Going Zero

Antony McCarten

Pan MacMillan

Otago Daily Times, July 29th 2023

Antony McCarten writes with a superbly cinematic eye, and Going Zero is a fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller ready-made for the big screen.

Cy Baxter, forty-five-year-old billionaire philanthropist and founder of WorldShare (a Facebookian social network with offshoots in security, coms, and surveillance tech), has a new venture. Fusion (a “bleeding edge, three-hundred-sixty-degree intelligence data sharing matrix”) – will leverage the combined resources of the US military-industrial complex, social media, and hacker communities to track down terrorists with unparalleled speed and efficiency. As proof of principle, he has arranged a beta test of the system: five professional and five civilian volunteers will attempt to evade capture for 30 days. There is a $3 million prize to anybody who remains at liberty at the test’s conclusion, and a $90 billion CIA contract for Cy if Fusion tracks them all down.

At first, it looks like a sure thing. One after another, the fugitives are captured in Fusions trawl through cell phone transmissions, traffic and security camera images, bank transactions, drone footage and even the microphones of smart TVs.  But as the deadline nears, one woman remains at large – a middle-aged librarian with no training or experience and a history of mental health problems. It’s not a good look for a company trying to sell itself as the partner the government needs to lift its security and surveillance powers to an incomparable level…

The plot unfolds in short, sharp chapters as the clock counts down to Zero, the perspective moving from person to person, pursuer to pursued, the close third-person narration controlling the revelation of key details to maintain maximum tension and leave us guessing up to the novel’s climax and beyond. Is Cy really one of the good guys, or is there something darker lurking behind his personable appeal? Who is this isolated and unstable civilian who continues to evade the technological web that infiltrates every aspect of our lives? And is it too late to reclaim the privacy we so readily relinquish, often unthinkingly, to a cadre of algorithmic overlords?

One of the many functions of fiction is as a mirror or a lens through which to examine the world from an alternative perspective, and there are interesting resonances between Going Zero and Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood. At first glance, poor-boy-made-good Cy Baxter might seem the antithesis of Catton’s villainous Robert Lemoine, but both are engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse in which the sheer power differential between themselves and their prey appears insurmountable. They are also touched with the same seductive charisma as real-life techno-capitalist high-fliers such as Jeff Bezos or (until recently) Elon Musk wield to such great effect, a lustre born of money and status in a culture where these are the ultimate markers of personal worth. 

Going Zero succeeds in reproducing the over-the-top action and conspirituality of the genre and is certainly a cracking read. It is also plausible enough to make one wonder if maybe a little more paranoia might be justified.