James Knapp: State of Decay

The systems you’re outfitted with are impressive. I could use a revivor like you in my ranks.

I’m not wired for reanimation.

Not yet.

I’d faced revivors in the field back in the service and again at home. In all that time, I’d never had one try to hack into my systems before; I didn’t think they were capable of it. I’d broken into the control center of many revivors before, though. I understood them. I knew how they functioned.

Before Fawkes could break through, I shunted a virus over the connection back toward the source. There was a noticeable lag before it dropped into his memory and executed.

I realized he wasn’t in the factory. Wherever he was, he was far away. Really far.

His next communication was garbled. The virus mapped his systems, then took control of them. When it was finished, it sent a full report, which included access codes to all of his systems.

His assault stopped. Before he could give the command to the revivor in the room with me, I severed his command spokes. Every revivor in the facility was cut off from him.

Agent, wait.

I sifted through the access codes and found the trigger to the small capsule of Leichenesser that Heinlein implanted in the skull of every revivor.

Agent, I have placed a lock on the necrotizing capsule contained inside Faye Dasalia. If you kill me and that connection times out, she’ll die too.

You’re already dead, Fawkes, and so is she.

You understand what I mean. Destroying me will be a mistake, Agent. There’s more going on here than you realize.

I connected to his system and tried to trace his location. Wherever he was, it was outside the country. He’d set up some elaborate chain of reroutes on the circuit.

Where the hell are you? I asked.

I’m right where I’m supposed to be, suspended in stasis fluid, in a plastic blister, in a metal box buried under a warehouse of other identical metal boxes. The only difference between me and the rest of the PH soldiers awaiting deployment is that I arranged to be outfitted with capabilities they don’t have. They keep me conscious and allow me to still act, even though I can’t move.

I wondered if that could be true, or if it was meant to keep me off his trail. If he had developed some means to do what he said, it was possible he was on a base somewhere in the world, still awaiting deployment. A PH soldier might sit in a storage depot for years before it was needed. If he had contact with the outside world and enough resources, he might have been able to orchestrate everything remotely.

This was planned a long time ago , he said. If you’re going to destroy me, at least take the information I have. If you don’t, it was all for nothing.

What information? What are you talking about?

It all goes back to Ning Zhang.

What does that mean? I asked. What does Zhang have to do with this?

What Olav Sodder first discovered wasn’t what he thought it was. I realized after studying the revivor Zhang that his memories weren’t corrupted at all, as everyone had believed. When I studied him long enough, I found that it was actually just the opposite; as a revivor, he had an almost total command over his memories, so much so that he could pick them out and access them almost like pages of computer memory. I can definitively say now that this analogy is not far from the truth.

You said yourself in one of the interviews with Zhang that events happen one way, not two , I said.

Yes, but the assumption was always that the revivor’s memory was corrupted somehow during reanimation and that one memory was the original true one, and the other was the corrupted false one. I compared the brains and the components of many different subjects, and there was no physical or chemical difference between those that were affected and those that weren’t. Whatever happened, it wasn’t a corruption that happened during death or during reanimation. There could only be one other explanation: the corruption occurred before death. Zhang’s reanimation didn’t cause the memory corruption, Agent, it removed it. The original memory, the living memory, was the false one. Not the other way around.

At that moment, I finally understood him. He was talking about Zoe. Not her specifically, but the phenomena she could create.

Are you saying someone altered Zhang’s memory when he was alive?

Yes.

And he remembered the truth, the way things really happened, after he was dead?

Zhang never committed the crime he was accused of; someone convinced him that he did.

Who? Why?

The ones who actually did it, I imagine. As for why, who knows? It served someone’s purpose.

Eyewitnesses came forward in the Zhang trial.

I was able to interview one such witness after reanimation. The memory of witnessing that event was a lie as well.

The memory was implanted? Is that what you’re saying?

I know you have some idea of what I’m talking about, Agent. Memory is a tricky thing. It plays tricks on us all the time. In the hands of a master, it can be manipulated, I promise you. You yourself were a victim before I had Zoe Ott removed.

She’s just one—

She’s just one of many, Agent. Your friend isn’t unique; she’s one of thousands, and they have been using you to get to me. When I started analyzing the new revivors we brought online, I began uncovering more and more instances of what we called Zhang’s Syndrome. As reanimation technology got more sophisticated, the memories became more specific. I catalogued them, trying to create a bigger picture, and eventually one formed. I began to see an order to the thousands of alterations, and an organization took shape. As I studied the recovered memories, I began to see themes, policies, agendas, and, eventually, names.

The list. A fragment of that list had been pulled from one of Samuel’s illegal imports; the rest later from Faye.

If these people really exist and they’re so powerful, then how did you manage to kill them so easily?

Because they have an Achilles’ heel. One that your friend may have noticed. They can’t read revivors.

I remembered Zoe’s reaction when I put her in front of Faye back in the storage unit, the surprise on her face and the fear in her eyes when she backed away. It sobered her, as much as anything could have. At the time, I thought it was a reaction to seeing the body walking and talking again. Some people could handle it and some couldn’t. Now I thought I understood.

They can’t read them, they can’t control them, and now they understand; we know too much.

My mind struggled with what he was saying. I couldn’t deny the reality of Zoe’s power. If she had it, others like her could too. Could there be any truth to what he was saying?

It doesn’t matter, Fawkes.

You don’t believe that.

You can’t justify those bombs going off downtown.

I knew how to take control of as many revivors as I needed; the only trick was getting them out of storage so I could do it. I used the ones I smuggled to strike the key players who might get in the way, then caused enough chaos to threaten the security of the city. When the troops were finally deployed, I used them to eliminate the rest.

All of them?

Enough to hurt them. Enough to set them back decades.

The blue sky warped, then flickered in front of me for a second. The sound of the voices and the surf skipped, and there was a pop of static.