The Doomsday Equation (4 page)

“Is he the guy who came up with the idea to pretend the insurgency is still raging? Or did he write
Green Eggs and Ham
?”

“Maybe you read a feature story about him in the
Times
a while back. He’s one of the best mop-up guys we ever had.”

There’s a pause. Jeremy isn’t sure what this means. Everyone can sense the cocksure geek’s lack of comprehension but no one wants to interrupt or correct the lead dog.

“Had,” the man continues. “A sniper blew off Colonel Stevenson’s face. A sniper from a band of still-raging insurgents owning us in the mountains around Patwa.”

After a pause, Jeremy says: “I’m not sure what that proves.” He’s lost a touch of his hostility. “I told you the insurgency was fading. I didn’t tell you no one else would die.”

“Fair point, Mr. Stillwater. We took a calculated risk to send in one of our best men to assess whether you and your computer had been accurate. And he walked into a hornet’s nest. That doesn’t speak particularly well to our own intelligence but then again we’ve never professed to have an Oracle of Delphi.” He pauses. “You’re right, though, that our paperwork proves nothing. It can be doctored, though I doubt the military has the technology to make it rhyme.”

He half smiles. He’s practiced, unlike Jeremy, in the art of defusing conflict. The others in the room aren’t sure whether to laugh. He continues: “The only way I can prove it to you would be to send you and your computer to the region and let you do a field test. And that’s a good way for you to wind up like Mitch, seriously and truly dead.”

The man stands. He’s tall in the way of people who
command power, with slightly slumped shoulders, and he has an emerging belly in the way of people who spend their days looking at monitors. Two of his lieutenants stand too but they stay when the man walks out.

Just before he hits the door of the big conference room, he turns back to Jeremy.

“Take the money.”

“What?”

“Take Silicon Valley’s money. Use your magic eight ball to do business intelligence, predict the future in some sector where no one gets hurt. I bet it’ll do wonders projecting the future of mobile apps.”

He reaches the door.

“Send me. I dare you.”

The man pauses, turns back.

Jeremy continues: “Send me to see for myself.”

Now the lieutenant colonel smiles, in full. “I was hoping you’d fall for that.” He looks at Andrea. “Work out some time that Mr. Stillwater can go to the region. Let him take his computer and run the tests real-time. Maybe he could get it to work. We sure could use the technology, if it could be refined into something not decidedly at odds with reality.”

He shuts the door.

J
EREMY FEELS THE
cab slow. At the time, Jeremy wasn’t sure who had won the exchange, but he subsequently learned. The lieutenant colonel was teaching Jeremy a lesson in patient disengagement. There were a few follow-up calls, Andrea never able to get the timing together on a trip, the budget not there; at one point it seemed like he was poised to be able to study a battle in southern Iraq, preparations made, then the thing
evaporated, one thing after the next, and then it all just faded away, like the rest of Jeremy’s opportunities. The crafty lieutenant colonel, the Pentagon, had slipped away from Jeremy, without even giving him the satisfaction of a fight.

And, thereafter, Jeremy started running all the diagnostics. Programming the algorithm to test itself, run war games, simulate conflict to see if it can rightly predict the outcome. Jeremy, even if he doesn’t quite admit it, started to question his computer, started challenging it, demanding that it prove itself right. And it seems always to be so. It can see and predict things that elude all possible human foresight. Can’t it?

“Here?”

He nods. The outer Richmond, predictably, is foggier than downtown, fog cum drizzle. He hands the cabbie a ten-dollar bill, which represents the fare and a fifty-cent tip, but Jeremy might need the last $20 in his wallet.

He glances at the countdown clock, 67:17:17, then puts the iPad into his backpack. He steps into the wet, the computer strapped to his back, like a papoose, or an albatross.

F
IVE HUNDRED MILES
away, also damp, a dim light, projecting the shape and yellowish hue of a dying moon, illuminates a slick floor. Then it flickers, and dies.

The thin man smacks the cool cylinder against his palm. The flashlight returns to its half-life. “Friggin’ thing.”

He takes two more steps, then slides his heavy boots on the metal, imagining himself skating, breaking the monotony of the chore. He raises the angle of the light, looking at the edges of the boxes and huge containers, the mountains of white rice, cell phone screens, car batteries, undershirts, kids’ pajamas, who knows what myriad of stuff piled high to the distant ceiling of this cavernous belly.

He looks up into blackness that, he imagines, could stretch to infinity. He thinks: I should have asked her to marry me. I should have, I should have. Now she thinks I’m on the fence. He pictures her sitting in a café in Hong Kong doing those tortuous emotional somersaults she can do, capable of deciding on an impulse to call off the whole relationship.

And he can’t call. His cell phone hasn’t worked in two days, the signal apparently unable to find a satellite in the vastness
of sea. Or maybe it’s the weather. Even in the hull, surrounded by mountains of boxes, he can hear the crashing and lashing of waves.

He looks back down, scoots along the narrow path, flashlight lit, thinking of her, looking at nothing. He sees the pants. Not pants, he realizes, legs with pants. A pair of legs jutting into the path, extruding from between huge containers. Give me a break, he thinks.

“Bryan.”

The legs remain motionless. He sighs.

Louder: “Yo, Bryan.”

Of the handful of shipmates on the skeleton crew, it’s the sarcastic and confrontational Filipino called Bryan who is most likely to have drunk himself into a stupor. The thin man uses his right foot to nudge a leg.

The body rouses.

“They’re gonna be pissed if they catch you down there.”

The thin man wants to keep it as neutral as possible, not be seen as a cop or do anything to make an enemy if they’ve got to spend another half week together at sea.

The legs bend, then the body starts to rise in the dark between the cold metal containers. In an unintentionally synchronized fashion, the thin man raises the flashlight, illuminating the tall figure wearing a long black peacoat and sporting a beard in full blossom.

“I fell asleep,” the bearded man says. He sounds surprised.

It’s not Bryan, the thin man realizes, not anyone he recognizes. Jesus, a friggin’ stowaway. Even as he thinks it, he’s transfixed by the beard. As much as it is full and wild, it looks deliberate, like something that would’ve been fashionable in some distant biblical era.

As neutrally as possible, the thin man says: “Come on with me. We have hot showers upstairs.” He wants to get this guy to the captain without a fuss, keep things simple.

The bearded man looks behind him, into the near-black crevice between the containers. He makes out the outlines of the backpack, the tattered brand-name knockoff bearing an otherworldly treasure, given him in a wordless exchange in an alley in Morocco. He was surprised that so much divine power and truth could be so light.

He turns back to find the flashlight upturned at his face. The bearded man closes his eyes, listens for other voices or footsteps. Hears none. He looks at the rail standing before him, a pasty, Earthy shell of flesh and bones. But a human being, a spark of life.

The bearded man mutters something.

“I can’t understand you. Bring your things. You can take them with you upstairs.”

The bearded man takes a slow breath, processing the inevitability of the logic, the undeniable rationale. After years of modest duty, he has been summoned, like his brethren, for divine purpose. It can only be that there is a gravest threat. As a Guardian of the City, he cannot doubt. His is a life of faith. He must act with purpose. Without reservation.

There is a flash of movement and the thin man feels himself turned, lifted. He feels intense pressure on his neck. He thinks: I should have asked her to marry me.

The flashlight drops to the floor.

“I said: ‘God forgive me.’”

A
S JEREMY STANDS
in the Richmond fog, he knows that what he’s telling himself he’s doing and what he’s doing are two different things. He’s telling himself that he’s come to the Last Cup, the rarest of all-night cafés in San Francisco, a city in which the eateries tend to close by ten, infuriating East Coast visitors and giving them a justifiable feeling of superiority. Here, Jeremy tells himself, he’ll run some diagnostics on the conflict algorithm.

It is true that Jeremy has spent more than one night lingering over a bottomless coffee at the Last Cup, working through a manic muse or dozing in a beanbag chair by the piano. It is also true that he has generally done so after a fight with Emily, who happens to live one block away from the Last Cup.

He’s standing in front of her flat, not admitting to himself that the real reason he’s here—not the café—is to connect somehow with Emily, even just to peek into her window. Jeremy’s reality is spinning off its hinges and Emily’s always the touchstone. She used to tell him he was the same to her. She’d concede that his antagonism, his snipes and counterpunches, while antisocial, often spoke deep truths others would not
speak. And she, unlike others, didn’t get threatened by them.

Her puke-green flat, so painted by an intransigent landlord, one of innumerable stubborn men who seem to surround her, stands between flats packed with large Chinese families. Jeremy points out to Emily that he has never had a single verbal altercation with the Chins and the Chus and Emily points out that that’s because the families speak no English.

Jeremy shivers from the chill but the feeling quickly passes. He tends to be impervious to changes in weather; Emily says Jeremy feels words and ideas, not physical conditions. She’s told him he’d endure physical torture without blinking just so long as it wasn’t accompanied by someone questioning his intellect or tousling his newly cut hair.

Her Jetta is not in the driveway.

Tomorrow must be garbage day, Jeremy realizes; that explains the line down the street of black trash bins, blue for recycling, green for composting. The city recently hired a group of right-minded young people at minimum wage to go block by block to see if people have properly distributed their waste. Once, Emily got a knock on the door from an earnest SF State student explaining that she’d done a “very good job” segregating her recycling. “But, if you’re up for it, it’d be great if you could be just a tad more vigilant with the newspaper. Mother appreciates it, y’know.”

“Mother?”

“Nature.”

“May I?” Jeremy bellowed from the other room.

Emily smiled, closing the door. “Too easy. This one’s beneath you. Let’s see if we can work off your venom in bed.”

Jeremy takes a step toward the trash bins. If he looks inside, will he find evidence telling him whether Emily’s Jetta is
missing because she’s on a date or a sleepover? Maybe she’s on a date with someone less like Jeremy and more like Emily, fluid and easygoing, artistic, Jewish, not that Emily ever considered religion a deal breaker in a mate. Emily finds prayer calming. She likes knowing “something bigger is out there,” an amorphous philosophy that drives Jeremy nuts. On Emily’s ankle is a Star of David tattoo, which Jeremy points out makes it impossible for her to be buried in a Jewish cemetery, and therefore, Jeremy razzes her, means she’s not consistent with her beliefs, like most of the freaking world. Inside the house, a dim light. Jeremy figures it’s the cheap standing lamp next to the couch. He pictures a babysitter on the couch, reading a trashy romance. Jeremy’s stomach sinks. Someone who is not him or Emily put Kent to bed, read him
Madeline
or
Jamberry
.

When it comes to Kent, and virtually only when it comes to Kent, Jeremy’s emotions are precisely what they appear to be—to him and anyone else paying attention. There is a one-to-one relationship between what Kent makes him feel and what he expresses. It’s linear. It adds up. When the two boys are hanging out, Emily says, Jeremy experiences no disconnect. She loves and loathes that Jeremy feels more comfortable with her son than he does with her.

She also cannot fully understand the phenomenon. Kent challenges Jeremy as much as or more than anyone else. “Why, why, why?” Kent asks Jeremy. Kent cries, he’s mercurial, he comes and goes, he becomes furious when Jeremy (or anyone else) can’t find his stuff, he rolls on the floor with giggles, then throws a tantrum when blood sugar fades. He’s nine and he exhibits all the behaviors of the most annoying of Jeremy’s investors. And Jeremy absolutely fucking loves him.

Loved him. Or whatever is the correct verb tense for a
situation where you’ve lost contact with someone, perhaps indefinitely, because you’ve lost contact with his mother, for at least the last three weeks. To top it off, a few nights before his breakup with Emily, he and Kent actually had a disagreement—and now Jeremy feels estranged from the boy, too.

Jeremy takes the first step of the slick stairs at Emily’s flat. He feels a buzz in his pocket. He pulls out his phone. He examines it for incoming stimuli—a text, a call, an instant message. But there’s nothing. He pulls out his other phone, from his other pocket, even though he didn’t feel a buzz coming from it. Nothing. He rechecks both phones. They are devoid of incoming stimulation.

Maybe I imagined it, Jeremy thinks, without finding that possibility at all remarkable. He recalls some research paper that documented the growing phenomenon of “phantom buzzing,” whereby someone feels the tug of a device even though it’s not actually beckoning. Researchers theorized that the phantom buzz might actually be serving as a reminder to the person of something he or she had wanted to do. The phone as proxy for the subconscious. The human brain and the computer becoming intertwined, even when the person is offline.

A sharp gust of wind blows down the street, stinging Jeremy’s face. He shivers. He looks at the phone’s clock. It’s just before midnight.

He puts his head down and walks to the café, heading into the wind. Instinctively, he realizes, he’s got his fingers gently pushing a fleshy spot on his left pectoral, where the nagging, pulsing pain seems to start. He rubs the spot. Then moves his fingers a few inches to the right and wraps them protectively around the key fob hanging from a chain around his neck. The key to getting into the guts of the program.

It’s what Evan’s suing over; even though Jeremy came up with it, it was so clearly his idea, Evan contends he owns or shares the intellectual property rights to many of the underlying ideas. The user interfaces, the countdown clock, the sizzle that has so many business applications. He’s put together a well-heeled startup, SEER, to spot business trends. Evan claims the technology doesn’t work to predict war but it’s good enough to “intelligently guide” corporations about the future of their industries. His tagline: Not predicting the future, shaping it.

Over the last year of their partnership, Jeremy and Evan were increasingly at odds. Evan seemed intent on showing Jeremy the potential business applications and Jeremy was intent on telling Evan where he could shove it.

And so, now, in short, their relationship has devolved into a patent dispute. Jeremy thinks this is the most vile, uncivil form of conflict in the entire world, so cruelly administrative. And really, in the end, just a negotiation, not a search for truth. But it’s also utterly du jour in Silicon Valley, with companies wielding armies of lawyers to vie over who came up with what idea first. And then smiling and signing royalty contracts, one company agreeing to pay the other such-and-such licensing rights because, well, the stupid fucking court can’t really disentangle.

At its heart, Jeremy tells himself, his opposition to such compromises is the kind of thing that drives his inability to let the little things go. One day, you let the barista at a café act like an idiot, the next you’re giving away your ideas, your soul.

Emily tells Jeremy that it’s just an excuse to act like a jerk and that Jeremy isn’t allowing anyone else to even contribute to finding productive uses for the technology.

And then Emily adds insult to injury: she says that Jeremy is jealous. Jealous! In particular, she says Jeremy can’t stand that
Evan had become tight with Harry, who for so long was Jeremy’s advocate and mentor. Evan and Harry seemed not just to become fast friends but to consult professionally. Maybe Evan, tired of Jeremy’s antics, was consulting Harry instead. Emily says Jeremy can’t stand to see anyone get along, especially people in his inner circle.

In any case, if Evan wants to shut down Jeremy’s efforts and get access to the technology he claims to have helped develop, then Evan’s going to have to come and get it.

Jeremy’s working on a theory: Evan’s doing just that. He’s somehow messing with his algorithm, trying to drive a wedge between a man and his machine, to get Jeremy to give up. Take the payoff, licensing fees, royalties, and then go work on something else. Fat chance.

Jeremy wipes the drizzle from his arms and walks into the café. He orders a decaf and nods his nod to the Jabba the Hutt, who works the overnight shift behind the counter. Jeremy plops into a blue beanbag chair in the back. The place is about half full but there’s no buzz or hum to it, the sound and energy sapped by the inclement weather, fog and drizzle as insulation. On the ratty orange couch, a guy with a beard quietly plucks a guitar and taps its face in rhythm to some song he’s polite enough to almost keep to himself. Toward the front, some college-student types bury themselves in earphones and texts. No talent, Jeremy remarks in his neurological recesses, referring to the fact that there’s not a single worthy chick.

He plugs the iPad into an outlet, signs on to the wi-fi, calls up, sees the machine come to life, paws the conflict map to bring it to life, then hears the machine beep. Three beeps,
those
three beeps, the same ones from the morning.

The war machine has an update for him.