Zero State Page 5

  Logan had never used the card before. It had spent the past five years inside one hiding spot or another, saved for a situation exactly like the one he was in now.

  Logan—dressed in filthy sweat-soaked clothes, barefoot and carrying a pair of mud-caked boots by their laces—casually placed the card on the desk.

  "We have several vacancies," the concierge said. "Unfortunately, all of our beachfront accommodations are currently occupied."

  "A garden view is fine."

  The concierge nodded. "How many nights?"

  "Two."

  Logan was shown a piece of paper with the price written on it. He nodded. "Perfect." There was no required signature, no ID verification.

  "Thank you," the concierge said. He briefly went over the various amenities at the resort—the location, beach, pools, spa, and restaurants. Logan listened.

  "Is there anything else I can assist you with?"

  "I need to do some shopping. Clothes, shoes."

  "There's a shopping plaza. There's also an outdoor market. Both are nearby, within a fifteen-minute drive."

  "Can you have a taxi waiting for me in twenty minutes?"

  "Certainly."

  A bellhop offered to show Logan to his room and carry the rucksack. Logan declined the offer, but tipped the bellhop anyway, using some of the cash he had with him. He found the bungalow easily—it was in the courtyard he'd walked through on his way in.

  Inside his guest room, he locked the door, lowered the blinds, and emptied the rucksack onto the bed. He shoved the empty water bottles and energy bar wrappers into a small trash bin. After assembling the assault rifle, he placed it under the bed, along with the stack of ammo mags. He stashed the pistol inside the empty rucksack, which he would take with him.

  Logan checked the time, ate another energy bar, drank another bottle of water. He'd worry about an actual meal later.

  The taxi was waiting as promised. Logan told the driver to take him to the outdoor market, which would have fewer cameras and less security, and where his grubby appearance was less likely to draw attention.

  He paid the driver to wait while he shopped. The market was a quarter mile of tightly packed stalls selling everything from cheap souvenirs and knockoff handbags, to counterfeit pharmaceuticals and prosthetic limbs. Logan bought four t-shirts, two button-downs, two pairs of twill pants, shorts, swim trunks, sandals, and a pair of loafers. He also picked up sunglasses, two baseball caps, and a pre-paid smartphone. Logan wanted options if he needed to disappear into a crowd. Even adding a hat or changing the color of a shirt could be enough to throw off a follower, or disrupt a witness's description.

  He paid cash for everything. The driver took him back to the resort. He'd been gone less than an hour.

  ***

  The sun was setting by the time he emerged from his bungalow, showered and dressed in khaki shorts and a light-blue button down. The pool and outdoor bar were more crowded than before, guests enjoying a few drinks and the last rays of daylight.

  He was one of the first to arrive at the restaurant, and the host showed him to a table on the veranda. The waiter arrived an instant later, and Logan ordered a strip steak, sides of asparagus and roasted potatoes, and a salad. It didn't seem like enough. He was ravenous.

  Alone on the veranda, he drank two beers and ate a dozen olives while he waited for his meal and watched the sunset. There was a sense of relief when the sun finally disappeared below the horizon and all that were left were shades of deep blue. He'd survived another day.

  Logan scrolled through the news on the prepaid smartphone he'd purchased at the market. He found no mention of the plane crash, the antimatter bombing, or anything even tangentially related to the events he'd witnessed over the past two days. This did not surprise him.

  He pictured the island being blasted into clouds of gray particles and thought about the female operator who had still been alive as the bombs fell. He wondered what her last moments had been like, what her thoughts were on death, how deep those thoughts went. He still couldn't help but imagine her as some kind of machine, and he wondered if this was his own psychological defense, the dehumanizing of his enemy to ease his own conscience. The same way he hadn't really thought of the body inside the coffin-pod as a man, only cargo.

  He typed in a few searches with variations on the keywords "explosion," "EMP," "apartment," and "young woman." There were few results, and none recent enough to have been Zoe. That made sense. Any incident like that would be investigated as a terrorist act. The first thing the police would do would be issue a news blackout. Most law enforcement hated journalists, and did this every chance they got.

  There were far more effective ways to gather information than keying in a basic internet search. But Logan didn't think about those. It wasn't a good idea. Flat drop meant you abandoned your life with the quickness and finality of an execution. It didn't mean you tried to gather intel about an associate who had worked to keep everything about herself a secret.

  His food took fifteen minutes to arrive and ten to eat. He ordered a third beer when the waiter asked him if he wanted another. More people began to fill the tables and chairs on the veranda. Logan got up to leave.

  As he exited the restaurant, he saw the couple he'd met at the waterfall that afternoon. The guy's sunburn looked worse, the redness of his skin magnified by the bright white shirt he wore. The girl had on a light dress and her bare arms and shoulders were tan and muscular, and her hair was wet like she'd just taken a shower.

  The guy smiled and toasted with a bottle of beer. "Hey, you made it!" he called across the room, his voice loud and slurred and intoxicated. The girl turned toward Logan and they made eye contact for a moment, her expression only slightly less blank than that of the female operator that had nearly killed him the day before. Logan nodded, smiled, and disappeared among the other guests.

  It was a few minutes past 8:00pm when he pulled the blackout drapes across the bungalow's windows and collapsed into the king-sized bed. Sleep was quickly overtaking his body. There was a heavy kind of muscle soreness in his legs and back that helped weigh him down into unconsciousness. A familiar feeling that brought to mind the satisfaction of a hard day of training, or a long run through mountains, or the privilege of falling asleep alive and unmaimed after a job.

  CHAPTER 7

  They called them squids.

  This was workplace slang. Management didn’t like it, but management didn’t come down here much, and that’s what the things looked like, floating in liquid with all those wires and tubes plugged into their skulls. Squids.

  There were thirteen in total, set along the edges of the rectangular room, feet facing the walls and bald heads pointed to a center aisle that was wide enough to give the techs plenty of room to work. Each was contained inside a human-sized aquarium, a nude body, hairless and without any muscle definition, suspended in clear liquid. Some had been male, others female—looking closely through the walls of the glass wombs, you could see the atrophied remains of sex organs and flattened lumps of flesh that had once been breasts.

  They called this room The Aquarium. For some reason, management had less of an issue with that name.

  The chambers were modified sensory deprivation tanks, filled with a breathable liquid that needed to be replaced every thirty days. Each body had an identical set of ports installed into its bald skull. Wires plugged into these ports, connecting to a computer terminal on the outside of each chamber. Thick cables led from the terminals to a server inside a locked closet at the far end of the room.

  The air in here was kept cool for the machines that never powered down, but the temperature of the liquid inside the chambers was much warmer. The lighting was dim and had a bluish hue to it, as not to disturb the squids, even though their eyes were covered with eyecaps that blocked out any light.

  The first wireless brain-to-brain communication had occurred more than forty years earlier, between two rats. Researchers im
planted wireless chips into the rodents' brains and let the first rat learn how to solve a maze through trial and error. When the second rat was placed in the same maze, it found the solution on the first attempt.

  The squids were a more sophisticated version of that experiment. With a few lines of command, a squid could be remotely linked to any of the operators in the field. When an operator needed to know something—how to repair a weapon, a phrase in a foreign language, a train schedule, if a plant was poisonous or edible—their brain automatically asked the squid's brain, and the squid's brain searched the web, filtered the answers, and sent it back, all in a matter of seconds. On a basic level, it was the same as any operator/handler relationship.

  As he often did whenever he was alone with the squids, Dante wondered about who they had been.

  There was no shortage of theories: that the squids had been soldiers hit with a chemical weapon that had paralyzed their bodies but left their brains intact; that they had been patients stricken with a rare neurological disease who had donated their bodies to science; that they had been volunteers, recruited out of an internet addiction clinic, promised a life where they would never have to log offline.

  Dante thought that any of these explanations seemed plausible.

  He scratched his brow, which was still sore and puffy from having his eyebrows waxed three days earlier. He'd gotten the waxing at the suggestion of a woman he'd gone on a first date with, hoping the effort would get him a second date. So far she hadn't responded to any of his phone calls or messages.

  At least Donovan hadn't noticed the eyebrows. If he did, Dante would never hear the end of it.

  Twelve of the terminals were dark. The squids occupying those chambers were in sleep mode, their dreaming minds adrift in information, not linked to any operator. Number thirteen was assigned to Eliza, to help her navigate her way home. Unlike the operators, the squids didn't have names, only numbers.

  Dante walked over to terminal thirteen. A laptop was docked into the top of the machine, the monitor showing a steady stream of data, green text on a dark screen, too dense and moving too quickly for a human to process. Dante tapped a command and the display changed. A series of pages flashed across the screen: weather radar, shipping routes, coordinates. They couldn't locate Eliza with GPS—her tracker, along with the sensors that monitored her vital signs, had gone silent when the island was blown off the map. But based on the queries her squid had pulled in the past twenty-four hours, they could approximate her location: she was approaching the eastern shoreline of the United States. Either she'd stolen a boat or stowed away on a ship.

  Eliza calling in had been a feather in Dante's cap. Donovan's too. The operation on the island had been a shit show. Three out of four operators had been killed, with nothing to show for it. The people who had planned the op were going to be tarred and feathered. Dante and Donovan hadn't had anything to do with the op's planning or failure, but they'd been the ones to deliver the good news that Eliza was alive. And if they reeled her in successfully, management would notice.

  Dante tapped another button on the screen and it switched back to a stream of raw data. He stood next to the aquarium and looked at the squid inside. She'd been a female. The chambers were opened once a month to change the catheters and clean the ports and wash the bodies. These were part of Dante's responsibilities, and the texture of the squid's skin always felt fascinatingly strange to him. Soft and youthful, almost prepubescent. Oddly appealing, though he'd never attempted anything more than a gentle grope. The squids were fragile creatures.

  Dante sighed, letting his eyes linger on the squid's flat breasts a moment longer. He went to a walk-in refrigerator at one end of the room and removed thirteen bags of foodstuff. Squids ate through a feeding tube ported into their stomachs. The foodstuff was gray liquid with the consistency of a watery smoothie. It could be eaten or ported directly into the digestive tract.

  Dante went about his task, scratching his irritated brows, wondering if that second date would happen, wondering if he could mod a sex simulation to emulate the feel of squid flesh.

  CHAPTER 8

  For the third morning in a row, Logan woke in a different place than he had the morning before: there had been the bunk inside the barracks at the airfield, followed by the tree in the jungle, and now the king-sized bed at the resort.

  He allowed himself a few moments of comfort, enjoying the warm bed inside the dark room, where every inch of space had been chilled by the air conditioning he'd left running all night. He wondered where he'd be waking up tomorrow morning.

  It wasn't the thought of people searching for him that drove Logan from bed, but thoughts of Zoe. He felt their severed connection as if it were a physical wound. For the past three years, she had been the only person he'd communicated with on a regular basis, the only person in his life who knew what he did for a living, the only person he counted as a friend, even if he'd never seen her face. And for the past year and a half—ever since he'd turned forty, a fact he hated to admit—Logan found himself increasingly lonely, increasingly unsatisfied. Day to day, it was harder to live with the life he'd chosen.

  That life is over, he reminded himself, and he realized there was comfort to be had in that thought.

  It was still early. Very early. The world waiting behind the blackout drapes was quiet, still asleep. The gray sky only had a thin slice of pink at the horizon.

  He put on swim trunks and walked to the beach, and for the next thirty minutes he ran at a punishing pace.

  The only people up and out were a few members of the resort staff, preparing the pool and patio for the day. Logan offered a friendly wave as he walked back to his bungalow.

  The bathroom was made of dark stone and had a rainfall shower head. He turned the water almost as hot as it would go as he lathered and rinsed his skin. Then he dialed the temperature to the right, letting the water run cold until his muscles were numb and the steam had cleared.

  Brunch was served in a different restaurant than the one where he'd eaten dinner the night before. This one offered its own patio and a slightly different view of the beach. He sat outside, enjoying the breeze and the salt in the air. A waiter poured him a cup of coffee and a glass of ice water. Logan drank the ice water first.

  At the buffet, he piled a plate with scrambled eggs, bacon, berries, pineapple, and four slices of whole grain toast. There were only a handful of other guests up this early—two women a few years younger than him, both wearing white dresses that stood in stark contrast to their tan skin and dark hair; an older couple, retirees, dressed in athletic clothing; a young couple speaking in a mix of English and what sounded like French.

  As he ate, Logan skimmed through the day's news on his phone, finding nothing of consequence. Mostly, he spent his meal staring out over the water and thinking. About what had happened. About what he needed to do next.

  He finished breakfast and drank a second cup of coffee before heading to the lobby. The concierge at the front desk was the same guy who'd been working yesterday afternoon when Logan checked in.

  "Good morning," Logan said, offering a smile. "Is there a computer around here I can use?"

  "Certainly. We have a library and business center on the second floor. There are private workstations available for guests."

  "Thank you."

  "My pleasure."

  The library and business center was a circular room. Bamboo bookshelves lined the walls. The workstations were glass cubes set around the room's edge. Logan chose one at random and sat down in front of a computer screen.

  Of all the skills he'd acquired during his career, the ones that surprised him the most were those related to technology. When he'd been hired to steal something for the first time, he'd never imagined it would lead to him learning to code a webpage or run security diagnostics on a site he maintained. But if you wanted work, you needed to know how to exchange information and money in ways that were secure, anonymous, and untraceable.<
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  At any given time, Logan maintained a handful of secure sites. Some he used to park software he might need to download to a recently acquired device. Others were used to communicate with the various contacts he had made over the years. Another was there to assist him in monitoring his finances and moving money between accounts.

  He installed a browser that would conceal his internet activity and location. The first thing he checked were his bank accounts, and he was relieved to see that those hadn't been touched. He hadn't made up his mind about where he would go, but he knew he would need money to get there.

  Next he checked his message boards. Two messages were waiting for him, both from the same sender: the security system in his apartment. Instead of sounding an alarm or calling a security company, the system was set up to post to the message board every time a door or window was opened. The messages read:

  BackEntrance_open: 09:48:31

  BackEntrance_closed: 09:48:37

  The clock in the top right corner of the computer screen read 9:53am. Five minutes ago, at 9:48am and thirty-one seconds, someone had opened the back entrance of his apartment. They'd closed the door six seconds later.

  Logan stared at the screen. He clicked refresh. Clicked refresh again. And again.

  He did this for ten minutes.

  There were no more updates. He thought that whoever was inside his apartment might have disabled the alarm, so he pinged the system with a message that read: system check.

  The reply arrived seconds later: system active.

  He pinged the system again: active time.

  Again, the reply arrived in seconds: 118 hrs 31 min 49 sec. The system had been active for nearly five days without interruption. No one had disarmed it.

  He clicked refresh again. No updates.

  Someone was inside his apartment. Someone had now been inside his apartment for fifteen minutes. He clicked refresh a few more times, saw no updates, and wished he'd rigged the system to the cupboards, the medicine cabinet, the toilet, the refrigerator, his closets and drawers. Then he might have some idea of what the intruder was doing. There were really only two possibilities: searching for information, or waiting there on the chance that Logan returned. If it was information they were after, they would find nothing. Any trace of his career was anonymized and stored online. He barely owned any electronics—a TV, some kitchen appliances. His smartphone had been smashed to pieces at the airfield. There were no records or photos or internet history on his laptop. The security system was connected to its own router that was hidden outside his building. And according to the replies he received when he pinged the system, it hadn't been discovered or touched.