Element Zero

Dulari Shaddrah gave me your name, I told him.

Something pricked at my control nodes remotely, some kind of low-level scan. Before I could cut it off, a stream of data went out on the wire.

Your command spoke is locked, he said.

Yes.

That’s interesting. Why?

Fawkes meant to kill me. I am no longer part of his network. He paused for a minute, considering or perhaps verifying that, then:

I can help you. Come to the lab.

Help me do what?

Come to the lab, he said. If you’re on the run as you say, you need to get off of Fawkes’s radar.

I took a step down the stairs and then stopped there, uncertain. Fawkes hadn’t told me everything, but I’d worked for years to make sure these events could unfold. I still did believe in his ultimate goal. Everything was moving so fast, I hadn’t had time to think. Why had I even run from Fawkes? Was the human survival mechanism so ingrained? I had no life to lose. Why did I run? What did I want?

You were a slave for the last part of your life, Faye, I know that, MacReady said. But ask yourself if what Fawkes offered you was any better. The control that command spoke provided was more absolute than anything you experienced in life. But you’re free now. Come to the lab.

He’s luring me, I thought. Some old intuition was bubbling up. There was something too silky about his words.

Is Dulari alive? he asked.

The last time I saw her, she was alive.

And Mr. Chen?

Alive, but they’re killing the rest.

I know, he said. And I know what you are. I know better than you do. I know there are still residual ties to your old identity. Fawkes knows too. It’s why even though he needed a seventh-generation to gain access to our systems, he considers you a liability now.

What he said made sense, but I wasn’t sure if he was right about me or not. Some people would die; I’d always known that. But people died all the time.

I need you. Nico’s message still floated near the corner of my eye. He’d understood. Not letting anyone get hurt was my ideal in life, but it was unrealistic. He’d known that, believed it. Was he right? I stood on the stairs, not knowing what to do.

Where are you? I asked MacReady. A map of the underground levels appeared in the air in front of me.

I’ll direct you. What floor are you on now? I looked up at the placard tab on the wall next to the gray stairwell door.

Sublevel five, stairwell E3.

Continue down to level eight. I looked over the railing; the stairs wound down into shadows far below. I had no reason to trust this man MacReady, but I didn’t have too many options left.

I took another step down and then continued for three flights. Following the path traced on MacReady’s map, I opened the stairwell door and into a long, dimly lit corridor.

Follow it to the end, and then through the lab on the other side. Security is down; you’ll be able to walk right in.

The hall was strangely quiet, with only the hum from the overhead lights and another, more subtle source of white noise. My footsteps echoed quietly behind me as I approached the heavy metal lab door and gripped its cold steel handle. The scanner mounted there on the wall was dark and inactive.

I pushed, and the door opened with a low thud that turned my skin to gooseflesh. My dead skin never did that unless it was near an electrical field. I traced the thud and the hum that followed it to somewhere over my head, where I saw large coils of thin, shiny wire. Beyond that, the room was dark.

Noise suppressors.

I took a step, and lights snapped on overhead. I was standing on one side of a huge room where rows and rows of figures hung from above, each one covered in thick, clear plastic sheeting. Silhouetted by the light, their feet and toes dangled around head level, where bundles of wires hung down to the floor, then snaked across the tile. Dim light from overhead flickered eerily.

To the other side, MacReady said. Quickly.

What is this place? I asked.

It’s the culmination of an old experiment, he said. One your leader started a long time ago.

I took a step, and something wet touched my cheek. When I wiped it, my fingers came away black. I looked up and saw three small children’s corpses tented underneath a single plastic sheet. Two black-skinned boys looked dormant, but the girl’s large, glowing eyes stared down at me. On the map MacReady had provided, the chamber I was in was marked as SEMANTIC/EPISODIC MEMORY RECLAMATION FACILITY.

Are you taking their memories?

As I’m sure you know, Faye, revivor memories are much simpler to package and transfer than human memories. They’ve been known to even share them in the field during long deployments.

Yes.

The light coming from overhead was from them. When I stepped past the door, they’d opened their eyes. Hundreds of them, all staring down to see me. The wires that trailed from them were connected to plugs under the skin. Another black drop dripped down from the end of the girl’s toe. More of the eyes looked my way, causing the eerie electric light to shift. The little girl’s legs hung still. She stared, conscious, but didn’t answer when I tried to contact her.

None of them can respond. Leave them, Faye.

I looked into her eyes a minute longer, then turned back toward the exit MacReady had called out for me. I sprinted between rows of bundled cable, the soft light shifting as their eyes followed me. As I passed between their dangling bodies, I sensed that their signatures were active, but they were cut off from me and each other. Many of their eyes moved around spastically, the way they sometimes did when streaming data.

What do you do with the memories, once you’ve taken them? I asked.

Come to the lab, he said, and I’ll show you.

Up ahead of me, several sets of toes twitched as I slipped through a second hanging plastic sheet, down past rows of metal hatches that were covered with thin layers of frost. Light seeped from under a door at the far end.

Without looking back, I opened it and moved on.

6 VEIL

Nico Wachalowski—Palos Verdes Estates

Impact. The word flashed in the air in front of me as the horizon lit up and began to grow brighter.

Satellites had detected the launch and tracked the missile as it entered the atmosphere, but the defense shield wasn’t designed to respond to a strike sourced from inside the net itself. There was no way to stop it. The