by Matt Richtel
The driver was warning Lyle that, distracted, he’d swerved into the lane. The human driver shouted something Lyle couldn’t hear. Lyle stopped along the edge of the far right lane. The fracas and pace and bouncing headlights of the cars speeding Oak disoriented Lyle. The feeling jostled him, sparked a memory of Steamboat, the cold and dark, that he couldn’t quite grasp. He looked into the fray of oncoming lights and couldn’t see the bubble car now. Had it disappeared?
Then, boom, there it was again, nearly on him, just a car length back. It had been hidden behind larger vehicles. The bubble neared. Fear jolted Lyle and he pedaled again.
Lyle willed himself to take a deep breath. He went right on Steiner. The traffic thinned. Lyle kept a modest pace. He craned over his right shoulder. The bubbly autonomous vehicle turned right on Steiner. So dutiful, it used its blinker and slithered onward, a perfect citizen, an innocuous robot, a guileless storm trooper. Lyle sped up. Then screeched the brakes when a car door opened. He swerved, righted himself, then at Duboce Avenue he went left and made a quick right on Sanchez Street; glancing behind him, he took another right on Fourteenth.
The driverless car went right too. There could be no doubt. This seemed to Lyle to be of zero interest to anybody but Lyle. Either these cars had become so common no one noticed, or everyone was so consumed with their own thing that they’d not have noticed a pink elephant following Lyle. He pedaled until he came to an alley and took a sharp right into it, then stopped. The car followed him. Lyle dismounted his bike.
The car slowed. It looked to Lyle like a bubble with a brain.
The car inched forward, and Lyle stepped in front of it. He scanned the attached houses across the street, a short, stark white one decorated with purple perennials attached to a taller greenish-gray house with exterior metal staircases. Was anyone in the window to bear witness? No such luck. Lyle pulled out his phone. He called up the video function and hit record.
The car had come to a complete stop ten or so feet from Lyle. He couldn’t help imbue it with human characteristics. In this case, Lyle decided that it had made a decision. It wasn’t going to run him over. He walked to the front of the car, his video still recording. Lyle, careful not to move out from the front of the car so that it might have an escape path, peered inside. He nearly laughed when he saw the cup holder. Maybe autonomous vehicles got thirsty. Other than that, the bulb of technology wanted for anything human. Sterile, beige leather seats matched either side of an instrument panel between. A trough stood in place of the dash with more gadgetry beneath it.
Lyle looked up at the black eye on the top.
The car lurched forward.
Lyle lunged out of the way. Off went the car. Just a roll of the wheel at first and then a sincere acceleration.
Lyle looked around. Did anyone see that? Did he see that? The car disappeared down Lloyd, took a right and by the time Lyle hopped on his bike again, it had disappeared. He didn’t stop riding until he’d reached City Hall. He took his bicycle onto the train with him. No car would follow him here. Not that he particularly cared. He was thinking of the Google car the way he’d think of a patient’s medical symptom, not as something to wish away but as a key piece of evidence. What was the car telling him?
Mostly, it was reiterating to him what his note had told him: he wasn’t imagining things. Second, it was telling him that whatever strange situation he’d stumbled into involved a powerful actor, powerful enough to involve a driverless car. How powerful did that make someone?
It did give him two disparate pieces of evidence to connect, and disparate clues were of immense value to Lyle when he’d taken on medical mysteries. The more disparate the better. Someone from central California with a pronounced stiff neck and sound sensitivity could have valley fever. Talk about disparate: here was this driverless car and then there was the note on his refrigerator. The note referred to seizures and channelopathy and Lyle had trouble seeing any Venn diagram with an overlap between these disease states and a Google car.
The note mentioned Google. And now the car. What was someone trying to do?
Draw him in?
Warn him?
Taunt him?
To what end?
Lyle looked through rows of commuters at the map on the wall over the door. He knew where he was headed and hadn’t fully admitted it to himself, or the reasons why. He could see the stop on the map, downtown Berkeley, Shattuck Avenue. He was going to find Melanie. His jaw tightened. The last time he saw her might’ve been eighteen months earlier. She’d stopped by his house with a bag of groceries. “Green things,” she said, “to help your liver process.” It was loving, painful, and patronizing. She’d looked around his house like a detective. “I’m here if you need me,” she’d said and closed the door quietly.
The time before that had been their last screaming fight—her screaming at him to wake up and him fighting with silence. Then her acceptance had set in.
What inspired this visit?
The question slithered over and around his brain, a deadly snake in his valley of denial. He stared absently at a woman clicking on her tablet and considered the question. He was going to warn Melanie, right? Warn her about what? A note he’d written to himself? He shook his head and knew that to be too simplistic. He swiveled his head and watched the man sitting next to him pecking at a game on his phone, transfixed. So, Lyle thought, maybe I’m going to ask her if she’d heard of anything like this potential pandemic; she’s a nurse, and one of the most well-read and thoughtful people anywhere. If it’s out there, she’ll know.
He shook his head and watched another man wearing headphones while staring at a phone he held so close to his face that it couldn’t possibly have been good for his eyes. It was oddly peaceful, Lyle thought, all these people so lost in their virtual worlds that Lyle could just stare at them, lapping up and observing the world without interference or conflict. No risk of interaction. Then he had a sudden thought about what he was going to ask Melanie. The question sent a tremor through him. He tried to will the question away and it clung and festered and he knew instantly he couldn’t deny it.
I’m going to ask her why I can’t do it anymore.
I can’t figure anything out. I don’t know how to try. Then he smiled, a private smile, because he knew even that wasn’t quite it. He settled back in his seat and let his shoulders relax. He was going to let the thing reveal itself to him, this powerful motivation leading him east. He looked back at the man sitting next to him lost in a game that involved shooting blocks that, when he hit them, turned into stars and soared and then turned into points.
A drip of drool gathered on the corner of the man’s lip.
Lyle closed his eyes, searching broken, blurry memories from his trip to Steamboat, and disparate clues.
Thirty-Six
Jackie Badger pulled her rental into the dirt parking lot at Lantern outside of Hawthorne. Alarm bells went off. Why were there six other cars in the lot?
She found out when she walked in the heavy, steel door. In the middle of the room, cubicles had been pushed back to make way for a conference table. Around the table sat eight people, most of whom she recognized but only distantly. Lantern representatives from various tech companies. They’d gathered only once before, at least in her presence, just after Denny’s death. They’d called it a fact-finding mission, but mostly it led to an internal, off-the-record explanation that Denny had died from a heart attack and that the Lantern program would be put on hold. Jackie had held her tongue, not sure what to say, absorbing occasional pointed looks from Alex and, at least once, giving one back. Would there be profit in accusing Alex of, what, murdering Denny? Police were not called, foul play never asserted, which Jackie rightly assumed was the product of wanting to keep this eye-popping project under wraps.
Now they’d called Jackie back to Nevada. It was early evening. The six men and two women sitting around the table were a characteristic lot of ambitious nerds. The men wore jeans and loose T-shirts and
fashionable, colorful tennis shoes. Both women wore sweatshirts. In the middle of the table, a speakerphone with a green light on the side. People listening in. Jackie figured telecommunications giants. At the head sat Alex, as petite as Jackie, no less feisty.
“I should have brought donuts,” Jackie said, seeking composure. She unzipped a light jacket.
“Have a seat, Jackie,” said Alex.
“I left something in my car,” Jackie said. “Can I go grab it?”
“Get it later,” said a man she recognized as belonging to Microsoft.
Jackie had vacillated about responding to the request for her presence. In the end, she decided she held plenty of cards.
“I thought Lantern was disbanded.”
Alex cleared her throat. She had evidently been christened here to take the lead. Maybe she’d always been in the lead. It looked to Jackie like an intervention.
“Jackie, we know about Steamboat.”
Jackie blinked several times rapidly.
“Excuse me?”
“We know,” Alex said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Damn it!” One of the men slapped the table. “We need to know what happened.”
“Alex,” Jackie said, glowering at Alex, “what is this? You . . . you took out Denny so that you could, what, take over?”
“Jackie, I’m not sure you realize how serious this is. You’ve effectively beta tested a very powerful, very dangerous system, and you’ve taken it over from the inside. We need you to remand control, and walk away, or . . .”
Jackie looked at the other members of the group, swerving her head.
“I have no idea what Alex—is that your name, Alex?—is talking about. Steamboat? Where is that even? Colorado, if memory serves. Something happened there?”
Alex pursed her lips.
“Jackie, this is pointless. I’ve prepared everyone here for your manipulations and cons. I’ve also prepared them for your genius, which is the better part of what is dangerous here. When I realized the system had been used, co-opted, I, we, did a lot of homework. It’s clear that you chose a time and a place remote enough that it might not be traced through news reports. You monkeyed with flight logs—or someone did—and must’ve taken a dozen other steps to cover your tracks, not the least of which was deploying technology that appears to have turned to mush the memories of people on the ground there.”
“My God, Alex, listen to yourself. You sound like someone with intimate knowledge of whatever it is you’re accusing me of. Is anyone else hearing what I’m hearing? It sounds like an outright confession. Something very, very sinister is going on, and I’m out of here.”
“Jackie, who is Dr. Lyle Martin?”
Jackie reddened, froze like a strawberry-colored ice statue.
“You’re in cahoots with him somehow, right?” Alex said.
“Who is—”
“Some doctor who was on the plane, and that Jackie appears to be following, or communicating with,” Alex said, then looked at Jackie. “That’s right. I can do my own sleuthing.”
“He’s a friend. This has nothing to do with—”
“This is how this is going to go down, Jackie. You are dismissed from Google, put on notice that we will, even at the risk to this group, go public with your beta or alpha test, or whatever you want to call it, and pursue murder charges in Denny’s death. Let this end here.”
Faces turned to Jackie. She took a long pause.
“Before any of you reach any conclusion here, I want to offer you an alternative version of events. Alex is evidently the real genius here, and she is scapegoating me. I suspect she wrested control of this from Denny, maybe took him out. I think I know why, too.”
“Jackie, I can’t even get into the system. Somehow, you’ve locked us out.”
“Lies. You know I’m on to you. You’re testing, preparing. You’re worried you might actually have to use Lantern. Denny explained it to me. Look at what’s happening in the world; it’s just as you worried: an authoritarian got elected, separatists storming Capitol Hill armed to the teeth, or a gunman indiscriminately killing toddlers at a preschool field trip— the list goes on.”
She directed her voice to the speakerphone. “Overseas, too. What nation-state is safe? Right?” she said. “I’m not sure if it’s altruism driving you, or the business of self-interest in keeping a relatively calm world. In any case, Alex, you’ve taken full advantage of your partners. What would China Telecom or Orange do if they knew you’d been toying around with their access points?”
“You’re done, Jackie,” Alex said. “This is not a toy. This is dangerous, even deadly, and it was in Steamboat.” Alex shook her head. “Don’t pretend you don’t know that, Jackie.”
“Wait until I go public. Wait until I tell people that we—the tech world—are responsible for the problem in the first place.” Jackie suddenly stood, her voice rising.
“You’re done, Jackie,” Alex repeated.
Jackie refused to back down. She dug in. “Everyone in this group knows what I’m talking about, Alex. You came together initially because we felt we had a duty to deal with side effects of the digital world we’ve created.”
“Enough!”
Jackie put up a hand. “Maybe it was more selfish than that, but that’s at least partly true—an altruism, an effort to deal with the side effects of our own work, your work. Our industry, our spectacular innovation, has led us to this place, this culture of fury. With all these devices, people are gorging on ideas that reinforce their political and social views. They are getting instant reminders when someone has affronted these precious perspectives, and, all the while, they are so facedown in their gadgets, they are losing their ability to empathize, cooperate, compromise. We’ve created a path of least resistance for people to escape and disengage. That’s precisely what Denny thought.”
Alex pushed herself back from the table, an indication she’d had enough. “Regardless of the half merits to what you’re saying, you’re not wriggling out of this.”
“You’ve created a fail-safe, and you evidently tested it, and you want a fall guy, or fall woman,” Jackie said. “You need to get rid of me because I’ve put it all together. I know that you and your partners have been swapping out individual wireless routers to ones with faster speeds—ones that can send the kinds of arrhythmic radio bursts that lead to hypnotic states. You know what I’m talking about: the cable or phone company calls and offers to upgrade your model, promising faster speeds. People are gobbling up the free new modems and routers. They love faster service from upgraded radio and cell-phone towers. Oh, but do they know that Lantern will put them on hold and erase whatever grieves them?”
“This sounds a lot like a confession, Jackie.”
“Hardly. I’m telling you everything I know, and that can endanger you.”
Alex stood. “I have proof,” she blurted. She looked solemnly at her colleagues. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. It’s personally very disturbing, painful.
“Let me direct your attention to my screen.” The brushed silver Apple laptop had been sitting in front of Alex the entire time, top closed. She leaned over and opened the top, clicked some keys, and turned the device to face the table.
“What is this?” asked the man from Microsoft.
“It’s a video taken from the day that Denny died.” On the screen, Denny sat in a chair in the room downstairs, outside the testing chamber. Alex moved the cursor over the virtual play button and pressed down. The video began. Denny appeared to be reading some papers. He leafed through the papers, underlined a passage with a pen, read some more. It went on for a minute.
“What the hell?” Alex said.
“I’m not sure what this tells us,” said a woman to Alex’s left.
“What’s going on there?” said a voice from the speaker.
“This isn’t the right video,” Alex said. The image remained innocuous, Denny reading away. “It must be a mix-
up.” Alex looked at Jackie, who shook her head and smirked. “I’ll find the right one. In the meantime, I have something much better.
“I’m going to show you video of Jackie boarding a flight to Steamboat. It’s taken from airport security. I was able to get ahold of it. You’ll be able to see the date, and the time stamp. So this can be the end of this.”
She turned her laptop around, clicked and clacked, turned it back. A grainy image appeared that showed a line of passengers lined up to board. The angle of the video suggested it was taken from a camera embedded on the large monitor behind the gate’s ticket counter. Alex pressed play and the passengers started to board.
“No way,” a voice said.
A petite woman walked past the counter and onto the jet bridge. Her face became unmistakable. It wasn’t Jackie. It was Alex.
The room exploded into chaos.
Jackie stared at Alex and walked to the door.
“Denny warned me,” Alex said. She was tapping on the window of Jackie’s rental. Jackie put the car in reverse. Several of the group’s members stood in the doorway, listening to Alex scream.
“When Denny brought you on, he told me he’d never met anyone like you,” Alex yelled. “He said you could solve any problem. It wasn’t a compliment, Jackie. It was part of a short but pointed explanation about why we needed to limit what we disclosed to you. He didn’t trust you, or what you’d do if you knew everything, Jackie.”
Jackie gripped the steering wheel like a mountain climber holding a rope for dear life.
“He warned me that you were unstable, possibly even insane. That’s why he didn’t tell you everything. He thought, he thought,” Alex repeated, “that somehow he could get the benefit of your abilities without taking on the liabilities.” She stared at Jackie. “It’s worse than that. You’re a sociopath.”