That’s what Maddox says, anyway.
“I don’t really give a shit,” Acosta’s saying. The tic at the corner of his mouth makes his grin a twitchy, disconcerting thing. “I’d put up with twice the offline time if there was always a view like this at the end of it.” Acosta lives for any scrap of nature he can find; his native Guatemala lost most of its canopy to firestorm carousels back in ‘42.
“So what’s in it for you?” Tiwana asks.
It takes a moment for Asante to realize the question’s for him. “Excuse me?”
“Acosta’s nature-boy. Kalmus thinks she’s gonna strike it rich when they declassify the tech.” This is news to Asante. “Why’dyou sign up?”
He doesn’t quite know how to answer. Judging by his own experience, ZeroS is not something you sign up for. ZeroS is something that finds you.
It’s an odd question, a private question. It brings up things he’d rather not dwell upon.
It brings up things he already dwells on too much.
“Ah—”
Thankfully, Maddox chooses that moment to radio up from Côté: “Okay, everybody. Symptom check. Silano.”
The Corporal looks at his forearms. “Pretty good. Less jumpy than normal.”
“Kalmus.”
“I’ve got, ah, ah …” She stammers, struggles, finally spits in frustration. “Fuck”
“I’ll just put down the usual aphasia,” Maddox says. “Garin.”
“Vision flickers every five, ten minutes.”
“That’s an improvement.”
“Gets better when I exercise. Better blood flow, maybe.”
“Interesting,” Maddox says. “Tiwan—”
“I see you God I see you!”
Saks is on the ground, writhing. His eyes roll in their sockets. His fingers claw handfuls of earth. “I see!” he cries, and lapses into gibberish. His head thrashes. Spittle flies from his mouth. Tiwana and Silano move in but the audio link crackles with the voice of God, “Stand away! Everyone stand back now!” and everyone obeys because God speaks with the voice of Lieutenant David Metzinger and you do not want to fuck with him. God’s breath is blowing down from Heaven, from the rotors of a medical chopper beating the air with impossible silence even though they all see it now, they all see it, there’s no need for stealth mode there never was it’s always there, just out of sight, just in case.
Saks has stopped gibbering. His face is a rictus, his spine a drawn bow. The chopper lands, its whup whup whup barely audible even ten meters away. It vomits medics and a stretcher and glossy black easter-egg drones with jointed insect legs folded to their bellies. The ZeroS step back; the medics close in and block the view.
Metzinger again: “Okay, meat sacks. Everyone into the back seat. Return to Côté.”
Silano turns away, eyes already jiggling in their sockets. Tiwana and Kalmus go over a moment later. Garin slaps Asante’s back on the way out— “Gotta go, man. Happens, you know?” —and vanishes into his own head.
The chopper lifts Saks into the heavens.
“Private Asante! Now!”
He stands alone in the clearing, summons his mandala, falls into blindness. His body turns. His legs move. Something begins to run him downhill. The artificial instructor, always sensitive to context, begins a lecture about dealing with loss on the battlefield.
It’s all for the best, he knows. It’s safest to be a passenger at times like this. All these glitches, these—side-effects: they never manifest in zombie mode.
Which makes perfect sense. That being where they put all the money.
Station To Station
Sometimes he still wakes in the middle of the night, shocked back to consciousness by the renewed knowledge that he still exists—as if his death was some near-miss that didn’t really sink in until days or weeks afterward, leaving him weak in the knees and gasping for breath. He catches himself calling his mandala, a fight/flight reaction to threat stimuli long-since expired. He stares at the ceiling, forces calm onto panic, takes comfort from the breathing of his fellow recruits. Tries not think about Kito and Rashida. Tries not to think at all.
Sometimes he finds himself in the Commons, alone but for the inevitable drone hovering just around the corner, ready to raise alarms and inject drugs should he suffer some delayed and violent reaction to any of a hundred recent mods. He watches the world through one of CFB Côté’s crippled terminals (they can surf, but never send). He slips through wires and fiberop, bounces off geosynchronous relays all the way back to Ghana: satcams down on the dizzying Escher arcology of the Cape Universitas hubs, piggybacks on drones wending through Makola’s East, marvels anew at the giant gengineered snails—big as a centrifuge, some of them—that first ignited his passion for biology when he was six. He haunts familiar streets where the kenkey and fish always tasted better when the Chinese printed them, even though the recipes must have been copied from the locals. The glorious chaos of the street drummers during Adai.
He never seeks out friends or family. He doesn’t know if it’s because he’s not ready, or because he has already moved past them. He only knows not to awaken things that have barely gone to sleep.
Zero Sum. A new life. Also a kind of game used, more often than not, to justify armed conflict.
Also Null Existence. If your tastes run to the Latin.
They loom over a drowning subdivision long-abandoned to the rising waters of Galveston Bay: cathedral-sized storage tanks streaked with rust and ruin, twelve-story filtration towers, masses of twisting pipe big enough to walk through.
Garin sidles up beside him. “Looks like a crab raped an octopus.”
“Your boys seem twitchy,” the Sheriff says. (Asante clenches his fist to control the tremor.) “They hopped on something?”
Metzinger ignores the question. “Have they made any demands?”
“Usual. Stop the rationing or they blow it up.” The Sheriff shakes his head, moves to mop his brow, nearly punches himself in the face when his decrepit Bombardier exoskeleton fratzes and overcompensates. “Everything’s gone to shit since the Edwards dried up.”
“They respond to a water
