James Knapp - Element Zero

The floor was littered with trash, and the air smelled like BO and piss. In with the empty food containers and cardboard cups were torn white wrappers marked STERILE. In one corner was a used syringe with a broken needle. Noelle looked at the mess sadly.

“It’s almost time,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

“You see your mind’s interpretation of the quantum data streams it receives,” she said. “Information can only be sent back.”

“What information? What are you talking about?”

“By now, Fawkes has released the nanovirus,” she said. “He does this in an attempt to end our influence over the rest of them.”

“Maybe he should,” I said.

“His plan will fail,” she said. “It was only supposed to replicate a set number of times. Enough to spread throughout the world, and then degenerate of its own accord. The violence of the spread would stop, leaving the world free from us, but something went wrong. Something alters the virus. The replication never stops. It can’t be allowed to spread beyond the city.”

“The bombs,” I said.

“The city’s destruction overshadowed and hid the real disaster. We couldn’t see past it. Fawkes never intended to destroy the city, but because of him, because of us, someone will have to. It will come down to the city, or the world.”

My throat burned, and I felt tears in my eyes as I leaned back against the cold concrete wall. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t have the strength. Was what she was saying true? Was any of this even real at all?

“What is this place?” I asked. “Why do I keep coming here?”

“The green zones are all that is left.”

Green zones. It was true, then; there was more than one. The Green Room changed from vision to vision because at some point in the future, there would be more than one of them.

“What are they for?”

“Refugees are brought here to see if they can be saved. This is all that’s left of humanity.”

My forearm itched. When I scratched at it, I saw the scab from the dog bite there.

“That’s how it spreads,” Noelle said, “at least at first. People without our abilities will begin to realize that we’re among them. They’ll wake up and regain their memories, but the mechanism to wake them up was fashioned on revivor technology. We didn’t know what we were dealing with until it was too late. We now believe the countervirus we developed corrupted the original variant somehow and caused the mutation. Pushed past the limits of its design, Fawkes’s variant eventually remembers its original purpose.”

“And what’s that?”

“To make revivors,” she said. “And that is what it tries to do.”

The ceiling spun over my head and a high-pitched whine filled both my ears. Pressure built up in my head and behind my eyes until every time my heart beat, pain throbbed through my skull. I felt like I was going to be sick.

What’s happening? The whine got louder, until it was all I could hear.

“Noelle, help me …I can’t do this…. ”

I couldn’t hear my own words. The whine got louder and louder, and the room spun faster and faster.

The lights went out, and it all stopped. The tone in my ears was gone and I could hear the hum of the air system again. I opened my eyes, and the ceiling had stopped moving, for the most part.

Huma variant 34000174T initialization complete.

The words appeared and floated in front of me.

Initialization successful.

The headache was gone. The tremors were gone. I looked around. Noelle still stood there watching me.

“What happened?” I asked. She didn’t answer.

“Hello?” My voice echoed in the room.

I didn’t feel drunk anymore, which was weird. I didn’t have the shakes anymore either. Instead I felt clear, clearer than I had in a long time, and maybe even ever.

It was so quiet, a quiet like I’d never known before, and after a minute, I realized why. That constant stream of sensation that always lingered in the back of my mind was gone. Noelle was standing a few feet away, but I couldn’t sense her. I couldn’t sense any of the stray thoughts that were always there, like white noise in the background. The sensation was gone altogether. It was as if I’d suddenly woken up blind and deaf.

For a second I felt panic, but then, just like that, it vanished and instead I felt something else: relief. I felt profound relief.

It’s gone. The thing people called my gift, the ability I never asked for and that had haunted me my entire life was gone. It was gone, and it took the visions and the nightmares and that horrible, crushing weight of responsibility away with it.

“It’s gone,” I whispered. Noelle smiled a little, but she didn’t look happy.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It felt good. I remembered once, years ago, the first time I’d come face-to-face with a revivor and I realized I couldn’t sense or control it. I remembered how scared it had made me feel, how lost I felt without that ability. It was different now. Now it felt liberating. If I didn’t know the future, then I was under no obligation to try to change it. I didn’t have to feel any guilt for not being able to change the things that couldn’t be changed. I didn’t have to live in fear.

“It’s gone,” I whispered again; then something moved under the skin in back of my neck. Phantom fingers wormed into the muscle and sent a shiver down my spine.

Error. The word appeared in front of me and flashed.

Error.

Something shocked me. My whole body jerked, and I almost fell to the floor. Before I could wonder what happened, the skin on my face felt tight all of a sudden. My lips peeled back and pain pricked at my gums.

What’s happening?

Something was wrong. Inside me, something was very wrong. The scratching in the back of my neck started to burn. I reached back, and when my hands touched the back of my head, I felt the skull melt away under the skin and hair there. Heat trickled down into my stomach, and under my fingers the skin pulled tight across the knobs of my spine.

Error.

Pain pricked my gums like needles and I felt my tongue peel down the middle into two pieces. My cheeks collapsed as the skin pulled taut around my neck, and the walls around me shifted from green to a colorless gray.

The word flashed more urgently, then winked out. The crawling under my skin stopped.

Primary node network construction failed. The new words floated under the first ones. A few seconds later, they both faded.

My head felt big and heavy. It wobbled as I turned, and when I did, I noticed a strand of drool had oozed down from my lower lip. When I wiped it with my hand, I saw something black in it.

I turned again and caught my reflection in the steel of the headset panel. I tried to scream, but nothing came out.

“This is how it begins,” Noelle said.

I stared at my face, distorted in the polished metal of the switchbox. My neck was shriveled to a bent stick, and my head bobbed at the end. I could barely support it. The back of my skull had melted away under the skin. My lips were pulled back to show my teeth. The gums pulled away and there was blood there, and saliva that drooled from the end of my chin. It was what Ai and the others had termed the Vaggot Deformation.

My eyes stared out of sunken sockets, the whites spotted with broken black veins. I turned back to Noelle and tried to speak, but I couldn’t form the sounds. All that came out was a guttural wheeze.

“Without the building blocks it requires, it tries to use the tissue around it,” she said. “It fails, but drags its victims into a state between life and death, and the spread never stops.”