Reading GOING ZERO is like binge watching ten episodes of a reality TV show, staying up late to find out if your favourite contestant is going to win. In the case of GOING ZERO, the reader will keep their fingers crossed for librarian Kaitlyn Day. The villain is billionaire tech mogul Cy Baxter who has teamed up with the CIA to beta-test a ground-breaking piece of spyware named Fusion. Ten carefully selected contestants, ‘Zeros’, have been given two hours to go off the grid and ‘Go Zero’. If they can evade detection by Fusion for 30 days, they will win three million dollars in cash. However, if all ten Zeros are captured in that period, Cy Baxter will win a 90-billion-dollar contract with the CIA. The CIA sees the collaboration with Cy’s private company as an opportunity to broaden citizen surveillance without getting their hands dirty.
Some of the chapters are dedicated to each of the Zeros and the various spy technology the Fusion team uses to track them down. This includes the dubious (and hopefully fictional) ‘Weeping Angel’, a spyware installed in smart TVs that listens into conversations when the TV is presumed to be in off-mode. The last one standing is Kaitlyn Day. For Kaitlyn, the competition is about something much more important than winning the three million dollar cash prize.
The reader will slowly learn what drives Kaitlyn. And this moves the story beyond the competition and into the ethics of surveillance. Most of us are aware that social media mines our private data and that there are many surveillance cameras out there. But how much privacy are we willing to give up for the sake of national security? Where do we draw the line?
Learning about the threat to privacy does not stand in the way of the hours of enjoyment we get from this page turner. The short chapters increase the sense of urgency, but they also make the book very accessible. This book is way outside my usual reading realm, but it’s going to be one of the most memorable ones.
Wilma
