Going Zero

by Anthony McCarten

walking home with your keys (weaponized) in your hand.

participants of the Going Zero Beta Test who are still at liberty at 12:00 noon on May 31 will receive a tax-free award of three million U.S. dollars ($3,000,000).

Each of the ten participants—or Zeros, as the team knows them—has two hours, and two hours only, to get a head start:

a message sent to ten cell phones across America: a small two-word phrase that almost rhymes. The hiders now have two hours before the seekers set out to find them.

GO ZERO She immediately flips over the phone, takes out the battery. Showtime.

stands at the ATM, awaiting her turn. In broad daylight. Cap. Sunglasses. Over her face this whole time (no one bats an eyelid anymore, will ever again) has been the COVID mask. But now, oddly, she takes it off.

A librarian, though? Representative? Really? A book person? When the rest of the world had gone digital a generation earlier, some fuckhead on his team chose a book person, an antiquarian, to stretch Fusion?

before realizing that analog people (haven’t thought about them in a while) actually hold advantages in the modern surveillance world, their boo-boos far less likely to set off digital alarms,

a loner, finds the world a hard nut to crack. Found sanctuary in the world of books.

being amused by the resourcefulness of this librarian—she’s really very clever—but

“Always carry the notebook. Always carry the cash. Fire at night. Heat pack during the day. Stay nowhere more than three nights.” Why? “Noticed on day one, wondered about on day two, reported on day three.”

Her side table is always piled high with novels, earmarked and only fractionally read before yet more books arrive, ordered online.

why the hell does such a genius waste her time in a library?

it’s getting a bit much, isn’t it? A librarian?

But of course this is not her plan. Can’t be her plan. If she was just trying to win the three million dollars, maybe it could be.

“Going forward,” Cliffe adds. “Yes we are. A balance between what the Chinese call the public good, which legitimizes a police state, and what we here in America call civil liberties and freedom.”

I mean I actually love my country, Mr. Baxter, what it could and should be, I mean, not what it currently is and is heading toward being. The idea of this country. But the government does such terrible and idiotic things, such brain-dead stupid lame shit, against which, in the course of my entire adult life, I’ve protested or tried to and written letters and letters, but they didn’t change one damn thing.”

he gets it now: the nagging enigma of this woman, why someone with the smarts to lay false trails across the data-verse could have done something so stupid as to use an ATM on a busy street, offering her face for its camera and so linking—all for Fusion’s benefit—Sam’s face to the name Kaitlyn Day, but not before, not before Sam had presumably gotten her face onto Kaitlyn’s driver’s license and passport, which he now guesses were both recently renewed! If she hadn’t done all that, Fusion would’ve concentrated more resources on archive photos, probably discovered this cute little switcheroo days earlier.

My husband is missing, and I want him back.

Me for Warren Crewe.

MARYLAND