Dead On Arrival

by Matt Richtel

  You’re a son of a bitch, Alan. A philandering Son. Of. A. Bitch.

  More like Husband of a Bitch.

  You’re blaming me?

  “The little girl sat on the back of the couch watching through the sliding glass window. She could see it coming. But she didn’t move. The little girl, me, I . . . I saw my mom take two bold steps forward. I still couldn’t move. People say these things happen in slow motion, but it’s not so. It’s so fast that you can’t stop it. It only feels like slow motion looking back on it. She shoved him just . . . just at the right angle, I guess. The wrong angle. His slipped and he fell against the glass wall. It was cheap, fractured, breaking, then broken. My dad teetered there. That was slower. I could see it. I couldn’t move. She pushed him again.”

  Jackie had her hands balled along the sides of her cheeks. She rocked. Silence for nearly five minutes. She counted. She looked up.

  “My dad was an asshole philanderer but I’m not sure he deserved to bounce off the cement from eight stories up. In fact, I can say now assuredly that my mother wasn’t supposed to be judge and jury, conflict of interest and all that. The trouble is, you can’t really know that in the moment. She couldn’t. Maybe I should have. I had the gift to intervene and there I stood.”

  She was more composed now. She started talking a bit more philosophically, what it was like to walk through a world where people saw what they want to see and not what really is, people lost in their perspectives and devices, buried in their escapes and perversions, whereas a gifted few could truly see and hear. She told him about the various people who wanted to use her, had used her. She told him not to pity her.

  She dropped her head. “You deserve complete honesty, Dr. Martin.” She paused and swallowed. “My sister, I had a sister, her name was Marissa. Two years younger. She was there that day. We went to live with my grandmother.”

  Jackie explained that she and Marissa were close. Marissa went away for college, to Cornell.

  “She said she couldn’t be around me all the time, that I was too intense. But, obviously, she was wrestling with demons—who wouldn’t, after our childhood—and she had to get away. I could take the blame. I loved her, dearly. We talked all the time,” Jackie said. She swallowed. “In her sophomore year, she jumped from a bridge and killed herself.”

  A tear slipped from Jackie’s right eye.

  “I’d talked to her hours before. I knew she was in trouble. But I did nothing. I couldn’t stop it.” She simultaneously laughed and cried and threw up her hands. “My self-pity has grown tiresome.”

  When she stood, she walked over to Lyle, pulled the piece of paper from his hand, and turned him on his back. She wondered for a moment whether he might be better off dead, as she’d wondered of herself a few times in her life. She propped a pillow under his head so that he might sleep comfortably.

  “I am better now, Lyle. Thanks to you. You saved me, turned my life around.” She told him a story about how she’d gone to Nepal, a tattered soul with a backpack. She’d gotten the monkey scratch, and then came the earthquake. At the chaotic airstrip, she lay down and let fate take over, expecting to die in the hot wind. But fate brought her Lyle, who was in the area building a pop-up clinic to help with a cholera outbreak. That day, of course, he was dealing with chaos at the airstrip, tending to various wounded.

  “I’m sure I was just another warm body to you,” Jackie said. She stroked his hair. She pictured the scene, the hot air blowing dust, people running, a doctor like a superhero seemingly unfazed. He knelt beside her, examined the monkey scratch on her left forearm, asked a few questions. I’m not worth saving, she recalled telling him. I’m unhinged, if you want to know the truth. Better off gone.

  “Nonsense,” he had muttered. He looked up from her at a square, red-painted building with a wall curving in from earthquake damage. It stood to the right of the airstrip’s “parking lot,” which was a dirt area free of brush, and the so-called terminal, where Jackie sat, which consisted of a cement roof held up by pillars, without sides. The whole operation could’ve passed in the States for a half-built bus station.

  Weakly, Jackie had watched Lyle walk to the red-painted building. As Lyle had gotten close to the building, Jackie saw him get intercepted by a uniformed man rushing by. They had a brief exchange.

  “No, no. Too dangerous!” the man had said. Jackie thought she heard the word collapse. Then she watched Lyle ignore the man, walk to the building, open a cellar door beside the collapsing wall and descend stairs. He had returned five minutes later, covered in dust. He’d found the vaccine, administered it, told her she now had three days to get to Kathmandu for a second one, but could even make it a week. He told her she’d be fine and then went on to help someone else.

  Now, back in the office, she stroked his hair again. She stared at him. “I’m so glad you did,” she said.

  Then she knelt beside him and she put her lips onto his lips. She felt his warmth and let her tongue slip into the crevice of his mouth and tasted his sour breath and felt sharp arousal. She pulled back.

  “You are a great man. The world needs you. I need you,” she repeated. “And I am here for you, as you were for me. You will rise.”

  Walking down the stairwell, she let herself look at the piece of paper that Lyle had been clutching. It was the result of a medical test. She took a moment to make sense of it. But then it was clear. Dr. Lyle Martin was infertile. He could never conceive a child.

  Thirty

  In the weeks after Jackie returned from her first Hawthorne trip with Denny, things settled down. She took the Google bus to work, did her putative day job, met with Denny every few days to look at new data on Lantern, went home, and dug. She looked for everything she might find on Lantern, including any incorporation, mentions on the Internet, affiliates, real estate licenses or purchases in Nevada, and so on. She came up blank. But she felt such exquisite purpose.

  She was careful to cover her snooping by using basic hacking techniques to bounce her inquiries from server to server. If anyone cared to be monitoring her, they’d not have been able to do it. She started to doubt anyone cared what she was doing: whoever had been following her hadn’t reappeared. Maybe she’d imagined it.

  She pursued a parallel path into the science of memory and its relationship to the use of technology and the Internet. There wasn’t much out there. A few behavioral studies had found that the bombardment of the brain with information had an impact on memory, but it wasn’t the impact that she was expecting. Memory didn’t get better, as the Google tests suggested, it got worse. For instance, a study from the University of Michigan involved teaching people information and then having them go on a walk. Some study subjects took a walk in a dense urban area and a comparison group walked in a serene rural setting. The ones who walked in nature remembered information much better than those whose brains had been clouded by all the incoming stimulation from the urban setting.

  A more scientific study had been done with rats at the UCSF lab. The rats were hooked up to leads that measured brain activity. Researchers found that rats who were constantly stimulated with new activities—say, presented with new challenges—did not generate as much electrical activity in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. They were having experiences, but not generating new memories (at least that was the presumption; the rats, obviously, could not be asked their own opinion).

  One Saturday, Jackie walked through Union Square. It stunned her to see the extent to which people had their faces buried in their devices. She’d always known it, of course, but as she studied the behavior, she felt like an alien landing on Earth and discovering a race of people with two arms, two legs, and a rectangular metal appendage they stared at as if it brought life. She watched a guy in a wheelchair staring at his phone lose track of his surroundings and roll down a ramp until he toppled.

  As she walked, she sometimes got lost in her own virtual reality. It involved Dr. Martin. She imagined how proud he’d be of her in her in
vestigations. She pictured them walking together, talking about how they were dissecting the world, their fingers touching lightly, a union of hearts and minds. She wanted to find him, talk to him, but she knew he needed to heal. Only at the most lucid moments did she realize she herself was unhinging. Her growing uncertainty about Denny, who had treated her like a beloved little sister, was particularly irksome. He continued to apply only the gentlest pressure to have her help him solve the Lantern problem. You’re my quarterback, he’d say, and my star wide receiver and my entire defense.

  It’s just that things didn’t quite add up.

  Then one day when she was home sick with a head cold, watching Sneaky Pete on Amazon, her cell phone rang.

  “Ms. Tether?” a man’s voice said.

  She almost hung up when she remembered that Tether was one of the fake surnames she’d used when calling around Hawthorne—realtors, the local tax office, et cetera—looking for indirect information about Lantern.

  “Yes, it’s Jennifer Tether,” she said. “I hope you’ll forgive my head cold.”

  She felt a moment’s gratitude that she was sick; it always helped when massaging someone to look a tad helpless.

  “I’m with the utility district; you left a message.”

  “Yes, thank you for calling back. I’m the administrator for Denny Watkins at Google. We’re moving our payment system. I need to change the account.”

  “I thought that was handled out of the Intel account.”

  “Jesus,” she said, trying to sound as exasperated as possible. “Too many damn chefs. Oh, excuse my language, it’s the cold medicine.”

  He laughed. He gave her a name and number of his current contact; she promised him that she’d get it ironed out.

  Intel?

  That was just the beginning. From there, she did a reverse directory search to find the origin of the contact and phone number held for the Lantern account. She followed one digital bread crumb after the next and wound up finding that it led to a WhoIs directory—which lists the administrators of Internet domain names—for a group called TechPacAlliance, or TPA. There was an e-mail address: TPAadministrator@TPA.net, which she dared not e-mail for fear of outing herself. She could only find one other reference to the TechPacAlliance. It was from a tech policy conference brochure from three years earlier, a mention of the sponsorship by the TPA and its partners: Google, Apple, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Verizon, AT&T, and Sony. And several international affiliates, big-name telecommunications affiliates, like China Telecom and Orange from France.

  Not a mention before or since. It just disappeared, this veritable who’s who of tech and telecom companies.

  She clicked back and stared at the names. They were giants, obviously, competitors, direct and indirect, not all in the same businesses, not exactly. With many common interests—in everything from technical standards to the mutual value of spreading the digital culture and gospel. She lost the afternoon surfing the Internet and came out none the wiser for it.

  She slept more poorly, ate little, became obsessed with understanding the game, the falsehoods. Dr. Martin had put it so well: people put you in terrible positions. More than once, thinking of Denny’s sleight of hand, his failure to disclose, it was as if her mother had asked her to help push her father off the balcony.

  She thought often about Dr. Martin—Lyle she called him when she had her internal conversations with him—and wished she might ask him what to do. She wouldn’t be plaintive, of course, he’d hate that. She’d be his peer, with a hint of protégée, knowing that he’d been through times in his life where he’d had to buck the conventional thinking, fight through idiocy, get to the truth.

  After work the next day, she felt well enough to go for a walk along the wetlands near Google’s campus. It was late February and still getting dark relatively early. A half mile from campus, now well into dusk, she heard a bicycle come up behind her. She turned and saw Adam Stiles, the nerd who couldn’t keep his eyes off her, despite the fact she tried to never engage.

  “Hi, Jackie. It’s nice out here.”

  He dismounted and stood beside his bike. “You want some company?”

  He was so awkward.

  “I’m good, Adam, thank you for the offer.”

  Adam swallowed hard and glanced at the surroundings.

  “You think you’re so special.”

  Her alarm bells exploded, her throat constricted, the hot blaze of terror. She thought back to a self-defense class in college and looked at Adam’s windpipe.

  “Adam . . .” She looked around. The spot was oddly isolated, given the otherwise wide-open terrain. They stood at the bottom of a hill, a cement retaining wall to the right and the bay on the left.

  “I think you’re special, too,” he said.

  “Okay . . .” Maybe he was just being awkward, not aggressive. What to do? What to do?

  “I know you’re special. I’m not talking about working with Denny, that’s cool or whatever. You’re special special. I bet you’re the smartest person in the whole Googleverse.”

  Her heart slowed. He was confessing, that’s all.

  “Adam, I have a boyfriend.”

  “Bullshit!”

  She reflexively put up her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you don’t. You think you’re the only one who can snoop around.”

  She reached into her pocket and felt for her phone. She could hit him with that.

  “Help!” she suddenly screamed. “Hel—”

  “I wish you wouldn’t lie to me!” Adam said. “You don’t have a boyfriend. But you want a boyfriend.

  “I’ll be your boyfriend.”

  He stepped forward. It all happened so fast. Did he fall into her, or did she push him? They were entangled, falling, scrambling. He was scraping at her, or defending himself and she was doing the same thing. She pushed and hit, and Adam covered and hit or defended himself, a nerdy scuffle of confused intentions. Jackie saw a dark shape standing over Adam. Almost comically, she thought Batman and wondered if she were imagining things in her happy place. Then her vision further righted and she could see that it was Denny. He plunged his meaty fist into Adam’s face. Then he put a knee onto Adam’s chest.

  “You’re going down, you son of a bitch,” Denny said.

  A moment later, Jackie was sitting up, refusing to cry.

  “I saw him follow you,” Denny said. “Okay, okay, okay, okay,” he added, looking at her terror, and reached to touch her shoulder and she let him. On his phone, he dialed 911 and told Adam not to move a goddamned muscle.

  In Jackie’s first act after her salvation, she took Denny’s phone from him and pressed end to sever the distress call. If there was one thing she knew, it was this: she’d rather solve things herself. All of it.

  A week later, she returned to her job. Adam had been let go by the company, nothing more said about it. She had news for Denny, big news.

  “I figured it out,” she whispered. Then went into the Basement in the Google X building. They sat at the conference table and Jackie spread out the various data sets comparing memory retention to Internet speeds, pixelation, frame rates, and so on and so forth.

  “Tell me,” Denny said. He paused. “Are you getting enough sleep?”

  She dismissed the question. “What’s the common theme?” she asked him rhetorically.

  “Was it the thing with Adam?” He ignored her question.

  She grit her teeth so hard that it hurt in the back of her skull. She kept her hands in her pockets, so as not to show the little scars where she’d chewed on her fingers. No, she shook her head.

  “I have your back, Jackie. Always. Adam, he was socially awkward, sure, but harmless, right? Trust me, it’s taken care of.”

  A deep breath, one, two, three. She counted. She discovered herself smiling. She was so sure that Denny was full of shit now and it was nice to be sure of something.

  “Of course,” she said. “What’s the common theme, Den
ny?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what we can’t figure out.”

  It struck Jackie that Denny had used the pronoun “we” but she ignored it. She took a red pen and circled some of the numbers.

  “It’s so obvious that I’m surprised I’d not seen it earlier.”

  He looked blankly at her. It wasn’t obvious to him.

  “All the transmissions where the memory changed—they’re wireless. All the ones where it didn’t change, or very little, were hardwired Internet connections. Some study rooms used wireless, some wired, some either or. We didn’t think it made a difference.”

  “But I thought it had to do with speeds or something like that?”

  “Of course, so did I.” She tried not to exclaim it excitedly but that’s how she felt, like she really had pieced something together. “We were looking for some subtlety instead of the big fat thing under our noses.”

  Denny picked at his beard and looked at the pieces of paper.

  “Doesn’t that leave us little further along than we were before? I mean, I don’t want to diminish your finding. It’s great. It’s just that we’re still stuck not knowing what circumstances lead to what outcomes.”

  She didn’t answer him right away. She didn’t want to rebuff his silly objection; of course this was a revelation. She also wanted to keep some of her ideas to herself. If some of her budding hypotheses were right, this was explosive stuff. Something was being triggered inside the brain by the telecommunications transmissions. If she was right, it wasn’t just Wi-Fi connections but, broadly, radio transmissions. When they were sent in certain bursts, certain patterns, these ubiquitous transmissions had the impact of putting people into a kind of catatonic state. It left her totally freaked out and it was also, perversely, somewhat obvious; the human brain was, fundamentally, fueled by electrical impulses. It was how cells moved information. Now, she—or the people she was working for—had muddled into a discovery about how the bombardment of the brain by certain pulses could distort neurological activity.