The Doomsday Equation (9 page)

“Sure it wasn’t a lion?”

Nik blinks. “What?”

“Not a cat burglar. A lion. Escaped from the zoo.”

Nik shakes his head, looks hurt. “It’s ridiculous.”

“What is?”

“Opening a lion’s cage. That’s just courting disaster.”

It’s Nik at his most animated. Jeremy laughs. “Not everyone shares your sense of decorum, PeaceNik.” Jeremy pauses. “Email me that stuff, pronto. Not from here.” Another pause. “Go to the gym. Lay low around some guys with big jabs.”

Jeremy starts walking to the subway, more convinced now someone is fucking with him. Rattling Nik too, or looking for something, business intelligence. Harry will enlighten Jeremy.

One of Jeremy’s phones buzzes. He pulls both from his crowded pocket. It’s the iPhone, with a reminder: dr.panckl.

He stares at it. He feels the tightness in his left pectoral, where the pain has been intermittent, sometimes severe. Coupled with night sweats and tired bouts during the day. Might be stress, his doctor tells him, but, just in case, she orders tests. His phone is reminding him to call and schedule the MRI. He’s told no one, not even Emily. She knows, of course, that Jeremy’s dad died young from the bad kind of Hodgkin’s
lymphoma, but that was before you could treat anything under the sun. And that his mother, notwithstanding the wrenching chemo near the end, lived to be fairly ripe.

He pockets the phone, looks up, sees the woman. Thin, perfect. And definitely familiar. From the café the night before, and then again from the bar.

H
EY!”

She looks up.

Jeremy starts to run. “Hey!”

He picks up steam, steps into the bicycle lane on the edge of the street to avoid a half dozen colleagues walking, spilling out from under two shared umbrellas.

The woman slips around to the driver’s seat, hops in. The car starts to peel away. It’s something bland, Jeremy thinks, a blue-gray Hyundai. He’s in the street now, fully unleashing healthy, practiced legs, decent lungs, and DNA that made him a sufficiently capable track athlete to win a Rhodes. Not sufficiently capable to catch a sedan, accelerating. He recognizes the woman, right? Same person from the night before?

He hears the horn. From behind. Another car approaching. It swerves, splashing rainwater onto Jeremy’s jeans.

It dawns on him he might want to get a ride from the car passing him, try to chase the sedan. Instead, he finds himself yelling: “Watch it, asshole!”

Brake lights go on in the car, a BMW. The driver slides down his window, then thinks better of it. Takes off.
Jeremy yells: “The prom queen called. She wants her low-end Beamer back!”

Ten minutes later, damp, furious, Jeremy descends into a packed BART station to head to Berkeley. Discovers train delays. Thirty minutes due to some refuse on the tracks near City Center in Oakland.

Jeremy forces his way onto a bench in the tunnel and pulls out his iPad. He looks at the map. Red, red, red. He opens a new window and clicks on a link that will let him delve further into the variables that, allegedly, have prompted the computer to predict war. Chief among those variables: changes in conflict rhetoric, language that presages war.

While the computer whirs, calling up the data, Jeremy marvels at this particular capability—the one that allows him to track the language of the world. It is, to Jeremy, one of the most powerful tools afforded by the Internet. It is the equivalent of giving the world a blood test, taking its temperature, assessing its mood. Or, rather, it will become that. Eventually. For now, the Internet is remarkable at capturing what everyone is saying, and even organizing that data—by region, topic, media (Twitter versus blog versus newspaper), communicator (politician versus CEO versus activist).

It was amazing for Jeremy to watch the Arab spring and the protests in Russia, organized around Twitter feeds, and social networks, spontaneous calls to action in which the language elicits, organizes and stokes conflict. An amazing nearly one-to-one relationship between words and thoughts and action.

More broadly, Jeremy thinks that this development of mining and sifting the world’s conflict rhetoric could help answer an age-old philosophical question about the relationship between language, thought and action.

Philosophers and linguists have for millennia debated the relationship. To what extent are the words we choose insights into what we think—not what we want to communicate but what we really
think
? On one hand, of course, it is very easy to lie about what we’re thinking, making words fundamentally untrustworthy. Clearly, Hitler did intend to invade Russia, despite his protestations otherwise, and George W. Bush did not believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Words, not true thoughts. To that end, Plato and others who engaged in the most powerful early analysis of communication thought of language in terms of rhetoric: not what do we think but what do we want to communicate? Or, put another way, what do we want other people to think we think, or what do we want to persuade
them
to think?

But where Jeremy thinks the Internet is so powerful is in the way it creates such a huge sample size of language that it betrays what we, the human race, think. All the linguistic data, unprecedented insights into the human psyche, a global inkblot test, a linguistic prism into our collective subconscious, where we’ve been emotionally and where we’re going, a digital augur, or, as Jeremy sometimes prefers, the Freud machine.

Part of a larger embrace of Big Data, aimed at predicting the stock market, of course, but also forecasting political tastes, weather, consumers’ susceptibility to pricing changes and their shopping desires.

Just before Jeremy’s fall from grace, there was a party held in his honor at a two-tone mansion off Fillmore. It was hosted by one of the handful of Silicon Valley socialites with that knack for convening, at a moment’s notice, fifty interesting and smart people, along with journalists. The evite heralded: “Make PC, Not War.” Computers, not conflict.

Partygoers came mostly for the interesting cocktails, using pomegranate juice or fresh leaves picked from such-and-such garden. But also to connect to, or stay connected to, Jeremy, just in case he became the next Zuckerberg. His own vertical, his little satellite world, opportunists, but also, given the highly politicized nature of the quest, ideologues, academics, curious government officials domestic and international and, of course, venture capitalists with military backgrounds—a staple in Silicon Valley going back to the creation of the region by the military brats who started Hewlett-Packard.

What they didn’t know, or some may have only sensed, was that Jeremy soon would be not the next Zuckerberg but, rather, the next
Hindenburg
. A week before the party, the Pentagon had told him the conflict algorithm had failed. He was waiting for Andrea to call to tell him when he could get on an airplane to Iraq, or Afghanistan, to check the results for himself, do the field research. He’d already packed a bag so, per Andrea and the Pentagon’s admonitions, he could pick up and climb on a plane at any moment.

Meantime, he pacified himself with figs and goat cheese and high-potency frozen vodka.

Drunk, in the shadows, he overheard the half dozen late-night stragglers descend into an argument about whether Big Data could be used to predict individual behaviors, like the likelihood of suicide. For instance, could someone’s communications or movement patterns—as measured by a mobile phone—be a predictor of whether the person is getting depressed or uncommunicative, suggesting eventual suicidal ideations?

Could it predict whether someone is becoming hostile, or even homicidal?

Jeremy heard one of them say: “I have a prediction. Sometime soon, Stillwater will let loose with a hostile outburst.”

Another said: “You don’t even need a calculator to tell you that.”

Lots of hushed laughter.

Jeremy, unseen, receded to the basement, to a guest room. He called Emily, who told him to calm down. He hung up and slammed the iPhone down on the bed.
I’ll fucking show them.

He passed out that night, furious, with an idea, the seeds of “Program Princip,” the algorithm named for the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Jeremy’s idea was to try to go deeper than merely understanding when a conflict might start, to understanding who might spark it. Not the obvious person—like an aggressive and politically motivated President Bush—but someone lesser known. Could Jeremy take all the increasingly public information about the connections between and among people and figure out who belongs at the center of a conflict?

Another brainstorm, a terrific one, marketable, at least. But personal too. At its heart, Jeremy wondered if he might be able to use the program to figure out who was lying to him—Andrea, Harry, Evan. Who, even then, was undermining him? Who is Jeremy’s enemy? Or who is his most central enemy?

It never dawned on Jeremy that night that the very problem might be Jeremy.

In the present, his computer beeps. It is returning the data. Unfolding before him, the report on where the rhetoric of the world has changed so much that the computer now projects Armageddon. T minus three days. Fighting off fatigue, he takes in the screen, a menu at the top. It reads: “five entities.”

Jeremy purses his lips. There has been a material change in the language of conflict in five different categories. The categories materialize:

            
North Korea (related), + 14 percent

            
Moscow (related), + 9 percent

            
Mexico (related), + 46 percent

            
Congo (related), + 6 percent

            
Fertile Crescent (related), − 12 percent

He taps his right toe on the ground, nervous energy. With an index finger, he points at the word “Mexico.” His finger is so close it nearly touches the screen. Forty-six percent—a veritable explosion in conflict language coming from Mexican authorities or from other figureheads around the world relating to Mexico. Something’s going on to the south.

He calls up another window with the map. It’s seething red, pulsing around the globe. He runs his mouse over Mexico. A pop-up box shows: 112,336,538, 8.8 percent. The population and its annual growth.

He looks on the bottom right of the map, at the countdown clock. 55:19:27. Hours, minutes and seconds.

Jeremy startles at the buzz in his pocket. Private number. He picks it up from the desk. “I’m on the Do Not Call Registry and have retained a legion of rabid plaintiff attorneys to enforce it with threat of lawsuit and execution.”

He hears nothing on the other end of the phone. Then a sound in the background, a horn or loudspeaker, maybe a hint of breathing from a caller. Then the line goes dead.

He recalls the list of regions with changing rhetoric: North Korea, Moscow and Congo experiencing rising tensions. Might
mean something. The Fertile Crescent, the Middle East, experiencing dulling tensions. That’s at least one variable he can toss out.

He slips the phone into his pocket. On his tablet, in the window with the Rhetoric statistics, he swipes the line about Mexico, and discovers a place consumed by the language of war.

J
ANINE FEELS THE
Earth move. The San Andreas Fault. A nuclear blast. Judgment Day.

Her phone.

She opens an eye.

She’s been dreaming. She’s drenched. There’s a vibration, something deep. Where is it coming from? Not the end, not yet. It’s from beneath her pillow.

“Okay, okay.” She reaches underneath the sweaty pillow and feels the vibrating phone. She registers the darkness. How long has she been asleep?

She flips open the phone. It’s 12:17. There are two texts. That’s very bad. One text is bad news. Two, worse.

Both from a private number. The first reads: “Rouge.”

She doesn’t let herself acknowledge it, or its meaning. She reads the second: “Maintenant. Hier.”

Red.

Now. Yesterday.

She picks up the pillow and uses it to wipe the sweat from
her face. She searches for images from her dream, something about a boy shooting a dog in a field. She flips on the light. She swings her jeans-clad legs over the bed and stares at the fax machine.
Maintenant
. It won’t be long.

She takes a voracious slug from the tea next to the bed. It both quenches her thirst and prompts a gag. No training, no will, she thinks, can allow the body to work if it gets only a few hours of sleep each day. She places the tea back on the worn copy of
The Killer Angels,
which she picked up for the title and discovered had nothing to do, really, with murderers or angels. But was about the Battle of Gettysburg. She can’t put it down, and it is in some minor part responsible for her insomnia. Brothers fighting brothers, courage, but all the blood spilled in vain, by a godless nation. This is her guilty pleasure. The last few years, emotionally isolated, often out of communication with anyone she can trust, traveling from one bed to the next, the only common thread her books.

Of course, there is only one book, the Bible, the word.

She thinks back to how the Guardians first enlightened her about The Book, when they found her, covered in filth, starving, a child of war, in ruins on the border of Lebanon. She couldn’t have been twelve years old, and she’d been in a terrible fight with two older boys, and routed them—over ownership of a water bottle. Just another day in the refugee camps; she’d been raped, her mother too, among the other daily indignities. Then a man lifted her from the dirt. He had bad teeth, smelled of American cheese but had an angelic face, a thick cross around his neck, and a Bible. She flailed and kicked at him too. And he took her attacks,
and smiled, what’s the word, “beatifically,” and he filled her water bottle. And then, trite as she’d come to think of it, he filled her soul.

He was a Guardian, of course. And he eventually trusted her enough to tell her the truth about him and the Guardians. Their secret work, how the network was sworn to protect the Holy Land, The City, Jerusalem. To keep it from being “compromised.”

That was the word the Guardians found most distasteful, evil—compromise.

If there is compromise, if the God-fearing do not truly adhere to the word of God, then the Messiah will not return.

She knows by heart the passage the man read her from Genesis:

            
I will be with you and will bless you, for to you and to your offspring I will give all these lands, and I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham your father. I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and will give to your offspring all these lands. And in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.

But, she asked: aren’t the enemies the Jews, the deadly army of the Israelites, the Muslims, and the other heretics?

He smiled.

Of course not, he said. Not the true believers, the ones who favor and follow the true word of God.

Think of the biblical passage, he told her: all nations on Earth will be favored if the Bible is truly adhered to. When he explained the meaning to her, she immediately understood the equation. Israel must be reestablished as a Holy Land, one in which the God-fearing descendants of Abraham embrace the covenant. Only then will all the nations be blessed. Only then will the Messiah come. Only then will there be no more hunger, no more rape, no more fruitless tribalism.

The Guardians gave her truth, meaning, safety. Hope.

And, over the years, deadly training.

She shudders with awe when she thinks of her transformation. She was raised to trust only Syrian Christians. But what good did they do her? Weren’t they just as responsible for the rape of her dusty village, her rape? Weren’t her supposed brothers and sisters just as culpable as the Muslim hypocrites and the pious but heathen Israeli army? All the generals and politicians, all the king’s men.

Not so the Guardians. They are not one ethnic group. But they are connected in their belief. They are a true family,
his
children. Her siblings.

She will do anything to protect them, help save them. And now they ask a new task.

The woman called Janine closes her eyes and allows herself to imagine she’s got one big eye on the top of her head, like a Cyclops. She’s mere hours from helping to open up the Earth. Throw the ugly parts into it, like the Cyclops, scrape things clean, then let God, the one and only, sort things out.

The fax machine beeps, answers, begins to print.

Janine reaches beneath the bed. She pulls out a small suitcase, a flee bag, she calls it, just enough stuff to let her survive if she has to go on the lam. She pulls out her last clean shirt, her last clean not-whore shirt, a green blouse she made sure was loose enough not to accentuate her breasts or attract attention. Still, she thought, almost too flattering. She pushes it aside, finds a long-sleeve gray T-shirt with a University of Arizona crest.

She lifts and smells it. Not clean but dry.

The fax is halfway through its printing.

She takes off her shirt, pulls out a bra from the flee bag, clasps it, pulls on the gray T-shirt. She opens the first text. She responds: “And a good morning to you too.” She knows any vague response will suffice to acknowledge receipt.

Rouge. Red. Blood. A simple, juvenile code. Kill.

Maintenant, hier. Now. Yesterday. Translation: No time to plan. Act.

And, within that, an unstated implication: Something is going wrong. Very, very wrong.

The printing is three-quarters done. She begins to make out the face coming through on the fax. She begins to recognize it. She whispers: “No. Gracias.” Not this man, this fierce individualist, with a big brain and a divine spark. He takes no side, other than his own, and his truth. Still, there are no noncombatants.

This is the target and this is her job. And this man, the one appearing on the fax, is, apparently, the source of sudden and acute trouble. He’s doubtless begun to piece it together.

The face fully appears, the fax near complete. And now, with a tight, bitter smile, she thinks she understands the dream
she just awoke from. This man is the mongrel shredded by bullets. She’s the boy with the gun.

At the edge of the facsimile, a scrawled note: Make it amateur.

She feels new sweat beads on her brow. On top of everything else, it needs to be messy.