The Doomsday Equation (5 page)

B
EFORE HE CAN
check the device, Jeremy feels something nag at him and looks up. He discovers he’s being stared at by the bearded guitar player, who quickly lowers his head. Jeremy recoils into his beanbag, tilting the iPad so no one else in the place could possibly see it.

He looks at the screen. A dialogue box pops up. Inside it reads: “Impact Update. Click for details.”

Sure, let’s see it, he thinks, clicking.

The dialogue reads: “April’s projected deaths: 75 million.”

In the abstract, at least, that’s not so hard for Jeremy to swallow. Just more game theory and simple probability. An attack in, say, San Francisco, triggers a counterattack, then reprisals, then the dominoes fall. The program is taking into account the hundreds of parameters and key variables that, Jeremy’s research at Oxford determined, can be used to predict the length and intensity of war.

He looks at the map.

Red, red, red. The only difference between the rendering of the future on this map and on the version of the map he saw six hours ago is that attack is six hours closer. That, he
notices, and it looks like the red is spreading. Meaning: whatever conflict this computer has foreseen will go from hellacious to worse. The countdown clock shows 66:57:02. Hours, minutes, seconds.

Jeremy looks up at the guitar player. It crosses his mind that if the guitar player is looking at him, Jeremy’s going to advise the guy on the problems with his chord-hand position. Just a little jab, one that will come across as possibly well-meaning and hard to interpret. But the guitar player is buried in his world, unavailable to hear unsolicited advice.

Jeremy pulls out his phone. He’s trying to remember Evan’s cell phone number. Trying to think what he’s going to say after: Hey, fuckface!

He pauses. Never go into a fight unarmed. He needs more evidence. He can check the inputs.

On the phone, he calls up Nik’s number. Taps out a text: “notice anything strange?” The corpulent assistant is either asleep or glued to an infomercial. But if he does see the text, it might jar him; Jeremy doesn’t ask questions like this, not open-ended ones, not even of Nik.

From his backpack, Jeremy pulls an external keyboard.

Is the data coming into his machine, the data that somehow adds up to impending doom, accurate? Has it been altered?

Jeremy rolls his neck, pre-computing calisthenics. He looks at the key fob, enters six numbers, then his password, then he begins tearing his way across the keyboard, causing symbols and lines and numbers to appear in the window. It’s less fancy than it looks. Jeremy’s simply creating a category of all of these data points—all 327 inputs—collecting them into a single file, then writing a code to send out the numbers, all of the data
points, and check them against their sources around the world, and then to double-check the data points.

Most of them largely irrelevant. In the grand scheme of predicting conflict, they are modest measures, weighted lightly relative to the handful of big ones: troop movements, demographics (specifically, concentration of males age eighteen to thirty-five), changes in income distribution (the wealth gap), weather, arms shipments insofar as they can be inferred by production and profit from companies in the military-industrial complex, and, powerfully, a “rhetoric” measure. It looks at changing use of language by politicians and media around the world but, with more emphasis, in hot zones. How are powerful “entities,” whether people or media outlets, describing their relationship to the rest of the world? Internet spiders can easily comb through mountains of publicly accessible commentary to look for phrases like “we will never surrender” or “vanquish the enemy” or “date which will live in infamy.” Algorithms Jeremy has developed and forfeited many nights of sleep perfecting can compare them with previous utterances by those politicians or outlets, looking to see if the rhetoric had been more conciliatory, and so forth.

Those are the key variables for understanding more conventional war. But predicting and understanding localized terror attacks, insurrection, jihad, guerrilla warfare that has, in effect, become war in the 21st century, that’s even tougher. It relies on narrowing the search to a region in question, even a city or mountainous area, to the spot where a group of insurgents are focused. It relies on looking at an additional key variable: the formation and concentration of small groups capable of carrying out attacks and creating instability. These are, in fact,
mini-armies, the modern analogue to the massive buildup of troops and a war machine before the outbreak of World War II. What, the Soviets never saw it coming?

And Jeremy’s been monkeying around with other ideas, ways to refine the conflict algorithm. Over the last several months, since everyone severed ties with him, he’s been playing with a particularly wild-eyed effort. It’s an attempt to identify a specific person whose actions, or words, are singularly important in igniting conflict. The program measures the relevance of a person’s influence to potential hostility based on that person’s network of connections. It aims to mine the mountains of data on the Internet to connect people to one another, a version of what Facebook does when it draws connections between potential friends.

Jeremy calls it “Program Princip.” It’s named after Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, igniting World War I. Jeremy’s idea is that he’ll go beyond being able to identify someone like Ferdinand as a potential influence in an impending conflict, to identifying the tiny needles that will ignite the conflict haystack. In some ways, it’s not so far-fetched. A handful of startups have gotten big venture capital to develop software aimed at combing the Internet to determine who is most influential in, say, business or art. So why not conflict? But so far, Jeremy has only beta-tested it, showed no one, only really muttered about it to Emily.

Jeremy finishes his latest iPad query in about twice the time it ordinarily would’ve taken, because he’s got to type so carefully in order not to make mistakes and because he’s tired. He hits “enter” on his command.

Is the data accurate?

If so, what data set changed? When?

He should know in the next six hours. It’s well past 1
a.m.
He pulls the iPad to his chest, folds his arms around it. Pulls it back off his chest. He opens a browser. Googles: Evan Tigeson.

Lots of hits. He clicks on the web site for SEER, Evan’s latest thing. And then a mission statement about not merely predicting but driving global trends using proven, patented algorithmic technologies. Yeah, Jeremy thinks, my fucking technologies. He clicks on Evan’s bio. Sees the picture, a black-and-white photo, square features, an almost seductive eyebrow raise undercut with a geeky subtext that Evan can’t bury. To Jeremy, he’s a “51 percenter”; just on the other side of slick. Like so many in the Valley, he’s just shy of fully slick, geeky enough to come across as authentic. This type of businessperson in Silicon Valley is like the do-gooders from college who go to Washington, D.C., and it becomes impossible to tell the difference between their ambitions for the world and for themselves.

Jeremy clicks back to the home page. Sees an infobox that catches his eye. “Sign up for SEER 2013, an initiative for the future.” A conference, the typical way to jump-start a new business, a networking opportunity. He clicks for more information. None comes up, other than a list of current conference partners. It’s impressive, Google, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard. The very biggest tech companies. Slick Peckerhead.

And there’s an email: [email protected].

Jeremy closes his eyes, pictures one of his last meetings with Evan, at least the last one with any pretense of civility. Down
in the Valley offices, where Jeremy visited with increasing infrequency, he ducked into Evan’s glass-walled office to find his partner playing around on the conflict map. At first Jeremy blanched, but then he realized Evan wasn’t actually inside the guts of the algorithm, not changing it or able to, just running various scenarios: what if this business were located here, or this one located there; what if flat-panel television manufacturing plants continued to decline in profit margins, blah, blah.

“What happens if Walmart gets into the widget business? I hear that’s going to be huge,” Jeremy said. “Get that one right and you can move to Atherton.”

Evan managed a smile. He always could. Nothing seemed to ruffle him, something he’d point out in speeches was owed to his upbringing in northern Minnesota, where twenty below was balmy. He’d say that his quaint upbringing in Moorhead, population forty thousand, was like the Internet: if you tried you could connect to everyone, live a more intertwined life.

“This is the future.”

“Business applications are my passion.”

“It’s so much more than that, Jeremy.” A slight hint of edge in his voice. “Look what happened when they developed Ireland and rural China. Huge economic prosperity. What if your machine could be more powerful than you ever even imagined?”

“Whatever, Peckerhead.”

“Don’t take my word for it. Ask Harry.”

This one stopped Jeremy in his tracks, a rare comment for which Jeremy didn’t have a quick retort.

“You’ve been talking to Harry?”

“It’s impolite to have lunch with someone and not talk.”

It was the moment that Jeremy learned that Evan, the business partner he was learning to loathe, had cozied up to Harry. Jeremy became instantly convinced the pair were conspiring behind his back. Maybe they were just two people interested in the world, Emily said, and she tried to broker a peace.

She arranged a picnic, held at the log cabin, a beautiful setting in San Francisco’s Presidio, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. The setting was also intended as symbolic; the Presidio was a former military base turned gorgeous public sanctuary. A place where the machinery of war, its essence, turned decidedly tranquil. And a favorite place of Harry’s to come think big thoughts about peace and conflict.

But so much for symbolism: no sooner had Harry and Jeremy arrived than they went right to war, each firing rhetorical ICBMs turbo-powered by his immense ego, each accusing the other of disloyalty and stupidity. After all Harry’s generosity over the years, Jeremy spat the ultimate insult—all the while, Harry was seeking to discredit Jeremy and his computer so that Harry, and Harry alone, would be the ultimate authority on conflict and its causes. Harry, Jeremy was saying, was little more than a power-hungry conflict-monger himself.

And here Jeremy sits now, in the café, ties severed from Harry, and Evan—and wondering if the two are somehow in league against him.

He stares at Evan’s new web site. He pulls up his phone and scrolls through old emails until he finds a phone number for his ex-partner. He pushes a button to dial. It rings and rings. Voice mail picks up. Jeremy hangs up.

His eyes are glazing over. He closes the browser, pulls the iPad to his chest.

He thinks back to what Evan had said in their last conversation at the office: “Your machine can be more powerful than you ever imagined.”

What had he meant by that? Something Jeremy didn’t realize?

The words and ideas blur and jumble together as Jeremy falls asleep.

T
WINKLE, TWINKLE.”

He feels someone kick his foot. “Twinkle, twinkle.”

Jeremy cracks open his eyes. “Twinkle, twinkle little fart,” Jeremy manages.

“How I wonder where you fart.”

Standing before him, a boy with light brown hair, spilling out unkempt from the sides of his red wool hat with earflaps. He’s got black rain boots and the trendy puffy blue ski jacket that Jeremy had given him at the beginning of the school year. Kent bobs his head and torso side to side, herky-jerky, as if moving to some unheard music, the rhythm of an energetic boy.

“You look like a collage,” Jeremy says. He’s getting his bearings. He’s sitting in a beanbag, arms wrapped around an iPad.

“Did you sleep here? You seriously smell like a fart. Seriously.”

Jeremy inhales. Boy’s got a point. Kent and Emily must be here on the way to school and work. How many times has Jeremy told Emily to make coffee at home to save the money;
and pastries aren’t good for the boy: even the raisin bran muffin brims with sugar.

Still, he smiles. His last interaction with Kent was the worst they’d ever had. Some stupid disagreement as they sat on the living room floor, trying to make sense of the strewn pieces of a rocket ship puzzle. Jeremy suggested looking for the corners first.

“I have a better idea,” said Kent. He was sorting the pieces by color, looking for the ones that might go together.

“Only if you want to be here all day,” Jeremy said.

“Get your own puzzle.” Kent said it absently, something from the mouth of a babe. But Jeremy laughed haughtily. Something cruel. But he at least was able to check the counterattack that nearly spilled from his mouth, even though the bad taste didn’t leave Jeremy for days.

Kent turns and Jeremy follows his gaze to the counter. With a modest smile, Emily orders coffee. She’s got high black boots and a long black skirt and a light purple blouse, her shoulders covered by her near-black hair, and Jeremy can practically taste the pheromones across the café. He thinks: Emily, something bad is happening. Someone’s messing with me.

And, then: But just in case no one’s messing with me, just in case something really bad is happening, get away from here. Take Kent to your brother’s house in Reno.

Emily tilts her head toward the guy standing next to her at the counter, listening to him. She laughs.

The guy is tall and wiry—built not unlike Jeremy, fuller brown hair suggesting he’s younger. Brownish skin, one of those hybrid ethnicities, half something and half something else. Is he seriously wearing a stone-washed jean jacket?

He puts a hand on Emily’s shoulder, friendly, close to intimate, maybe not quite there.

Kent says: “Ready?”

Jeremy looks at the boy.

“Old McDonald Had a Fart.”

Part of their ritual, turning Mother Goose rhymes and songs into potty humor. Relief washes over Jeremy; whatever tension is long since past.

“Eee-eye, eee-eye-oh. And on that farm he had a cow,” the boy continues, off pitch, a little self-conscious. “With a poo-poo here and a poo-poo there.”

Emily looks over. Jeremy watches the cascade of analysis and emotion: why is my son talking to this strange man unfurled on the beanbag chair; oh shit, that’s not a strange man. Her face turns to puzzle pieces. One looks like anger, one like pity, and one like fear, not from the threat of a stranger but of the familiar.

She turns and says something to the guy she’s with—the guy she spent the night with?—then clears her throat and begins her last-mile walk to Jeremy.

Jeremy represses an urge to stand to meet her. Realizes he wants to save that movement for when it might really count. Before Jeremy can look down, in an effort to communicate his fake nonchalance, the old flames lock eyes.

“We’re late, bunny. Let’s get a move on.” Emily’s balancing her coffee and a juice and a couple of pastries on a compostable brownish takeout tray. “What are you doing here, Jeremy?”

“You can’t be serious,” Jeremy says. He juts his chin toward the guy. “The 1980s called. It wants the denim jacket back.”

“Let’s go, bunny, we’re late.” Then to Jeremy: “Let’s do this later.”

“There isn’t going to be any later.”

Typically obtuse for Jeremy; he must be setting up some
line of attack. But Emily senses that it’s dramatic in a way that Jeremy usually avoids until he’s launched his final verbal offensive. Which is why moisture glistens in her brown eyes, sympathy, yearning for understanding, not recrimination. His heart thump-thumps, a drumbeat urging him forward into an embrace or confession. He clears his throat.

“Kent, bunny, can you go wait by the piano while I talk to Jeremy.” She extends a raisin muffin to the boy. He holds it, but doesn’t move. Emily grits her teeth at this impossible situation, her stubborn son and stubborn former lover. “It’s not healthy for you to be here.”

“Not healthy?”

“Jeremy . . .” She knows the essence of what’s coming, if not the exact words.

“What’s not healthy is that raisin bran muffin. Tons of sugar. What’s not healthy is bringing home some strange man. It’s in all the literature. You’ve got to be sure he’s the guy. It’s sending Kent really confusing messages.”

“I’m right here,” says Kent. “She didn’t bring him home.”

“Not healthy, Jeremy? Like starting a fight in front of Kent? Like showing up at a café blocks from where we live; there’s a café every half block in this city. Like . . .” She pauses. She looks around, happy that no one seems to be paying attention, but still lowers her voice further. “I’m not doing this.”

“He’s definitely not Jewish.” He’s looking at the guy who was with Emily and who now sits in a ratty high-backed chair near the front trying hard to pretend he’s flipping through a broadsheet.

“That’s sheer desperation, and obnoxious, and neither, for that matter, is Kent’s dad, or you.” She pauses. “But you do need a coping mechanism.”

He’s fighting for footing. “Did you notice his shoes?” Emily looks at the guy for a lingering second, looks back at Jeremy.

“You are brilliant, Jeremy. I’m not disputing that. You are so kind when you want to be. Kent cherishes you. But you have the biggest blind spot of anyone I’ve ever known. You only see trees.”

“The shoes and the jacket don’t match. Something’s off about that guy. There’s a lie in him. I’m guessing he picked you up at the gym, or after work. You fell for his apparent goofiness. You like a project. But this guy is a charade. He’s using you for something.”

“All trees. No forest.” She shakes her head. She’s practically seething. Enough so that Jeremy lets himself look at her directly, another move he tries to avoid when in a heated conversation because it also can send the message: okay, I’m listening; you might have a point.

“You can’t see the big picture, Jeremy. It’s pathological. You nit and pick and nitpick and nitpick. Challenge and refute. Then, when you finally let down your guard, whenever we got so close, you’d nit and pick and then go nuclear. You destroy everything in your path, tree by tree by tree.”

Jeremy has to pause before responding. He’s impressed by her reasoning, flawed though it is. Usually, she’s led by succinct, true emotion, famous for such profundities as “I’m feeling sad.” It’s how she prefaced the final breakup with Jeremy, after lovemaking on the futon in her living room that was, on its face, intense, but in which Jeremy sensed her absence.

“I know you’re bitter about how things turned out,” Jeremy says, which is true but also ridiculous because Jeremy’s equally bitter.

She ignores his bullshit. She looks up to see, thankfully, that Kent has receded to the piano bench, where he’s munching his muffin.

“It’s not me, Jeremy. It’s everyone. Jeremy, to be blunt, I don’t think you’ve got a friend left. Not a single ally. Not that people wouldn’t help you. You won’t let them. Remember the log cabin?”

“Harry’s messing with me, Emily.”

She laughs. She bursts out. It’s a genuine laugh, a honey drip of irrepressible amusement.

“Harry didn’t want to fight with you. He wanted to help you, and you just attacked him. Get out of the trees, Jeremy. And probably you should stay out of this neighborhood. It’s really not healthy for you.” She looks at Kent. Unstated: It’s really not healthy for Kent. He loves you. You know how much he loves you.

Jeremy feels a vibration in his pocket. He extracts his phone. It’s a call from a private number. He’s about to send the call to voice mail. A call from a private number. He remembers what’s going on with his computer. Who is calling?

He swipes his finger across the screen. “Hold on,” he says into the phone. He cups his finger over the microphone.

“Kent is the forest, Jeremy,” Emily says. She looks him in the eye, draws him in. He wants to put his head on her lap. “Please don’t bother us.”

Jeremy’s arm shoots up. He holds up his hand as if to say: wait, please. With his other hand, he cups the phone against his chest so that whoever is on the other end of the line can’t hear what he’s going to say. He looks at Emily, the slight cherub in her cheeks, the emerging crow’s-feet around her deep brown
eyes, a picture of softness and beauty, someone he, when he’s feeling charitable and condescending, likens to the Giving Tree in the book by Shel Silverstein that he often read to Kent. She gave, Jeremy took, and it seemed to work for everybody.

She senses something powerful in him. “Is everything okay?”

Now is the moment, he thinks. Now he can tell her that he needs to tell her something.

“Where were you last night?”

She raises her eyebrow. Are you kidding me?

“I was on a date. I didn’t spend the night at his house. He came by this morning to take me to coffee. He’s a nice guy, a friend, and nothing more. For now. And you are not entitled to know anything further about my life, Jeremy. If not for Kent, please, do it for me. I need to be able to live without fighting.”

She shakes her head and starts walking away. Jeremy feels his heart thump, unable to respond. So he switches his attention away from it, and to his head. “Hello.”