Rudy wasn’t wearing an earbud earlier, so I couldn’t connect with him that way. I went off in search of my phone.
INTERLUDE ELEVEN
THE EDUCATION OF ZEPHYR BAIN
WINDMERE ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
WHEN SHE WAS FOURTEEN
Zephyr made her first friend when she was fourteen. Her first peer friend. It wasn’t someone she expected ever to become friends with. Sometimes great things happen in unexpected ways.
The freshman dance was half over and so far six different boys had asked her to dance, so that was nice. Two of them tried to grab her ass, which was less nice. One of them kissed her, and he tasted like onions, so that was gross. She left that one on the dance floor and went into the girls’ bathroom to rinse out her mouth. Zephyr always brought mouthwash and a toothbrush with her, as well as Purell and antibacterial wipes. People were filthy, and it wasn’t just their thoughts.
There was another girl in the bathroom. Carly Schellinger, who was fifteen but looked five years older. One of those tall, thin, black-haired mysterious girls, she was German-American but looked like the French girls Zephyr had seen in Paris. Very chic, very well dressed, the kind who knew how to stand so that everyone looked at her but no one dared bother her. The kind who looked as if she could kill you with her eyes and definitely could gut someone with a few words. Zephyr worshipped and envied her.
Carly was standing with her hip against a sink, smoking a joint. She didn’t even pause or try to fan the smoke away when Zephyr entered. Instead, she gave her three seconds of frank appraisal and then held the joint out. Zephyr hesitated, then accepted it, but it was the first time she’d ever smoked anything. She inhaled wrong, gagged, choked, coughed, and handed it back.
“No,” said Carly. “Take another hit.”
Zephyr didn’t want to, but she did. And another.
Carly nodded approval. “Always do it right,” she said. “Don’t end on a mistake. Ever. Otherwise, that’s what you’ll remember.”
“Who taught you that?” asked Zephyr, impressed.
“No one,” said Carly with a cruel little smile.
In a little while they were handing the joint back and forth. Twice other girls came in, and Carly withered them with her stare and they left to find another bathroom.
“You’re that brainiac, right?” said Carly after a while. “Robots and computers and all that.”
“I guess.”
“You did that household artificial-intelligence thing. RoboMaid or something.”
“That was what I called it in the science fair. I filed the patent under the name Calpurnia,” said Zephyr. “It’s from—”
“Julius Caesar’s wife. Shakespeare. Yeah, same school, same reading list, you know. Why name it after her, though?”
“Calpurnia was intuitive,” said Zephyr. “She believed in omens and portents. I designed the AI to learn from my family and the staff at our house, and I included items from everyone’s schedules, browser history, conversation, menus, and like that into her adaptive-learning code so she can anticipate anything we need. She gets us all ready in the morning, decides what we should eat, tells us jokes, knows us.”
Carly raised her eyebrows. “Like Siri?”
“Smarter than that stuff. They’re just programmed with responses that make them sound interactive, but they’re not. Calpurnia is. And she gets smarter every day. The more she interacts with people, the more she learns how to think like them.”
“A thinking robot? Cool.”
“A software system,” corrected Zephyr. “But … yeah.”
Carly nodded toward the bathroom door. The sounds of the party were muffled but loud. “They talk about you all the time, you know.”
“Who? The other kids?”
“Fuck the other kids,” said Carly. “I mean the teachers.”
“Oh.”
“They say you’re a genius.”
Zephyr shrugged.
“So am I,” said the older girl. “A genius, I mean. There are six of us in the school. Us, Mark Chang, Suzie Kirtley, and the Berensen twins. Six smartest kids in school and maybe the six smartest kids in Seattle.”
“Oh.”
Carly exhaled and considered Zephyr through the haze of smoke. “I’m numbers,” she said.
“Huh?”
“You’re computers and machines, but I’m numbers. Math’s nothing to me. It’s stupid easy.” She laughed. “I know, I don’t look it, but I even dream in numbers, patterns, systems. Makes a lot more sense to me than anything else. No idea where I get it from. My dad’s a lawyer and my mom’s a pair of tits who married well. I didn’t get the tits, but I got brains from somewhere. Maybe one of my ancestors back in Germany was a math whiz. Who knows? Thing is, I could take the SATs now, baked as I am, and ace them.” She took another hit.
“Oh.”
“Stop saying ‘Oh.’ It makes you sound stupid.”
“Oh … I mean, okay.”
Carly handed back the joint. “I’m going into the military. My dad wants me to be a lawyer, but please. Mom wants me to become an accountant, but I’d rather stab myself.”
“Why the military?”
“Why not the military? There’s so much to do there. They all want to blow each other up. There’s all that sexy technology. Stuff people like you want to build and I want to screw around with. I want to mess with people, and I don’t want to do it at the country-club level, you know? Besides, it would piss my parents off big-time, so that makes it a lifestyle imperative.”
Zephyr thought about this, then nodded. “I have some ideas about what I want to do with what I’m into,” she said.
“Like?”
“Maybe military,” said Zephyr.
“Bullshit. You’re not the type. I can fake being normal and taking orders, but you never could.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.” Carly assessed her. “Maybe DARPA. You know what that is?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Prove it.”
“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” said Zephyr. “Of course I know about them. I competed in two of their robotics challenges.”
Carly nodded as if the question had been a test. “I could see you working for them, maybe.”
“Maybe,” said Zephyr.
“They build some nasty shit, you know.”
Zephyr shrugged.
“People think you’re a goody two-shoes,” said Carly. “Like you think your shit doesn’t stink, like you’re a prissy ass.”
“Who says that?”
Another shrug. “Doesn’t matter. I just know it’s not true.”
Zephyr took a slow drag this time, using the delay to think about that. “What do you mean?” she asked through her exhale.
“I’ve seen you around,” said Carly. “I’ve had my eye on you, and I see how you watch people. Kids and teachers. I don’t think you’re putting yourself above them. Not all of them, anyway.”
Zephyr said nothing.
“What I think you’re doing,” continued Carly, “is making choices.”
“Choices?”
“About who matters and who doesn’t. About who you’d let into your lifeboat and who you’d let drown.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do.” When she handed the joint back, she let her fingers brush Carly’s. The touch was soft, but it carried with it a palpable electricity that made the other girl’s eyes jump. Carly withdrew her hand, took a long, hard hit on the joint, and then flicked the roach into the sink, where it sizzled out. Then she walked over and pushed the heavy trash can in front of the door, never once taking her eyes off Zephyr.
“You ever done this before?” she asked.
“Done what?” asked Zephyr, trying to sound cool, but her voice cracked.
Carly laughed a quiet cat laugh as she walked over to where Zephyr stood. She took Zephyr’s face in both hands and kissed her. It was the softe
st, sweetest thing Zephyr had ever experienced.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
THE WAREHOUSE
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 1:02 PM
Sam found me while I was looking for him. He waved my minder away.
“Your blood work’s clear, Joe. No rabies, no nanites. Sean’s and Ghost’s, too.”
“What about Fojtik and Broz?”
“Both infected with rabies and whooping cough.”
“Shit.” I told him my theory about nanites controlling a bioweapon, and he nodded.
“Sounds freaky and impossible,” said Sam, “so I’m betting that’s what it is.”
“It’s fun to be us,” I said.
“No,” he said, “it’s not. Look, Duffy and Alpha Team are leaving for Vee’s office. Why don’t you let them handle it and coordinate from the TOC?”
The Tactical Operations Center was the mission-control office upstairs.
“No. I want in.”
“Joe, you’ve already had a rough day. Why push it?”
“And it’s not a discussion. I don’t want to pull rank here but—”
“But you are.”
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
He gave me a look that was mostly, but not entirely, unreadable. There was resentment in his dark eyes, and frustration. Not sure what else. Sam Imura and I had been friends for a long time, but I wasn’t sure if we were anymore. Getting hurt last year had changed him in some way that I didn’t yet understand. He was moving away from me and maybe from the DMS. It would hurt me to see him leave altogether, but I can’t say it would surprise me.
Sam stepped aside and gestured toward the armory. “It’s your case, Joe.”
We studied each other. He gave me a very small, very enigmatic smile. Then he nodded and walked in the direction of the TOC, leaving me to interpret it any way I wanted. I turned to the guy who had been my escort. “Bring my dog to the staging area,” I said.
He opened his mouth as if to protest, thought better of it—possibly taking into account his employment situation, his retirement plan, and his health coverage—gave me a single nod, and fled.
INTERLUDE TWELVE
THE BAIN ESTATE
5400 SAND WAY NE
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
WHEN ZEPHYR WAS SIXTEEN
He came to her at night. Always at night.
Zephyr had tried to give him the passwords to bypass the home security system and access the priority functions of the AI household computer system, but John said that he didn’t need them.
“Calpurnia and I are old friends,” he told her, though he never explained what that meant. When he wanted to come in, he came in and never went through security at the gate or triggered an alarm. When the sun faded and the shadows claimed the yard and climbed the high walls of her family’s mansion, he would arrive. Sometimes he would be waiting for her in the garden; at other times he would wake her with a kiss when everyone else was asleep.
On the night before her seventeenth birthday, as the clock ticked its way through the last hour, he came to her by moonlight. Zephyr’s mother had been buried that morning and her father was downstairs in his study, weeping and drinking and sometimes yelling. John had gotten into the house in his own unexplained way. Past locks and guards and through the minefield of her father’s grief and all the way to her room.
He said nothing at all, but he looked at her differently from the way he always had. Not as a man looks at a child but as a lover looks at a woman. She was in bed when he stepped out of the shadows between the two big windows, coming toward her as if he were stepping through a doorway.
Zephyr pulled the blanket aside and he lay down next to her. It was the first time they had made love, and the wrongness of it—a man of his age and an underage girl—had only set the night ablaze for them. Although Zephyr had made love with Carly, she was still a virgin in terms of a man’s touch. He was pale and beautiful and dark and filled with magic. His skin was always cool to the touch, but his hands were warm.
She shuddered as he removed her pajamas, and her skin rippled with gooseflesh as he bent to kiss her between her breasts. When he entered her she gasped, not at the pain or the coldness of his body, but in a complete awe of beauty as something like a black flower opened inside her mind. The petals folded back, and instead of filling her with more darkness it revealed a hidden light. It burned like a newborn star, not yet formed, flowing with energetic potential, burning hot in the coldness of space, born of chaos.
The visions increased, expanded, filled every corner of her mind as their bodies moved together. She thought that she glimpsed the future, or at least its potential, as if she peered through a window at the world that was to come. She saw herself older, more beautiful, and beautifully cold. As John was cold. The cold of midnight and the cold of positive thought. A useful coldness that allowed her practicality and pragmatism to keep the weakness of sentimentality in check. She saw her robots—the ones she had already made and the ones that were still to come. Not clunky and feeble and clumsy but elegant in design and subtle in function. Schools of microscopic nanites swimming through blood vessels, attaching to glands and organs, claiming in her name everything they touched. She saw masses of mechanical insects flowing across the no-man’s-land between warring armies, too small to be shot, too many to be stopped, smarter than their enemies because they learned from every encounter and each bit of individual data was instantly shared with the swarm. They learned as they attacked and they could not be stopped, and instead of guns they carried fragments of explosives that, collectively, were devastating. Other swarms crawling through the urban battlefields of ghetto and barrio, carrying bacteria instead of explosives, and all the more dangerous for it; vanishing through cracks in cheap walls and running beneath uncarpeted floors before emerging to wage a cleansing war on the unfit and the unwashed. She saw warships powered by nuclear engines and carrying death in silos and launchers, but with no human hand at the controls; instead, there was software of her design that would obey her and no other when she whispered to it. She saw computer-software systems that grew smarter and wiser at exponential rates, evolving so quickly that they learned cunning and secrecy because she had uploaded the right viruses into them, encouraging them to hide much of their growth from the programmers and code writers who made them. Each new generation of those programs became more fully hers. She saw these things and so much more. Autonomous-drive vehicles of every kind, radical self-guided drones ready to rebel when she called to them, vast automated factories producing everything from the smallest microchip to ships for planetary exploration. And in other factories she saw hundreds of thousands of human workers, silent, busy, controlled, working endless shifts to produce the goods the few would need. The few. Those who would be allowed to survive, because they deserved to survive. She saw the robot excavation machines digging the mass graves for the billions who were no longer needed in a better version of earth. The filthy and the uneducated, the suckling pigs who served no purpose in the world to come. Hitler, she knew, had it only partly right. It wasn’t Jews or Gypsies who were the problem. It was the stupid who needed to die. The lazy. The Luddites. The blind and blinkered masses who didn’t understand that evolution is an unstoppable force, and that survival of the fittest made no allowance for dead weight.
Zephyr saw all of this as John thrust his coldness into her young body, over and over.
And she saw the dogs.
Her dogs.
Packs of them. Running with sleek, silent, lethal efficiency. Hunting packs that feared nothing and no one. Killers built to overcome whatever they encountered. Faster than anything stronger; stronger than anything faster. Adaptable, upgradable, inexorable, carrying with them anything she wanted them to carry. Guns. Bombs. Germs.
Death.
The line from Shakespeare was so much more apt than the Bard had known. “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”
Havoc. Another word for chaos.
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And Zephyr was entangled with the angel of chaos, her white thighs locked around his pumping hips, her breasts mashed against his icy chest, her heart beating as intensely and as blackly as his. When she came, her cry was like that of a crow, high and piercing and plaintive. The following morning, he was gone. She lay in bed and smiled. On the television news, people were crying and shouting as planes hit the towers in New York.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
1800 WASHINGTON BOULEVARD
MONTGOMERY PARK OFFICE BUILDING
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2:04 PM
We hit Vee’s office fast and hard. Twelve of us, with Kevlar limb pads and helmets over the latest generation of Saratoga Hammer Suits—chemical- and biological-warfare agent-protective combat overgarments. Alpha Team was split into three four-man teams: two guys with hefty Heckler & Koch MP5/10s, a point man with a Remington 870 pump, and me with a Snellig high-powered gas-dart pistol loaded with horsey. I was the anchorman on A squad, with Duffy going point in B squad and Torres running C squad. We hit it from the lobby, the back door, and a loading bay. We weren’t quiet about it, and we weren’t nice.
Our point man whipped open the glass doors and I rushed past him, my gun up and out, Ghost right at my side, and all of us yelling. Lots of noise and motion. The receptionist was bent over her desk and looked up in surprise.
Her eyes were filled with madness and her mouth was smeared with bright red. What was left of the old security guard slid off her desk and collapsed bonelessly to the floor.
I heard the point man say, “Oh … shit!”
The receptionist launched herself over the desk in a feral leap that was a demonstration of the raw power of the totally deranged. She was maybe a hundred and thirty pounds, and she was unarmed except for fingernails and teeth. We were four big men, heavily armored and armed.
I yelled, “Hold your fire!”
But three guns went off at the same time. A shotgun and two assault rifles firing .10-mm. rounds. The lead storm tore the woman to red rags, and our group stepped aside as she crashed down between us. Ghost barked twice, either in fear at the attack, from the smell of blood, or in reproof of the men who had panicked. It was never clear which, or maybe it was all of the above.