Version Zero

by David Yoon Narrated by Kevin R. Free, VyVy Nguyen

Overview

From the brilliant mind of New York Times bestselling author David Yoon comes a lightning-fast and scorchingly observant thriller about how we can save ourselves from the very real perils of a virtual world.

Max, a data whiz at the social media company Wren, has gotten a firsthand glimpse of the dark side of big tech. When he questions what his company does with the data they collect, he's fired...then black-balled across Silicon Valley.

With time on his hands and revenge on his mind, Max and his longtime friend (and secretly the love of his life) Akiko, decide to get even by rebooting the internet. After all, in order to fix things, sometimes you have to break them. But when Max and Akiko join forces with a reclusive tech baron, they learn that breaking things can have unintended--and catastrophic--consequences.

Editorial Reviews

MAY 2021 - AudioFile

Kevin R. Free and Vyvy Nguyen narrate this work of speculative fiction, which asks listeners to consider whether the world would be better off without the Internet in general and social media specifically. Nguyen narrates the first and last chapters, which are in the first person, leaving Free to do the majority of the third-person narration. His strength as a narrator comes near the climax, when the story morphs into an all-out action thriller that shifts among multiple points of view, with the emotions of each character swinging wildly. Free ensures that listeners feel the intensity through his tone and pitch. Near the end, his almost breathless delivery makes it impossible to stop listening. A.R.F. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

02/08/2021

YA author Yoon (Super Fake Love Song) makes his adult debut with a clever if uneven near-future thriller. Max Portillo, a 26-year-old tech genius at Wren, “the world’s largest social network,” has a crisis of conscience after discovering that a new company project is designed to extract even more data from its billions of users that will be sold not just to advertisers but to intelligence agencies around the world. When Max starts writing a “vision statement” to bring Wren back on course, he’s promptly fired and blackballed. He then joins forces with his best friend and former coworker, Akiko Hosokawa, to hack Wren. Max and Akiko’s efforts attract the attention of a reclusive billionaire who has his own reasons for taking down Wren and the internet culture it personifies. The novel is at its best when satirizing the high-tech business world and internet culture, but loses steam when it shifts into high-octane thriller mode. And the insights into the Faustian bargain between social media users and data harvesters aren’t particularly surprising. Still, fans of dystopian fiction will want to check this one out. Agent: Josh Getzler, HG Literary. (May)

From the Publisher

One of Entertainment Weekly's "Best New Books"

“The novel is at its best when satirizing the high-tech business world and internet culture...fans of dystopian fiction will want to check this one out.”—Publishers Weekly

“For his first adult novel, YA superstar Yoon draws on his decades in the tech industry to envision a takedown of the digital world so complete that paper comes back into fashion...A fast-paced, contemporary take on The Monkey Wrench Gang, blowing up digital infrastructure instead of dams.”—Kirkus Reviews

“With Version Zero David Yoon holds up a mirror to our ways of life, our hardships and vulnerabilities. As he lures us into the story of a smart, naive young man’s desire to make the world a better place, the mirror turns black. This propulsive, visceral, tech-rich tale is both all head and all heart , which is to say, it’s all David Yoon.”—Caroline Kepnes, author of You

“Version Zero is fast and fun, but more importantly, it’s an incisive, thoughtful takedown of Big Tech, our own social media consumption, and ultimately, may just serve as a call to arms.”—Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse

"Imagine a world in which the entire Internet is controlled by a handful of shady CEOs. Oh. Right. Well, imagine someone doing something about it. Imagine a high-speed, edge of your seat adventure with stakes higher than you can measure. Imagine it told in David Yoon’s unique and singularly engaging prose. That’s Version Zero, an addictive, brain-hacking exploration of the tech-run world we live in, and a rollercoaster so fast it will blow your hair off."—Sylvain Neuvel, author of Sleeping Giants

MAY 2021 - AudioFile

Kevin R. Free and Vyvy Nguyen narrate this work of speculative fiction, which asks listeners to consider whether the world would be better off without the Internet in general and social media specifically. Nguyen narrates the first and last chapters, which are in the first person, leaving Free to do the majority of the third-person narration. His strength as a narrator comes near the climax, when the story morphs into an all-out action thriller that shifts among multiple points of view, with the emotions of each character swinging wildly. Free ensures that listeners feel the intensity through his tone and pitch. Near the end, his almost breathless delivery makes it impossible to stop listening. A.R.F. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2021-03-17
A trio of disgruntled coders, a reclusive genius, and a teenager attempt to take down the internet—the whole damned thing.

For his first adult novel, YA superstar Yoon draws on his decades in the tech industry to envision a takedown of the digital world so complete that paper comes back into fashion. The book’s main protagonist is Max Portillo, a Salvadoran American programmer for Wren, the world’s all-encompassing social media platform. Cal Peers, the company's CEO, invites Max to contribute to the Soul Project, an unabashedly evil plan to hoover up personal data that would guarantee higher market penetration. Max is horrified. Together with his best friend, Akiko Hosokawa, and her boyfriend, Shane Satow, Max envisions a global hack he dubs Version Zero, using anonymous personae to put a permanent dent in the web’s usability. “We broke it to fix it,” the anonymous hackers explain. Yoon never fully clarifies his version of the world, but there are breadcrumbs to follow—references to a Handmaid’s Tale–like social hierarchy that includes “whitemen” and “browns” and targets that include the world’s most influential companies, proxies for Facebook, Uber, Reddit, Amazon, and Apple. The mischief rises to another level when the three friends are approached by Pilot Markham, a wildly successful and equally withdrawn entrepreneur who believes the internet has left us emotionally bankrupt and who wants to help take their scheme to the next level with the help of his teenage neighbor, Brayden Turnipseed. Markham’s thirst for revenge was largely caused by his daughter’s untimely death by trolls, but he’s certainly as unhinged as his enemies. Digitally agile readers will recognize plenty of the ills of our time, and some will empathize with the counterintuitive way our heroes interpret the modern adage “Move fast and break things.”

A fast-paced, contemporary take on The Monkey Wrench Gang, blowing up digital infrastructure instead of dams.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177170602
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/25/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

9780593190357|excerpt

Yoon / VERSION ZERO

Max is twenty-­eight.

It is sometime in the future. Where is he? Probably alone. No friends. No girlfriend. He could still be in Tokyo, among the brutalist canyons of apartment buildings. Office towers crowding into the blue of the early morning haze.

Max must read a lot. What else would there be to do these days?

Say he reloads his vaporizer with a fresh cartridge. Say it looks like a tiny vial of blood. He takes his first hit. On the other side of the planet I step out into the helgic light of late afternoon, wishing I could have one, too. But pregnant girls can’t smoke. So I hold two fingers to my lips and inhale an invisible cigarette.

He exhales a billowing wisp taller than himself. It dissipates like a cloud from an ­ukiyo-­e painting.

Imagine his apartment. Bookcase after bookcase, all the manga and anime he could ever want. No laptops. No devices. A stack of postcards and an inkwell and fountain pen. A small tidy apartment. An ocean of pretty Japanese girls to look at.

Do they remind him of me?

I do not want to think about that.

Maybe he is working on something secret. Or is he simply hiding?

I know all about hiding. I hide in plain sight.

From below, the square notes of a crosswalk melody float into Max’s hearing. It’s an old, warbling tune called “Toryanse.” Max has probably studied it like he studies everything. He hears it every day—he must, it’s unavoidable—and every time it reminds him of the last time we ever saw each other. I’m sure of it.

Going in is easy / Returning is scary

But while it is scary

You may go in / You may pass through

Japan suits him. Lots of tidy spaces and orderly routine. Being Salvadoran American, Max has hair dark enough, stature compact enough to vanish into crowds with an ease he never knew back in Southern California.

Back in Playa Mesa.

I don’t know what he does next. Say he removes his Buddy Holly glasses. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until swirls and checkerboards appear. When he opens them we are atop that bright snowy mountain under the impossible deep blue sky where the days last much longer than they should.

How I wanted one final kiss. How childish. There was no time anyway. The door shut and I was launched up into the whirling universe of crystal and snow.

And there was nothing to be done about that.

Max presses his eyes and sees flashes of phantom light. When will he finally be free of this thing? He’s traveled all over the world. How much farther will he have to travel to escape it?

But while it is scary

You may go in / You may pass through

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