nsaxchange.blogg.se

In the site’s canteen, where they serve tasteless, colorless, textureless pseudo-food, Jeffrey makes the acquaintance of a monk who seems to be an elite member of this organization, and who inexplicably grants Jeffrey access to the site’s dark reaches. The Convergence, as the cryogenic site is called, is a typically DeLillo non-space, at once moody and atmospheric, yet indistinct enough for him to fill it with dismaying absurdities plucked from our collective subconscious.įor instance, it somehow seems correct that during his peregrinations Jeffrey comes across two twins delivering a lecture composed almost entirely of portentous one-liners: “Will the missiles talk themselves out of the launchers?” “Does technology have a death wish?” “We will colonize their bodies with nanobots.”

There’s a Scientology-level creepiness here: As Jeffrey joins Ross to say goodbye to his stepmother, he’s outfitted with an anklet of the kind used to track released convicts. Buried deep underground so as to survive apocalyptic events (take your pick as to terrorist, epidemic or extraterrestrial), it is a strictly controlled environment filled with miscellaneous and aggressively purposeless details.

Told from the perspective of Jeffrey Lockhart, whose sixtysomething, ridiculously wealthy father, Ross, is putting Jeffrey’s stepmother, Artis, into a cryogenic slumber, “Zero K” asks what happens if humanity conquers death, just as it has conquered so many other maladies.ĭeLillo constructs his Central Asian cryogenic facility as something between a cutting-edge penal colony and an ancient religious sect.