James Knapp - Element Zero

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.

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 helicopter had just begun its approach to Palos Verdes when the missile detonated above the water, past the mouth of Palm Harbor. A blinding flash lit up the night sky, and spots still swam in front of my eyes as the huge dome of light began to boil into a cloud of radioactive fire. Even at that distance, it was awe inspiring. As the signature cloud rose over the skyline, panic set in for real, and I could see mobs surge through the streets below us. Not even the Guard could control the flow of bodies as they scrambled to clear the area.

I couldn’t raise anyone on the JZI. Our people were scattered. Calls were flooding in from all over the city, jamming the switchboards, and it was about to get worse.

You will kill Fawkes—that’s what they think—but Zoe will stop him.

I thought about Van Offo’s last words as the column of smoke continued to rise above the skyline. I fished the card he’d given me with her number on it out of my jacket pocket. The way things were playing out, I might not get another chance. As we moved over the crowd that had spilled into the street, I dialed it.

It rang several times, but she didn’t pick up. When it bounced through to her voice mail, I stared at the mob below and didn’t speak.

“We’re closing in!” the pilot said.

“Zoe—”

Scrambled code streamed in the corner of my eye and then winked out as the chopper hit turbulence. My stomach rolled, and my dead right arm seized as the scene in front of me changed abruptly.

“ Just tell me what you want ,” I asked. I was sitting in my car, with Zoe next to me. The sign for Pleasantview Apartments shone from across the street through falling snow as I waited for her to answer.

I remember this. It had happened years ago, back before Faye had been killed.

Zoe sat in the passenger’s seat, her eyes turned down toward the floor. Her hair covered most of her face, but I saw a tear roll down her cheek.

“I want you …to like me …” she said. Her voice was so soft, I could barely hear her.

“I do like you, Zoe. I …”

She turned and stared up into my eyes. The color was gone from them, replaced with shiny black. I felt the strength drain out of my body.

“Don’t say anything,” she said. “This is hard enough.” Her eyes returned to normal.

“You really don’t get it, do you? You really don’t see it.” She shook her head. “You and me …there’s got to be a reason for it …I kept seeing you …something made me find you …we were supposed to meet. Didn’t you feel it too?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. Zoe always seemed emotional to me, but I hadn’t realized until then just how much she kept buried.

“You mean so much to me …don’t you see it? You changed my life…. ”

“Zoe …look …”

“Am I anything to you at all?”

I realized then that she had feelings for me. More than that, she’d pinned some kind of hope on me. I’d been so caught up in what was happening that I hadn’t even noticed.

Zoe was deeply disturbed. She was a late-stage alcoholic, prone to outbursts and paranoia. I thought she might also be critical to my investigation, but she’d asked a straightforward question. Whatever it was she felt, I didn’t feel it, but I thought she deserved an answer. Even before I could frame what I was going to say, though, she knew.

“Don’t …don’t say it,” she said, shaking her head. She was crying now. “I don’t want to hear you say it.”

“Zoe—”

“Don’t!” Her pupils expanded again and her eyes turned coal black. My head began to reel. “Forget it! Just forget it! Forget this whole thing! We never had this conversation, so forget—”

The helicopter bucked, and as fast as the vision had come, it was gone. The phone was still in my hand. Zoe wasn’t there. I snapped it shut as the pilot began his descent.

I was sure that time; that was a memory. Zoe had wiped my memory, and somehow it had returned.

The dead arm ticked once, and I felt it in my shoulder. The first flash came after Fawkes took over Heinlein Industries, after he sent the transmission to alter the code of the Huma carriers. They had to be connected.

I set up a data miner to dig up instances of revivor bleed-through and memory recall. It began its search, but the networks were jammed and it was slow going. After a minute or two, it had trawled up some garbage, but nothing substantial. There was no tie between nanoblood contamination and memory, at least none on record.

“Hold on!” the pilot said as he brought us in. Maybe Deatherage would have some answers, if he was still alive.

We were closing in on the street below, and the crowd surged beneath the helicopter as people were buffeted by the wind of the rotors. We passed between the buildings and veered down Stark Street, where the traffic was jammed bumper to bumper. As the wire was flooded with warnings about the approaching radiation, people were abandoning their vehicles to escape to anywhere away from the shore. Throngs of bodies shoved their way down the sidewalks on either side. One man trudged along the side of a snowbank with a pistol clenched in his hand. Farther down, two men guarded a storefront with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.