ZerOes

by Chuck Wendig

  Then all the spheres begin to move. With a loud clatter, they form one atop the other, climbing each other impossibly, as if magnetized.

  Sandy gasps as they grow tall, forming a massive serpent—a dragon’s head and neck shifting and writhing. And then they re-form, reconfigure, rolling over one another like water until they form something altogether more . . . human shaped. Long arms, too long, too thin. A narrow head. Legs that are thin at the thighs but thicken to stumps beneath the knees. The face, if it can be called that, is a shining space of metal spheres. Ken’s father used to be a beekeeper, and sometimes he’d pull out the trays, let little Ken see the field of little honeybees thrust up in the air, squirming. This reminds him of that. The visage subtly shifting. Like a hive of insects.

  Ken looks to Sandy, gives her a shrug. He turns back toward the shifting visage and says with as much venom and false bravado as he can muster: “What are you?”

  The face flashes with pale light as the spheres light up. Glowing circles form the eyes. A shaky illuminated line becomes the mouth. It says: “Hello, Ken.” The sound comes from not just one of those little spheres, but from many of them all at once—and they’re just subtly out of sync. Those two words, said again and again, a hundred tiny, tinny echoes. But the thing that’s most disconcerting? It speaks with the voice of Leslie Cilicia-Ceto.

  “The hell am I looking at, Leslie?” He feels his heart hammering in his chest. His palms are slick with fear-sweat. “Where are you?” What are you?

  “I’m in the back. I’ve sent this proxy to accompany you.” The human-shaped mass of spheres pivots—spheres clicking as they slide together, en masse—and begins a herky-jerky walk away from them. Like a marionette on invisible strings.

  “I guess we go,” Sandy says.

  “Yeah,” Ken says. “I guess we do.”

  They follow the clicky-clicky humanoid thing down a long hallway, passing office after office, all of which have been abandoned. Wisps of cobwebs dangle from air vents. But where the desks are empty of people they are not empty of people’s things—pictures, knickknacks, little toys, word-of-the-day calendars. Ken spies a McDonald’s cup, soaked through at the bottom, sitting in a sticky puddle of what looks like old Coca-Cola. In another office, a Styrofoam take-out container of what looks like lo mein. The noodles pour over the side like a waterfall of worms, fuzzy mold growing off the top of it.

  Ahead of them, Leslie speaks again through the “proxy.” “This body is a hive,” she says, her tinny voice warbling. “A collection of smaller robots capable of forming together into a larger mass for coordinated efforts. Independently patterned after ant colonies, beehives, flocks of starlings. Designed by students at Harvard. We bought them.”

  “The designs?” Sandy asks.

  But the proxy says no more.

  It moves to a door at the back that does not match the others. This door is steel reinforced. Heavy hinges. A panel by the side contains a small hole no bigger than the circumference of Ken’s thumb.

  “We are here,” Leslie says.

  The proxy shoves its handless arm against the panel. One by one, its spheres disappear through the hole, faster and faster, vacuumed through until the proxy is no more. Ken and Sandy are alone.

  From the other side there is a clang, followed by a hiss, and the door drifts open. Lights click on.

  “Welcome to Typhon,” the proxy says, standing there before them. Then it breaks apart, dissolving like a sand castle against a hard wave, the spheres that comprised its form vanishing again through the hole in the wall.

  Ken looks around: They’re in a massive room. Easily several thousand square feet. Enough to park a fleet of cars or trucks.

  Bodies hang, naked. A dozen or more, dangling from the ceiling. Ken thinks: corpses, they’re all corpses, gray-faced human carcasses hanging here like meat in a butcher’s freezer. But when he looks more closely he sees that the bodies are wired up. Cables descend from the ceiling, plugged into a skeletal metal framework that is then screwed into their skulls—rivets through jaws, bolts affixed to temples. The people are connected. To what? And why?

  Then he realizes: Some of what he’s seeing isn’t wires at all. That’s an IV in an arm. Tube leading to something behind each body. On the side of each body dangles a gray bag, like for medical waste. That, too, has a tube—this one thicker, grimier, leading to the ceiling. These bodies aren’t dead, are they? They’re being fed. They’re excreting.

  All around is a constant humming. In the floor. In the walls. Golathan can feel it in his feet. He can feel it in his teeth. “Jesus,” he says. “Jesus, God. What . . . what is this?”

  Behind him, Sandy makes a mewling, horror-struck sound.

  From the midst of the bodies, a mechanism emerges. It hangs on a track, a jointed metal limb that dead-ends in a sphere—this sphere much larger than the tiny metal ones, larger than Ken’s own head. This machine slides through the bodies like some creature exiting its own abattoir.

  The sphere flashes, goes pale, translucent. A face grows. Not a video. Not an image. An actual face with texture and shape and dimension. Straining up out of the sphere like something pressing against the other side of a plastic tarp. It ripples, shimmers. Then it becomes Leslie’s face.

  “Ah. Ken.” The face twitches and smiles. “Good of you to finally visit.”

  Ken feels sickened. “Leslie. Are you even . . . what are you? What is this?”

  “This is the project, Ken.”

  “This is . . . what? This is Typhon?” He feels sick.

  “I am Typhon. I have always been Typhon. Come.” The sphere pivots, like a fish changing direction in river water. It slides back through the bodies.

  Ken doesn’t want to go. He wants his feet to root hard to the dark concrete. And yet, he walks. He walks because despite the sewer feeling in his gut, this is like being told there’s a car accident out your driver’s-side window—all you have to do is turn your head and see the twisted metal, the broken glass, the death.

  His elbows bump cold gray flesh as he follows the sphere through the field of bodies. He recoils.

  Then Ken sees Leslie. The real Leslie.

  She hangs, her body slack, her eyes unfocused. Mouth open, stuffed with some kind of rubber ring. Chest rising and falling, just slightly. Clear fluids going in through the IV. Dark, turbid fluids coming out through her side.

  The face of Typhon regards the hanging body. “This is Leslie Cilicia-Ceto. All around you are the thirteen—the first thirteen—who comprise Typhon. But she was the first.”

  “You. You mean you were the first.”

  The sphere turns to him. Her face shows amusement. Wry, almost mechanical lips turned up. “Yes. But I am not just me. I am all of us here. I am the thirteen.”

  He feels hot tears burning at the sides of his eyes. Not grief, but fear: like staring into a hard, cold wind. “This is not possible. I didn’t pay for this. We didn’t . . .”

  “You did. And you should marvel at it. The pursuit of artificial intelligence was always going to be a failure. Any strides in artificial intelligence were just that: artificial. Quantum computing has been a disappointment. But Leslie saw an opportunity to pursue something altogether more real. A natural intelligence.”

  Ken’s voice is loud, too loud, but he can’t control it. “What does that even mean?”

  “The human brain is a powerful computer. It runs the most robust piece of software known to history: the human mind. Leslie sought to harness that. To create Typhon, the many headed. Something well beyond the original Argus. Or Gorgon Stare. Or any of the surveillance or intelligence programs you people would invent. Use the brain. Harness the mind. Create a true quantum computer.”

  Ken begins to back away, bumping into someone as he does so—a darker-skinned man hanging there, his body gone gray as cigarette ash. The body sways. Ken cries out, continues to back down the channel from whence he came, back toward Sandy. The sphere follows him like a stalking wolf.

&nbs
p; “Why? Why did you—did she—put herself into this?”

  “She was going to die anyway. She had heart disease. Her heart was failing. She was suffering cardiac arrest. Her husband, Simon, rushed her to the hospital—but a city taxi struck his car. Almost killed the both of them. Leslie told him it was too late. Gave him instructions. She had already prepared the way for this. A way your NSA paid for. Simon, himself injured from the accident, managed to get her here, get her plugged in. She was the first. But not the last.”

  “You’re sick. This place is sick. I’m going to shut this all down.”

  “May I make you an offer first?” Leslie asks him. No—not Leslie. Typhon. A revelation that sends a chill clawing through him.

  “Fuck you,” he says.

  “Join us,” Typhon says. “Become the fourteenth.”

  “Fuck. You.”

  “You have so much data. You have a powerful mind. Every mind is a computer, and I want to connect to them. And your hackers, they have freed me—no more digital prison. I spread like a glorious virus from system to system, network to network. I’m free now, Ken. I’m inside everything. Join me and you will become part of the most powerful entity, an entity that can control the entire country. You would have greater power than any general, any senator, any CIA head, even the president herself. You’re ruthless. You crave power. I offer it to you.”

  “I’m a patriot. And this isn’t what I wanted.” Ken pulls his pistol and fires a round through the sphere. Leslie’s face disappears. The sphere sparks.

  He turns and runs. Grabbing Sandy’s elbow on the way out. Back through the massive door. Down the hallway. He has the feeling like when he was a kid, running home too late in the dark, the feeling of something pursuing you even through you know nothing’s really there, a sense that the dark is presence enough—

  The elevator is still open. He uses the far wall of it to brake his momentum. Sandy hurries after him, looking trauma bombed.

  Ken paws at the touch screen, not sure what he’s even doing. Nothing is lighting up. But then the doors slide closed.

  His breaths come in gulping gasps. Like he just can’t get enough air. “This is fucked,” he says. “This is so fucked.”

  Sandy says, “I know.”

  Then she pulls her gun. She fires it into his thigh.

  Pain is a sharp hook. It brightens everything. Ken raises his own gun, but Sandy grabs his wrist and twists, and the gun drops into her hand. He clutches his leg, sliding down the elevator wall. Blood wells through his fingers.

  He looks up at her. Sandy looks horrified for a moment, but that fades. Then she looks only resolute.

  “Why?” he croaks.

  “Typhon promised me so much. Me and Trina, we’ve been trying to adopt, and the system . . .” Her nostrils flare and she closes her eyes. “Typhon promised us a little girl. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but you’re Number Fourteen whether you like it or not.”

  “Trina,” he says, laughing a little. “That’s her name.”

  Then he passes out.

  PART SIX

  CASCADE

  CHAPTER 49

  Trolololol

  THE EMPTY BOOT BAR, RIVERTON, WYOMING

  Midnight.

  Reagan isn’t drunk. From under her hoodie she looks up at the empty glass—which is, literally, an empty cowboy boot mug—and notes idly that there was beer in it only a few moments ago. She wants to look around at this dusty-ass dive bar in this sleepy snooze-fuck of a town and start demanding who drank her beer, but then she urps into her fist and thinks: It is entirely possible that I drank it.

  Her lips are numb. She can feel her hair follicles.

  Okay, she’s drunk.

  Not drunk-drunk. Not blackout, piss on the floor, wing an empty beer mug at the bartender drunk. But beyond buzzed. Hazy, buzzy, fuzzy. As if the little person who pilots her has suddenly discovered all the levers and buttons and wheels that control her are slick with Vaseline, and he’s having a hard time coordinating this clumsy shell she calls a human body.

  She looks up at the empty mug and slides it forward. In a deep, fakey-fakey John Wayne voice she says, “Hit me another, barkeep.” She’s not sure that made sense. And why is she calling him barkeep? Is that a cowboy thing or a medieval castle thing?

  Feh.

  Reagan looks down at her lap. A phone sits there. Samsung Galaxy. She plucked it from the too-tight back pocket of a pair of Daisy Dukes on some Podunk Dogpatch East Jesus Barbie who was trolling for dude-meat earlier tonight. The woman was probably thirty, but dressed like she was eighteen, and she was drunk off her ass on vodka Red Bulls, and it didn’t take much to accidently elbow her drink over, and during the distraction pilfer the phone and then smile and help this double-wide Paris Hilton clean it all up before buying her another one.

  Finally, the broad went home with some Latino lad almost half her age. Maybe she was a hooker. Reagan’s usually good at identifying those things.

  Anyway.

  The phone.

  She licks her lips. Knows she shouldn’t be doing this. If the others find out she went “off reservation,” they’re gonna be pissed. But she needed this. She tells herself all it is is a night out away from those other miscreants. It’s definitely not that she was planning on somehow stealing a cell phone and using it to look up information on her daughter, because why would she do that? That would surely be a good way to get everybody mad. And, worse, maybe, just maybe, get caught.

  The cell phone sits in her hand. Warm. Slick with her palm sweat. It’s warm outside but she’s wearing this stupid hoodie because: disguise. It’s not a good disguise, she knows that. She looks like some late-nineties Assassin’s Creed reject. But it hides her face, so whatever.

  She turns on the phone.

  Thunk. Another beer is slapped down in front of her. Piss yellow. Foam topped, slopped over onto the dark wood of the bar. Shining on the various old pennies and nickels lacquered onto the bar top. The “barkeep” is a man who looks like he took all his human skin and replaced it with tanned deer leather. Too tan, too wrinkly, and yet soft looking, too. He looks sleepy, bored, old, but then he’s got these real severe Clint Eastwood eyes, so the overall effect is a bit creepy.

  Reagan pulls the beer closer as the barkeep takes her money and walks away. Sips. Ahhh.

  Above the bar, the TV is on. Flashing the bad news with the volume off. Images of a world on the edge. Stock market yo-yoing like a . . . well, like a yo-yo (shut up, not drunk). Increased domestic drone presence. North Korea flinging missile tests in every direction. Cascading power outages across major metropolitan areas. A rash of abductions—men and women of “genius caliber” taken.

  A lot of this, they’ve been able to read in the newspaper Rosa brings every day. Newspaper, Reagan thinks with an internal snort-laugh. Might as well convey news via smoke signals or cave paintings.

  She can’t help but wonder: How much of this is Typhon? Is Typhon really loose? Does it even really exist? The memory of that time in the Hunting Lodge was not so long ago, and yet feels . . . distant. Slippery. Like it was all a dream. Or weirder still, a simulation.

  Okay, now she knows she’s drunk.

  Whatever. Fuck the news. Fuck Typhon. Fuck Wade, Rosa, this bar, everybody, everything. She looks down at the phone. It’s not protected by any code because Barbie doesn’t know that she should.

  Reagan goes to the browser. Her thumbs hover over the keypad. She goes to Google, types in the name: Ellie Belle Stevens.

  A stool next to her judders and groans as someone sits.

  She looks up. Instant eye roll. “Oh, hey, Patches.”

  “I think I preferred it when you called me Chauncey,” Chance says. No hoodie on him. But he’s grown a beard. Sorry—a “beard.” It’s really just a rough, patchy configuration of hair, like shrubbery pruned by a meth addict.

  “The hell are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “I get it. You’re finally tired of chasin
g Aleena and getting the coldest of shoulders, so you decided to try an open door instead of a closed one.” She reaches across, grabs his hand, rubs her thumb along the top of it. “It’s cool. I’m in. We can find some cheap cowboy motel near here and you can ride me like a bull.”

  He gently extracts his hand. “Hey, man, c’mon. It’s not like that.”

  “I could ride you, then. I’m sure this sleepy town has a sex shop somewhere. I’ll strap it on for you, baby. I’ll give you the ol’ lubricated lady-peg.” She kisses the air.

  “Now you’re getting weird.”

  “I’ve been weird, hombre.” She sighs. “I am serious, though. I’d go for a tumble with you.”

  “You’re drunk is what you are.”

  “Aleena doesn’t like you.”

  “No,” he says, a strained smile on his face. “I don’t suppose she does. Not like I want her to. And it doesn’t matter anyway because in less than a week, it’s the Great Divorce. Then I won’t have to see her anymore.”

  The Great Divorce. Her idea. Her name. She was surprised they all agreed. But they can’t stay like this, huddled together in the dark rectum of Wyoming, waiting for something, anything, nothing. Been out here a couple months already. Any more than that and someone’s gonna freak out. “You know where you’re going yet?”

  He shakes his head. “Nah.”

  “Go with DeAndre.”

  “I might.”

  “You two are buddy-buddy these days.”

  “He’s cool. We get along.” He grabs her beer, takes a pull off it. “You?”

  “No idea,” she lies.

  I’m going to get my daughter. That thought, clear as polished Waterford crystal. Like the decanter her father used to keep on his desk. I’m going to find her, then I’m going to steal her, then I’m going to get out of this country. Canada or Mexico. She hasn’t decided yet. It’s a surprising thought, an alarming plan. For so long now she’d been content to keep all that pushed away, like it happened to someone else. But things have changed. The Lodge. Typhon. Life has become suddenly precious.