Version Zero

by David Yoon

  8. With one hand, hold out pepper spray or a similar personal defense weapon and sweep every room in the lodging. With the other hand, have 911 (or local equivalent, if available) pre-dialed and ready to call.

  9. Take pictures of every room in the lodging and send them to friends.

  10. Shout “Hello?” (or local equivalent) repeatedly. This lets everyone around you know you are there.

  1.21

  They met back at the house and drove out in separate cars: Akiko and Shane in the Poolwhip, led by Pilot and Max and Brayden in the Proton.

  “Self-driving?” said Brayden, examining the car’s interior. “Nice.”

  “I spend three years building this prototype,” said Pilot, “and all I get is nice.”

  “A hundred people die every day from cars,” said Brayden. “Cars are the number one cause of death for kids. People don’t deserve the privilege. Car ownership is debt pwnership anyway. That’s what I meant by nice.”

  Max and Pilot shared an impressed look. Neither of them was expecting such an outburst of insight from the boy.

  Pwnership was early 2000s slang derived from pwned, a typo of owned, which meant to be dominated by someone. People typed fast and furious in the early 2000s, often using just their thumbs, and typos were the norm.

  The road ahead cut through tall grasses turning gold and copper in the afternoon light. There was a single low hill. Upon it rested a single tree in silhouette against a diagonal orange sun. It struck Max as a good place to rest, and Max realized how noisy his brain had become and how nice a rest would be.

  “In a thousand feet, you will arrive at your destination,” said the car.

  There was now a chain-link fence a mile long, and not much else.

  “Arrived,” said the car.

  They approached a hangar, and a small jet, and a uniformed pilot, beckoning.

  “Check out this private jet bullshit,” said Max.

  “It is obscene,” said Pilot, all sheepish. “But so much faster than flying commercial.”

  They pulled up and stood on the breezy tarmac. The plane gleamed. Its door sat open in two toothed semicircles, ready to ingest passengers. Shane and Akiko parked the Poolwhip and joined them.

  “Fucking sweet-ass shit,” hooted Shane through his fingers.

  Pilot shook hands with the pilot. “Mister Cody, good to see you.”

  “How do, Mister Markham,” said Cody. “You see that Arcs game?”

  “I still hate sports, Mister Cody.”

  “A man can change.” He said can like kin. He gave the gang a wink.

  “Everyone, this is Mister Cody,” said Pilot.

  “How do, folks,” said Cody. “Y’all climb on in, we’re number one for takeoff.”

  * * *

  * * *

  There were no seat belt lights here, thought Max. No FAA-regulated safety instructions. None of this you-may-now-move-freely-about-the-cabin. The interior looked more like a lavish hotel conference room than a plane.

  Cody—or someone—had left them a rainbow-colored sushi spread and bottles of sake chilling in ice. A stack of little bamboo cube cups stood nearby.

  Shane, being Shane, began piling a plate with sushi atop sushi. Akiko bit her nigiri in half, an odd habit. Brayden removed the fish slices, dipped them in soy sauce, and put them back into place. Everyone with their own way of doing things.

  Pilot did not eat.

  Before long they were cruising in the sky, and Max was buzzing from the sake. Akiko offered him another cup. Akiko was a pusher, because as long as others were drinking, it gave her permission to drink, too. A person like Akiko with a mother like hers needed permission.

  Akiko got giggly when she drank. It made Max feel like the funniest man alive.

  Akiko turned red when she drank. Once, Max pressed her forearm and saw the white mark his finger made before the red came flooding back in to reclaim the spot.

  Akiko this, Akiko that.

  Her skin looked flushed and hot and Max wanted to touch it. Max decided he should do something else. So he turned to Brayden.

  “Mister Brayden,” said Max.

  “Yo, Mister Max.”

  “Give us the latest.”

  “On it,” cried Brayden. He thumbed his phone quickly, then slowly. Then he stopped. “I don’t know how to say this.”

  Max set his cup down. “Use your mouth?”

  Brayden showed his screen. Akiko began reading, then snatched it out of his hand for a closer look. Now she was frowning. Now she was fuming.

  She flopped her arms and flung the phone away. “I give up.”

  “Hey,” said Brayden.

  “What is it?” said Max.

  Akiko looked at Max with her eyes closed. “Account deletions have stopped.”

  “What?” said Max.

  Akiko opened her eyes. “People are reactivating their accounts.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Shane.

  “Because it doesn’t fucking make any kind of logical sense,” said Akiko.

  Max blinked and blinked. Was he drunk? “I genuinely don’t understand what you’re saying to me right now.”

  Max held his hand out, and when Brayden handed him his phone he scrolled rapidly left, right, up, and down through tables of live data.

  “We just had forty-one thousand deletions,” said Max. “This can’t be right.”

  “What’s it at now?” said Shane.

  “Half that,” said Max. “And falling. It’s been less than twelve hours.”

  “Wull,” murmured Brayden, “it is March Madness right now.”

  Max cocked his arm and aimed it at the back of the plane.

  “Please don’t throw my phone,” said Brayden.

  “So people return to Wren and Knowned,” said Pilot, fascinated. “Even knowing now what they are.”

  “It’s like nothing will make people change,” said Max. “Is the internet like smoking? Just like smokers know it’s bad for them but they’re too addicted to stop?”

  “Is it a surprise?” said Akiko. “Think about all the evil shit we normalize in our lives. Like: I know these shoes were made by child labor but they’re so cheap and cu-u-u-ute. I know my 401(k) is managed by evil empire bankers investing in evil empire Big Pharma, but the forms are just so confu-u-u-using to tweak myself. How is the internet any different?”

  “Damn, baby,” said Shane. “You get so serious.”

  “For me personally I would have a hard time quitting Wren,” said Brayden. “The FOMO would get to be a lot.”

  FOMO was short for fear of missing out and was pronounced foam-oh.

  “People want to bet on brackets with their friends,” said Brayden. “Wren is where you bet on brackets.”

  “Yeah, but you agree the internet is a deeply broken place, right?” said Max.

  “I agree,” said Brayden.

  “Everyone knows the internet fucks with our shit every day, right?”

  “Agree.”

  “Everyone knows the internet can’t just keep going the way it’s going, right?”

  “Half my team went on a social media fast a while back,” said Akiko. “These are super-savvy, supersmart Wren employees I’m talking about.”

  Akiko paused. Max knew why. It was impossible to imagine her going back to work at Wren after all this. She would have to quit. And then what?

  “Certain technologies hijack the primitive brain to thwart our better selves,” said Pilot. “Cars make us fiercely territorial. Television holds our orienting response hostage. Phones trap us in a vicious oscillation between social reward and rejection.”

  “I just say FOMO,” said Brayden.

  Max let his hands flop onto the buttery leather of his chair. “So what are we doing here?” he said. “If people keep coming back d
espite themselves, how are we supposed to fix the internet? Can we just blow the whole thing up?”

  “If only that were technically possible,” murmured Pilot to his fingernails.

  “The only time people change is when something super heinous happens,” said Shane, sitting up now. “My grandma used to tell me about how so much shit changed in Japan after Hiroshima. Everyone started looking inward, you know? They stopped trying to conquer China or whatever. A fucking A-bomb will do that.”

  Max closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He recalled a graphic novel, one of his all-time favorites, where a misguided genius launches a fake alien attack on earth to unite nations through tragedy—even at the catastrophic expense of innocent millions. Version Zero needed something like that.

  Without the millions dead, of course.

  “We gotta come up with our A-bomb,” said Max. “Because hacks don’t last.”

  “Death does,” said Brayden, and he held up a photo of Fred Mould and a headline.

  RIGHT-WING WHITE SUPREMACISTS FIND MARTYR IN MOULD

  “What’s the rest of the article say?” said Shane.

  “I don’t read the articles,” said Brayden.

  Akiko squeezed Max’s shoulder. Max thought about her team back at Wren. She must be on some kind of official shit list by now, after such an unexplained absence. Max wondered if there was a Wren van parked in front of their place in Delgado Beach, too.

  Where was there for Version Zero to go? Were Max and his friends and his strange new mentor simply playing at being revolutionaries in this outrageous private jet?

  Max drummed his fingers. “What exactly are we doing?”

  Pilot answered. “We are going to Glass Island to relinquish all our preconceived notions of reality so that the answers may come flowing forth.”

  Pilot stood with his hands clasped for a long moment. Then he burst out laughing.

  “That was cheesy as fuck, eh?” he brayed.

  Everyone else laughed, and Max joined in. It was true what they said about laughter. So many dumb, simple things were true. It made all the rest of it infuriating.

  Max’s phone buzzed. It was a text. Max stared.

  “Who is it?” said Pilot.

  The plane tilted. Ovals of light crept down the walls. Max had to sit, lest he lose his balance. He could no longer see the horizon.

  “Final descent,” said Cody over the intercom. “Glass Island, y’all.”

  1.22

  Max, please inform Akiko Hosokawa that her employment with Wren has been terminated.

  —Cal Peers

  1.23

  It seemed to Max that they would descend into nothing but the ocean itself. But at the last moment a coastline appeared, and a small runway, and at the end of it stood an old man waving from a long electric golf cart festooned with streamers and glittery orbs.

  They were Christmas ornaments.

  “Heyo,” said the old man as they exited.

  “Grandpa,” said Pilot.

  Max looked at Shane. Shane looked at Akiko.

  “I thought, that ain’t no single-prop coming in, and I knew right away it could only be you,” said the old man, hobbling over for a hug. He wore a rifle across his chest. The turbines were still whining to a halt. Max guessed a man like Cody, working for a man like Pilot, could just park his plane anyplace he wanted.

  “He looks like one of Santa’s elves,” whispered Max to Akiko.

  “Grandpa?” she said.

  “No idea,” said Max. “Maybe a nickname?”

  “What were you looking at on your phone earlier?”

  Max hesitated. Cal Peers must be casting about his suspicions; Akiko was officially among them. Normally, Max would’ve been terrified into hiding by such a message.

  But Max had Pilot. Pilot could body-slam Cal Peers into a skyscraper like a giant mech-warrior if he wanted to. If he were purely driven by animal rage, and not any kind of higher vision.

  Max put his phone away. There was no point in worrying Akiko.

  “Just spam,” said Max.

  Max turned to gaze at the perfect green hills and long grassy chales massaged by gusts from the endlessly repeating ocean—a miniature emerald isle straight out of a video game.

  “Grandpa, these are my good friends and business partners: Max, Akiko, and Shane. And this is Brayden.”

  “Well, konnichiwa and hajimemashite. Oh,” he said, looking at Max, “um, mucho gusto. Am I right?”

  “Mucho gusto,” said Max. “And what’s your heritage?”

  “Oh, I’m just generic standard-issue White,” said Grandpa. He then held Pilot’s arm aloft as if inspecting him. “My lord, this man never ages. He’s got a portrait in his basement that does it for him.”

  “You got me,” said Pilot.

  The old man grew earnest. “You holding up okay?”

  Pilot shrugged. “Eh.”

  “You’re a fighter,” said the old man.

  They regarded a nearby orange cone like two men before a grave marker.

  “You still make llama burgers?” said Pilot.

  Grandpa grinned. Max had read that in the great emotional graph of life, happiness in old age soared and even surpassed that of youth. This old man looked drunk on bliss.

  “Climb in, one and all,” he said.

  Glass Island was a pair of mountainous islands connected by the Isthmus of Nosebridge, located twenty miles southwest of Playa Mesa in the Pacific Ocean. It was originally called Pimu by native Tongvans, then renamed to San Solanus by Spaniards who killed the Tongvans, then renamed to Glass Island by the oil mogul Henry Hutchinson, who appropriated it from the bankrupt Spaniards, and blablabla.

  Max had come to Glass Island only once on an elementary school field trip, and his class didn’t venture any farther than the tide pools they were tasked with studying. Max never imagined people actually lived here full-time. But of course they did. Where else had their hot lunches come from that day? Who else were all those people driving around in electric golf carts?

  Grandpa’s cart trundled them down a narrow sidewalk marked with miniature street signs no bigger than dinner plates, passing house after house made of scrap, tin, hubcaps, and drums: a junker’s paradise, a first-world Whiteman’s utopian vision of third-world charm meticulously crafted into tiki-torched reality.

  Max was struck with the urge to never leave this place. They waved at every person they passed. They traveled no faster than fifteen miles an hour, and only on downhills. There was a barbecue pit made out of a dismantled truck bed, and an old Whiteman in an aloha shirt raised his ceramic hash pipe from underneath his straw sombrero in greeting.

  “Sammy Sauce, I love you,” said Grandpa.

  “I love you more, Grandpa,” said Sammy Sauce.

  The place struck Max as a kind of do-over: their careers done, their money made, the residents of Glass Island had all the time in their remaining lives to make whatever society they wanted. And they chose this—lo-fi, junky, funky, slow as it comes. Max could see himself reading on a breezy bluff surrounded by manga.

  If everyone could recalibrate their expectations so, would all the world look like this?

  Or was such recalibration a luxury that only cloistered retirees could afford, and only after a lifetime of wealth amassed through unscrupulous exploitation?

  Did there need to be losers in order for there to be winners?

  The golf cart trundled over an unpaved wash leading to an open gate marked with a plywood cutout of a llama.

  “Llamas,” said Shane. He pointed.

  There was a leaning barn house with a deck draped in fluttering tinsel and a picnic table and a rickety fence beyond. And beyond that fence: llamas.

  “Gararararrarara,” said the llamas.

  “There’s a bucket of beer by the picnic ta
ble,” said Grandpa. “Be right back with some grub.” He unslung his rifle and set it with effort against a fence post. Then he vanished.

  Pilot fished out beers for all.

  “Always meant to come out here more,” he said. “It has been years.”

  Max paced with Pilot while the rest of Team Version Zero followed. Pilot walked slow here. He seemed at ease.

  “This place feels really special,” said Max finally.

  “No cell signal. No internet. All you can do here is just be.”

  Max looked at his phone. He showed Pilot the text message.

  Max, please inform Akiko Hosokawa that her employment with Wren has been terminated.

  Pilot was unconcerned. “It is natural that he should suspect you and Akiko. She has been AWOL for a week, after all, coinciding with the Big Fix.”

  “Has it been a week already?” said Max. Again he imagined a Wren van parked in front of her place in Delgado Beach. “We should lay low.”

  “Do not let this Cal Peers motherfucker bother you,” said Pilot. “We will take care of him.”

  “What do you mean?” said Max, hoping for a glimpse into Pilot’s inner heart. Because—good God—who knew what kind of history he had with a man like Cal Peers? Had something happened between them?

  But Pilot said nothing. He smiled and waved to passersby, lazily, as if on a parade float.

  1.24

  Max turned off his phone and pocketed it. The wind drew ornate curlicues all around them. It felt good to be offline,

  unmarked,

  unnoticed,

  a blank spot in the endless data continuum.

  “How do you know Grandpa?” said Max.

  “He and Grandma are very good friends of friends. They are technically Noelle’s godparents. Were. Grandpa worked for Polk Chemical during the war. He invented napalm, you know.”

  “Huh,” said Max. He took a swig of the lightest, chilliest beer ever.

  They sat.

  Pilot gazed at the rickety llama fence and grew still as a statue. “Last time I was here was with Anna and Noelle,” he said. “A dozen or so years ago.”