by Matt Richtel
Dave sighed. He didn’t have time for this. “Use your brain for once and not your heart. It isn’t that hard to fathom. You send imperceptible electrical currents through a keyboard. Nerve endings are stimulated, consistent with frequencies understood to stoke the brain’s pleasure centers. You couple that with subliminal advertising. Personal images—a vivid, instant, unseen bombarding of the senses. When you’re sitting at a computer, your eyes and whole person are focused on the computer, locked on to it, and the messages are going right into your brain, reinforced with physical sensation. That’s powerful suggestion. But it isn’t even close to rocket science.”
Glenn sagged against the examining table. His jaw was clenched. He inhaled slowly, the practiced move of someone who knew how not to lose control, then addressed me.
“I’m afraid this simply isn’t what you think. Yes, Annie is alive. You’ve seen her. But the rest of it—it’s just not true. I had nothing to do with any of this.”
“Glenn, stop,” Dave said.
Glenn put his hand up.
“We had a terrific innovation. Attention span as currency. Was it brainwashing? No. Listen. People would still think for themselves, we could just make thinking more fun. We’d highlight it. We’d make commerce a highly stimulating experience. It’s just a natural evolution. The way it’s going anyway. But we saw it. We could have created it. We would have led the evolution. We had some of the biggest executives in the world on board. And Jesus, Dave, you . . . and Annie had to take it to the extreme. They wanted to ruin me.”
Dave put his hand on Glenn’s knee. “Enough. Don’t forget, you’ve been ruining Annie for years.”
Dave turned to me.
“Meeting adjourned.” He walked close to me, pulled out the tranquilizer gun. I closed the laptop and handed it to him.
“You have no evidence. Walk away,” Dave said. “Do you need further convincing?”
I looked him in the eye. “I think I can live without saying anything.”
He walked to the door.
“One last thing, Nathaniel,” he said. “You need to put Annie behind you. I’m sure you realize by now. She’s not worth it.”
“Right. You can’t wait to have her to yourself.”
Dave laughed. “C’mon, Nat. You don’t care about Annie. You couldn’t love her. You never loved her in the first place. You just thought you did. You just imagined you did. Think about it. You’ll see what I’m saying makes sense. Then you can move on. You need to. Annie Kindle is not long for your world.”
I shook my head. He was still trying to get inside my brain. The door shut.
I left the room and glanced around the hallway. There, in a chair, reading a magazine, sat Mike.
“Well,” I said.
He gave me a high sign.
“Blackjack,” he said. “This is going to be one hell of a podcast.”
Mike had fitted Andy’s laptop with audio software and a tiny microphone. When the computer was turned on, it simultaneously recorded a conversation, then transmitted it to a nearby receiver, in this case controlled by Mike. That way, even if the laptop was destroyed, we had a copy of the recording.
I didn’t have time to get further details.
59
The Monkey was a fifty-six-foot houseboat. And it had gone missing. It wasn’t in its prescribed slip in Callville Bay Marina. Annie had already made her escape.
I stood with my fists balled in the dusk, looking out over massive Lake Mead.
“It left half an hour ago. You can still see it,” a voice said.
From behind a bait stand walked Erin. She pointed on the horizon. You could still make out the Monkey in the distance, crawling away. I began scanning the marina, but listened to Erin.
“You’re alive,” she said. “That’s a very good start.”
“Did you see Annie?”
“The boat was pulling away when I got here.”
I could feel Erin come up to me from behind. A shirtless man was cleaning chum from a skiff with an oversized outboard motor. I walked toward him with Erin.
“What are you going to do?”
I turned to face her.
“They framed you.”
“Who did?”
“They planted evidence in your apartment. They—” I said, stopping short. I didn’t have it in me to tell her she’d pulled the trigger, that she’d been the physical tool used to detonate a bomb. A right time would come. “They used you. The same people who . . . killed Andy.”
The implications washed over her face. She was the victim, and yet had been suspected of killing people she loved. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was, that we’d hit the bottom, and that we were going to go home soon. But I’d arrived at the shirtless man. I pointed to the Monkey. I offered him the contents of my wallet—$82—for a water taxi.
“Do the police know?” she asked.
“Not yet. Where’s Bullseye?”
“I left him in the hotel, sitting in the lobby, talking on the phone to Samantha, listening to her talk.”
I climbed onto the taxi.
“I’m coming with you,” Erin said, suddenly searing with strength.
I convinced Erin to wait for me on the dock—that I needed to do this next part alone—and jetted out to the Monkey. I climbed onto the houseboat and found Annie sitting in the common area. She didn’t look surprised to see me. I’d been obsessing over what to say, and still, when I saw her, I couldn’t find words. How had it gone so wrong? She finally broke the silence.
“Turtle. You have to understand. I loved you. I love you. You were the only person who ever understood me for what I am . . . for what I could be.”
The old Annie.
“Stop it, Annie. It’s time for the truth. Please help me understand.”
“Who knows you’re here?”
“No one.”
A lie—not just about Erin. Mike had given me another GPS device for my car in case I went missing. With a couple of hundred bucks and a little technical expertise, you can make the CIA look like a bunch of Luddites.
I’d started putting the facts together on the drive. Maybe the effects of the computer were finally wearing off, allowing me to process. Somehow, Simon Anderson had learned Annie was alive. That must have been what Andy meant when he said Simon was upset about someone named Tara. He was trying to bribe the family again. They had to act, taking him out, along with others they’d experimented on, and destroying the rest of the evidence of their lab tests. Annie and Dave had been partners, piggybacking on Glenn’s connections, but going further than he imagined. They planned to undo him all along, I guessed. From her phone, she’d sent a text message to Dave, urging him to barge in on the meeting with the executives. I recounted it for Annie, just above a whisper. She shook her head, in a quasi-admission. “My father and Dave were behind it,” she protested, unconvincingly. This topic bored her.
She walked to me and put her arms around my waist. She looked into my eyes.
“I got him good, didn’t I?”
I pushed her away.
“You’re disappointed in me,” she said, soft, sad.
I couldn’t reconcile the Annie I’d known with Annie the Conquerer, Annie the Smiling Assassin. It was too simple to describe her behavior as multiple personality disorder. A changeling was more like it. Different shades and shapes and angles, changing light and darkness. But there was a unifying force: selfishness. Annie wanted what she wanted when she wanted it. She felt utterly sincere about her passions. What did she want now? My help escaping? I didn’t say anything and silence descended. Suddenly she looked so old, like my grandmother, undone, mourning the loss of Grandpa.
“No, you can’t love this. You couldn’t love this,” she said, with a touch of self-pity, then an edge. “You thought I was pretty. You liked the sex, right? The sex was great. You thought I was witty and smart. What does all that mean?”
Remarkably, she wanted affirmation. It was like the tone she used to muster when she got
jealous.
“Not true, Annie. You made me feel something I’d never felt before. I still feel it,” I said. “True love. Whatever happens, whatever happened.”
“You mean that?”
She was a killer, I had to remind myself. But we had loved each other. It’s what people pray for, what they die for. Someone who makes them feel all the highs and depth that emotion has to offer. The divine. The feeling of being needed, and understood. Better than any drug. Because you share it.
“Yep. You made me feel it,” I said.
I leaned against a railing and realized what my gut had been telling me for hours.
“I wasn’t your first true love, Annie, was I? I was your beta test.”
The epiphany prompted a ringing in my ears. There was another sound. Police sirens approaching the marina.
“Subliminal advertising. On the computer you gave me. When you gave me the desk, and the quill pen.”
I took a step toward her. “You put something on the computer you gave me. You programmed me, like you programmed Erin to blow up the café. Like you programmed the rats. You manipulated my feelings. You made our love neon. You made it bigger than life. You made me into an addict.”
She closed her eyes. She responded softly.
“Why do you think you couldn’t see my flaws? It was primitive. Simple. Subliminal advertising, pictures of me, positive messages.”
“Messages and pictures? Those are the bases of our relationship?”
“I watched when you were most drawn to me, what I was wearing and saying. I took high-definition pictures dressed the same way, and loaded them onto your computer. I posed naked. I took pictures of us in bed. I created images with short phrases like ‘I love turtle’ and ‘Annie = happiness,’ random images with me wearing Denver Broncos T-shirts, and eating your favorite foods. I loaded an audio file with my name and played it at very low and high frequencies. A hundred experiments. Every time you were on the computer, you were flashed with the images, when you surfed the Web, checked sports scores, sent e-mail, shopped, played Scrabble with your grandmother.”
It seemed, at last, like something real. Yet on some level, it rang false. Intellectually I could grasp what had happened; it was the most profound, inescapable assault. I was fighting myself—head and heart. Blow for blow. My own realization undermined by incredulity.
“Bullshit! It’s not that simple. You can’t deny what we felt. I loved you even after your vicious computer was gone. You can’t take that away from me.”
Annie took my hand. I pushed it away.
“I used to watch you when you were on the computer, wondering what you liked more, me or my digital incarnation.”
“You were manipulating me? I was nothing to you—an experiment.”
Silence.
“Then you put something on my laptop five days ago too?”
“No.”
“No?!”
“You didn’t have me tortured?! You didn’t order those cops to torture me?!”
“Dave.” Quietly. “Dave hated you. He was jealous. After the café . . . He . . . ”
“It doesn’t make sense. Why would you save me from the explosion? You never cared about me. Why save me?!”
Annie plopped onto the couch. I practically sprang toward her. She recoiled.
“Because you loved me too,” I said. “You can’t imagine what we felt, Annie. You can’t invent it. You can’t digitize it. You can’t fake it.”
She paused.
“I will grant you that no one ever made me feel the way you did,” she said.
“You will grant me?”
“When we first met, I couldn’t believe you felt that way about me. How I started to feel. How the whole thing made me feel. I couldn’t trust it,” she said. She’d sewn up the psychology nice and tight.
“It was real. It was the goddamn real thing! You were it. I loved you from the moment I laid my eyes on you. I loved your laugh. I loved your smile. I loved your passion.”
“That’s why you were perfect.”
“Because I was inspired by you?”
“Because you’re a romantic. Because you’re the kind of person who leaves a career in medicine to become a writer. Because you wrote me poetry—the goofy kind that rhymes. Because you believe in intense emotion.”
“Stop rationalizing!”
My yell rocked the boat.
I heard a rush of cascading water. Speedboats were getting close. The police.
Annie stood, her eyes widening. She ran out of the far door of the cabin, onto the deck. I followed her into the pitch black. She moved to the front of the boat. Police headlights were coming. I could hear voices. I moved close enough to see Annie’s face. She’d turned hard. “If they frame me, I’ll go to jail forever.”
“Frame you? Jesus.”
“They don’t get it,” she said. “They’re missing it.”
“Missed what?”
“You’re still missing it. My father is finished. He was small-time. I didn’t need him, or his precious executives. They were convenient. They gave me structure and resources but I hung those flailing hypocrites out when I realized their use had passed. They don’t know a damn thing about real connection, especially my father. Anyway, this won’t stop anything. People want the connection. They need it. They crave it. It’s what matters. It’s already out there.”
“It’s over, Annie.”
She walked to the railing. She paused, then softened just a bit. I swear I saw a tear.
“A few months before I went away, I had lunch with Sarah,” she said, sounding suddenly rational. “I told her that if something were ever to happen to me, I wanted you to be happy. I wanted you to find someone to be with. I mean that still. I want you to be happy.”
I smirked.
“Erin seems quite amazing. See how easy it is to replace me?”
Annie had closed her eyes. She opened them again.
“I have to go. This time, no tricks,” she said. “Will you try to save my life?”
“What?”
“You know how to save lives. You told me on our second date. Can you save mine? Will you?”
Annie was not impervious to pain. She could dress it up all she wanted, but the thing we felt, however engineered, meant something to her. I meant something.
“You’re right, you know,” I said.
I heard a voice on a bullhorn. “Stop your engines.” The police were almost near enough to climb on board.
“Right about what?”
“I didn’t love you. I could never have loved you.”
Annie flinched. That flinch I’d seen when her father told her she’d have to disappear.
“STOP THE ENGINES. NOW.”
Annie climbed onto the railing. Her voice was childlike—a whisper.
“Will you save me?”
I heard the police climb into the boat.
I grabbed her arm.
“Don’t forget me. Don’t forget how we made each other feel.”
She caught my gaze, then leapt. Gravity broke my grip and I scrambled to the railing. When she hit the water, she looked up at me, churning her arms, and she smiled.
60
The boat exploded in lights and chaos. I pointed an onrush of police to the spot where moments before I’d seen bubbles. It took less than a minute for the first officer to dive in. A hand restrained me from diving in myself, or maybe I was just paralyzed.
The hand belonged to a familiar arm—that of Lieutenant Aravelo.
“We tracked you to Vegas. You and your friend have a lot to explain.”
“Yeah, us meddling kids,” a voice said.
It was Erin.
Aravelo scoffed.
“They wanted me to identify Annie,” she said.
I stared into the water, and pointed.
Erin put her hand on my shoulder. She let it slide down my arm, onto my forearm. She took my hand and gently rubbed the webbing between my thumb and forefinger.
EPILO
GUE
Some people consider the extraordinary beauty of our world to prove the existence of God. How else to explain the aspects of nature so perfectly suited to human comfort and joy?
But another explanation is that humans and our surroundings evolved together for millions of years. Of course we see our world as beautiful; we’ve been growing in concert with it, fitting together with it, and surviving thanks to it. Nature may not be evidence of the divine, but, rather, the ultimate living room in which our rear ends and the couch have been forming together for our entire existence.
What is distraction? What is true?
Three months after Annie disappeared for the second time, American Health Journal published my article on the scientific basis for the physiologically addictive qualities of computers. It either was unintentional or subconscious poetry that inspired me to sit down in a café (not the one that exploded, at least) to read the finished product in print.
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON E-MAIL
by Nat Idle
A small but growing body of evidence suggests that human interaction with computers is altering brain functions, and affecting mood and productivity, not necessarily for the better.
While the science is nascent, it indicates measurable impact on neurotransmitters from the continual stimulus-response feedback loop created when people send and receive information from computers, cell phones, and other digital gadgets.
The issue first emerged three months ago, after a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and his cohorts were discovered to have allegedly developed technology aimed at maximizing the stimulatory effects of computers. The financier, Glenn Kindle, is awaiting trial on murder charges in the deaths of experiment subjects, and has pleaded innocent, asserting that his company was trying to understand and develop new ways to enhance the computing experience.
The larger issue, of whether the brain could be impacted by computer interaction, now seems answerable in the affirmative, though the research is largely derivative. One early study at Michigan State University mapped images of people’s brains while they were playing video games and was able to demonstrate that players’ brains look similar when stimulated to those of individuals with compulsive aggression disorders.