Element Zero

He smiled, showing unnaturally white teeth, but he couldn’t maintain it. He stood and approached me.

“You’ve held up remarkably well,” he said.

“That isn’t Fawkes’ only target.”

“I know. Did Fawkes remove the Leichenesser seed, or was it Agent Wachalowski?”

“It was Nico.” My eyes moved over the screens, following the trees of data mapped out there. On some level, the patterns were familiar. I saw profiles of individuals, lines tracing associations between them.

“It reminds me of the precinct,” I told him. “When we’d try to chart organized crime or gang associations.”

That caused him to grin weakly. He followed me as I passed by him and stepped toward the screens.

“That’s not too far off,” he said.

A high-pitched whine filled my head as something cold pierced the skin behind my ear. Immediately, I felt my muscles seize. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could, my jaw locked in place.

“I’m sorry, Faye,” he said. He guided me down into the chair he’d been sitting in, and reflected in the screen I saw that he had some sort of handheld tool pressed near the base of my skull. He disconnected something at its tip and moved it away, placing it on the table behind him. A long, metallic rod was left behind, sticking several inches out of the back of my head. He guided a wire into the rod and fastened it there.

I tried to move, but I was completely paralyzed. When I tried to access my communications node, I found I was cut off. He moved back around to where I could see him and tapped a stylus to an electronic pad he held in one hand. My jaw unlocked.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I’ve frozen your primary systems. I’ve cut off most of your motor functions, and outgoing communications will be monitored and controlled from here on out.”

I triggered the injector, but my arm didn’t respond. In my system tree, everything was locked down. My core functions still ran, but electrical impulses had been cut off at the C3 vertebrae.

“I will need to disable your control shunt as well,” he said.

“If you do, Fawkes will reestablish his command spoke.”

“I know, but he won’t be able to do much with you now.”

“He’ll be able to track me and come here.”

“I know,” MacReady said, “but there’s no other option; Fawkes has to be stopped. Your friend needs your help, and I can’t leave this to chance.”

“My friend?”

“Agent Wachalowski,” he said. “He needs your help, and so do I.”

He pointed to the screens of data.

“This is where we continued Fawkes’s work,” he said, “after he was gone. This is where we continued his work studying Zhang’s Syndrome. There were six of us at first. Heinser, Cross, Deatherage, Dulari, Chen …and myself. We kept it quiet, but believe me, I understand, and I know what Fawkes is trying to do.”

“You may not know as much as you think,” I told him.

“Every second-tier citizen who dies comes through here,” he said. “We’ve had access to all of them, along with every scrapped generation-seven model we’ve been able to get back in here. As you saw on your way in, reclaiming their memories has gotten much more efficient since Fawkes’s day. That’s a lot of data points. These people manipulate things in a very-well-thought-out way to influence policy and politics on governmental, corporate, and even social levels. Right now, their most powerful organization is based in the UAC, and the UAC dominates the globe both militarily and economically. But there are others like them, and over time other seats of power will rise in other parts of the world, if they haven’t already. What we will ultimately end up with is a group of powerful countries that follow the UAC model.”

What he said surprised me. I’d heard this before, but I didn’t expect to hear it from him.

“You sound like Fawkes,” I said.

“Fawkes’s data was irrefutable,” he said quietly, looking back to the destruction on the screen. “When I realized what we had, I knew no one could know. When your friend Wachalowski came sniffing around, I threw him a bone, hoping he’d track down Fawkes on his own without leading anyone back to us. But it was a mistake. Both sides figured out someone was watching them from here. Cross was killed and Heinser disappeared overseas after the Second Chance incident. Two years ago someone—Ang, I think—took matters into his own hands and used a rail-gun sniper to try to assassinate their leader, Motoko Ai, when she came out into the open to meet with Agent Wachalowski. I should have known then. I should have kept a closer eye on him. When Ang and Dulari truly understood what was at stake, data gathering wasn’t enough. They wanted action.”

“They were right,” I said. “Fawkes has a plan to stop them, not study them.”

“There are things Fawkes doesn’t know,” he said, “things he never bothered to learn. He was obsessed with proving their existence and eliminating them. He never dug into those lost memories to understand what drove these people. They are afraid of something, Faye. Something much bigger than Fawkes himself.”

His words triggered something inside. Memories swirled over the void below them, and one small cluster disengaged from the rest. As one ember broke orbit, a portal opened to the contents inside.

“What you did was attempted murder, Noelle,” I said. “You’re going to jail.”

In the memory, I sat in an interrogation room. A gaunt, wasted woman sat across the table from me. This was the memory Fawkes didn’t want to hear.

“I wish I was,” she said. “They might not be able to get to me there. That’s why I’ll never go.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“I was supposed to stop him,” she said. “I just wanted to stop him. Samuel Fawkes is a dangerous man.”

“He’s some engineer at Heinlein Industries. The man is not dangerous.”

“Things change,” she whispered.

MacReady’s brow creased as he watched the tablet in front of him. He tapped at it with his stylus, and memory addresses began to appear in the HUD in front of me.

“That’s a suppressed segment you’re replaying,” he said. “Reclaimed information.”

“A woman,” I told him, “long ago. Fawkes was still alive, but she was afraid of him even then. Afraid enough that she had tried to kill him.”

“Did she say why?”

“No,” I said. “She never did, not directly, but I got the impression it was to avoid something much larger.”

“Did you relate these memories to Fawkes?”

“I tried. He didn’t agree.”

”Well, your instincts were right, I’m afraid. What they fear is much larger than anything we’ve seen so far, and it begins with the destruction of this city.”

“Fawkes has specific targets. He won’t destroy the city. He’s trying to save it.”

“Fawkes will destroy the city,” MacReady said. “He knows that killing hundreds or even thousands of them is futile. If you remove the human equation, then the only efficient way to stop this is genocide. He’s been lying to you, Faye. He plans to wipe the slate clean, and start fresh. These people, these mutations, they don’t just envision the city’s destruction; they’ve seen a nuclear annihilation specifically. They foresee eleven nuclear devices— specifically eleven—that will cause it, and after dropping one in the bay as a warning, that is exactly the number Fawkes currently has pointed at the city from the orbiting missile shield. Fawkes will destroy this city and with control of the nuclear defense shield I don’t think he’ll stop there. These people have foreseen a world-ending event, Faye. Total annihilation of society as we know it.”

He stepped closer, and I could see the bands of orange heat that ran up either side of his neck beneath the skin. The core in his chest pulsed. He believed it too.

“Fawkes will strike another target, probably soon, and I think you know that,” he said. “You’ve been dead a long time, but I don’t think you’re ready to write off the world you knew as an acceptable loss, not yet. Please. Help your friend.”

Orange flickered behind MacReady’s pupils. Shortly after, he forwarded a link to my communications node. It was him. It was Nico.