Going Zero by Anthony McCarten

Author:Anthony McCarten [McCarten, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

10 Days, 5 Hours

FUSION CENTRAL, WASHINGTON, DC

BURT WALKER THINKS FUSION CENTRAL looks way too much like a theme park. The greeters aren’t dressed up as anthropomorphized rodents, but they might as well be. From the power smiles of the receptionists to the high-def trickery of the indoor arboretum to the Void staff bopping around like problem-solving Oompa Loompas in a tech version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, everything is designed to make you engaged, safe, happy, make this venture seem like fun. It all makes his blood sluice backward. His halls, the halls at Langley, are austere, cold, spare, and practical. The CIA has an actual dress code; it’s a place for serious people to do serious work, and these people know one thing: that stability is fragile and may be shattered like a teacup on a tile floor with the smallest tremor of God’s thumbs. Fun? When you’re faced with a Ukraine-level crisis, with the world plunged from peace into a Code Red in a single morning, with foreign skies filling with bombers heavy with ordnance, with hell falling on democracies and their innocents forced, in their millions, to go on the move, and with the selfish Western world required in response to regain its small claims to nobility, what place for T-shirts with pictures of Mickey Mouse, for high fives, for free candies in giant bowls, for pinball in the hall, for “fun”?

Burt, in the back seat of a town car on final approach to Cy’s magic kingdom, briefcase open on the seat beside him, ignores the reports it contains. Frets instead about Cy’s new toys, such as the fake off-mode program and Clear-Voyant, both arguably valuable but arguably disastrous, and either way he is complicit now in their future impact. By providing the money and support for their deployment, he may as well have invented these himself! As a scientist, he can predict what new threats these weapons pose, though not in the damage they will do to personal privacy. That debate, a quaint twentieth-century one, is just ignorant background noise: the right to privacy is gone, lost already, or at least so compromised it’s really worthless. No, the real present and future threat is manipulation, the inculcation of prescribed attitudes and modes of behavior into an unwitting citizenry, the unseen shift by the state from monitoring to control, the last chapter of the long tale of democracy, free will deformed into willing compliance.

On this epochal issue, and as a scientist, he is secretly with the civil liberties types, has always been, even as he represents the CIA. I am not your enemy. He is even trying, in his heart, with good conscience and with all his wits right now, to think of a sweet spot between what this technology gives and what it destroys, between creation and destruction, between a moral and an immoral universe, finding only that he can’t. It looks right now, as his car stops at the front entrance, where Erika Coogan is waiting for him, like a clear-cut choice, between one thing or the other.

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