Element Zero

wooden desk while the UAC flag hung from a brass pole in a stand over to his left. Ang and Dulari were there. Ang’s face looked calm. Dulari’s eyes were wide. There were tears in them.

He’d been in stasis too long, and those years in storage had taken their toll. His skin had grown thin and slightly translucent. The black veins underneath were easily seen as they branched along either side of his neck and formed a web across the curve of his scalp. I knew his body was still strong physically, but he appeared almost old and decrepit. He leaned in and spoke to Dulari and Ang. I adjusted my hearing so that I could pick up their conversation.

“ …you found Deatherage?” Fawkes asked.

“No,” Chen said. “I think at this point we have to assume he faked the entry log and he’s not here.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“What about the other problem?”

“I’ll handle that too, Mr. Chen. Leave it alone.”

“Gen sevens retain ties to their old identities,” Ang said. “You yourself have cited her relationship with the FBI agent more than once.”

They were talking about me. It wouldn’t be the first time Ang had recommended that I be destroyed. He was clear on where he stood concerning me.

“I don’t agree,” Dulari managed, her voice shaking. “She can be trusted.”

Fawkes looked past them and the two turned and saw me. Ang had a steely look in his eye as he watched me approach them.

“Hello, Faye,” Fawkes said. His softly glowing eyes stared back at me like those of an owl. I nodded to him.

“We don’t need Mr. Deatherage any longer,” Fawkes said. “We have the variant now. Can you proceed?”

A shot went off nearby, and Dulari jumped.

“Y-yes,” she said. “The reactivation sequence is complete. Transmission of phase two was completed an hour ago.”

“The upgrade was accepted?” Fawkes asked.

“The system shows a failure rate of less than two percent,” Ang said. “It worked.”

I didn’t know what they were referring to. I waited and didn’t ask.

“How long will the change take?” Fawkes asked.

“You’ll begin to see effects immediately,” Ang said. “How long it will take for complete saturation is difficult to say, but the heightened aggression should facilitate that.”

“Monitor the situation,” Fawkes said. “Let me know if there are any problems.”

“Understood,” Dulari said. Fawkes turned to Ang.

“Make sure anyone else who can operate that equipment is eliminated,” he said. “Take the employees the soldiers have reserved and fit them with the devices.”

Ang nodded, and he and Dulari turned and left the room. As they passed by me, Dulari met my eye. She stared at me intently, like there was something she was trying to say. A second later, she sent me a message over a private circuit.

He lied to us. He’s going to kill you. I know you can cut his command spoke. Do it. Find Robert MacReady.

The way she stared back at me made me think she’d known for a while about the override I’d discovered, but she hadn’t told Fawkes. The words hung there in the air between us; then she nodded and continued on out of the room. As the door closed behind her, I sifted back through my memory and found the override. I didn’t execute it, but turned it over in my brain thoughtfully.

He’s going to kill you. The message faded away as Fawkes watched me, his expression not changing. I’d known many revivors, but none that were quite like Fawkes. He was from an earlier generation, but his mind was incredibly well preserved. He could track amazing numbers of details, but even more important, he retained a strong capacity to scheme, and unbreakable resolve. He had big plans for the humans of this world, even though he himself was far from human. The years of isolation and obsession had left their mark on him.

“You’ve kept me in the dark,” I said. He started at me, not moving.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Honestly, because I needed a seventh-generation model to plant the virus, and I wasn’t sure you’d help me if you knew what I had planned.”

“I thought you needed Heinlein’s transmitter array.”

“I do.”

Another long burst of gunfire drowned him out for a minute. He waited calmly for it to subside.

“Then why take the whole facility?” I asked. “We could have done it remotely. By the time anyone knew, it would have been too late.”

“I have my reasons.”

“Why kill them all?”

“So that no one can undo what happens today.”

He leaned back and sat on the edge of the desk. One thin black vein bulged slightly as it squiggled from his scalp to his temple. His eyes stared at nothing for a few seconds, twitching faintly back and forth.

A second later I felt him creep in over the command spoke, that connection that gave him access to me. It had been there every day since I died, and I knew firsthand it gave him full control. He’d used it once to force me to kill Nico, and though I’d failed, I’d stabbed him through the breastbone. There was nothing he couldn’t force me to do, if that’s what he decided.

He could even send me down into the void …and he was.

“Sleep now,” I heard him say, and beneath my memories the void yawned wider. My high-level systems began to wind down. He was in my command node. What I was sensing was my own deanimation.

“What are you doing?” I asked. My vision flickered as I began to sink. In my mind, I fell below my field of thoughts to where the blackness waited. Its threads began to reach for me, pulling me deeper and deeper below.

I tried to force him out, but it was no use. All revivors had free will, but it wasn’t absolute; commands from the spoke overrode everything. I still had access to the override shunt; I could still sense it in my active memory, but…

“Sleep now,” he said.

Maybe this is for the best, I thought. I’d always feared that darkness, but maybe I didn’t need to be afraid. My life had expired a long time ago. Maybe this force that was reaching out to me was something I’d been avoiding for too long.

As my last moments trickled away, the lightless force almost seemed to be alive. It was pulling me deeper down inside it. I thought it would be cold or maybe painful, but instead it was calming.

Time to go, Faye …

I resisted once more before relaxing. I was jarred as my knees struck the tiled floor, but barely felt anything.

Yes.

Time to go …

Yes. Okay.

Just then, I received a communication. It had come from outside the perimeter. Fawkes’s eyes narrowed slightly. He was watching me over the command spoke; he had seen the message too.

The message was from Nico. A single sentence:

I need you.

The blackness recoiled, and the field of memories churned inside my head. The lights swirled and scattered like coals that had been raked as my consciousness rose back through the field, and for a second I was standing with him, back at sea, on the tanker. The rain pounded over me as a tarp cracked in the wind. Nico stood in front of me, a gun smoking in his hand, but the murder had left his eyes. I reached him and grabbed hold of his slick lapel. Before he could move, I pressed my lips to his.