Element Zero

Back in the car, I saw Penny was rattled. She didn’t turn the music back on, and she didn’t call Ai, either. When I offered her the flask again, she grabbed it and took a big swallow. Then she drove to a bar.

Things got a little fuzzy after that. We didn’t talk about what the general said, or what we saw in the lab. We didn’t talk at all until maybe three drinks in, and even then we didn’t talk about anything serious. She didn’t flirt with the bartender or punch up any music. She just drank until she got to the point where she could laugh, but even then, her eyes looked worried.

At some point we stopped at a liquor store, because I spilled ouzo while trying to refill the flask, and Penny was drinking grappa straight out of a long-necked bottle while she sped down the street. Then she did turn the music back on, louder than before, like she was daring someone to pull her over and give us a hard time. By then I didn’t care. By then I was having fun, and I was glad to forget about the whole thing, at least for the night.

A cop on a motorcycle pulled up alongside us and matched our speed, the reflective faceplate of his helmet turned to look down at Penny. She took a long swallow from the bottle while he watched, then looked over at him as snow spit past the window. A few seconds later, he slowed down and peeled off.

The incoming-call light came up on the dash for the third time. The ID said it came from Stillwell Corps. Penny took one last swig from the bottle and stabbed the stereo button with her finger, cutting off the music. She answered the call, but they’d already disconnected.

“At least they got it working, right?” I offered.

Penny wasn’t biting. She shook her head. “The point of all this,” she said, “the only point of all this is to change that future. Literally nothing else matters.”

“I know.”

“An attack here and there, even by that many revivors, that all heals,” she said. “Not that big, empty nothing. We have to fix it.”

“I know.”

“If an infinite number of times everything dies, then there have to be an infinite number of times we get out of it. We have to figure this out. The turn’s coming up fast.”

“I know,” I said, not really understanding her completely.

“Do you?” she asked. “Do you have any idea what I’ve …” She trailed off and took another drink from the bottle. I tipped back the flask and swallowed, past tasting it.

Like the map they used to chart it, I didn’t understand the future as well as some of us did. I knew what Ai believed, and that the visions weren’t so much looks into our actual future as they were bleed over from what she called alternate possibilities. I knew there were an infinite number of those possibilities, and that meant an infinite number were almost identical to ours. She thought we could see into them, and that their present was our future. They were all almost the same, and some pitched off the cliff into nothing, while others somehow avoided it.

At least that was what she thought. I don’t think she really knew. Not for sure. All I understood was that we wanted to be one of the ones that avoided it, whatever “it” was. The dark void that no one could see into meant we were on the wrong path. We were making mistakes, the same mistakes as the rest. Was the virus a dead end? Was that the mistake?

“Look at it this way,” I said. “Even if this plays out a million times and everyone is wiped out every time, we could still make it, right? We could be on the right path.”

“No one sees past the end of their own life. You know that.”

“But we don’t know that for sure. If what we see comes from somewhere else, couldn’t it just be that they all die, but we live?”

Penny opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. She smiled, and for a second the worry left her eyes.

“You know, I think that might actually be deep,” she said.

“Hey, it could be true,” I said. “Admit it: you don’t really know.”

“Ai—”

“Ai is amazing, but come on, at the end of the day she’s just a person like you or me.”

“She’s not like you or me.”

“Penny, she isn’t a god or anything.”

“What is this insolence?” she asked. She was kind of kidding but kind of not.

“I’m just saying, she’s a person, she makes mistakes just like everybody else, and she doesn’t know everything.”

“Then you think she’s wrong about all this?”

“No, but—”

“Because if she’s wrong about this, then what the hell is it we’re trying to do here?”

“Fix it,” I said, getting annoyed. “Fix everything. That’s why we sneak around messing with everybody’s head, so we can fix everything, because we know everything, and everyone else is a bunch of stupid sheep—”

“Hey, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”

“Yeah, well, just because you break a bunch of eggs doesn’t mean you get an omelet either.”

Her knuckles turned white on the steering wheel as she took another swig from the bottle. She was drinking more than usual, a lot more. If I hadn’t been so drunk myself, I’d have probably thought more about the fact that although she wasn’t any bigger than me, I’d seen Penny break men’s fingers. I’d seen her stab people and shoot people.

“I think you’re talking some dangerous talk,” she said.

“I think you’re drunk.”

“I think you’re drunk. I think you’re always drunk.”

“Screw you, Penny.” I growled. That was crossing a line. She wasn’t allowed to bring that up. “My drinking is not a problem.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” she snapped back. “Do you know how many times I’ve held your hair while you puked your guts out?”

There were actually tears in the corners of her eyes. That was something I’d never seen before, but I kept going.

“If you didn’t, they’d probably throw you out on the street,” I said. My face was hot and my hand had made a fist around the neck of the flask. “Just like they did with what’s-her-face—”

“She had a name!” Penny shouted. I didn’t think I’d ever heard her do that either. It actually stopped me cold for a second.

Before me and before Penny, Ai had pinned her hopes on some girl named Noelle Hyde as the one that was going to save the world. She didn’t work out so good, though, and so from what I could get, they had to kill her. Penny never talked about her. I never really thought much about if they knew each other or how much or for how long. I could tell by her face that this time it was me who crossed the line, and opened my mouth to maybe take it back or something, but it was too late.

“She had a name,” she said in a low voice. Every muscle in her body looked tense, like she wanted to break my neck or something.

She wouldn’t, though. Even if she tried, she wouldn’t be able to. I was no match for her physically, but if I had to, I could make her stop. If I wanted to, I could kill her.

“I know,” I said. I was breathing hard.

“Sometimes you keep talking when you really should just shut up,” she said.

Heat rushed up my neck, and I was just about to lay into her when the screen on the dash lit up again with an incoming call. This time it was from Ai.

Penny frowned, and we glared at each other, but when Ai called, you didn’t keep her waiting. Penny took a deep breath and answered.

Ai’s face appeared on the screen. Her eyelids were half-closed, like when she was concentrating, and her pupils were dilated. The prominent vein on the right side of her neck bulged, and every few seconds she twitched, just barely. She’d drugged herself like she sometimes did to enhance her abilities, and she looked like she was tripping hard this time.

“Where are you two? What is your exact location?” she asked. I closed my eyes for a second and when I