He recruits his friend, Akiko, to help him break the Internet literally.
They team up with a highly secretive tech mogul to reboot the entire digital system.
Below, read an excerpt fromVersion Zero’s first chapter.
Credit: Penguin Random House
**
0.1
Max was 26.
It was way back in the year 2018.
Hashtags and dont-text-and-drive and fear-of-missing-out and virtual reality.
Selfies and the Troll President and revenge porn.
Max walked in the white Californian sunlight.
He walked into a village made of glass.
The village was Wren.
Wren was the worlds largest social connection.
Asocial networkwas a computer program where many-many people could share their thoughts/photos/videos and also share other peoples thoughts/photos/videos.
Then they would talk about it all.
For some reason, this kind of thing was hugely popular in the year 2018.
Wrens only product was Wren itself.
Everyone used Wren, everyone loved it, everyone hated it.
And as strange as it sounds, Wren was everything.
People used it for news.
As strange as it sounds, three billion people used Wren every day on their smart-phones.
The people could not stop themselves.
They said they wereaddicted.
Back then being addicted to tech was considered a good thing.
Techmeant anything involving computer programs, especially the ones used by many-many people.
It was different fromtechnology, which meant non-computer things like building bridges and inventing medicines.
Max wore a hoodie.
It gave him entrepreneurial elan.
All CEOs in the tech industry wore hoodies as symbols of egalitarianism belying their positions of supreme power.
But they did no such thing.
For they were good men.
Wrens number-one rule was this:Dont be evil.
One day Max wanted to be a CEO of his very own Wren.
Max wanted to put a dent in the universe.
But in a good way.
His Benevolence, CEO Maximilian Portillo.
For now, Max was in Product.
Three men Mexican, maybe were setting up some kind of epic barbecue.
They eyed Max as he walked past.
I am not you, Max wanted to say.
Im supposed to be Salvadoran.
But I was born here.
So, you know.
Max felt the constant need to explain himself.
He felt it now.
He entered a glass building.
He passed Maurice, the African-American security guard.
He waved to Aimee, the ever-smiling Whitewoman at Reception.
He passed through the large bullpen full of brown-skinned programmers from India and Thailand and so on.
Max, though brown-skinned, was not one of them.
Wren put the programmers first as a show of prowess for visitors.
Max was not one of them either.
Max had long given up on being one of anyone.
He decided to simply be one of himself.
This meant Max had no tribe to speak of, which Max disliked.
But it also exempted him from the expectations and assumptions of a tribe, which Max liked.
So Max chose his own tribe: Product.
And despite being the only brown-skinned one there, Max did not feel like a fly in milk.
Maybe it was because Max was happily deluded.
Max was Senior Product, the youngest ever in Wrens ten-year history to achieve such a rank.
Mister Max, said Justin Richards, a tall and hale Whiteman, Maxs boss only in title.
Justin Richards, and Wren in general, did not believe in titles.
Titles were a big pile of bull.
Work was notwork,either.
Work was calledhanging out.
Mister Justin, said Max.
Drop what youre working on, said cool-boss Justin Richards.
The Helix wants you.
