7 Days Later: 20 Minutes Before “Go Zero”
FUSION CENTRAL, WASHINGTON, DC
ON MAY 1, AT TWENTY minutes to noon, Justin Amari, unbreakfasted, rumple-haired, is greeted by a welcome committee outside Fusion Central, a private complex that had sprung up near McPherson Square the year before with odd speed and mystery—“Silicon Valley Billionaire Cy Baxter Buys Block of Downtown DC, Spending More Time in City, Reasons Unknown.”
Justin spots, among the faces, Cy Baxter’s almost-as-famous-as-he-is right hand, Erika Coogan, cofounder, with Baxter, of Fusion’s parent company, WorldShare. A powerhouse, too, if in her own subtle way.
“Nervous?” Justin asks her as he approaches.
The question surprises Erika into a grin.
“I have faith in Cy, and in what we’re doing here,” she says. Her voice is pitched low, just a trace of Texas left. “But today, for sure I’m nervous. It’s big. Huge.”
Along with other dignitaries, they walk across the lobby of glass and steel, then through a pair of high-security checkpoints, before entering the super-secure area, the no-digital-dust-on-your-shoes, no-cellphones-no-laptops-no-Fitbit-no-recorder-in-your-pen-cap area, whose atrium-like center and active hub, full of dedicated teams on the ground floor overlooked by a system of gantries, has been dubbed The Void.
The scale of it still shocks him. Ice-down-the-spine stuff. A vast hall of screens, within which are rows of desks occupied by the super-smart engineers, data scientists, intelligence agents, programmers, hackers, and myriad analysts from the private and public sectors who are the foot soldiers of the Fusion Initiative. And from a dais on the first floor fit for Captain Kirk, Cy Baxter, vibrating with nervous energy and pride, looks down on his mighty works.
I’m the one who should be nervous, Justin thinks. For one thing, it’s my ass that’s on the line here today.
All the screens—desktop, tablet, cell phone, even the huge ones on the rear wall—are black, sleeping, waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting to be woken.
Justin checks his watch. Fifteen minutes and fifty-nine seconds remaining . . . fifty-eight . . . fifty-seven . . .
When he is waved forward, he walks up to the dais where Cy waits, formally suited for once, sparing today’s crowd his usual adolescent and stubbornly unretired uniform of sneakers, baggy jeans, T-shirt bearing some inspiring quote like WHY THE FUCK NOT?
Also waiting, Justin’s boss, Dr. Burt Walker, CIA deputy director for science and technology, he and Cy up there looking like they’ve just discovered the Theory of Everything. Also with them, less pleased, clearly not so convinced that all this is such a great idea, is Walker’s predecessor (now CEO of some threat analysis start-up), Dr. Sandra Cliffe.
To Justin, Walker looks like he’s trying to spot a ribbon to cut. Wrong era, Burt. No ribbons here. What will initiate the launch of this all-important beta test will be something as inauspicious as the click of a single mouse, which in turn will fire the ten chosen candidates in this secret trial to Go Zero, to get lost. Rapidly, they must disappear off the radar, leaving no trace. But this will not be easy: Cy Baxter and his team of cybersleuths are equipped, as no others in human history have ever been equipped, to find them, and find them rapidly.
Each of the ten participants—or Zeros, as the team knows them—has two hours, and two hours only, to get a head start: to activate their strategy, whatever it may be, after which the pursuit by Fusion will begin in earnest.
“A few quick words,” Cy says with amplified solemnity—at forty-five, he is boyish still, with a slightly forward-tipping body, weight on his toes as if poised always to take a run—“before we begin. First, thank you to our friends at the CIA for this truly historic public-private partnership.” His eyes pass over Justin to settle on Drs. Walker and Cliffe, giving each a meaningful nod. “I’m also grateful, of course, to all of the investors who have placed their trust in us, some of whom are here today.” A nod to the array of suits at the front of his audience. “But thanks mostly to all of you, the Fusion team, for your tireless hard work and genius.”
The Fusion personnel applaud. Made up of experts in their respective fields, and equipped with immense technological weapons and wide jurisdictional powers, they number nearly a thousand here at headquarters but are augmented by thousands more personnel in the field, Capture Teams sprinkled all over the map and ready to pounce. Cy Baxter has drummed into each of them that it is the speed of these successes, as much as the means by which they will achieve them, that everyone has come to witness.
“We have serious business ahead. The next thirty days will determine the fate of a ten-year commitment from the CIA to fund this relationship, the fusing of government intelligence with free market ingenuity.” He pauses then, and seems to weigh his next words carefully. “Everything you see . . . all this”—he waves his hand to encompass the atrium and indicate the three floors of basements beneath them full of thrumming servers coddled in air-conditioned racks, the 932 handpicked personnel (each one rigorously background-checked by the CIA) stationed throughout the ops rooms, VR suites, drone bays, research facility, food court, and offices—“will be nothing if we fail. For me personally, this project is the most important work I’ll ever be part of. Period.”
Applause greets this.
“When I was first approached to see if I could imagine a public-private partnership that might lift this country’s security and surveillance powers to a whole new level, to an incomparable level, I looked at the deputy director here . . . and Dr. Cliffe, who may remember my reaction . . . I believe it was . . . right? . . . ‘You must be shitting me!’”
Laughter on cue.
“But I guess—I guess Orville Wright must have said something similar to his brother, right? Or Oppenheimer when ordered to make a bomb, or Isaac Newton when asked to define which way is up.”
More laughter.
He grins, a surprisingly winning smile. “You don’t know you can till you can. Right? ‘No way’ always precedes ‘of course.’ But despite our confidence, and all the hard work put in by everybody in this room, we still don’t know, one hundred percent, that we can. Hence this beta test. So let’s all get to it. Light the touch paper and see what we’ve got here.”
Extended applause. Cy loves these people and they love him right back, for ample reason.
Justin’s eyes stay on Cy as he wonders, Just how rich is this guy? No one is quite sure. His biography is opaque. Details scarce. Born where exactly? Even over this there is confusion. Cy says Chicago, but no birth certificate has been offered to answer rumors that his Slovakian mother brought this only child to the United States at seven. Recently, when the Ravensburger jigsaw people approached Cy, releasing a thousand-piecer of him—arms akimbo in front of a Bezos rocket ready to set WorldShare security satellites in orbit—folks finally gained a forum, with avid fingers and searching eyes, to do what up till then had been a purely mental challenge: assemble a clear picture of this man.
Justin has studied him from afar, collected the facts. Magazine profiles, invariably flattering, reveal a slow developer, one late to learn which fork to use, the right way to say words like niche (Cy: “nitch”). IQ of 168, though. A lonesome kid, often bullied, almost good-looking, although his small eyes were slightly asymmetric, his elbows and shins blotted with eczema. Got into computers early, then rode the tech wave. Built the garage start-up into a business valued at twelve billion dollars by the time he was twenty-six, and was off to the races. His thing, initially, revolutionary tech and social networks. Grew WorldShare from a small, friendly information exchange—“Wanna hook up?” “Sure, why not?”—into a global friendship ecosystem and from there fanned out fast, in all directions, sinking the profits into riskier ventures as if betting on swift greyhounds.
Wall Street fell in love at first sight with this future-seeing whiz kid, pipelined money into his escapades: cybersecurity, home protection cameras, alarms and public surveillance tools, even communication satellites. Midas-rich after a decade but never one to flaunt it (never photographed at Paris Fashion Week, no Hollywood friends, no giant yacht or private jet), he quietly, without undue publicity, also bet big on a green, wholesome, earthly, and even interplanetary future. Now he funds solar power research, battery life extension, and transparent cryptocurrency for the Federal Reserve, while also digging modular nuclear reactors to finally end the era of oil. What makes some people love Cy, find him so appealing, beyond his brilliance and despite his wealth, is how he truly seems to want to use who he is, and what he possesses, to aid the world when he could just, well, surf. Or rocket into space.
And not just a workaholic, he makes time for his private life: plays bass guitar in an indie four-piece and sweats at his local Palo Alto public tennis court twice a week. He has never been romantically linked with any other woman than Erika Coogan. He told Men’s Health he finds much-needed balance in meditation. He can endure the lotus position for hours, and perform ‘the plank’ exercise for well over fifteen minutes. (When the media disputed this, he livestreamed a twenty-three-minute retort.) He has emerged, ultimately, a cult hero: head and heart in twin good health.
Quite an act to pull off, concedes Justin, that in this unadmiring age a billionaire can acquire and achieve so much and yet engender so little disdain. Further proof, he is forced to conclude, of the abiding benefits of keeping whatever the hell you actually do way, way, way under the radar.
18 Minutes Before “Go Zero”
89 MARLBOROUGH STREET, APARTMENT OF KAITLYN DAY, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
THE CLOCK SEEMS TO HAVE stopped. Time crawls, collapses, and just when she’s sure that something is wrong, that there is a wrinkle in its weave, the second hand ticks forward again. She curls up at the far end of the sofa, a blanket over her knees and a book in hand, a book she can’t even remember picking up, long ignored on the overpiled coffee table, slippery with magazines twisted over one another like strata after an earthquake—the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker.
But she isn’t reading, she’s debating: This is a bad idea, this is a brilliant idea, this is insane. This is her best chance, her last chance, roiling like waves, crashing and receding.
Forget. Remember. The thoughts break and shatter over her too quick to latch on to.
Backpack
Sleeping bag
Hiking boots
6 T-shirts
1 extra pair of jeans
Anna Karenina
Breathe, woman, she tells herself. Breathe slowly. Remember who you are. I am Kaitlyn Day, she whispers, like a mantra. Thirty-five years old, birthday September 21, Social Security number 029–12–2325. These familiar facts are a healing oil, a balm, a prayer wheel, a tether to hold on to, and finally she can feel the air filling her lungs, reaching her blood.
Road maps
Pup tent
Gas stove
Cooking pot
Face mask
Phone K
Phone J
Compass
Canned food
Cutlery
Trail mix
Can opener
Tampons
Soap
Toothpaste
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