ZERO

In O’Leary’s dystopian novel, an app displays the number of years one has left to live, resulting in an ostracized class of people known as “zeroes.”

Smith Babbitt has recently started working as an application reviewer at a medication disbursement company called “MediSoon,” where he is closely monitored by his ruthless, micromanaging boss, who wants to ensure that he approves applications to prescribe addictive medications. In this world, an app (called “Timmy®”) can predict when people will die, resulting in a society in which folks distance themselves from the people with less than a year to live and one’s age is ‘counted down’ from an impending death date. Smith is young—a “64:25,” meaning he has 64 years left to live and has already lived 25. When Smith meets Mavis, a co-worker who has just become a “zero” (a colloquial word for people who will die within the year), he is smitten. The narrative takes the form of a race against the clock until Smith and Mavis cause an accident that leads to the death of their boss, who was supposed to have 30 good years left to live. The couple tries to figure out if the tech that determines when they will die is actually fallible—and, if so, who might want to cover up that fact. O’Leary’s book is a clever send-up of technology and consumerism, featuring Luddite communes and crooked politicians in a bleak hellscape of corporate machinations. Boasting an original concept, strong writing, and an intriguing May-December love story at its center, the novel is also surprisingly poignant. Smith’s father and mother are the same age—they both have 13 years left—but she is suffering from Alzheimer’s, which becomes, for Smith, “a nightmare” from which he cannot wake her; his budding affection for Mavis is colored by the looming inevitability that, even if the app is wrong, she will one day die. The novel’s ending raises more questions than it answers, and it is abrupt, but the ride remains consistently entertaining.

It’s time well spent, thanks to this unique premise and biting social commentary.