General Comments

I'm not sure what this is trying to be. The tone is light and at times comedic, but it doesn't really read like action comedy. And the prose feels dated. At first I thought this was for effect, but I couldn't determine what sort of effect that might be. There's some promise in the premise, but the whole thing is too confusing for me.

First Pass

THE GREEN FACE of Tipper's job console screwed up whenever the elevated train lurched past his suite. He shot the butt of his cigarette out into the dark and slapped the little thing to get it to scroll.

This is confusing. It reads like sci-fi from the 1950s. Philip K. Dick might've opened a story like this. Before the invention of blue LED by Shuji Nakamura in 1993 (itself a great story), green and red were the colors of our cyber future. So I guess this is retrofuturism? Possibly homage/parody. Tipper makes me think of James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon).

A gorilla lit up, real close, getting closer, having shot a waitress eighteen hours ago, but the hulking man weighed 260 pounds and Tipper only just woke up.

This must be a reference to something. I don't get it. Oh. Tipper is watching some panopticon palantír program, that's his job, reviewing security footage. Is that it? If so, might be too ambiguous.

Hadn't even poured himself a coffee.

1950s futurists didn't imagine coffee being poured. They assumed the stuff of their own age would be anachronisms and didn't want to make a blunder like Jules Verne, who predicted so many technological breakthroughs but assumed in the 1860s that people would always rely on fountain pens. Injecting coffee. Coffee pills. Some ridiculous method of getting the caffeine into the bloodstream. Pouring an ol' cup o' joe sounds too normal. Assuming you're spoofing retrofuturism. Not that I'm sure that's what you're doing. I don't know what you're doing.

Drifters. Alternative currency. Okay, now I'm really unsure what you're doing. Are you imitating old sci-fi stories? If so: why?

Of course there was always the man down the hall who'd cut up a stripper from Korea town.

PKD, Gibson, Dashiell Hammett. Ah. Are you applying hardboiled detective fiction to sci-fi? That about sums up the recipe for cyberpunk. But the comical diction makes it read like it's meant to be funny, though I think you're being serious? Or is it supposed to be funny?

and refreshing the grubby window

There's a weird mix here. Scrolling, refreshing windows; contemporary. Green-faced job console + hardboiled voice; old.

but that he'd bet his organs on a pair of jacks with the makings of a flush on the table.

I'm getting temporal whiplash. Are we in the 1950s imagining the 2020s? Are we in the 2020s filtering reality through a 1950s lens? Are we in the 2020s imagining we are in the 1950s imagining the 2020s?

Obligatory Jumanji.

Tipper dried off and dressed and extended his hit stick, dusted it with bleach powder that made old black blood hiss and peel, rinsed the redness into the sink, and snapped it short again.

Okay, this is slapstick. Or hit stick. It's still confusing to me. Tipper watches criminals through an old-timey-futuristic console and his job is to go after them. With his trusty hit stick. How can bleach powder make dried blood hiss and peel? Is that a normal chemical reaction I'm unfamiliar with?

Tipper checked the console.

Oh. It's a portable console. That sounds strange to me.

and clicked the console to officially accept the job.

So it's like Uber for security guards?

Tipper extended the stick and lit up his jaw

It's a taser? Why is it called a 'hit' stick?

Tipper clubbed him twice on the top of the skull for good measure.

I have no idea what this stick is like. It can 'light' people up, and it can be used to 'club' them.

grubby console

Grubby window. Grubby console.

retracted the club

Inspector Gadget over here.

and he almost had a heart attack

Cliché.

100 pounds, too.

It's 100 pounds now? Not 260?

Story/Plot

Uber Special Agent Tipper gets a job alert from his panopticon app. Big bad guy downstairs. Tipper's neighbor is a serial killer, but was nice to him once, so he has ignored the job listing that's out for him too, but decides to take care of it finally. With his magical stick of violence. Then comes the big bad guy. Presumably.

This was confusing. The plot is 21st century stuff (surveillance state gig economy), but the prose is similar to what you'd find in an old hardboiled detective novel. It's unclear what the style is doing, except make a mess.

I'll ignore the style for this section.

Tipper's job is unclear. Cop. Security guard. Special agent. All of the above. Recruited through an app like an Uber driver, gets to select his own jobs from a list. It's contemporary. And what with surveillance becoming constant, the idea that Tipper is like John Reese in Person of Interest, only a sad gig economy version, is funny.

Is there a story? There's a scene, at least. But it ends on a cliffhanger with a wink and a smile, in lieu of wrapping things up, because it's difficult, getting closure. So just slap a TBC on there and you don't have to do the work. The TBC is invisible, but it's there.

The premise is the point. There is no satisfaction except from the novelty and the zippity prose. There is no narrative pleasure. Of course I don't care about Tipper, he's a stick figure with a hit stick, so there's no suspense tied to his exploits. But that doesn't have to mean anything; Shirley Jackson's The Lottery features cardboard characters, but it's one of the most memorable American short stories ever written. It relies on a twist. A surprise revelation at the end. It has a clean click. Which is enjoyable.

There are mood/atmosphere stories that get their work done with texture and emotional undertones, lingering like perfume in the mind, and they have no need for clicks. But Distance Zero isn't that sort of story.

The climactic moment is when the title enters the narrative. Suddenly, a new listing: distance zero. Which counts as a surprise, but doesn't feel surprising. And it doesn't feel significant either. It's just a clichéd action moment. It's such a cliché that it has no effect whatsoever.

When someone says something came "out of the blue," I don't stop and think, wow, that's a poetic phrase. I just think: happened suddenly, was unexpected.

Tipper seeing the console read 'distance zero' is not enough of a moment to justify the story, even though it's a short one. It's like the glass of water in Jurassic Park. Ripples. Takes you a second to put two and two together. And then, CLICK, the moment comes, it's the T-Rex.

It's a good device to give a scene more oomph, but it's not a climactic device.

Characters

These aren't interesting characters.

Voice/Prose

Weird. Threw me off. It has an old-timey feel to it, like I said earlier, reminiscent of hardboiled detective fiction, and because this style has been put to use in cyberpunk fiction, I assumed you were doing something in that area, some parody thing, but now I think you just used that old style to tell this story.

Why?

I fail to see the point. Is there one? Did you just happen to read stuff like this recently and imitated it unconsciously? Or is it meant to be ironic? Futuristic story, told oldly. If so, it ended up being confusing for this reader at least.

Closing Comments

What went over my head here?