Zeroes: A Novel
Chuck Wendig
Language: English
Pages: 437
ISBN: B00Q33FYZO
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
An exhilarating thrill-ride through the underbelly of cyber espionage in the vein of David Ignatius’s The Director and the television series Leverage, CSI: Cyber, and Person of Interest, which follows five iconoclastic hackers who are coerced into serving the U.S. government.
An Anonymous-style rabble rouser, an Arab spring hactivist, a black-hat hacker, an old-school cipherpunk, and an online troll are each offered a choice: go to prison or help protect the United States, putting their brains and skills to work for the government for one year.
But being a white-hat doesn’t always mean you work for the good guys. The would-be cyberspies discover that behind the scenes lurks a sinister NSA program, an artificial intelligence code-named Typhon, that has origins and an evolution both dangerous and disturbing. And if it’s not brought down, will soon be uncontrollable.
Can the hackers escape their federal watchers and confront Typhon and its mysterious creator? And what does the government really want them to do? If they decide to turn the tables, will their own secrets be exposed—and their lives erased like lines of bad code?
Combining the scientific-based, propulsive narrative style of Michael Crichton with the eerie atmosphere and conspiracy themes of The X-Files and the imaginative, speculative edge of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, Zer0es explores our deep-seated fears about government surveillance and hacking in an inventive fast-paced novel sure to earn Chuck Wendig the widespread acclaim he deserves.
is no serpent. It is, instead, a writhing mass of tiny spheres—metal, gleaming, glowing, though the light is hard to see in the day. The spheres break apart, begin rolling over him, sliding under his shirtsleeves, under his collar—he feels them begin to fill his wounds, pressing into the injured flesh. Some crawl to his ears, his mouth, pushing up through bulging nostrils. His back arches. Pain courses through him. From the Jeep, another box drops. More spheres begin to slalom through waving
pulls his hand away from his lip. A string of saliva and blood connects his chin to the fat of his palm. “You hit me.” Gonna do it again, too. Chance rushes forward like a hardheaded horse, slamming into Shane and carrying him into the pod and into the computer. The monitor spins off the desk. The keyboard flies and the keys come off like broken teeth. The two of them fall over onto the desk and Shane brings a hard knee up into Chance’s gut—pain blooms there like a flurry of bubbles breaking.
monster had invited us to its cage and shown us where the key was, all without alerting its keepers. Then it convinced us that we needed to open it. It enticed us. Dangled itself in front of us. So we unlocked it. We let it out. And when it was free, the Lodge became instantly expendable. We were already all off the books. Not processed through any system. It was easy to make us officially dead or missing. Typhon got what it wanted. It was free. And we were not.” More murmuring. Chance asks
For the company intranet. Aleena’s not supposed to be down here. But a hacked key card made it easy. She grabs the cell she plucked from under the snack machine, unspools a cable, plugs the USB right into a random server—doesn’t matter which one, she just needs the connection to the Firesign pipe. Down here it’s pure bandwidth—useful for the encrypted video she’s about to send and receive, but not strictly necessary. No, why it’s important to be in this building is because most connections in
dark with fireblack. He pushes it over to her. “Sit.” “My skirt—” “Fuck your skirt, I’m about to show you my balls. Not literally. I mean, I’m about to let you in on some secrets, but I want you sitting down.” She wipes off the chair best as she can, then gingerly sits. He puffs out his cheeks, then says: “Ooookay. Here’s the deal. This whole meltdown of a place? I ordered its creation. But I did not order its destruction. Those men out there took orders from me, except I didn’t give those