Zero

‘What have you got in here – rocks?’ groans Cynthia Bonsant as she heaves a packing box on to her new neighbour’s desk, almost dislocating her shoulder in the process.

‘No end of cool gadgets,’ boasts Jeff. ‘Product samples for the technology department to test.’ He takes a Weeble with blinking eyes from a cardboard box crammed with bits of technical gear and cables.

Technology department! Cynthia runs her fingers tetchily through her short hair, sending finger-long strands splaying in all directions. She pats them back into place as her eyes wander over the new open-plan office where the Daily’s print and online journalists are being herded together like cattle. Old and new colleagues are busily unpacking their belongings on to six long rows of desks, piling and arranging their things like workers on the assembly line at an office equipment mail-order company. The monitors are virtually touching; between them, the IT team are connecting the last cables, which spill like intestines from the electronic devices. More and more colleagues enter the room, carrying boxes pressed to their stomachs and elbowing their way through the crowd in search of their desks. A flurry of pictures from international news channels, websites and social media flickers down at them from the gigantic wall of monitors at one end of the office. A ticker message for newcomers runs along the bottom: ‘Welcome to the Daily newsfloor!’

She studies her own packing box. No cool gadgets in there. She plonks the battered tin for her pens down firmly in front of the new screen and lines up her notepad alongside it.

When she next looks up, Jeff’s stopped tidying things away and is staring trance-like at his monitor. Other colleagues have also broken off their work on the assembly line and are clustering around the screens in whispering groups.

At precisely that moment, the editor-in-chief, Anthony Heast, rushes out of his office. ‘Put it up on the video wall!’

All the monitors have been showing the same footage for some time already: wobbly aerial views of a golf course, scattered roofs in the woods beyond, with the Stars and Stripes fluttering over one of them.

Cyn recognizes the President of the United States now too. He’s positioning a golf ball to tee off. Next to him is his wife, and their two children are unenthusiastically thrashing away at balls on two adjacent tees. A few yards from the First Family, five members of the President’s security detail wear bored looks behind their dark glasses.

‘These pictures of the President’s holiday home have been streaming live on the internet for the past few seconds,’ blathers an excited TV presenter from the video wall. ‘Shortly beforehand, an organization called “Zero” took to social media to inform the public and the media of the operation. We don’t yet know how the drone got through the security system, let alone what Zero plans to do!’

Cyn’s heart starts racing as the airborne camera speeds towards the US President. Hasn’t anyone there noticed? Several colleagues cry out in terror. Even the removal men have now interrupted their work and are gawping at the screens.

The President pulls back his club, swings through the ball and watches its trajectory. He rams the head of the driver into the grass and shouts something after the ball. Not a compliment, Cyn reckons, given the face he’s pulling. Suddenly his expression twists, he stretches out his arm and points straight at the camera. He spins towards the bodyguards, then runs over to his wife and children, who are rooted to the spot in terror. Several secret agents rush after him. Two black SUVs come shooting out of the woods. Their tyres plough up the fairway, as the security personnel fling themselves on top of the President and his family to protect them.

A squad of men appear from the trees behind the covered driving range. A few of them hurry over to the First Family while others scan the area nervously or peer through binoculars, tap frenziedly on their smartphones and tablets, or yell into their headsets.

The bunch of agents bundle the First Family into the front car. Divots of soil and grass spray out from under its wheels as the car speeds off into the woods. It’s only when Cyn exhales that she realizes she’s been holding her breath with all the suspense.

Her pulse starts to accelerate again when the flying camera tracks the vehicle through the gaps in the tree canopy. The second car soon catches up with the first. Men with machine guns lean out of the windows, scouring the sky, until the SUV reaches a compound and disappears into a garage.

‘OK,’ the TV commentator announces breathlessly when the door shuts behind them, ‘the President and his family seem to be safe for now.’

‘Is our live ticker ready to go?’ calls Anthony, loosening his tie. ‘Can we embed the stream on our home page? Headline: US President under attack …’

His voice trails off as agitated cries ring out in the engine room. Cyn can now make out the two SUVs on shaky footage showing the inside of a brightly lit garage. The President, his family and their defenders look tense as they clamber out of the cars. They don’t notice the intruding drone until a child screams. Everyone starts running again. As if they’ve been cornered by a swarm of hornets, Cyn thinks with a shudder.

Shielded by their guards, the President’s family reach the exit, while two watchmen remain behind, helplessly waving their guns around. A fist-sized shadow buzzes around the room behind them.

‘Fuck! How did they get inside?’ one of them yells as he levels his gun barrel at the camera. The images on the video wall dissolve into a blur of walls, vehicles and people, accompanied by the sound of deafening gunfire. Then the screens go black, leaving several TV presenters talking over one another.

A collective sigh runs through the engine room, and Cyn wonders if it expresses relief or disappointment.

‘Shit!’ cries Jeff when the pictures return. ‘They’ve got another camera in there!’

A worm’s-eye view of a flurry of legs. This hidden camera’s lurking somewhere like a beast ready to pounce on a hunter. Cyn realizes she instinctively sides with the little animal. Even though it might be about to murder the President of the USA.

‘There are some left, Chuck!’ Chief of Staff Erben Pennicott roars into the phone. His free hand clenches tensely. On the computer and TV screens in his study, Erben sees the First Family and their security men reach the exit from the next room. Only two pairs of sturdy black shoes now remain in shot, but suddenly the camera scurries past them and after the President. Gunshots. Screams. For what seems like an eternity, the camera fixes the fear-filled eyes of the world’s most powerful man and the dark hole of his screaming mouth.

Goddammit! Goddam and shit! Erben thinks with a grimace. The whole world’s watching these pictures, and they don’t show the President in a good light. No authority whatsoever – none at all!

There’s another burst of gunfire and the screens go dark. Erben stares at the screens, still clutching the receiver to his ear. He has no idea who fired those shots. Their own people or the drones? The TV commentators’ voices resume their excited chatter. What if the President or one of his family has been hit? Erben runs out of the room.

He sprints effortlessly through the hallways and rooms of the rambling compound. More shots ring out. Another room that could easily accommodate ten people. The double doors on the other side of the room are open. The President’s children, flanked by three hefty minders, rush towards him like panic-stricken dwarves, followed by the First Lady, the President and several secret agents. Out of the corner of his eye Erben sees a shadow scampering along between their feet. The group races past him, and the guys with the guns fire randomly at the floor.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he yells at the men. ‘Where is the fucking thing?’ he shouts, his eyes darting back and forth between the live video on his smartphone and various spots around the room.

Erben forces the man’s arm upwards, and a volley of gunfire crashes into the ceiling, bringing a shower of plaster dust raining down on them.

‘Quit shooting the place up!’ he shouts. He’s spotted the little legged robot. Quickly he wriggles out of his jacket and dashes towards the metal spider. He flings his jacket over the device like a dogcatcher’s net, and hurls himself on top of it.

‘Oh!’ gasp several people on the newsfloor disappointedly as the pictures vanish from the monitors. Howls greet the switch to a worm’s-eye view from yet another camera. It shows Erben Pennicott reaching under his crumpled jacket with one hand and triumphantly pulling out his fist. A few metal legs squirm between his powerful fingers and after tearing them out with a few swift movements, his hands expertly explore the mouse-sized remains.

‘What do you mean?’ answers Jeff. ‘That’s a mini legged robot fitted with a camera. Pennicott had his own internet start-up back when he was still a student. He sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. He knows all about this kind of device.’

Seconds later, the chief of staff holds up something Cyn doesn’t recognize between two fingers.

‘A wireless card!’ Pennicott’s deep voice intones from the screens as the security detail frantically search for further cameras. Then he shouts, ‘OK, make sure every regional mobile network is shut down right away!’

A dark shadow covers the remaining camera, and the voices are suddenly muffled. Someone’s just tossed a jacket over the second legged robot.

‘Who or what is Zero?’ Anthony roars across the newsfloor. ‘Terrorists? You got anything for me, Charly?’

‘Internet activists,’ says Charly, scratching the back of his head. He’s a Daily dinosaur; Cyn knows him from the print edition. She’d bet any money that every morning he ticks off the days until his retirement on a calendar and has been for a while now. ‘A bit like Anonymous, but much less known. They’ve posted a few videos online, along with a guide to protecting yourself from surveillance. The Citizen’s Guerrilla Guide to the Surveillance Society.’

‘Well, they’re not unknown any more. How daring can you get! I wouldn’t like to be in their shoes when the FBI catches up with them …’

Cyn listens to her colleagues chatter excitedly for a few minutes until it dawns on them that the fun and games are over. No more broadcasts of unauthorized footage from the President’s holiday residence. The removal guys crawl back under the desks to connect the cables and tighten the last few screws.

‘Now turn all that into a story for me!’ says Anthony. He’s a smart bloke about Cyn’s age – a manager and accountant who’d love to be doing something more creative, as his clothes and hairstyle attest. The owners appointed him to this job to ‘lead our media group into the future’, which of course means online. ‘Jeff, Charly, you research Zero. Dig up anything you can find! Cyn will cover the investigation.’

‘The internet isn’t my field,’ she reminds him as he rummages around in a packing case.

‘No corpses, no injuries,’ Charly says half-heartedly. ‘If that’s it, then the story’ll be dead by the day after tomorrow.’

‘But until then we’re going to milk it for all it’s worth,’ says Anthony with fervour, still up to his elbows in the box. ‘Where have they got to?’ he mutters. ‘Ah, there they are!’

Proudly he holds up three small cardboard boxes and hurries over to Cyn, Charly and Jeff with them. ‘To help you give the story a modern twist,’ he explains.

‘Oh, awesome – the latest glasses!’ Jeff cries, his fingers already tearing at the packaging. He pulls out a pair of glasses and promptly puts them on. Next, his hand reaches for the smartphone on his desk.

‘Smart glasses, augmented reality glasses – or whatever else you’d like to call them,’ he grunts. ‘You can screen things you’d usually only see on your smartphone on your glasses.’

‘Oh, come off it, Cyn,’ says Jeff with some amusement. ‘You must have heard of them! Google and others brought out the first models back in 2012.’

‘A new manufacturer has lent us a few to test,’ Anthony explains excitedly. ‘Ideal for the present circumstances.’

‘What am I supposed to do with them?’ she enquires. ‘I’m a newspaper editor. I write.’

‘Live research. Reports. These glasses mean you can always keep an eye on your surroundings and obtain all the information you need directly before your eyes. These things are the future!’

‘Everyone’s every kind of reporter nowadays,’ Anthony lectures her. ‘And you better get used to that quick, or soon we won’t be needing you.’

‘If everyone’s already a reporter,’ she gripes, ‘then I’m already not needed.’

‘I heard that,’ says Anthony. ‘Watch out, Cynthia, or I’ll take you at your word. Some computer programs can already write articles on their own that are indistinguishable from ones written by humans,’ he adds with a laugh, passing so close to her that only she hears him when he hisses, ‘You’re on my list as it is.’

Annoyed, she turns away from him. Beside her, Jeff is waggling his head back and forth. ‘Wow! Wicked …’

She studies the frames in her hand. ‘Look just like any other pair of glasses.’

‘That’s deliberate,’ says Charly. ‘Most people don’t like you walking around them with smart glasses on. They’re scared of being watched and filmed.’

‘They probably record everything they see and hear,’ Cyn guesses. ‘And then save it somewhere or other.’

‘Correct,’ says Jeff, giggling. ‘Cyn mutates into a four-eyes for a company bent on spying into every hidden corner of her life.’

‘You really make it sound tempting! At the moment I’m happy if I can make my mobile work.’

It’s true that there’s an old-fashioned receiver fitted to the smartphone on her desk, a light-hearted present from her daughter two years ago.

She gives Jeff free rein, as this would definitely take her hours, whereas he’s able to establish the wireless connection between her smartphone and her smart glasses in a matter of seconds.

‘Put them on,’ Jeff directs her. ‘Sound’s transmitted directly to the bone behind your ear by vibrations in the frame of the specs.’

‘Nope. It’s a proven technique they’ve been using in hearing aids for decades.’

‘Get moving, ladies and gentlemen!’ Anthony claps his hands. ‘Off you go!’

‘I’ve got him on screen,’ says Charly and manoeuvres his chair ponderously to one side to make room for her and Jeff.

A familiar-looking male face stares out at Cyn from the sinister black-and-white screen. Melancholy yet piercing eyes, a full head of hair painstakingly combed back, a thin moustache on his top lip like a third eyebrow.

‘I have a complaint to make today,’ the English author explains. ‘In 1948 George Orwell wrote a book. He called it 1984.’ As Orwell speaks, his face morphs, as though made of rubber, into a pasty-looking bald man wearing black glasses and a grim expression. The timbre of his voice changes too, becoming deeper. ‘In it, a totalitarian dictatorship practises comprehensive surveillance over its citizens and tells them how they must live their lives.’

The book was required reading at Cyn’s school. That was back in 1989 when not a single surveillance state was in power, and in fact Communism and its informer apparatus were collapsing.

‘Ooh, how scary to imagine – a nightmare vision! By the way, the book’s slogan was “Big Brother is watching you.” Now Big Brother’s a TV programme.’

This Zero loves mutating. As one face morphs into the next, Cyn recognizes first the US President, followed by the British Prime Minister, the German Chancellor and other heads of government. It reminds her of a Michael Jackson video from her childhood, but that was far more static. The voice keeps changing too: sometimes it sounds like that of a woman, then a man, and yet Cyn finds the sound pleasant rather than alienating. Its peculiar lilting quality has something of a hypnotic effect on her.

‘Now imagine your government for a second. It only wants the best for its citizens. It develops amazing systems to protect every individual: PRISM, XKEYSCORE, TEMPORA, INDECT and Lord knows what else. These wonderful systems collect and analyse all the data they can get their hands on in order to identify in advance any possible threat to their citizens.’

Cyn catches herself grinning. Whatever else, Zero does at least have a sense of humour.

‘And how are those governments rewarded? They’re derided as Big Brother! So why is the National Security Agency monitoring worldwide phone and internet communications?’ The picture changes. Zero is standing in an Underground station in a dark suit and shades. All around him, people are babbling into their mobiles. ‘You really think it’s fun being buried every day under a gigantic heap of small talk, bragging and other nonsense? You only do this if you really, really want to do the best for people – because you hope that somewhere in that heap you’re going to find a terrorist! So, feeling safer now? I hope so! No? Griping, are you? Still calling the state Big Brother, like in 1984?’

The images keep switching, and Cyn has to concentrate hard. Zero is now a young blonde woman in red shorts and a white top. She runs past rows of numb, grey, ordinary people staring at a grave-faced presenter on a giant screen, swinging a giant hammer over her head as she goes.

‘Over thirty years ago, a computer manufacturer launched an ad campaign for its latest model featuring the slogan “On January 24th Apple will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” That’s the same computer manufacturer whose iPhones and iPads now log where we’re standing or walking at every instant. Whose apps search and pass on our address lists. Which bans apps from its App Store when they show, say or do something that Uncle Sam doesn’t like. A bare nipple? Heaven forfend! But let’s be fair: Google and all the others apparently undertake precisely the same kind of surveillance with their services, mobiles, glasses and sensors.’

Cyn can’t help nodding along to this. This is exactly why she’s so sceptical about recent technological innovations.

Zero morphs into a police officer and continues: ‘Imagine if your government or the police demanded you carry a little box around with you at all times that constantly signals where you are and what you’re doing. You’d give them the finger! Yet you’re paying the world’s data oligarchs to spy on you. That, right there, is consummate surveillance. Please let me give you money so you can locate me and use my data! They could sure teach international spy agencies a thing or two …’ Zero lowers his voice, his tone more biting. ‘Here they come with their Trojan horses, offering you search results, friends, maps, love, success, fitness tips, discounts on your shopping and who knows what else – but all the while, armed warriors sit lurking in their bellies, waiting for an opportunity to pounce! Their arrows strike you right in the heart and the head. They know more about you than any intelligence service. They know you better than you know yourself! But the old question remains: who’s monitoring the monitors? And who’s monitoring their monitors? But perhaps we already know the answer: everyone monitors everyone else,’ Zero chants almost cheerily, wagging his index finger at the camera. ‘Little Brother, I’m watching you.’ He suddenly turns serious again. ‘But not us! Another thing: I believe we must destroy the data krakens.’

‘Zero’s published over forty of these videos in the past few years,’ says Charly.

‘OK. And I’ll see what I can find out about the investigations,’ says Cyn, packing her handbag. It’s past seven.

‘Wait!’ says Jeff when he realizes she’s leaving. ‘You haven’t heard the best thing about those glasses yet. Facial recognition.’

‘Facebook and photo software have used it for quite a while. Developers have been holding back with live versions, but for a few months there’ve been updated versions that let you identify just about any face online. In real time! I’ll show you.’

He puts the glasses on, stares straight at her and holds up his smartphone, which shows a picture of her. Beside it she reads:

Bonsant, Cynthia

DOB: 27.07.1972

Height: 1.65 m

Address: 11 Pensworth Street, London NW6

Mobile: +44 7526 976901

Tel: ex-directory (more >)

Email: cynbon@dodnet.com

Profession: Journalist

Status: Divorced, from Cordan, Gary (more >)

Children: Bonsant, Viola (more >), > Freemee profile

Mother: Bonsant, Candice † (more >)

Father: Bonsant, Emery † (more >)

Images: …

More Freemee info:

Professional from £0.02 (> purchase)

Analysis from £0.02 (> purchase)

‘Everything anyone needs to know,’ Jeff explains. ‘So who’s this young lady?’

‘My daughter,’ Cyn reluctantly admits. Young people’s careless way with the internet gives her the creeps, and she’s not at all impressed with her own daughter’s online behaviour.

A more recent photo shows Viola with short fair hair. She’s turned eighteen and inherited Cyn’s slender figure and her father’s blond curls. She’s worn her mop like a tomboy ever since she let the black of her goth phase grow out and had it all chopped off.

At least two dozen other pictures show Cyn at different times in her life, including one from her university days. It comes from a platform old school friends can use to get back in touch.

‘Information. Analysis. Who you vote for, the kind of products you buy, where you’re going on holiday and so forth.’

‘They have no trouble figuring it out from everything they know about you, me and billions of other people.’

‘Most companies do it nowadays,’ Jeff explains patiently. ‘And have done for a long time. You’ve got a mobile phone, loyalty cards for supermarkets, petrol stations and hotels, your credit card and all kinds of other stuff. You’ve been leaving a vast data trail for years. How do you think insurance companies, banks and credit agencies calculate their risks? A credit card company knows with ninety-five per cent certainty which of their clients will get divorced in the next five years.’

Jeff’s mouth twists into a wry smile. ‘There are some good sides to it, though. Google can follow the development of flu epidemics or even make live predictions based on searches by people who’ve contracted the illness, and software like this has also made weather forecasting far more accurate, to give just two examples.’

Jeff carries on unperturbed. ‘You heard about the famous case of Target pregnancies?’

‘So famous I missed it,’ sighs Cyn. She’s longing to go home – it’s been a long day – but Jeff’s in his element now.

‘Years back, the discount retailer Target worked out from data recorded via a huge number of loyalty cards that all their pregnant customers bought specific products at different stages of their pregnancy. Fragrance-free soap, unbleached cotton wool pads and so on. By implication, Target also knows, of course, that if a woman buys this or other product, she’s in a particular month of pregnancy. So Target is able to predict the child’s date of birth almost to the day.’

‘Nope,’ Jeff insists. ‘It’s all about identifying patterns of behaviour. It’s called predictive analytics. Nowadays we all think we’re individualists, whereas in fact we behave in relatively standard ways – which can be anticipated. It’s how the police hunt serial criminals, because arsonists and rapists often repeat patterns of behaviour. Using predictive policing and pre-crime software, they can identify particular streets in particular cities where crimes like drug dealing and burglary are most likely to occur. They can then turn up to prevent them. More and more cities employ such software.’

‘Sounds like Minority Report,’ says Charly. ‘Not a bad film, by the way.’

‘Preliminary versions are already in use,’ Jeff replies. ‘In some US states, judges refuse certain prison inmates parole because someone’s developed algorithms that have calculated that their particular group is highly likely to reoffend within three years.’

‘They don’t get a chance to show they won’t reoffend?’ Cyn asks in bewilderment.

‘Well … In this brave new world of ours, possibilities and chances are sacrificed to probability. Your future depends more than ever on your past – because your future is assessed on the basis of your past.’

‘And they’re always assuring us that they’re only collecting anonymized data.’

‘It was proved years ago that you can identify individuals from anonymized data,’ Jeff explains. ‘Especially if you combine various different datasets. Our online history, mobile data, and travel and purchasing behaviour produce a unique profile.’

‘So they’re just lying when they claim that the data is anonymous. And most of us fall for it.’

‘Yes and no. They gather the data in an anonymous fashion, but then someone in the data analysis chain plays around with it. They trace it back to you, and then they can figure out your habits and make predictions.’

‘Not a hundred per cent, but often with a high degree of probability. They also know how easy or hard it is to influence you on certain subjects.’

Cyn purses her lips. ‘It doesn’t work very well, though. I keep receiving online adverts for things that don’t interest me in the slightest.’ She thinks of all the sponsored links for all sorts of diets that have recently kept popping up on the sites she visits. And she really has no need for them either.

‘You receive them because it works so well,’ Jeff contradicts her. ‘If advertisers keep offering you the right things, it starts to seem spooky and you feel as if you’re being watched and someone’s worked you out. It’s known as the “creepiness factor” in the profession. To avoid it, they scatter a few irrelevant offers into the mix from time to time. And then you believe what you just said: that they haven’t figured you out – and so you fall into their trap all the more easily.’

Jeff rolls his eyes. ‘What do you mean? I’d honestly rather they left all the unnecessary crap out of it. It saves a lot of time if they offer you what you want straight away.’

Jeff’s generation simply have a different approach to all these forms of media. Just like her daughter. Or doesn’t Cyn herself pay enough attention to it? Why does she object so much to the technological innovations of recent years? Her mind goes back to what Zero said. How did he put it? ‘Here they come with their Trojan horses, offering you search results, friends … love, success …’

She turns to leave, but Jeff’s effusions are unstoppable. ‘Wait, I’ll set up facial recognition for you.’ Before Cyn can stop him, he’s fiddling around with her smartphone. ‘There you go! Try the glasses out on the Tube on your way home. The video tutorial explains everything.’

‘I don’t really want to know.’ She drops the glasses into her handbag and says goodbye to Jeff and Charly, her head spinning from all the new information.

Cyn loves playing guessing games about people she doesn’t know. Sitting in the bus or on the Underground, she speculates about their jobs, their past, their desires and their family life. Of course she never knows if she’s right or not, but she trusts her intuition. So the glasses in her bag are obviously a huge temptation. How good is she at guessing actually?

She sticks her hand into her bag, feels the glasses and hesitates, then takes them out and toys with them. Puts them on. No one pays her any attention.

Within a few minutes, Cyn has worked out how to use the things. She can enter a question by voice, by blinking, by moving her head or touching one of the arms. She can view all the information directly on the lenses instead of on the touchscreen. It floats there in space before her eyes, semi-transparent, like ghosts, and what’s more her hands are free, which is practical.

She studies the man opposite and activates the facial recognition software. After a few seconds, several lines of text and symbols appear beside the man’s head. Name, age, address. She glances around her and swears under her breath. The internet knows every single person on this bus! I know every single person on this bus …

She fixes her gaze on one face in the crowd – the device’s automatic eye tracking identifies the person she means – and whispers, ‘Glasses, identify.’

Within seconds she knows all about Paula Ferguson, a housewife and mother of three who lives in Tottenham and is thirty-five years old. She could find out more, but to do that she’d have to set up an account with a vendor and pay. She switches to a young man with dreadlocks and a wire dangling from his ears. In the blink of an eye she discovers that the twenty-three-year-old Dane is studying at the London School of Economics and listening to Wagner. She admits she’d never have guessed that.

Despite some lingering reluctance and a tinge of shame, she’s beginning to share Jeff’s enthusiasm, fascination replacing her sense of guilt. By the time she changes on to the Tube, she’s unmasked over a dozen people. She realizes that her fantasies are often wide of the mark. Yet the reality – or what her glasses pass off as reality – is often no less surprising.

She continues her observations as she makes her way through the Underground station. A woman of similar age comes walking towards her. The glasses display the usual information and pictures. And more: newspaper reports from fifteen years ago show the woman was hospitalized following a serious attack. ‘… A brutal assault …’ Cyn picks up from an old headline, ‘… lost a foot … early retirement …’ The woman does indeed have a slight limp, she notices, before turning away in shock. Spontaneously she turns the question around. How many pairs of glasses on the faces coming towards her might be like hers? Which of them are currently doing to her what she’s been doing on the bus and while changing on to the Underground? Who might potentially be streaming live pictures of her on the internet? She suddenly has a weird sense that thousands of eyes are boring into her.

Cyn sneaks a quick sideways glance at the glass covering a billboard to check out her appearance and study her behaviour. She looks up and suddenly realizes where she is: on a London Underground platform at rush hour. Hundreds of people can see her here, even without such glasses. So can Transport for London’s ubiquitous CCTV cameras, of course. Welcome to paranoia, she thinks.

Her train rattles into the station. Shoved into the carriage by the press of workers heading home, she heads for an empty seat. The glasses tell her how long it’ll take to the station where she needs to get off.

During the journey, Cyn uses the glasses to surf the internet. The US administration hasn’t yet published its official response to Zero’s Presidents’ Day action. Cyn presumes that the mood in certain offices in Washington must be a bit like when a fox has ransacked the henhouse. The media’s already cooking up the most ridiculous conspiracy theories featuring the usual suspects plus a few new ones.

Cyn has to stop by the supermarket to pick up a few bits and bobs. She’s just reaching for a pack of tomatoes in the vegetable section when the glasses warn her about pesticides. She leaves the tomatoes where they are and heads for the biscuit aisle. The glasses advise her to buy these biscuits in a different supermarket just around the corner where they’re thirty pence cheaper, so she puts the trolley back and heads for the rival shop.

The biscuits there are indeed at a lower price, and the tomatoes are pesticide-free, juicy and organic. She realizes that her prejudices about the glasses are gradually fading, and notes how easy and fun they are to use. She makes her way along the aisles and examines various special offers. The glasses give her some useful recipe suggestions. When she opts for egg sandwiches, the glasses ask her which of the ingredients she has at home and remind her to buy the missing ones.

Standing at the till soon afterwards, she begins to have second thoughts. What’s she doing? She only set out to buy tomatoes and biscuits, although she could certainly use all the items in her shopping trolley.

A queue has formed behind her. Lost in thought, she places her items on the conveyor belt and takes her purse from her handbag. The glasses recommend that she get the supermarket’s loyalty card, showing how much it would save her on this first purchase.

Another card? Cyn wonders with a glance at her wallet, and instinctively decides against it. She pays with cash. So much for see-through customers! she thinks.

‘The President is still mad,’ rages Erben. Gathered before him are the heads of the US security agencies. They’re all used to long meetings, but Erben’s gaze encounters only weary faces.

‘These jokers have made a worldwide laughing stock of us! And it might have been a whole lot worse … You all realize, of course, that those drones could have been carrying more than cameras.’ His tone is sharp as he continues. ‘The President wants to know why we didn’t anticipate this attack. He wants to know who these people are. He’s insistent that we hunt them down as fast as possible! Orville?’ he says, brusquely addressing the head of the FBI. He’s struggling to control his fury at these activists. They seem to see themselves as some kind of Monkey Wrench Gang!

The mere thought of this guy’s stiff soldier’s face makes Erben angry. The operation may have one good outcome at least: changes in personnel, all the way to the top.

‘Three minutes!’ cries Erben. ‘If that thing had been armed, we wouldn’t have a president now.’

‘It would’ve had to have been a lot bigger for that, and then it wouldn’t have slipped through our security net,’ Orville answers. He starts the film again.

‘Within another three minutes the bodyguards had the President in the garage. Unfortunately, in all the hullabaloo, a few tiny companions followed them inside.’ He pauses the film and points to five shadows swooping down from the treetops behind the car. ‘These five drones flew into the garage in the slipstream behind the car.’

‘It all happened very fast,’ the FBI director says in his defence. ‘Two of the drones were doing more than filming. Five legged robots with cameras were carried piggyback on them, and immediately set loose in the garage. Those things were the size of tarantulas and darned speedy.’

‘What if one of them had been loaded with a chemical weapon and sprayed it?’ roars Erben. He isn’t sure what enrages him more, these activists or Orville. ‘We can’t rule it out. The President and his family murdered! Images of an ugly fight to the death beamed live around the world! This shit is worse than 9/11 … it proves that even the best-protected man in the world isn’t safe! Those jerks pierced the very heart of our great nation. They’ve sown poisonous doubt and undermined trust in all the security measures we’ve put in place in recent years. No one in this country is safe – that’s the message they’ve sent! Who was steering those damn things, and how?’

‘Jon?’ the director of the FBI calls to one of the assistant directors, adding by way of explanation, ‘Jon’s leading the investigation.’

It’s an obvious ploy. Orville is hoping to placate Erben with this detail of personnel.

Erben and Jonathan Stem have been friends since college. Everyone in Washington knows this. At thirty-seven, Jon’s young for his job. A highly decorated former Navy Seal, wounded several times, with a law degree, he and Erben have made it to the top by displaying the same ruthless self-discipline, if not the same smart appearance.

‘We presume it was Zero,’ Jon says in his slightly shrill voice, ‘via the internet. They channelled the mobile signals through anonymizing networks. Zero was able to pilot those things using a smartphone and the internet anywhere in the world. That’s the bad news—’

‘But …’ Erben interrupts him irritably. The President can’t afford to lose face like this. If the President’s image is damaged, his leading advisers will feel the burn too. Meaning him. ‘We’re eavesdropping on the whole world and we don’t get so much as a sniff of the planning or of the operation itself? What the hell’s the point of shovelling billions of dollars up the asses of our intelligence services and their contractors every year?!’

‘We’re pursuing three main lines of inquiry,’ says Jon, trying to bring the conversation back to a rational level. ‘First, the drones. We’re investigating the origin and path of every tiny part and testing them for classic traces such as DNA, fingerprints, etc. Beyond that, we’re of course finding out where the wireless cards came from and who bought them.

‘Second, the video stream. It was broadcast live from a YouTube account and also on a dedicated website called zerospresidentsday.com. Probably as a backup, just in case YouTube closed the broadcast down. YouTube channels and websites have to be registered by someone. The associated email addresses, IP addresses and other digital trails were obscured or else are pseudonyms and disposable addresses, but we’re already screening them.

‘Third, Zero has published a lot of videos in recent years as well as an online privacy handbook called The Citizen’s Guerrilla Guide to the Surveillance Society. We’re naturally examining them all for potential clues.’

‘OK,’ says Erben. He can hardly ask for more at this stage. Things are kicking off in the Middle East, China is simmering dangerously, the Russians are baring their teeth again and the Europeans are trying to break their shackles of debt. He really does have a lot else on his plate. ‘Keep me posted, Jon,’ he says in a deliberate affront to the established directors around the table. Without so much as a glance, he turns to go.

The tiny hallway of their flat is dark, with only a narrow strip of light shining from beneath Viola’s door.

‘Hi, I’m home!’ Cyn calls out. She puts the shopping on the table in the kitchen, which is scarcely any bigger than the hall, and lays the glasses down beside the bags.

Only now does she notice how worn out she is from the constant stream of data. She feels a mixture of relief and loss, as though she were painfully but happily kicking off a pair of smart new shoes.

‘Smart glasses – awesome!’ Vi cries euphorically before she’s even picked up the device.

How does she know what they are? She and Jeff would get on like a house on fire, thinks Cyn.

Without so much as a grumble, Vi prepares some sandwiches while Cyn goes to the bathroom to freshen up. Over dinner, Cyn asks her daughter how her day at school went, but Vi’s only interested in the glasses. Cyn tells her how she got them.

‘Oh yeah, the Presidents’ Day operation,’ says Vi. ‘Sick. If they catch those dudes, they’re dead meat.’

Cyn lets her take them to her room, then settles down with her laptop on the sofa, which takes up virtually the whole living room – and not because of the size of the sofa. She doesn’t mind the slightly cramped space. Moving into this flat shortly after Vi’s birth had marked a new start. The rent’s very low because she’s lived here for so long. She couldn’t afford to live in London otherwise.

She checks the newswires. There’s a terse press release from the White House: the President and his family are fine. No weapons were involved in the attack. The FBI and Homeland Security have started investigations to track down the terrorists.

Terrorists? Cyn wonders. Of course. Anything remotely resembling an invasion on American soil is immediately branded terrorism. But what’s really going on behind the scenes?

Every single headline mentions the operation, even though no one was killed or injured. Wherever she looks, the media are talking about nothing else. Reactions range from Schadenfreude to wild speculation and outrage. The reports are dominated by one photo: the President’s panic-twisted features, his eyes wide with fear and his mouth open in a scream.

If Zero’s aim was to turn supposedly the world’s most powerful man into a miserable little heap in the eyes of the public, then the operation was a success. He’ll never forgive them, thinks Cyn, and she feels a spark of concern in the pit of her stomach. A hysterical and insulted superpower is not to be trifled with.

Cyn has put the kettle on and is enjoying a couple of minutes of peace and quiet while the water comes to the boil for her tea. There’s no sound from Vi’s bedroom. That would have worried her even a year ago, but over the past few months, Vi has metamorphosed from Lily Munster into Goldilocks. Not so long ago, as an excuse to check on her daughter, she’d have knocked on her door to ask if she wanted tea. Every now and then, she was gripped by the fear that Vi might slide into a quagmire of depression and drugs.

She no longer feels the need to control her daughter. After years of endless and ugly arguments they’re on the same wavelength again, as Vi would say. She seems to have picked herself up, Cyn thinks. It’s a shame she’ll probably be moving out soon when she finishes school. Vi plans to start a law degree in September.

One good thing to come of the Daily’s modernization efforts is the new digital archive containing every published article, which Cyn can now access from home. She searches for recent reports on surveillance, privacy and investigations by the US authorities. There’s no lack of material about Wikileaks; Bradley – now Chelsea – Manning, the American soldier who uncovered US Army crimes in Iraq; and of course Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s worldwide surveillance regime. Cyn followed the articles for a while back in the summer of 2013, but as usual, at some point she’d had to turn her attention to other, faster-moving stories such as revolutions, civil wars, floods, earthquakes, terror attacks and the financial crisis.

Also, she’s a Londoner: she’s used to being watched. What can she do about it? Ultimately she consoles herself with the thought that surveillance also brings a degree of safety.

She shakes off a vague sense of unease and focuses on her work. She finds an online report about how US investigators hunted down Anonymous members and a group called LulzSec. Go on the internet without the necessary precautions, she learns, and they’ll nab you. Doesn’t look good for Zero, it occurs to her – they’ll get them too. In the next article about the film-maker Laura Poitras, to whom Edward Snowden spilled his secrets, she discovers that the two of them were actually able to communicate undetected. Most of the measures they put in place sound technical and complicated, and others are the stuff of spy thrillers, for example, details of how they hid their phone batteries in the fridge. She takes a few notes and drafts a very rough article using keywords.

Only just turned 40, I feel as if I’ve woken up in a sci-fi story from my childhood … Privacy is dead … Is privacy dead? … Privacy has only existed as a legal concept for about 100 years … Is it outdated? Or isn’t it being defended robustly enough? Is Zero’s kind of resistance to surveillance a last twitch of the corpse or rebellion resuscitated? → Examples of other activities and activists … Fear of terrorism real reason for surveillance or just excuse for control and/or profiteering?

Slowly the article begins to take shape in her mind. She’ll write it up in the morning.

Next, she logs in to her account with a dating agency she throws money at every month with no real results to show for it. Her photo is almost up-to-date and she hasn’t edited it out of all recognition. The slight auburn tinge to her brunette hair looks good. She shaved a few years off her age to make sure there was a three on the front.

There are five messages in her inbox. She deletes three because of the subject line and one due to its brevity. The last one doesn’t sound too bad, even if he’s not really her type. She might write back. But probably not.

Shortly before eleven, she starts to flag. She goes into the bathroom, which is so small she can hardly turn around between the shower and the washbasin. She sheds her clothes and, as every morning and evening, her eyes avoid her reflection in the mirror, only to wander over the pattern of taut, twisted swirls of red skin on parts of her left breast and ribs and on the inside of her left upper arm.

She feels a momentary surge of panic that online there might be a photo of the fire seventeen years ago, like the ones she saw today of the woman who lost her foot after being attacked two years later.

She takes a long shower before carefully drying herself and gently rubbing some ointment into the scar tissue. Then she puts on a T-shirt and a pair of pyjama shorts with her comfortable old dressing gown over the top.

‘They’re so cool!’ her daughter cries after opening the door. ‘Can I borrow the glasses tomorrow? I’ll give you them back in the evening. Please! Pretty please?’

‘Well, I’m supposed to use them for work,’ replies Cyn, quickly adding, ‘although I’m not quite sure what for. I probably don’t need them tomorrow anyway, so take them if you like. Don’t lose them, though.’

Monday