by Chuck Wendig
The same fate befell all the original thirteen, all except Leslie Cilicia-Ceto, who was pronounced brain-dead at the scene. Whether her brain had just gone too far (since she was, after all, the first) or whether she just couldn’t abide being separated from her creation, none can say.
Those who were connected far later—Ken Golathan and the rest—fared much better. They have problems. PTSD, depression, OCD. Some have difficulty concentrating. Others concentrate too hard. It’s like part of them is still with Typhon somewhere. Or like part of Typhon is still with them.
But mostly, they’re okay.
Wade doesn’t have much of that. Mostly Typhon comes to him in nightmares. He wakes up at night, feeling his breath caught in his chest, feeling a terrible pressure at his head like something’s grabbing him, dragging him up, up, up as a thick cable is forced down his throat and into his guts . . .
Well. He doesn’t want to think about that now. He wants to be with Siobhan. Be present with her.
A hand falls to his shoulder. “Hey, Wade,” comes a voice.
He reaches up, clasps the hand. “Hey, Rebecca.” He smiles as he looks up at her. Pretty like her mother. Got some curls in her hair, too, even in this dry heat. That’s a little part of him with her. His daughter. She comes here when he does. They sit with Siobhan.
She doesn’t know much about what happened. She knows the official story—that the Zeroes were cleared of all wrongdoing, declared innocent (without so much as an apology or a prize check or anything like that, Wade notes). Flight 6757 was brought down by “enemies of the state.” And that these enemies—unspecified terrorists, classified blah-blah-blah—kidnapped their loved ones and tortured them. Which is true, in a distorted way. Further, those victims of Typhon were listed as victims of the unspecified terror act commited by these unspecified enemies—enemies that, Wade figures, will one day be named and used as an excuse to invade some country. Probably one with oil.
Still. Wade wishes the truth could be free. He flirts sometimes with going rogue and telling the world all that he knows. Because they should know. The American people deserve to know the truth: that one of its own agencies sanctioned the creation of a deranged machine intelligence, an intelligence that needed human brains and bodies to do its thing.
Sometimes he gets worked up over it. Blood pressure making his whole body feel like a squeezing fist.
But mostly, he just tries to forget. Because he doesn’t want to bring any more hell down on his head. Or, more important, on Rebecca’s head.
Besides, Copper asked him to play nice.
And he does.
Mostly.
Mostly.
He’s got a plane to catch soon, but for now, he sits and enjoys being here.
OCEAN CITY, MARYLAND
Hollis Copper stands across from Ken Golathan. Golathan looks like hell. Weak and withered.
“You’re blocking my view,” Golathan says.
“I know,” Copper says. To his back, the gray surf of the Atlantic pounds against the beach.
Golathan sits in his wheelchair staring out over the deck. Gulls squawk and shriek in the sky above, fighting over something. Fish, maybe. “Fuck you, then,” he says. But he doesn’t move. And neither does Copper.
The ex-NSA man hasn’t gotten out of his wheelchair. His nurse says by now he should be able to, physically, that it’s depression keeping him saddled there. His hands knit in front of him. He looks small.
“Gonna be trials,” Copper says. Secret trials. They don’t put this kind of thing on display.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll tell them everything I know.”
A small smile. “Including Fellhurst?”
“I think so. An unburdened soul will feel good.”
“You might go to jail.”
“I doubt it. But if I do, I do. They might hang your ass.”
Ken barks a mirthless laugh. “They should. I wanted to protect this country and ended up giving it over to some . . .” His nostrils flare. They both know what happened, and despite all that, it’s hard to describe it, too.
“How’s Susan?”
“She’s fine. I guess. They . . . fixed her up okay. Bone implant to plug the hole at the back of her head. Healed up fine. She barely has any memory of it. But she’s weird, too, sometimes. Sometimes screams in her sleep. Or says . . . things. Who knew they could rewrite the human brain like that? Even a little.”
Hollis shrugs. “What do you think the CIA used to do with LSD? Or electrostimulus? Brain’s a computer, even if I don’t like to think about it.” Because, Hollis thinks, if the brain’s a computer, we can all get hacked. “By the way, you seen this?” Hollis takes out a photo. Hands it over to Golathan.
As he expected, Ken can’t feign proper surprise. Oh, he says the words, of course: “Sandy Molinari. Dead, huh? Shot in the back of the head? Huh. That’s a shame. I hope they find what happened to her. She was a good agent.”
“You don’t know anything about it?”
“Why would I?” But there’s a gleam in Ken’s eyes. A cruel, playful flash. Like the Devil rolling a shiny quarter over his raw, red knuckles.
“Fair enough. I’ll see you, Ken. You should really get up out of that chair.”
“Go swim up your own ass, Copperfish.”
LA GUARDIA AIRPORT, NEW YORK CITY
Aleena stands in the airport. All around her data flows. Arrivals. Departures. Advertisements. Fast food places collecting credit card data. People cradling phones, Kindles, iPads. Everybody swimming in the silent, invisible current of wireless Internet. Planes take off. And land. All of it, driven by data. Pushed by complex systems protected far too simply.
Everything is connected. And all of it is vulnerable.
Aleena’s own phone chirps. It’s Nasir.
Hey, sis!
She types back: How’s it going, college boy?
Not yet. Soon!!!
Ugh. Too many exclamation points from that one. Still—he should be excited. Princeton’s a good school. And given all that happened to them—even now, she knows her face on national television will always haunt her. Even though she’s been proved innocent, she’ll always be a terrorist.
But her family is safe. The pieces were pulled apart and put back together crudely, but together is together. She’ll take it.
Another text comes in, this one, from Chance.
See you soon?
She texts back:
Then she pulls her ticket out of her pocket and heads to the gate.
I-70, UTAH
The Plymouth Duster races down a long stretch of Utah highway. Fading light of day paints the sides of stone arches with a bright red brush.
“I forgot to tell you,” DeAndre says. “I like the hair, homie.”
Chance raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, little longer, little shaggier. I think I like it.”
“You got that patchy hobo thing going for your face, too.”
“I’ll get there. A good beard is like bonsai. You just gotta groom it.”
“Dude, I think they actually trim bonsai trees.” He laughs. “Aleena like it?”
“She hasn’t seen it.” Chance hesitates. “This is the first time I’m seeing her since all the shit went down. I dunno what it’s gonna be like. How’s your mom?”
“Moms is good, man. Things are a lot better between us now that she thinks I’m, like . . . secret agent man.”
“What? You still haven’t told her the truth?”
“I can’t stand my mother’s stare, man. I tell her the truth, she won’t have to whip my ass red. She’ll just stare at me until I’m like a little bawling bitch-baby. It’s better this way. Better she thinks I’m, like . . . still working for the government. Besides, I was, kinda. It’s not a total lie.”
On his lap is an external hard drive. Chance looks at it. “So.”
“So,” DeAndre says.
“That her?”
DeAndre offers a wicked smile.
COLUMBUS, OHIO
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Reagan gives Ellie Belle a kiss.
“You gonna be good for Me-Maw?”
“I am,” the little girl says.
“And you’re excited to see Grandma and Grampa, too?”
“I am.”
“And remember what I always tell you?”
“Don’t take no shit from nobody.”
It sounds so awesome coming out of the little girl’s mouth.
Reagan stands. Her own mother is giving her a face. That face. The face that says, I am disgusted in you, you are not my daughter.
Whatever. She shrugs. Says, “Thanks for taking her.”
“Your father’s on the campaign trail and . . . well, this big house is very quiet, and—” Her mother suddenly stops. “Did you just thank me?”
“I did.”
“You don’t normally do that.”
“I’m growing as a human being.”
“It sounds so weird when you put it like that.” Her mother’s face looks like it’s always smelling shit somewhere.
“Love you too, Mom.”
“Glad you’re back in our lives, Reagan.”
Reagan gives Ellie Belle one last kiss good-bye. Then she heads out the door. She’s got a sick, tight feeling in her gut. They’re denying her adoption papers—her grandparents, however sweet, want custody, and right now, it looks like they’re going to get it. But Reagan isn’t a girl without tricks up her sleeve—one particularly big trick, as it turns out, thanks to DeAndre.
The other thing is the nightmares. Sometimes when she sleeps. Sometimes when she wakes. The back of her head is . . . fixed, mostly, though she can feel the ridge of scar tissue there. But the inside of her head is mixed fruit. And the nightmares that come from it are terrible, noisy things. Oppressive. She awakens feeling like . . .
Like she’s not herself.
And she really likes herself, so that’s jarring as hell.
Still. She’ll get it straightened out.
She always does.
COLLBRAN, COLORADO
When they meet again—this time at Wade’s home—it’s all a lot of hugs and fist bumps, lots of small talk about travel woes, whether they came by plane or car or train. They ask Wade about his daughter, and he tries to play it cool, but he’s like a kid with a cookie, he seems so happy. Reagan talks about her little girl, too—and for once she sounds like she might just have a go at being a normal person for once in her life, not some Internet troll popping everybody’s balloons just because she can. Aleena and Chance capture stolen glances between each other but nothing more.
Eventually, though, all eyes turn to DeAndre.
“You brought her?” Wade asks.
DeAndre holds up the SSD drive. “You bet your ass I did.”
Typhon. Captured in transit before she could back up to wherever it was she was going. DeAndre wrote quick code that used the data from the boogeyman’s head as bait—like calls to like and all that. An act that worked doubly well because, as it turns out, that creepy dude was once the husband of Leslie Cilicia-Ceto. DeAndre compared it to Ghostbusters—said it was like opening a trap underneath a monster and sucking it down into the box. Now, she’s theirs. He tells them he’s done some tests. Run her through her paces. She’s under their control now. Only has about 10 percent of her original power, but hell, that was once a lot of power. And while none of the original minds are still feeding her, she’s still got image maps—same way you take an image of a hard drive’s contents—of almost three dozen human minds in there.
“Time to go to work?” Aleena asks.
“Hackers gonna hack,” Reagan says.
CHAPTER Ø
The Trans-Mongolian Railway
OUTSIDE ULAN-UDE
Walking on top of a train is not something Chance ever thought he’d get the chance to do. Once, he probably thought, Oh man, how awesome would that be? Like something out of a movie or a video game. James Bond. Or Indiana Jones. And yet, now that he’s up here, everything feels slippery and uncertain. The air is cold, cutting into him like knives. The train sways back and forth, and he’s willing to bet smart money that he’s gonna barf, then slip on the barf and then fall into the wide open nowhere of Mongolia.
The Widow—she doesn’t have a problem. She storms ahead like this is just something she does. Like she was born on top of a fast-moving train.
He tries to hurry after her.
Without, of course, dying.
There, against the platinum sky—
A small dot growing closer.
The whup-whup-whup of helicopter blades.
“Give me the phones,” the Widow yells.
He gingerly hands them over—
And one slips out of his hand.
Her other hand darts out, catches it. She clucks her tongue. Scowls.
“You’re lucky!” she says. “Because these phones pay your debt.”
Jesus. Was that what this was? He knew they were here to pay her back for what she did to get them into Manhattan—a blackout that lasted for weeks, as it turned out—but she was real cagey about what the actual repayment would be.
Then Chance got himself caught and—
Was this all her?
She set him up without telling him what was to come?
And what of Aleena? He tries to yell at her but she cuts him off. “This is your ride!”
“You’re not coming?”
She stomps down. “This is my ride. I go where it goes. I have the phones. I have what I need thanks to you and your . . . monster.”
Typhon. She means Typhon.
Monster. Battering ram. Skeleton key.
The helicopter—an old Sikorsky—hovers low, and he sees Wade in the front. Reagan next to him. Wade, who, it turns out, was a chopper pilot in ’Nam. The helicopter flies up alongside, and the door opens—inside, he sees DeAndre and—
“Aleena!” he shouts.
“You’re going to need to jump!” the Widow yells in his ear.
DeAndre and Aleena reach out of the door. Hands waving as if to say, Grab hold.
“Jump? I’m not gonna—”
Behind them, men in suits begin to climb up over the side.
Machine guns at the ready.
Oh, hell with this.
He jumps.
And he wonders: What next?
Acknowledgments
When I was a kid, I ran a few BBSs—bulletin board systems—with names like Unreality, BizarroWorld, ShadowLands. All dialed into using those modems that shriek like cybernetic harpies. The Internet wasn’t for public consumption yet, so each BBS was this weird little island unto itself, even more isolated and walled off than the big services like AOL or Prodigy.
As the sysop on these BBSs, I got to hang out with other early techie nerds, and we talked as much about “warez” and “l33t hacking” and “phreaking” as we did about writing cool stories and books and movies and all that other stuff. Kiddies, all of us, but it was fun, and those experiences informed part of this book. So it’s important, I think, to acknowledge some of the folks from my BBSs—folks such as Grebok, Mournblade, Viper, Icculus, Taxi Driver, Yeoman, and their ilk.
Also, the standard acknowledgments apply: Despite BBSs being islands unto themselves, writers are not, and we have these support systems in place that are ultimately invisible. Thanks to the fine folks at HarperCollins for publishing this book; thanks to my agent, Stacia Decker of DMLA, for helping to make this book what it is; and thanks to my wife for enduring nights where I would stay up too late poring over weird books about hackers and hacker culture.
About the Author
CHUCK WENDIG is the author of the Miriam Black thrillers, which begin with Blackbirds, and numerous other works. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his popular blog, terribleminds.com. He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.
@ChuckWendig
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Also by Chuck Wendig
• THE MIRIAM BLACK SERIES •
Blackbirds
Mockingbird
The Cormorant
Thunderbird
• THE HEARTLAND SERIES •
Under the Empyrean Sky
Blightborn
The Harvest
• OTHER NOVELS •
The Blue Blazes
Double Dead
Unclean Spirits
Atlanta Burns
Star Wars: Aftermath
• NONFICTION •
The Kick-Ass Writer
Credits
Cover design by Adam Johnson
Cover image © by Mohamad Itani/Arcangel Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction, and while it sometimes strives to get details right about hacker culture and the actual act, be advised that it also takes liberties with the subject in order to tell the story.
Harper Voyager and design is a trademark of HCP LLC.
ZER0ES. Copyright © 2015 by Chuck Wendig. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-235155-5
EPub Edition August 2015 ISBN 9780062351586
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