Going Zero

by Anthony McCarten

Cy Baxter, vibrating with nervous energy and pride, looks down on his mighty works.

Ozmandias allusion

“These Big Tech giants have had it all their own way, been granted a license to basically steal and manage and manipulate and sell human experience and personal data for nearly two decades, and no one on the Hill has really said boo. So is it really any wonder that they now exercise almost total control over the production, organization, and presentation of the world’s information?”

Looks at the clock counting down. Three days gone, three Zeros down, seven to go. And then? Brave new world, baby. Brave new world.

Then, at twenty-six, Michael was killed in a mass shooting in Flagstaff, Arizona—an event so horrific it fixed on the American mind like a barb for three weeks on account of the footage captured on people’s phones. Not that you can see it online anymore: Cy made sure it got taken down and scrubbed. He remains vigilant about this still, has a search-and-erase code on constant patrol, so that Erika will never again (except in her nightmares) have to watch her fallen brother be resurrected, then die anew, and anew, and anew

Eleven lives were lost in that half hour, time in which, if the police had had better detection and anticipation capabilities, Michael might have been spared.

She doesn’t judge him at such moments, even when he loses his temper and blurts out something reprehensible. Allowances have to be made for such special characters. You can’t take a genius of that order and then complain if at times they don’t behave like everyone else.

People don’t want privacy, not anymore. Privacy is passé. Privacy is a prison. People can’t wait to give it away, if you really want to know the truth. The fact is, they’re so damn lonely—which maybe, just maybe, you know a little something about—that they barter away their privacy with relief, first chance they get. Because, why? I’ll tell you. Because what they crave is to be known, not unknown . . . to be transparent, watched, as if they matter, as proof they matter, all their secrets laid out there in public view, their sins proclaimed, heck, even advertised! Nothing hidden. They want it that way. And why? Wanna know why? Ms. Day? Because being watched . . . it feels a little like being loved.”

In the end, some things—air, avocados, railroad tracks, a note on a violin, silence, trust between lovers—need to be perfect.

The power of sisterhood made manifest.

borne up by hope’s abrupt revival.

he once told her his theory of why human beings had never met any aliens. “All over the universe,” he’d said, “civilizations like ours appear and grow up and get smart, and around the time they get close to really transcending their brute origins, they start inventing the means of their own destruction. Bombs. Chemicals. Viruses. Gases in the atmosphere. This triggers a planetary disaster. Anyway, when one person can gather enough power over these destructive forces that can fuck up half the planet, eventually that person will use them. It’s the entropic principle but accelerated. Boom. Then everything goes back to the Stone Age and we’re back at the start, looking for someone who knows how to make a wheel.”