Zero State Page 7

  It was exciting shit, scary shit, and Dante loved every minute of it, even in those first months where it had been so much trial and error, when every other body they printed died moments after coming out of the machine, or came out so fucked up that they needed to put it down with a lethal dose of narcotics.

  But eventually they got it right, and they started printing things that were perfect. Better than perfect. Things like Eliza.

  One day a caravan of trucks arrived at the gates. Inside the trucks were the squids. And with the squids, came Donovan.

  Donovan trained Dante on how to run the brain-to-brain interface, and Dante trained Donovan on how to run the printer. Then a team of handlers arrived to train both men on operational support. They ran practice ops, first at The Farm and then in the vacant town nearby, real estate that was owned by the company. The homeless population there had provided useful targets for Eliza and the others to practice stalking and shooting.

  Dante's comm unit chirped. He pulled the device from the clip on his belt. It was like a phone, but worked on a closed network that didn't extend beyond the borders of The Farm. External communication was strictly monitored.

  He had a text message:

  Eliza just arrived in town.

  He thumbed out a reply:

  On my way.

  He checked the status of everything and left. It wasn't imperative that he spend every hour of the process in the shop, all of the equipment was capable of running itself, but he liked this part of the job. Had the interruption been anything other than Eliza's arrival home, he would have been annoyed.

  A set of stairs and a plain concrete corridor led him to the control room and his workstation. He tapped a series of keys and the three computer monitors at his desk showed a world in luminous grayscale, night vision from the dozens of cameras that were positioned throughout the town and along the road leading to The Farm. Dante clicked from one feed to the next until he found her.

  Her hair was gone, buzzed down to a layer of fuzz. Her appearance was already somewhat androgynous, and this made it more so. Dante was a little ashamed that it piqued his curiosity, and he was glad Donovan wasn't around to comment.

  He tapped another key and the monitors began to automatically switch from one camera feed to the next, tracking Eliza's progress.

  His phone chirped again.

  She's five minutes out. She still connected?

  Dante replied:

  Yeah. Wait till I get up there before opening the gate.

  He felt a little nervous, a little excited. He pulled a stick of deodorant from a desk drawer and reached under his shirt to roll it under his arms, feeling the chemical itch as the antiperspirant choked his sweat glands.

  He closed the video feed and hurried down the hall to The Aquarium, where he shut down Eliza's connection to the squid.

  ***

  The Farm was comprised of four sections, more or less nested within one another. The outermost section included the fences, guard towers, and the ruins of a dozen buildings left over from when this had been a grain processing plant. The ruins acted as a maze—anyone attempting an assault on The Farm would be forced into a small-scale urban war, fighting building to building against the security team. The second outermost section was home to The Farm's staff. It held barracks, locker rooms, a mess hall, lounges, and a gym. This was where Dante and the rest of the staff dormed. Staff weren't required to live onsite, but most of them did, due to the long hours and shift work that their jobs demanded.

  The third section was the operator's territory. There were sleeping quarters, rooms for examinations and medical testing, common areas, and training facilities, including a house for live-fire drills and a warehouse-sized gym.

  The innermost area was sacred ground. This was where the labs, The Aquarium, The Print Shop, and the operations center were located.

  On his way to welcome Eliza, Dante passed from the innermost layer to the outermost.

  Front gate access was controlled from a small concrete bunker set a hundred yards from the perimeter fence. Three guards waited inside. Each was twice Dante's size and dressed head to toe in black. Each was armed with a shock stick and a handgun. A row of monitors showed the video feed from the cameras positioned around the front gate. Each showed Eliza from a different angle. In all of the images, she was staring straight ahead, waiting.

  "Let her in," Dante said, and one of the guards threw a switch.

  ***

  Eliza stood at the gate, alone under the glittering stars and surrounded by the song of night insects. The secondmind had gone, and for a moment she felt every single step she'd taken on her journey, from drifting in the ocean to the walk down the single dark road that led to this gate.

  A motor began to groan and the fence began to move, part of it pulling aside to reveal an opening.

  On the other side, more chain link and barbed wire created a wide chute that led toward the buildings. Concrete barricades were staggered in ten-yard intervals to prevent a vehicle from approaching at a speed greater than a few miles per hour.

  Eliza walked forward. The fence closed behind her.

  More cameras flanked either side of the chute, the same smooth black orbs set on stakes that she'd seen at the gate. The guard towers were set further back, two-story wooden structures with slanted roofs, each containing a man with a scoped rifle or a heavy machine gun.

  Ahead of her, another gate. As Eliza got closer, she could make out the shapes of three men standing behind it.

  ***

  Eliza wandered out of the dark. She was dressed in loose-fitting jeans, a thin sweatshirt, a scarf, old sneakers that looked too big for her feet.

  "Hello, Eliza," Dante said through the fence. Two of the guards had followed him outside. The third remained inside the bunker.

  "Hello," she replied. He wondered if she remembered his name. He wondered if she had ever known his name. Though he worked closely with the operators, there was never really any occasion for them to address him by name.

  "Eliza, is the man in the tall hat happy?"

  "No, his hat is too tall. He must take it off to walk through doors."

  Dante spoke into his comm unit. "She's good, open it."

  A motor hummed, and the gate opened.

  ***

  They passed through a cavern-sized building as they moved away from the gate. Dante walked next to Eliza. The two guards followed behind them.

  Inside a small white room, Eliza handed over her bag. One of the guards emptied it onto a table. Inside was a sawed-off shotgun, along with a half-dozen shells, extra clothes, and an assortment of bottled drinks and packaged food. When they asked if she had any other weapons, Eliza handed over a pair of knives. One of the guards patted her down and found nothing else.

  The guards seemed tense, but Dante wasn't concerned. Off the battlefield, Eliza was meek. All the operators were.

  Dante motioned to the contents of the table. "Box this stuff up, label it for disposal." The items would be destroyed. It was safe to assume the weapons had been used in at least one killing at this point, and while companies like the one he worked for operated outside the law as much as possible, murder investigations still existed, forensics still existed, prisons still existed.

  Dante left the security guards to it, and led Eliza out of the room, into a wide corridor with white walls. The harsh florescent lighting gave Dante a better look at her. There was some scarring on the left side of her head, and the ear there was pink and small, not quite done growing back. The operators had limited regenerative abilities. They couldn't grow back an arm or a leg, but skin healed quickly, and ears and noses would grow back, though not always perfectly.

  ***

  Dante stayed in the room while Eliza removed her clothes and the doctor examined her. The doctor took her temperature, her pulse, her blood pressure. He listened to her lungs with a stethoscope and shined a flashlight in her eyes. He examined her injuries
and asked her questions. Dante half paid attention to the proceedings, distracted by Eliza's bare skin.

  The appointment concluded with a full body scan. Eliza stepped into a chamber that reminded Dante of one of those stand-up tanning booths. The scan took ten minutes. Afterward, the doctor handed Eliza a set of pajamas and asked them both to wait outside while he looked at the results.

  The waiting area was cold and Eliza's nipples were hard underneath the thin material of the pajamas. Dante fondled one of her breasts, and then the other.

  "Does that feel good, Eliza?"

  She looked at him with wide eyes. Innocent eyes. As violent and brutal as the operators were in combat, they were also completely naive when it came to most things, including sex. This excited Dante. Eliza had the body of a twenty-year-old, but she had only taken her first breath eighteen months earlier.

  The doctor emerged from his office and asked them to come inside.

  The news wasn't good.

  "Her brain is damaged. Two of the nodes inside her frontal lobe have shifted. This was probably caused by blunt force trauma—a fall from height, a crash, a blow to the head. The result is damaged tissue. Judging by the fact that she made it home, the interface works, but I can't guarantee it will work again in the future."

  "Will the damage heal?"

  "It already has, to some degree."

  "Surgery?"

  "A possibility, if we could find a surgeon and staff qualified to do it."

  Dante already saw where this was going.

  "What's your recommendation?"

  The doctor shrugged. "Recycle her. Grow a new one."

  CHAPTER 10

  It took Logan over thirty hours to reach his destination. Along the way, he made periodic stops to empty his bladder, stretch, and buy coffee and food. He avoided fast food and sugar and anything that might make him sluggish. He ate light, favoring snacks like fruits, nuts, and jerky.

  Each time he stopped, he checked the secure site for updates. There were none.

  Shortly after crossing the border from New Jersey into New York, he found a hotel and slept for six hours. He also took the time to have a proper meal, spend an hour stretching, and clean the gun he had acquired.

  As a result, he felt rested, alert, limber.

  And the drive had given him plenty of time to think about his approach. As eager as he was, he would need to be patient, observe the apartment from several angles, look for that one thing that was inevitably out of place, that would give him a foothold on the situation.

  ***

  Logan stood in the dark, hidden in a grove of trees, and watched the outside of his home.

  He called it an apartment, but that might not have been the most accurate description of the living space. It was a light industrial unit, intended to house offices or workshops. Most of the substantial square footage was comprised of two large rooms. The larger of the two he'd converted into a loft, with areas for his bedroom, kitchen, and a living room. Adjacent to this space there was a bathroom, which he'd remodeled after moving in, doing most of the work himself over the course of a few months. The other room was a combination of a gym and a workshop. There was a heavy bag, a pull-up bar, a rowing machine, a weight bench, and an assortment of other exercise equipment—kettlebells, sandbags, tires, ropes, rattan sticks. There was also a desk with a computer, bookshelves, a workbench, and several metal lockers that held a small arsenal of guns, ammunition, and gear. This was where he trained and where he worked.

  He'd lived here for five years. He wondered what would happen to it, if it would be sold as a residence or if the property owners would sell his stuff and undo the remodeling he'd done. It bothered him, the thought of having to abandon this place where he'd spent so much time, that he'd put so much work into. He hadn't thought about it until now.

  Not the time to get sentimental, he told himself.

  There were two vehicles parked in the garage beneath the apartment. One was a hybrid hatchback that got fifty miles to the gallon, which was what he drove most of the time. The other was a truck with all-wheel drive, which he used in inclement weather, or when he wanted something with more power and weight. It would have been his vehicle of choice right now, were he able to retrieve it.

  The windows of his apartment were dark. The windows of the neighboring buildings were also dark. Only exterior lights were on. There were six units in total, two currently available for lease, and the other three occupied by small businesses—one that manufactured and sold vacuum-pressure coffee makers, another that repaired electronics for a big box department store, and another that made print-on-demand t-shirts. Since it was hours past midnight and a Friday, anyone who worked here had gone home hours ago.

  The location was secluded and accessed by a single road, but the other buildings on the property offered plenty of places to hide.

  Logan checked his watch. 2:02am. He'd spent the past hour watching for any signs of movement within his apartment or from the other buildings.

  There had been none.

  Still, he had the sense that he wasn't alone out here.

  Logan retreated deeper into the grove. There hadn't been a new sound in the past hour, only the distant drone of the highway, two miles east, and the occasional hoot of an owl. He made his way to the northernmost part of the property, taking his time, making his approach slow and cautious. The buildings on the northern end were unoccupied and would be the most logical observation post for anyone watching his apartment.

  Last year, over the course of several weeks, Logan had gone to every other building in the industrial park and figured out a way to let himself in. He'd done this at night, while he was the park's lone occupant. He told himself that it was practice, because his job frequently required him to gain entry into locked buildings. Later he would admit that he was going through a phase of heightened paranoia.

  A fire escape on the side of one of the north-end buildings led to the roof, where an access panel for the building's security system was hidden. The alarms were basic, easy to circumvent. His plan was to start here and work his way through each building, searching from the top down. If he didn't encounter anyone, he'd spend another hour observing his apartment and move in just before dawn. He'd incapacitate whoever was waiting inside and move them to another location to interrogate them.

  He stepped onto the roof and found he was no longer alone.

  A body was silhouetted in the light at the edge of the building.

  His gun was drawn, he moved laterally but forward at the same time, aiming at the center of the silhouette while his eyes searched the rest of the rooftop.

  "Hello, Logan."

  The greeting stopped him mid-step. Not the words, but the voice. A voice he recognized.

  He lowered the gun and the silhouette stepped closer. And though he had never seen her before, though he could barely make out the features of her face in the dark, the voice was all he needed.

  "Hello, Zoe," he said.

  ***

  The diner was ten miles from his apartment and open 24 hours a day. He'd come in here with some regularity over the past few years, but never this late. It was past 3:00am, and none of the staff working at this hour were familiar.

  Two cups of coffee cooled on the table. Zoe sat across from him. She didn't look like any of the ways he'd ever imagined she would look. She was short, no taller than five-foot-five, and she would be shorter when she removed the heavy boots she was wearing. She had the kind of body that managed to be slender and thick at the same time, the kind of body Logan had only ever seen on soldiers or very dedicated athletes. When she'd removed her jacket, she'd revealed arms that were toned and sinewy, and it was easy to imagine the rest of her body looking the same. Her hair was dyed black and pixie-cut, which may have been a recent effort at altering her appearance. Regardless, it worked for her.

  When they'd entered the diner, her eyes had gone to the same places his had, checking the exits, th
e other patrons, looking for anything out of place and any potential threat. She'd been trained in counter-surveillance, other things too. Lock picking, which is how she'd opened the door to his apartment. Some kind of close-quarters or hand-to-hand combat, apparent in the way she moved. He wanted to know more about her background, but they hadn't gotten to that part of the conversation.

  Her eyes were slate-blue and far too serious for her youthful face. How old is she? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?

  He had always expected her to be older. Not much older, but older than she looked.

  Logan took a sip of his coffee. They'd ordered food, but it hadn't arrived yet. The conversation was, so far, incredibly awkward.

  "So you opened the door to my apartment, counted to five, and closed it again. How'd you know I had a system that would notify me?"

  She didn't fidget with her spoon or her coffee. She looked in his eyes when she listened, and when she spoke. "An educated guess. I knew you'd have some kind of security system in place. I knew it would probably be something you built yourself, because you have the knowledge to do that and you prefer to deal with problems on your own."

  She sipped her coffee. Her voice was an octave deeper in person, or maybe it was the late hour and her own lack of sleep.

  She continued. "No one else has been by your apartment. I've been watching it for the past two days. I checked the other buildings. If I'd seen anything, I would have found a way to warn you."

  "Why?" Logan asked.

  "Why what?"

  "When you called me, at the airfield, you said 'flat drop.' That means abandon everything, cut all connections. Why did you come looking for me?"