The Doomsday Equation (2 page)

T
O DO.

Jeremy rolls the pencil in his fingers. Lets the tip fall on a jagged scrap of paper. He looks at the words. To do.

He hears Emily’s voice. How about cleaning up your desk?

Next to the paper scrap an iPad rests on two books,
Superstring Theory: Volume I,
and
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dating
. In their shadow, on a rectangular black mat covering the blond wood desk, sit two cell phones. A sweetness floats in the air, owing to something starting to turn in a Chinese food takeout container over the small fridge.

Jeremy squeezes the pencil, feels its rubbery vulnerability. It could snap. He flips it to the floor, where it lands beside a crumpled
Inc
. magazine with a headshot Jeremy had nearly deigned to smile for.

How’s that for clean, Em?

With his right thumb, he rubs circles on the tender spot just inside his left shoulder, suppresses a wince. He closes his eyes. When he opens them again, a long moment later, he finds his gaze aimed at the computer’s on/off switch. It’s right beneath
the second from the left of four computer monitors, the one with the map.

To do.

Options: Jog; spend the last sixty-five dollars on clothes or a haircut; pick up a thirty-something subverting hunger for children into some exotic erotic position? In the morning, maybe he’d put too fine a point on her transparency to find out if truth inspires yelling or tears.

Nobody, Emily tells him, is less qualified to predict and prevent armed conflict, war. “It’s like M&Ms crusading against childhood obesity,” she said.

She had pointed this out in their last conversation—not the last
last
conversation but the one before that. They were parked in front of Walgreens and she also pointed out that, in the prior few days alone, Jeremy had proved himself smarter than (and infuriated): a former congressman turned big-name Silicon Valley investor; his former business partner; the guy behind the counter at Walgreens.

“One percent hydrocortisone is not the same as 0.05 percent hydrocortisone. He works at a pharmacy, Em. It’s like a zookeeper not knowing the difference between a snake and a bird.”

“Maybe. But you needn’t have said so. A guy at Walgreens looking at me and smiling is not the same as the guy being a jackass.”

“It’s bad parents.”

“What?”

“Stupid, lazy parents cause childhood obesity, not M&Ms. It’s one of many flaws with the simile.”

Silence creeps heavy through the front seat, then Emily says: “I’m a world-class mom.”

“I wasn’t—”

Jeremy shakes his head and looks at the monitors. The one on the far left has all the data, scrolling, 327 precious inputs constantly updating; next to it, the map with the countries pulsing mostly green with a few yellows and oranges, Libya and Syria; then the magic, the genius, the monitor that shows what it all means, what all the data adds up to; and then the fourth monitor, the one with online Scrabble. It’s the one he’s paid attention to lately.

He scans back across the screens and sees beneath them the off button for the whole contraption, and quickly averts his eyes.

They fall on a picture of a boy wearing overalls and a grin. Transparent tape holds the four-by-six, unframed, against the base of the second monitor, a faint thumbprint smudge beside the bookcase next to the boy. Words pop into Jeremy’s head, skirt across his mind’s eye. “My bad, bud,” but he swallows the whisper that would carry contrition. He looks at his iPhone, Emily and Kent a call away.

A crunching noise pulls him from his thoughts, sounds he hears before realizing the door has opened with a visitor.

“You move well for a big guy.” He turns to find Nik. “But your snacks precede you.”

Nik stands in uniform, his lumpy corpus—six foot two and 260 pounds—loosely covered in a T-shirt and sweatpants. A thick brushed metal cross hangs around his neck. Over his shoulder hangs a pregnant leather gym bag, a sweatshirt poking through the zipper.

“Go look for a job,” Jeremy says.

Nik raises a greasy eyebrow. Nik, short for PeaceNik, christened Perry Dutton, nicknamed by Jeremy not long after he wandered into the Oxford lab and joined the team. Now he’s
the last loyalist, the final Templar, a deckhand waiting with the captain for the last part of the stern to sink. Jeremy imagines Nik goes to the little boxing gym where he spends his off- hours, suits up, then lets people hit him and never falls down.

Emily, while she likes Nik—who doesn’t?—says he’s a man so devoid of Earthly ambition that Jeremy can’t possibly conflict with him. Still has a clamshell flip phone. And Evan once joked that if Jeremy was Richard Nixon, Nik was like that muted, bizarre version of his wife, Pat, in the famed Checkers Speech, named for the Nixon dog. Nik’s got a mutt, a big, plodding white girl called Rosa, slobbery jowls, droopy eyes, currently lumbering behind him, loyal to Nik as Nik is to Jeremy.

“You’ve got unopened mail,” Nik says.

Jeremy half nods. “Jesus can’t save you from disodium guanylate.”

Nik pops a Cool Ranch Dorito into his mouth, turns and plods away, Rosa in tow.

Jeremy notices that slid beneath the door is the unopened mail. Bills or something from Evan’s lawyers.

Jeremy rubs the spot inside his shoulder. He stands and pushes away from the desk.

O
UTSIDE THE OFFICE
,
on the waterfront, Jeremy ignores after-work commuter foot traffic and the rules and steps over the railing.

He sits on a concrete slab beside an iron boat tie. Waves lap the slab, splashing the bottom of Jeremy’s feet.

Genius was supposed to pay off better than this.

His paper, “Conditions of Conflict,” published in the
Journal of Dispute Settlement,
was seminal in its combination of two
disciplines: computer science and history. Over eight years of doctoral study at Oxford, Jeremy used original algorithms to break down the conditions of the world before, during and immediately after conflicts from World War I to Vietnam to the Rum Rebellion in 1808, the Pastry War with France and Mexico and on and on.

To crunch the numbers, Jeremy persuaded the CS department to lend him hours of time with the supercomputer. Later, Jeremy managed to streamline the algorithms so that he no longer needed the supercomputer and could instead run them on regular-strength desktop computers jerry-rigged to perform multiple streams of concurrent parallel processing.

At first, a prestigious journal called
Peace
had rejected Jeremy’s paper (not on merit so much as on charges he sought to intimidate a peer reviewer), so Jeremy approached the
Journal of Dispute Settlement,
a decidedly not prestigious journal and a competitor of
Peace
. It had the desired effect—at least in the academic community. How, people wondered, had
Peace
failed to land research that, within days, would generate a mountain of media and, within weeks, millions in prospective investment dollars? He was invited to travel the world to lecture, talk about conflict, how to avoid it.

There were media mentions, and plenty of cheap turns of phrase.
Popular Mechanics
asked hyperbolically if Jeremy Stillwater had invented the Digital Messiah.

The editor of
Peace
sent a congratulatory email to Jeremy, who responded by proposing a resignation letter that the editor send to his bosses.

The editor got the last laugh.

Something catches Jeremy’s eye. A boat,
The San Francisco Experience,
brimming with tourists.

Jeremy looks down at the water. It doesn’t look that cold.

The investors insisted he take on Evan. That’s just Silicon Valley. The creative types get paired with the money types, the marketers who spin gold into a lot of gold. But at a price of input, especially on the marketing.

Jeremy grudgingly admitted some of Evan’s ideas were good. Evan came up with the map with the hot spots lit up, changing with the changing conditions of the world, changing by the minute. On a typical day, Libya, yellow and mellowing; Iraq the same, but tinged with orange; Iran and Syria, a light, almost pulsing orange; central Africa deeper orange still, inflaming but not in flames; the cool blue of Norway suggesting terminal calm; and, always, the 38th parallel fluctuating between a deeper orange and red. Next to each hot or warm spot, a gauge, like the gas gauge in a car, suggesting the direction in which conflict is headed. Lots of arrows headed near north, meaning: conflict ongoing or looming.

The map had people at hello. The second that customers or investors saw the map, they were ready to listen.

Then Jeremy could talk about the data, a flurry of hundreds of inputs pouring in from around the globe. Specifically, 327 inputs. Oil and food prices, temperatures and tides, population density, migrations from rural areas to cities and back, birthrates, election cycles, high-level executive movements, stock market indices, news reports and a “rhetoric” measure, which reports the language used in speeches by major political and business leaders and in headlines from newspapers and blogs around the world.

More eyes lighting up. Can it really work?

“The data, that’s monkey junk,” Jeremy would say. With the
Internet, anyone can collect data. “It doesn’t mean anything without this.”

And then he would talk about the algorithm. It took all that data, all the inputs, and collated the incoming data, mashing and weighing it, giving it relative value. A change in leadership in a relatively stable country is valued at X, while a change in an unstable country equals X-plus-some-quotient. Prices for commodities or oil get a baseline given weight that is subject to changes in value depending on time of year and other variables, like precipitation; it is astounding, Jeremy thought, how much the weather dictates the likelihood that certain conditions will lead to conflict, because, when it comes down to it, invaders and attackers prefer clear skies. See: D-Day.

Sometimes, he’d get applause.

Part of him knew he was a show pony, a hub for the spokes of idealistic thinkers about the nascent field of data-driven peace and conflict studies, someone awesome to invite to and point out at parties.

Now Evan is trying to sue Jeremy’s pants off to get access to the guts of the algorithm. He was never interested in conflict stuff. Jeremy knew it. Evan, PowerPoint Peckerhead, as Jeremy calls him (not
completely
without affection), and the investors wanted to apply the technology to predicting what would unfold in the world of business.

They wanted to sell it as a consulting tool to help Verizon understand how telecommunication was likely to change or to McDonald’s to presage the next trends in food production or consumption. They wanted real, predictable revenue streams.

And who could blame them? It didn’t take a supercomputer and a genius man-child to realize that investors make money
by helping companies and other investors make money, not by predicting the outbreak, length and nature of a conflict in some island in the Sea of Cortez, or where-the-fuck-ever, as one of the big Valley investors had put it.

Besides, there was another problem, a kind of basic one. Jeremy’s fancy invention didn’t appear to be actually working for its stated purpose: predicting conflict.

He looks down at the water. He stands and raises himself over the iron barrier, and looks into the murky distance.

He glances back at the water. Not that cold. Not for a computer.

B
ACK IN THE
office, Jeremy sits. He checks the two phones, the iPhone and the other one. Same old story. Nothing, as it has been for more than two weeks, excepting unrequited badgers from the law firm of Pierce & Sullivan, and a call from a debt collector with a wrong number looking for Song Yung Li. With that one, Jeremy played along for three minutes until, just for fun, he duped the caller into revealing the debtor’s Social Security number and then let her have it with both barrels.

After the paper came out in the
Journal of Dispute Settlement,
Jeremy worked briefly on a contract for the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, took in a mountain of their data about the conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq and made two decidedly horrific projections.

While working for the DoD, he predicted an insurgency in the Al Anbar province that never happened. And, separately, he had a 98 percent certainty that guerrilla movements in a particular mountain range near the Afghan-Russian border would subside within three months. They went on for two years, the unsettling and unconvincing back-and-forth with the military.

The initial paper had provided ironclad proof of the validity of the method. But then when it came time, when the opportunity came to do it for someone other than academics, it flopped. It didn’t add up. None of it added up.

Jeremy looks around the room. Academic papers and newspapers and trade journals and a
Wired
and a
Maxim
on the rack of servers to his left, power cords jumbled on the floor and, everywhere, that smell. Emily, you can take a bite out of my ass if you think it’s because I fear order that I don’t want to clean up. It takes more than a bachelor’s degree and single-motherhood experience to play armchair analyst.

The office was supposed to be Jeremy’s think pad away from the main office down in Silicon Valley—walking distance from the ballpark and the swanky condo Jeremy bought at the peak of the market. A perk afforded a genius that has turned lease waiting to expire.

He rubs the inside of his shoulder, then his pectoral.

The fourth monitor shows the Scrabble board where he spends his hours playing people he’s never met at the highest levels of the virtual Scrabble world.

He almost never wins. Because he never finishes a game. He’s usually ahead but then he makes some suggestions to his opponents about the word they probably should have played, and they disappear. Many just won’t play him anymore, even though, at Emily’s counsel, which he took in this case, he prefaces his suggestions to opponents by asking if it’s okay if he offers up an idea.

Jeremy catches his reflection in the Scrabble monitor. Something in the dull image reminds him that his monthly haircut is forthcoming. That’s forty-five dollars that is not currently
falling off the trees, but is also nonnegotiable. When it comes to his hair and other personal grooming, Jeremy subscribes only to the strictest ergonomics. He still doesn’t understand that, even without a great haircut, he’d get the girls. He’s muscular with long, toned runner’s legs, and a sturdy, full face that hints more at the handsome qualities of a rugby player than an actor, having long since shed the slump-shouldered geeky kid who formed a chunk of his self-image.

He closes his eyes.

It’s something between a catnap, daydream and slide presentation. His mom is there, bony and wispy and still totally in control of her emotions. There’s Kent, just the opposite, childlike, a child, smiling and asking Jeremy to come over to build a fort. There’s Peckerhead waving a pen, and there’s Emily. Her eyes are red but dry.

Then Harry. Not alone, with Andrea. Both of them, together, laughing. Laughing and laughing. He strains to hear what they’re saying but he can’t. He can just feel their laughter rippling through him.

The three chirps startle Jeremy.

He clears his throat and opens his eyes. He blinks.

The computer beeps again. Three beeps. Those three distinctive beeps.

He looks at the monitors, starting with the one that is second to his right. Data, scrolling. Then the next one with the map.

His first impulse is less curiosity than disappointment. “Monkey junk.”

Red. Bright red. The red he’s never actually seen, not this bright. And never heard these chirps, not these three. Not since he programmed the computer to make such a sound.

Three beeps that mean something very dire is about to happen. Three beeps with all this red means it’s nothing short of apocalyptic, the apocalypse.

Jeremy twirls around in his desk chair. He looks at the server, and up in the corners of the walls. He sees the door is closed.

He looks at his phone, checks the clock. He’s been asleep, or daydreaming, for just a few minutes, less than an hour. It’s a bit after eight.

“I’ll humor you.”

Jeremy scoots in, cocks his head like a bird. Looks at the map. Then begins tapping on the keyboard. On the monitor to the far right, the Scrabble board disappears.

In its place appears the web site of the
New York Times
. The lead headline is about a press conference in which the president is asked about the latest job figures. Below that, in the middle of the page, there’s a picture of a man wearing a robe and sitting in a wheelchair, a feature about a judge in Brooklyn who is trying out for the Paralympics. There’s something masquerading as breaking news that looks to be a roundup of technology company earnings.

Nothing to explain what’s happening on the map. Nothing to explain why his computer is predicting there is going to be a massive global conflict, engulfing the world in death and destruction—and that the calamity is imminent.

Jeremy clicks and the
New York Times
disappears.

He clears his throat. Taps his fingers absently on the edge of the keyboard. After a full minute, he moves his cursor onto the first monitor, the one most to his left, the one with all the scrawling data points, and, with a few keystrokes, causes the flurry of data to appear also on the fourth monitor, where the
New York Times
had just been.

He moves his cursor onto the fourth monitor and starts moving up and down through the data with his cursor. The data is moving too, updating with every second, the inputs changing in real time: gas prices, stock market indices, weather. It comes in so fast from around the world that even Jeremy—for as much time as he’s spent with these programs—can’t quite grasp and make sense of it. He scrolls up, looking at the various measures, looking at time stamps.

Is there some needle in this haystack? Something that changed or stands out, or explains the map?

Nothing stands out. Of course not. No way for the human brain to make sense of this flurry of data. That’s what the algorithm is for. And it speaks through the map. That’s where the predictions show up in the nice accessible way, just as Evan envisioned.

Now it’s mostly pulsing red—North America, for sure, Latin America, Europe. Even the Southern Hemisphere shows hardly a spot neither red or orange, and a few bits of yellow.

He puts his cursor onto the map. He clicks on a gauge, a cross between an odometer and a clock. He clicks on it. He reads the prediction. He clenches his teeth.

He pushes back from the desk. He stands and looks up at the corners of the room. He peers alongside the metal shelf holding the servers. No cameras. No overt signs someone is setting him up for the YouTube humiliation of the century when, finally on the verge of giving up on his creation and tossing it into the sea, he freaks and screams, “I told you so!” because the app is reporting that the world is going to end.

No signs someone has tapped into or tampered with the computer. Who could do that? Few, if any. They don’t have the password to get inside the machine. No one does. Who
might want to? Start a fucking list of the let’s-turn-Jeremy-into-a-marionette. Evan the Peckerhead, Professor Harry Ives, the disgruntled investors.

How long was he gone outside at the water? Did someone get in?

Jeremy pulls out two middle fingers and shares them with the room.

He eyes the envelopes on the floor under the door. He kicks them over and confirms they are both, as he suspected, from the lawyers at Pierce & Sullivan, representing Evan, who is suing for access to the conflict algorithm so he can predict the future of mobile communications or fast food. Jeremy grinds the envelopes with his shoe.

He picks up his iPad, scrambles around the mess on the desk for the white cord. He plugs the iPad into his desktop and clicks a few keys.

While he’s waiting for it, he walks out to Nik’s cubicle. He pauses before the violation, then shuffles through Nik’s papers. Sees late-payment notifications, legal correspondence, bureaucracy.

He bends over and reaches for Nik’s computer mouse. Fiddles with it. The screen comes to life. He sees a black backdrop and a few windows open at the bottom. Jeremy clicks them. One is an email folder, left open, with mostly spam. Another is World of Warcraft, Nik’s guilty pleasure, an innocuous enough time sink, his connection to a community of shut-ins and night owls.

Emily says Nik and Jeremy are like photo negatives of one another: Nik, a quiet and deferential loner who, on the Internet, commands armies and plays war; Jeremy, aggressive and confrontational, who uses the Internet to make peace.

Taped to Nik’s desk, Jeremy finds a list of phone numbers and emails—contact info for all the big players, like Andrea, Harry and Evan. Even Emily. Nik is Jeremy’s shadow, secretary, baggage handler, designated driver, still holding out hope.

Jeremy walks back into his office.

The iPad has finished doing its thing. He stuffs it into a briefcase, snags his phones, shuts out the light and closes the door.