Zero Day: The Static Protocol

Chapter 2 — Patch Notes

The one in front was a woman, maybe forty, with a rifle slung low and easy across her body like it had grown there. She stopped just inside the shattered doorframe, boots crunching on broken glass, and studied Kai with the flat, assessing look of someone pricing livestock.

"Well," she said. "There's the light."

Kai didn't understand her at first. Then he realized she wasn't talking to him — she was talking to the man on her left, younger, with a tablet strapped to his forearm that glowed the same pale blue as Kai's panel. The screen on it was angled so Kai couldn't see it, but he watched the man's eyebrows climb as he read whatever was scrolling there.

"Provisional Admin," the younger man said. "Barely five minutes old. Look at that corruption reading, though — boss, he already patched somebody."

"I noticed." The woman's eyes didn't leave Kai. "That's fast for a fresh spawn. Most new Admins panic and neutralize. Costs less."

Kai kept the box cutter up, even though some distant, exhausted part of his brain understood exactly how useless it would look to someone holding a rifle. His hand was shaking. His numb arm throbbed in a way that wasn't quite pain, more like the ghost of pain, an ache from a limb he wasn't sure still fully belonged to him.

"Who are you," he said. Not a question so much as a demand he didn't have the strength to make properly.

"Depends who's asking." The woman took a slow step forward, and Kai noticed the third figure for the first time — a heavyset man hanging back near the door, watching the gray static beyond the frame instead of watching Kai, like he expected something to come out of it. "Name's Priya Kessler. This is Dez." She nodded at the man with the tablet. "And that's Foster, on lookout, because in my experience the static doesn't like it when Admins gather in one place too long. Draws things."

"Draws what things," Kai said.

"Things that used to be worse than Renata over there," Priya said, and it took Kai a second to realize she'd read the name off Renata's work badge, still pinned crooked to her vest, without needing to ask. "Bigger corruptions. Older ones. The longer a zone's been static, the nastier what crawls out of it gets."

Renata made a small, frightened sound and pressed herself back against the register, and Kai found himself stepping half in front of her without deciding to.

Priya's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Protective. Good instinct. Keep it, it'll get you further than the box cutter will."

"You're Admins too," Kai said. It wasn't really a guess. The blue tablet on Dez's arm made that obvious enough, and something in the economical, unhurried way all three of them moved told him this wasn't their first collapsed grocery store.

"Dez and Foster are Handlers," Priya said. "Support class. I'm Admin, same tier as you, just a few zones further along than a five-minute-old provisional." She crouched, unhurried, and picked up the fallen carton of Marlboros from where Kai had knocked it off the rack, turning it over once in her hand before setting it back down, like the gesture meant something to her that Kai didn't have the context to understand. "You did the math yet on what happens when your contamination hits a hundred?"

Kai's stomach dropped. "No."

"Good, because the math is ugly and you don't need it clawing around in your head right now on top of everything else." She straightened. "Short version: you stop being able to tell the difference between yourself and the static. It doesn't hurt. That's the part nobody warns you about. It just feels like relief, right up until you're not you anymore."

Kai's numb arm suddenly felt very cold.

"So the smart move," Priya went on, "is you don't patch every corrupted host you find like it's some kind of point system, because guess what — it *is* a point system, and the system doesn't care if you survive it, only whether the region gets reclaimed. It'll happily burn you down to nothing patching strangers if you let it."

"She's not a stranger," Kai said, and his voice came out rougher than he meant it to. "She's my coworker."

Something shifted in Priya's expression — not quite softening, but recalibrating, like she was updating a file on him in real time. "Noted," she said. "Doesn't change the math, but noted."

Dez cleared his throat, tapping something on his forearm screen. "Boss, region integrity's still dropping. Thirty-eight percent now. We've got maybe twenty minutes before this block goes full decay and the walls stop being optional."

"Walls stop being optional," Kai repeated. "What does that mean?"

"Means the building forgets it's supposed to hold its shape," Priya said, already turning toward the door, waving Foster in from his post. "Means we should be somewhere else fifteen minutes ago. You coming, or are you planning to stand in a collapsing grocery store defending your generous employee discount?"

Kai looked down at Renata, still shaking, still human, still hers. He looked at the panel hovering at the edge of his vision, its cool blue light unbothered by any of this, patiently waiting on him to make a decision it had probably already modeled out six different ways.

"She comes too," Kai said.

Priya's eyebrows rose slightly. "She's uncorrupted now, but she's not an Admin. Civilians slow a group down."

"She comes too," Kai said again, flatter this time, no room in it for negotiation, "or I stay here and figure this out myself."

For a second nobody moved. Then Priya huffed something that might have been the beginning of a laugh, shook her head, and gestured toward the door with two fingers. "Fine. Your funeral, new guy. Dez, get her a static charm off the truck, she's not walking through a decaying zone unshielded."

Dez peeled something off his belt — a small circular tag, black metal, humming faintly with the same blue light as everything else in this new broken version of the world — and pressed it into Renata's shaking hand. She stared at it like it might bite her.

"It won't stop corruption," Dez told her, not unkindly. "Just slows it down if you get caught in a bad patch of static. Keep it close to your skin."

Kai helped Renata to her feet. Her legs weren't fully steady yet, and she leaned into him hard enough that he felt it in his still-numb arm, a dull pressure more than a real sensation. Above them, the ceiling tile flickered again, existing and not existing, existing and not existing, like the whole building was thinking hard about whether it wanted to keep being a building at all.

"One more thing," Priya said, pausing at the shattered doorframe, silhouetted against the humming gray nothing beyond it. She looked back at Kai with an expression he couldn't quite read — something between warning and grudging respect. "You're not the only fresh Admin this city's spawned today. We've picked up three other signatures since this morning, all within a two-mile radius. That's not normal. Reclamation Protocol doesn't usually stack Admins that close together unless something big enough is coming that it needs more than one of us to patch it."

"That's supposed to make me feel better?" Kai asked.

"It's not supposed to make you feel anything," Priya said. "It's supposed to make you pay attention. Because some of those other three Admins are going to want what's in your head the second they find out how fast you leveled off one patch. And not all of them are going to ask nicely first."

She turned and walked out into the static without waiting to see if he followed, Dez and Foster falling into step behind her, and above the humming gray horizon, Kai thought he saw something move — vast, and slow, and not remotely finished glitching into whatever it was going to become.