ZerOes (5 page)

What the—
Aleena looks up. The server to which she's attached is dark, too. No blue lights. No hum. Still as an alien obelisk.

She unplugs, starts to plug into the next one.

The phone rings. Which is odd, because it has no cell service. Doesn't even have a SIM card. It's rigged. Jailbroken to be used only for data.

The name on the call is “PROTECTED.”

Don't answer it
.

But she's a curious girl. Always has been. Aleena curses under her breath and answers.

“Aleena,” says the voice. A gruff voice. Short. Sharp. Gravel rattling in a cup.

“Wrong number,” she says.

“This is Hollis Copper, Aleena. I'd like to speak with you.”

“Gotta go,” she says, and hangs up.

The entire server bank goes dark. One at a time, like a series of lights going out down a long hallway. It seems so simple a thing, but she knows what it means. You turn off a bank of boxes like this, the ISP grinds to a halt. Firesign would never consent to that. Someone's got a finger on a very big switch. She's compromised.

She races back to the elevator. She stabs the button. It lights up, but
doesn't ding. Then the button goes dark. She hits it again. It lights up. Goes dark.

They've cut off access to the server room.

The phone rings. She pops the back of the case, pulls the battery, flings it away from her like it's a scorpion found inside a boot.

All
the lights on the floor go out. For a moment, all is dark, and Aleena is left with her own breathing, her own rushing blood in her ears. But then the backup lighting flicks on, and everything is cast in a red emergency glow.

She thinks fast. On the ground floor, they'll be waiting. Garage floor, too. So—where? She could hide. Duck into a janitorial closet.

Wait. The old skybridge. Runs across to the ISP's second building—which they sold last year to a developer who diced it up into smaller offices. They closed the skybridge, but it's still
there
. Sixth floor? Seventh? She doesn't remember. She'll figure it out. She throws open the stairwell door—

And there stands the man with the muttonchops. In one hand, he's got a Taser. In the other, a foil-bubble pack of gum. He pinches the pack, pops what looks like a Chiclet into his mouth. He grinds it between his back teeth and smiles. “Hey there,” he says.

Aleena just stares. Feral. A cornered animal.

“Aleena, I take it. Nice to finally meet you.”

“I didn't do anything wrong. People are getting hurt. I have work to do.”

“I got work to do, too,” he says. “So let's get right to it. Are you going to make me Taser you, or will you join me of your own accord?”

She thinks about it. “You're going to have to Taser me,” she says. “And you'll have to carry me up several flights of stairs by yourself. You're older. In your fifties. It won't be pleasant. My sincerest hope is that it takes a few weeks off your life.”

He sighs. “At least I'm told you don't have a heart condition,” he says. “So let's hope your medical records are right.”

Then he fires the Taser into her stomach.

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

C
ourtney Gurwich is in love.

She never expected it. Not like this. Not . . .
online
. But dating's hard. She doesn't have a lot of time in her life these days, and the last thing she wants to do is go to a bar because she already manages an awful chain restaurant called McGlinchey's. It
has
a bar, one that comes stocked full of slacker staff and rude customers. Whenever she's there she hears all the cheap, crappy, toxic come-on lines the guys at those places say to try to get in a girl's pants. It's all very
pathetic
.

Courtney's not like that. She hasn't had many boyfriends. She's almost thirty, and it's not like she's a virgin or anything, but—most guys, they just want to get right into it. All that pawing and panting and fumbling to get the bra off and then it's another ride on the Amateur Hour Express, where they hitch and grunt and she lies there staring at the ceiling fan and then it's all over but for the shower swiftly after.

Then she met Dave. She decided to try online dating, and it wasn't even a week after putting up her profile that she met him. He e-mailed her and was sweet and polite. Handsome, but not too handsome. Cleanshaven.
A little heavy but not so much that it bothered her. In fact, she likes a man who has some heft to him. He was Christian, too—that was a good sign. It's not like she's a Bible-thumper or anything, but she goes to church once a month and wants someone who believes in something bigger than himself.

One problem: Dave lives in Portland. Oregon, not Maine. Still. He made her laugh. They started e-mailing. He asked her lots of questions, responding with compassion and kindness and, above all else, wit. He even wrote to her, “Lot of girls say they want a sense of humor but never seem to mean it, but I'm glad you do.”

She did like it. She liked
him
. She started dreaming of Portland.

Now it's been three months. They've e-mailed on and off. They've spoken on the phone a few times. Skype, too, though only through headphones—his camera's busted.

Today's the day. He's flying in. She's going to meet him down at Frick Park. Then they're going to go to dinner—and she thinks she'll bring him back here. He said he'd stay at a motel but she told him he could stay here. He was playful about it but not rude. “Why would I come to your house?” he asked.

She danced around it but eventually typed: “So we can have some fun together.”

                  
HIM
: Whatever do you mean?

                  
HER
: ;)

                  
HIM
: You're naughty.

                  
HER
: For you, maybe.

                  
HIM
: How about a preview?

She didn't know what he meant but he said
her
camera was working so maybe she could do a little routine for him. Like a striptease or something. She'd never done that, and she balked a little. But then she admitted she'd imagined what it would be like and so she decided to oblige him, thinking it
would
make a nice preview for what was to come.

Courtney turned on the camera. Did a dance as sexy as she could. She maybe rushed it a little bit—took off her clothes too fast—and it was hard to know how much he could see and how much he couldn't. She tried to push her breasts together to make them look bigger. She kissed
the air. Bent over, waggled her beehive. Hiked her panties down as she did it—slow and seductive, or so she hoped.

Then she lost it and started laughing and he laughed too and told her he had to go get packed. Because he'd see her tomorrow.

Now it's tomorrow.

Dave does not exist.

Courtney Gurwich gave Dave explicit instructions where to meet her in Frick Park. She told him there's a bench that faces an overlook of trees, and nobody ever seems to sit on it. The bench has a little plaque attached that says
DONATION
:
JAMES AND ANN TROXEL
and she always says a little thank-you to those two even though she doesn't know who they are. Because she loves that bench.

Courtney shows up right on time. She is not the type of person to be late.

But Dave is not sitting on the bench. What sits there is a laptop. And playing—
looping
—on that laptop screen is Courtney's striptease. Her awkward, unsexy, graceless striptease. Someone has edited the sound so that whenever she moves, the laptop speakers belch out bold, realistic fart noises.

Courtney tries very hard not to cry. She sees a Post-it note stuck just below the laptop's keyboard. With a hesitant hand she snatches it up. Then she sees it's not one Post-it, but several layered on top of one another. She reads them one by one, each message like an arrow fired into her quaking, clammy flesh.

Courtney

You crabby stuck up beeyotch

suck a thousand dongs in Hell

I sent this video to all the McGlinchey employees

also uploaded it to your FB page and sent a link to all the contacts in your e-mail using your e-mail address so they think it came from you

FUCK YOU you fucking twat

Love, Dave Who Doesn't Exist You Dummy

P.S. you should've never fired Carlos you racist ho

And that's when Courtney loses it. She screams. And sobs. And takes the laptop and wings it off the overlook.

Then she collapses in a heap and cries, pulling at her hair until clumps of it come out in her hands.

Dave is a construct of Reagan Stolper.

He is one of her many constructs. She created him months ago for the sole purpose of fucking with Courtney Gurwich. Courtney the McGlinchey's Dictator. Courtney the Whitebread Half-Christian Assbitch. Courtney, who once referred to Carlos the line cook as a “wetback.” Courtney, who once told Reagan she was fat.

Reagan decided that Courtney's firing Carlos—because she said he was “leering” at her—was the last straw, and so she started spying on Courtney, even hacking her MasterCard account. (
So
not hard, what with the password being her dog's name.) She saw a line item for an online dating site and that's when the idea hit her, like a magical meteor cast from the heavens.

Now Reagan sits a quarter mile away, in Frick Park, at a picnic table not far from the Reynolds Street Gatehouse. She does a few quick finger-swiping video edits on her Android phone. Like tying a child's shoelaces, it's that easy. She takes the brand-new video—the laptop's webcam was on and so it recorded a reaction video of Courtney seeing herself galumphing about nude—and uploads
that
online. She's not sure which one is her favorite, really. The awkward Courtney slut-dance, or the one where she cries a lot and flips shit before flinging the laptop into the woods.

That was a pretty good laptop, but Reagan's glad to lose it. Sometimes
sacrifices must be made
in the search for
sweet lulz
.

She wonders if maybe she should call Courtney. Put on her Dave voice one last time—for kicks. She has a naturally deep voice and it's easy to do.

But then her phone dings and the upload is finished. Time to go home.

Reagan heads back to her car.

She doesn't see the man in the backseat at first. Reagan hops in, fishes around the glove compartment for her pack of smokes, and
then someone in the backseat says, “Looking for these? You shouldn't smoke.”

Reagan reacts fast. She reaches deeper into the glove compartment, wraps her hands around the pepper spray, whips around and hoses the backseat with the stuff. The man thrashes around like a cat covered in bees.

Reagan throws open the car door to get the hell out of there.

Reagan hoofs it to the bus stop. Then takes the bus to her apartment.

She thinks about calling the cops, but given who she is and what she just did to Courtney Gurwich, maybe that's not such a hot idea. Instead, Reagan decides she'll go back to the car the next day, when creepy backseat black dude will be long gone. She seems to remember him wearing a suit. Odd for a tweaker. Or for a homeless guy. Though sometimes they buy third-hand suits from the thrift shops.

Tired, she staggers into her dirty butthole of an apartment, throws her phone and bag on what little counter space she has—

“Pepper spray, huh?” says the man in the suit, rounding the corner by the coat closet and stepping into the kitchen. Reagan utters an incomprehensible curse—some panicked pastiche of
fuck
and
shit
—and grabs a knife out of the block next to the oven. She slices through the air with the serrated blade. “I'll stab the crap out of you,” she says.

The man blinks a pair of raw, red-rimmed eyes. He sighs. “I'm an agent of the government,” he says, and flips his identification toward her. “Spraying me with that toxic shit already gives me complete and total license to stick a bullet in you. Stabbing, slashing, or slicing me open will get you a lot worse than that.”