to get one or some or even all of them washed out, sent packing.

  But he has the advantage of daylight, and he’s onto something. Hollis follows the trail. It’s hard—he’s no tracker, isn’t a wilderness guy. But he does have a good eye for deviations from the status quo. Disruptions. He wanders farther from the Lodge, deeper into the pine and the oak, past fallen trees taken by wild honeysuckle, past an old deer skeleton whose antlers are broken and gnawed, past spiderwebs glowing like optic filament strung between trees.

  Until he finds it. A cave. Small—not some dramatic movie-style cave, not some spelunker’s delight. Just a trio of huge boulders and a space in between them—a gap big enough for someone to crawl into on his belly.

  In the dirt outside the rocks, he sees footprints. Several of them, different sizes. Some bare feet. Some with boot or sneaker treads.

  Hollis looks down at the dark gap between the rocks. Sees the dirt disturbed by the entrance. There he sees not only footprints, but handprints, too. Which means . . .

  He sighs, takes off his jacket. Sets it gently atop the boulder. Then he rolls up the sleeves of his white shirt and pulls up the legs of his pants so he can bunch them around his knees. Here goes nothing, Hollis thinks, then gets down on the ground and army-crawls his way into the hole.

  The smell reaches him—stirred earth, and something else. Something richer, stronger, sickly sweet. Blood. Or rot. He pulls his left arm over his nose. The movement stirs something in the air—the tinny buzz of flying things. Something flicks into his forehead. Another pelts his cheek. Flies. Beetles. He doesn’t know. He groans, reaching for his back pocket and grabbing his phone with his other arm, hitting the phone’s light.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he hisses.

  It’s not the dead raccoon that does it. Not the smell of its torn belly, or the sight of the carpet of flies feeding on it, or the way the fur—rotten now for what must be days—ripples and moves as if the thing is still breathing. The maggots pushing at the margins of its skin tell him this thing is long dead.

  Rather, what takes his breath away is what has been written on the walls in blood. Maybe the animal’s blood.

  TYPHON STIRS

  The flies hum and fuss as Hollis tilts his phone around—other words and phrases have been painted onto the rock, too:

  THE GODS WILL FLEE

  THE TYPHONIC BEAST

  IT WANTS TO BE FREE

  WE ARE THE DRAGON

  GIVE TO MOTHER

  Drawings accompany the sayings—strange cave paintings. Something that looks like a crudely sketched jackal. Another thing that might be a dragon, but has many heads. Stranger still: something that looks to Hollis Copper like programming language—but not in English. Gibberish language—or, at least, a language he damn sure doesn’t know—broken apart by parentheticals, by brackets and slashes and numbers.

  He turns the light dead ahead. The cave keeps going. Down. The small tunnel descends. Part of him wants to keep crawling, just to see. But he can’t. Not now. He has to get back. Tell someone. Tell everyone. Call Golathan. The perimeter has been breached. There’s a way out. Or, more important: a way in.

  He backs out of the cave, that word, that name—Typhon—singing in his ears like a terrible song.

  CHAPTER 32

  Many-Headed Dragons

  THE LODGE, CAFETERIA

  Reagan still hears the song in her head: Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel the Noize.” It’s her victory song. Graves hurt her the other day with that bullshit about her poor baby and she’s had her emotional boots stuck in
a sucky bleak mire ever since. But today she feels like a fucking queen. She just trolled the Iranian nuclear program, bitches.

  They’re all feeling pumped up. It’s like, boom, with that win in their pocket, the band’s back together. Smiles all around. Everyone having a good time, laughing. Even Aleena let the hard rebar stuck up her ass bend just a leetle beet.

  All week, between their own little . . . dalliances, Reagan and the others concocted one lulz-bringing badass plan: Loud noises. Offensive imagery. Sound and fury signifying nothing but brash American immorality. All it took was sending an e-mail to a handful of the administrator accounts on-site at Mount Tochal—enticing readers to click a link to download free Persian hip-hop (Erfan, Zedbazi, Salome MC). All it took was one click—which on their end seemed to do nothing at all. Oh, but it did something, all right: it installed a backdoor. A hole through which digital rats could crawl. It gave the Zeroes root access. And from there . . .

  Cartoons and dick pics and chicks making out and animated GIFs of dogs running into sliding glass doors. All set to a looping mix tape of Quiet Riot and audio distortions that would make Trent Reznor foul his sleek black industrial diaper.

  Nobody could stop them. They started pulling everything—every program, every bit of data, every last digital crumb anyone could find. The Iranians surely have backups, they will surely be able to pry out every bug and every backdoor they left behind, but it’ll take them a while. That was their goal, wasn’t it? Slow them down, suck up the data. Done and done.

  Reagan takes a bite of a hot dog, watches Chance and Aleena cozy up to each other. Do they even know they’re doing it? Reagan’s a pretty good study of people—you can’t fuck with ’em if you don’t know ’em—and it seems sometimes that both of them realize it, then back away before whatever gravity they got going on pulls them back together again.