by Alan Glynn
“Who recognized him?”
“It was an Agency guy. He saw a photograph in the newspaper. There was some event, a big dinner in a hotel, a lot of the RAND people were there, and so was Monroe. This guy followed up on it. He later claimed that Ned had stolen a quantity of MDT back in New York.”
“Stolen it?”
“Yes, it was—”
Janek reappears at the door. He’s got a cell phone in his hand. “Mr. Proctor?” he says, and holds out the phone. Proctor takes it.
I lean forward and bury my face in my hands, ready to scream.
“Fine, fine,” Proctor says into the phone. He hands it back to Janek. “I have to go.”
I look up. “No fucking way.”
“Hey!” Janek points a finger at me. “Watch the language. Not in here.”
“It’s okay,” Proctor says, waving Janek away. He stands up.
“You can’t do this to me again, Mr. Proctor.”
“There’s a medical unit outside. They think I’m going to have a heart attack. I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”
“What happened to Ned?” I say. “Tell me.”
“We didn’t treat him well, Ray. We didn’t. We were afraid of him. That’s the truth. We didn’t understand what MDT was, what it could do. We just wanted to shut it down. We wanted it to stop.”
“But—”
“And the fact is, I wasn’t there, because they took him back to New York from Santa Monica, so I didn’t see what they did to him, and I never asked. But I could guess.” He turns to leave. “Meet me upstairs in fifteen minutes, Ray. There’s something I want to give you.”
He walks out the door.
I’m too dumbfounded to say anything or to try to stop him. I look up at Molly. We stare at each other in silence. Then she slides off the upper bench, comes over, and sits next to me.
* * *
I get back upstairs first. I wait by reception and pretend to read something on one of the noticeboards.
Tom Monroe? Santa Monica?
This is all new to me. I don’t even know if I believe any of it. Instead I’m back to thinking that old man Proctor is fucking nuts. Molly appears. She walks over to where I’m standing in front of the noticeboard. She takes my hand and squeezes it.
“You’ve got some explaining to do,” she whispers.
“Yes.”
“Maybe over a drink? After work?”
“Sounds good.”
Proctor’s head appears at the top of the stairs. He’s back in his old-man sweats and hoodie, and is carrying his small gym bag.
“Thanks, Anna,” he says, and waves at the girl behind the reception desk. He comes over and stops a few feet away from us.
“I’m sorry about all of this, Ray.” He looks at his watch and takes a deep breath. “I wish I could be more specific about what happened to Ned, I really do. But that’s not why I wanted to find you. It wasn’t to get into the details. What does any of that stuff matter now anyway?” He glances out the window. There’s a black van parked where his Lincoln was earlier. He looks at me again and comes a step closer. “Besides, I’m running out of time.”
“What?”
“You remember in the park I told you that I thought we might have blown it, that humanity might have blown it?”
I nod.
“Well, if we have, I believe it’s a process that dates back to 1953. Because that was one hell of a year, Ray.” He takes another deep breath and starts talking really fast. “Look, two essential things happened that year—one, we started figuring out how to build a digital universe, and two, we started figuring out how to decode our own genetics. And we did it ourselves, using these”—he points to his head—“our brains, our wetware, but since then there’s been a tug of war between the two sides, and now we’re losing the fight, because it seems like we’re bending over backward to outsource to technology the one thing we can’t afford to give up, our intelligence. Twenty, thirty years from now, and that’ll be gone. It’s not the rise of the machines, Ray, it’s the rise of the goddamned algorithms, it’s the rise of big data. And the so-called hard problem? The one about the nature of consciousness—where it comes from, where it’s located, what it means, the mystery of it? Well, that gets left behind, it gets forgotten in the relentless and infinite expansion of ones and zeroes. It really will be artificial intelligence…”
Molly is still squeezing my hand.
“… unless we push back,” he goes on, “unless we expand our idea of what intelligence is, or can be, unless we realize that human intelligence simply can’t be separated from human consciousness.”
Outside, a car door slams shut. We all turn and look out the window. A man—it looks like Dean—has left the van and is approaching the entrance to the Hudson.
Proctor rummages for something in his gym bag.
“Ray,” he says. “Here.”
He tosses something at me and Molly releases my hand. The object is small. I catch it. It rattles.
The door opens and Dean enters, removing his sunglasses. Street sounds flood in.
“That’s organic,” Proctor whispers, nodding at my hand. “It comes from a plant, a living thing.” His eyes widen into a broad smile.
Molly nudges my hand and guides it behind my back.
“I think it’s time there was another leak,” Proctor whispers. “Ned did his best. So did Eddie Spinola. See what you can do.” He looks at Molly. “The two of you.”
“Mr. Proctor,” Dean says, “they’re waiting for you.” He glances over at me, his face expressionless.
“Okay, Dean, I’m coming. Take my bag, will you.”
As he passes the bag to Dean with one hand, he turns back to me and Molly and makes a flapping gesture with his other, indicating that we should wait till he’s gone.
“Anna, my dear,” he then says in a loud voice, turning to the desk this time, “see you soon.”
“Goodbye, Mr. Proctor,” Anna says, looking up from her phone.
Dean gets the door and holds it open for the old man. They leave.
Molly and I stand watching through the window as they get into the black van. It pulls away and disappears into traffic.
* * *
We go back to the coffee shop across the street.
“I didn’t know that was going to get so weird,” I say. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you.”
She shakes her head. “I probably shouldn’t have been there.”
“No.” I lean forward. “I’m glad you were. Otherwise I might have strangled him. Besides, it was thanks to you that it happened in the first place.”
A waitress comes over and we order coffees.
“I’m not sure where to begin.”
“You don’t have to begin at all. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”
“I know, but I do want to.” I pause. “He came across as pretty close to insane there, right?”
“I guess, but in an interesting way.”
“Sure. But here are two things I know for a fact. He did work for the CIA in the fifties and he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two years ago.”
“Shit.”
“That’s why I’ve been pursuing this.”
“And to find out about your grandfather.”
“Yeah. But Proctor wasn’t too helpful on that score.” I reach into my pocket and take out the bottle of pills that he tossed at me. It’s unmarked and I reckon it contains about fifty or sixty of them. They’re small, white, also unmarked. I give the bottle a gentle shake and place it on the table between us. “He seemed more interested in these.”
She hesitates, then picks up the bottle, examines it, and puts it down again. “They look like homeopathic pills to me.”
“Let’s hope they’re a little more effective.”
“Do you really think these are—”
“MDT? I don’t know. Why else would he give them to me?”
The waitress approaches. I pick up the bottle and
put it back in my pocket.
We sip our coffees in silence. After a while, I’m about to say something, but Molly’s phone pings. She checks it.
“Shit, Ray, I have to stop pretending I don’t have a job.”
“Tell me about it.”
“We’ve put a statement out saying Steph has pneumonia. So I need to get back to the office.” She makes a face.
There’s another silence, an awkward one.
“Look, why don’t you send one of those pills to a lab,” she says eventually, “and have it tested. See exactly what it is.”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t take one.”
I look at her.
“Or do. Who am I to tell you? But…” She leans forward. “I know this has all been weirdly intense, and also confusing, but … I like you, Ray, and I don’t want anything awful or stupid to happen to you.”
“I like you, too, Molly.”
She taps the table gently with her hand. “Good.”
We make an arrangement to meet later, then head our separate ways. I walk to Seventh Avenue, my heart pounding to a rhythm of names, a sequence of syllables—Clay Proctor, Tom Monroe, John von Neumann, Molly Boyd.
I hail a passing cab and tell the driver Sixty-Fourth and Lex.
As the cab moves off, I take the bottle of pills out of my pocket and examine it again. Despite what Molly said, I know I’m going to take one of these sooner or later, and as I consider the various ways that that could go horribly wrong, I also detect an unmistakable hint of anticipation.
17
It’s during the third, rambling, hour-long telephone call to his hotel room from Senator Johnson that Sweeney realizes he’s had enough. The senator wants Tom Monroe to come and work for him and won’t take no for an answer. For his part, Sweeney can think of few things he’d like less. But in this third call he makes the mistake of getting Johnson all fired up. He starts by telling him that he’s too Machiavellian, that it’s an instinct he needs to rein in, and that sooner or later he’s going to have to commit to something, to take on a fight or an issue that will either destroy him or catapult him into contention for the White House—something like, say, civil rights.
“Go on.”
“Okay, since you entered Congress, Senator, you’ve voted against every civil rights bill that’s come up, and it was probably the pragmatic thing to do each time, I’m not saying it wasn’t, but history, or rather the future, is on the other side of that argument now, and if you want to make yourself acceptable to liberals and Northerners for ’56 or ’60, which you’ll have to, you need to do something this bold. I mean, you could single-handedly turn the whole civil rights thing around, send it in a different direction.”
Johnson considers this, clicks his tongue a couple of times, then says, “Fuck me, son, that’s just brilliant. Now I’ve got to have you on my team.”
Sweeney can feel the pull of Johnson’s personality here, the insatiable need for attention, for loyalty, and he knows it won’t stop. Also, Sweeney has spent the best part of a week huddled over his Remington typewriter, getting ideas down on paper, and he’s concluded that this is a much more productive way to spend his time than simply talking to people—or, increasingly, at them. He told Johnson he was writing a book, and now that he actually is, he likes it, and wants to continue.
But there are too many distractions to contend with. Besides, it was clearly a mistake to think that the nation’s capital was where he was going to find the nation’s best minds. Now that he’s had some time to mull it over, he reckons he knows where that is—or, at any rate, where it’s more likely to be. So he decides to move on. He packs up all of his stuff, checks out of the Rutherford, and gets behind the wheel of his car.
Leaving D.C. behind, he heads west.
There’s a freedom in driving, and in being out on the open road, that helps him to order his thoughts. He doesn’t know what he’s going to call this book yet, but it’s shaping up to be an examination of human history—not so much the familiar succession of personalities, governments, conflicts, and fluctuating powers, but rather a study of how and why whole civilizations rise and fall, the hidden forces, the larger patterns. But it could also—he’s not sure—be a book about the future, an elaborate extrapolation of the dynamics he sees at work in the world today. The scale of it worries him, though—he already has a couple of hundred typed pages in the trunk of the car, and he sees no end to the flood of ideas.
He stops at motels along the way, making sure that he eats properly and gets at least four or five hours’ sleep a night. It’s been a while since he had one of those incidents where he gets dizzy and blacks out for seconds or even minutes at a time, and he’s not sure why this should be. Maybe he’s finally got the dosage right, maybe it’s a cumulative thing, he doesn’t know. But his energy levels are extraordinary, as is his ability to focus, and up and down the sensory scale—so whether it’s a vast tableau of billowing clouds in the sky ahead or the single flick of an insect wing on the edge of his vision, a crack of thunder or the barely audible squeak of a loose V belt, it doesn’t matter, he’s paying close attention and taking it all in.
Over the course of three or four days, he makes his way through West Virginia, Kentucky, and into Missouri. At Springfield, he joins Route 66, and keeps on going for another four or five days. He passes mining districts, cattle ranges, woodlands, flatlands, factories, oil derricks, hundreds of gas stations, and countless towns—a few big, many small, some abandoned. He drives, bleary-eyed and sun-baked, through the Texas Panhandle, the Staked Plains, the Mojave Desert, and on, finally, to the cool orange groves and vineyards leading to Pasadena and then Los Angeles itself. Driving west through Beverly Hills, he stays with Route 66 for its last seventeen-mile stretch, to the shore of the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica.
The end of the road.
Except, of course, it’s nothing of the kind.
* * *
Sweeney finds a studio apartment to rent in the Sausalito Arms, a three-storey, oceanfront stucco building with double windows and Moorish columns. His room is on the second floor and he sets his typewriter up at the end of the bed, exactly as he had it in the hotel in D.C.
The RAND Corporation campus is on Fourth and Broadway, a block from the ocean—just opposite city hall at the edge of Santa Monica’s business district. The building is brand-new. It has two stories and is in a modernist style. That’s from the outside. Sweeney has only heard about what it’s like on the inside. Apparently, it has a dense, lattice-like structure that was mathematically designed to maximize the number of connection points in the hallways and corridors, the idea being to promote chance interactions between employees. But the problem is, he can’t get any farther into the building than the lobby area. This is a heavily guarded facility, and Sweeney doesn’t have a security clearance.
He doesn’t care, though. He’s not looking for work. He’s not looking for a contract. He just wants to talk to people.
The thing is, D.C. is for politicians, and what politicians do is compromise. The successful ones do it with art and cunning and patience, but at the end of the day it’s still compromise. Out here, by contrast—in Santa Monica, at RAND—none of that applies. Scientists, mathematicians, and economists are all encouraged to dream and innovate, and if one of them has an idea at three o’clock in the morning … well then, fine, let him come on in, because the place is always open. (This is something Sweeney read about in Fortune magazine. They also wear short-sleeved shirts, apparently. And no one wears a tie.) But what really interests him about RAND is what they do there.
It’s a think tank.
So they think.
Under contract to the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission, RAND’s stable of eggheads are essentially using theoretical and applied mathematics to game U.S. nuclear defense strategy. Sweeney is not much of a math guy—not yet—but this really appeals to him. It’s not the military stuff so much as the idea of solving complex problems using systemat
ic thought and quantification. It’s something he brings up in conversation with John von Neumann the first time they meet.
Sweeney arrives at the entrance asking to speak with von Neumann and is basically told to take a hike. But he persists and von Neumann’s curiosity is eventually piqued. It’s a little awkward at first, but Sweeney manages to press the right buttons and within half an hour they’re deep into a discussion about rational choice theory. They meet again a few days later for coffee, and the following week Sweeney goes to dinner at Johnny and Klara’s house.
Each time they meet, Sweeney has done his homework, so he’s able to keep up. But it’s not just about that. Von Neumann is warm and sociable. He loves a drink, and a bad pun. He has an astonishing memory and is insatiably curious. He’s deeply empathetic. In fact, he operates at a level of intellectual and emotional clarity that is exhausting for most people to be in the presence of. So when Sweeney is leaving their house after dinner that night, he finds himself wondering—and he has to accept that this is what drew him to the guy in the first place—if von Neumann isn’t somehow on MDT. Sweeney has met other RAND people around Santa Monica. At one event in particular, a gala dinner at the Hotel Casa Del Mar, he met quite a few of them, and while they’re all extremely smart, geniuses in some cases, the intelligence gradient seems to curve upward to a peak that is undisputedly occupied by von Neumann.
Plus, he always wears a jacket and tie.
So he is different.
Nevertheless, the idea that he is on MDT is absurd. There’s no question that Sweeney finds von Neumann’s company massively stimulating, but as the weeks go by, and as 1953 gives way to 1954, things do begin to change. It’s not so much that Sweeney disagrees with positions von Neumann is taking, it’s more that he feels himself moving beyond those positions—being able to extrapolate so much farther into a matrix of real-world outcomes than von Neumann could possibly imagine. When Sweeney talks about the “limits of rationality,” von Neumann bristles. But von Neumann’s understanding of behavior comes, in the main, from theoretical models formulated in the intellectual hothouse of a government-funded think tank. Sweeney’s, on the other hand—most recently, at any rate—comes from observing the heat and desperation at the card tables in the clubs and casinos over in Gardena. This is human nature in the raw, he points out to von Neumann—visceral, irrational, often delusional—and it’s really all he or anyone else needs to know.