The Cloud

by Matt Richtel

  Oddly, I felt for her at that moment, not me, or Polly or Isaac.

  And in this moment, I feel a bit like the doctor, in the position of delivering painful news. For a journalist, this is supposed to be exhilarating, the gotcha moment. But I’ve never particularly liked the handful of times when I move from discovering a truth to confronting a bad actor with it. It’s beyond anti-climactic. It’s sad. The death of someone’s dark dream. And my own realization that my success in solving a mystery, the arrival at some analytical Mecca, has not made me whole.

  “She ran into the street,” I begin.

  I tell him what the girl’s mother told me. I tell him what I only suspect: that the girl had been among a handful of test subjects he’d used to develop the precursor technology to the Juggler. The girl must have grown increasingly impulsive, I speculate, unable to focus, and then one day the technology pushed her still-fragile frontal lobe over the edge.

  “She acted like someone with the brain of a three-year-old, running in front of the Volvo. Maybe she saw a dog across the street she wanted to touch, or some blinking lights.” I pause, then add: “I can only imagine how much more dangerous the commercial version of the technology will be.”

  He stares at me.

  “Care to comment?”

  He stands. He picks up the gun. It hangs in his hand. He turns his back to me and he walks to the window. Below, tens of thousands of houselights burn, creating a collective glow to rival the darkness.

  He extends the hand with the gun at the window. He’s pointing slightly to his left, in the vicinity of Menlo Park.

  “You can see it,” he says.

  “What?”

  “That’s why I built this place.”

  I start walking to the window. He turns and I jump back, wondering if he’s about to shoot me. Wondering too: maybe I’m not ready to die?

  He turns back to the window. “You’re right: I hate authoritarianism. I’ll give you that.”

  He’s switched topics on me. I’m still not sure what he was pointing at but he appears to want to take the conversation in another direction and he’s the one with the gun.

  “Hence the beef with the Chinese kids.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Nope. Will you grant me some literary license? About literature? About Orwell and Huxley.”

  I shrug, not following. Is he going crazy?

  “George Orwell and Aldous Huxley depicted distinctly different views of how the modern world could crush the human spirit. Orwell presaged the mortal dangers of authoritarian regimes. Roughly speaking, it was the kind of thing the Eastern Bloc represented.”

  “Or China.”

  “But in Brave New World, Huxley identified the problem not so much as the state but our own frailties. We could succumb to our own ravenous desire for entertainment, truth subverted to triviality. We could become awash in bells and whistles.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s been said many times in a very flattering light that I created one of the Next Big Things. But I created the Brave New World.”

  I consider it.

  “The Juggler entertains us into a stupor?”

  “It’s so much worse than that.” He turns to me. A deep-set wrinkle like a river on a map trails across his forehead. “The technology I helped build, the algorithms meant to serve us have tapped our worst demons, our most primitive impulses. In that respect they are so much more powerful than I ever dreamed.”

  “You wanted this?”

  “No. God no.”

  He gestures again out the window with a jut of his chin.

  “I’m not sure where you’re pointing.”

  “See the tall building, with the smattering of lights on the upper floor? It’s west of the Dumbarton Bridge and a bit to the left.”

  “It looks like a law firm?”

  “That’s the one. Now look two blocks further left.”

  I see a smear of residences. It dawns on me.

  “That’s the street Kathryn Gilkeson ran into.”

  Silence. Then: “When I built this house, a year later, my dear wife couldn’t understand why. We have plenty of space. I’ve never been a particularly materialistic person and certainly not fixated on real estate.”

  “You wanted to be able to see where she died.” I whisper it. I’m wondering: Is Leviathan some kind of sociopath, a serial killer who has created a view to his kills, a virtual collector with a window through which to ogle his conquests?

  But then, in an instant, something else replaces that thought.

  “You didn’t mean for her to die.”

  “It has crushed me, Nathaniel. Destroyed me.” It seems his voice might break but he clears his throat. He tells me that he introduced a new generation of multitasking software to the kids, like little Kathryn, who came to free day care and after-school programs at Leviathan Ventures. He jerry-rigged handheld devices, nothing fancy and commercial like the current Juggler. But the devices were years ahead of their time, combining crisp video and motion detection to allow the kids to move from one task to the next. The kids were entranced. He thought he was preparing them for the future.

  “I used to sit in class and marvel at their immersion. It was like watching baby kittens bat balls around—endlessly excited and with preternatural dexterity. I could see their reaction times increasing. But they were moving data, refining their multitasking, becoming more competitive, not less.”

  “So it worked.”

  “In one respect. They did show increased visual acuity. They could pick up amid the clutter of images the ones they needed to focus on. At least that’s what I could discern through my unscientific observations. And research has since backed me up on that.” He pauses. “Then it turned dark.”

  “When Kathryn got hit by the car.”

  “Months before, the kids started getting agitated. They hated disconnecting. One kid hit another. A few parents started complaining that on the days after, their kids came acting like they were back in the terrible twos—impulsive, unwilling to take direction, highly susceptible to being startled.”

  He says the teachers looked at whether they were serving too much sugar, providing insufficient rest time. The complaints never reached Leviathan. But after Kathryn’s death, he started asking questions and surmised that something wasn’t right.

  “I buried the technology.”

  “You knew it was problematic.”

  “I suspected.”

  “More than suspected. You built a bunch of charter schools. You became a firebrand for improving education. You . . .” I pause, thinking it through; Leviathan’s schools limited the use of technology in instruction. I look at him. “But the technology resurrected.”

  He nods grimly. “That’s what I needed you for.”

  “Me?”

  A sound comes from the direction of the stairs. I look up to see Leviathan’s wife step into the room. She stops, and looks at her husband, stricken, as if suspended mid-step, a horrified puppet.

  “Please no.”

  “My fair lady.”

  “A gun.”

  “It’s over, sweetheart.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Andrew.”

  “I’ve already done it.”

  58

  She blinks, and she suddenly smiles. She walks toward me. She extends her arms, not like greeting an old friend but more formal, like one politician about to embrace another onstage. It’s fake but she’s so magnetic.

  “He’s not gotten much sleep. He’s rambling. It doesn’t happen often but when it does it can turn the world’s smartest man into . . .”

  “Sit,” he says to her.

  She looks at him, unaccustomed to this tone, then turns to me, plaintive, she shuffles to the love seat.

  “I hired Alan Parsons,” he says to me. “I asked him to contact you, discreetly, and”—he mulls over the word—“seduce you into looking into the Juggler.”

  “By shoving me into a train?”

 
He shakes his head and shrugs.

  “I don’t get into the details. I just knew you were the right guy.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re like him,” his wife says.

  “Not in any way I can imagine.” Not rich, famous, world changing, married to a beautiful, devoted wife.

  He holds up his hand, asking his wife to refrain. “You are very talented. But your talent is outweighed by your curiosity. You overextend yourself.”

  Andrew says that he discovered my work when his team went looking for a journalist to award with his annual magazine prize. As he looked into my work, he became convinced that I had done a good job questioning Silicon Valley’s implicit assumption about the inherent good of all technological progress.

  “Okay, but why now? The Juggler’s been on target for months, years. You’ve known about it.”

  He points out the window.

  “Don’t do this to yourself,” his wife says.

  I look where he’s pointing. To our right, over the rolling hills in the direction of a concentration of residential lights.

  “Los Altos High School. Another alumni of our after-school program killed himself.”

  The kid who jumped in front of a train. Just a few months ago. Anthony Gearson.

  “But that doesn’t have to do with your work.” His wife stands.

  “Wrong! Don’t let me lie to myself. I love you. But don’t let me lie anymore.”

  She’s frozen again, her eyes half closed; she can’t watch anymore.

  He turns to me. “It’s true that I didn’t resurrect the Juggler technology.” He explains that, in fact, he thought it was long buried. But he realized that his old partner, Gils, had revived it and sold it to a manufacturer with the backing of the Chinese government. Gils, he tells me, never knew about the negative neurological implications. On the other hand, Leviathan says, he had admonished Gils more than a decade ago that the technology didn’t work and that it should not be sold under any circumstances. To sell it, Leviathan told Gils, would be unethical.

  His wife interjects. “But you have to understand. Gils always lived in my husband’s shadow. It’s the same old story—Jobs and Wozniak at Apple, Gates and Paul Allen, to a lesser extent, at Microsoft—two co-founders at these companies, one is known as the genius and the other guy counts beans.”

  There’s a moment of silence. She adds: “This was Gils’s chance to put his stamp on the Next Big Thing, absent my genius husband.”

  He explains that Gils worked out deals to have the technology tested in a handful of day care and learning centers, after-school programs, and juvenile detention centers.

  “It’s up to industry! We have to police ourselves,” he exclaims. He sees that neither I nor his wife understand his outburst. He explains that the old government social safety nets and regulations can’t possibly keep up with technology and the deleterious impacts on the margins of technology. It would take the equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration, he says, to create policies around the potential downsides of mass consumption of technology.

  “Technology is like food. We need it to survive. But some technology is like brussels sprouts and some is like Twinkies. Some is arsenic.” He bows his head. “We’ve swallowed technology whole.”

  “The industry is to blame?”

  “Society is broke. We privatize our schools and our prisons. We’ve abdicated to industry. The corporation, writ large, is the future. It’s got to take responsibility—to act responsibly. But how can we ask it to be other than what it is—to ask ourselves to be other than what we are?”

  “Industry?”

  He shakes his head, defeated. “There are no bad actors here. No malice. Just the usual human failings.”

  “Such as?”

  “Greed, self-deception, envy.” His wife again.

  “What about Alan Parsons? He tried to bribe you. That’s not malice?”

  He nods a concession. “And he got his comeuppance through a heart attack. Fortune turned against him.”

  “Pure accident? Natural causes?”

  He nods, yep. “But it brought me down too.”

  “How so?”

  “My plan, weak as it might have been, was to get you looking into the Juggler technology without tying it back to my original failings. Gils didn’t know about it. Sandy Vello, a mid-level manager, certainly didn’t know. The Chinese didn’t know. Only I knew, and Alan Parsons. He was smart and started putting things together.”

  “So why not just blackmail you and that would be the end of it? Why bother contacting me?”

  “I guess he wanted to show me he was playing along and doing my bidding. He never actually had gotten around to directly blackmailing me, just dancing around it. And it might be that he wanted to use you to get more information.”

  I noodle it. “So the Juggler is not a plot to destroy young people’s brains?”

  “There’s no malice with the Juggler, like I said. Unless you consider profit making to be malicious.”

  We fall silent.

  “Why not just come forward, Andrew? Why not just tell the world about the dangers?”

  “I’d be a rich, old, doddering fool.”

  “That’s not why. I begged him not to.” It’s his wife.

  He looks at her and says: “Don’t you have anyone you love so much that it causes you to stuff down and deny the most obvious truths?”

  I feel a terrible weight, Polly and Isaac, my inability to adapt to their absence, and the absence of the life I’d romanticized, a crushing truth in my life.

  His wife chokes back a sob, the slipping away of her desperate hold on dignity. Is there little uglier than the most beautiful among us coming apart at the seams?

  It dawns on me. He’s not going to shoot me. He’s going to shoot himself.

  She falls to her knees.

  “He has given so much to the world, not just the technology, but the charity.” She looks at him. “You can’t believe everything you’ve built has been without value. It’s driven an economy, productivity, let grandchildren and their grandmothers talk over the Internet. You’ve built an engine for twenty-first-century communications.”

  He takes it in. She senses she’s gotten momentum.

  “The Juggler is only one iteration of dozens of devices with dual edges—video-game consoles, phones, all the fast-twitch gadgets. You can’t blame yourself.” She turns to me. “Don’t write about him. Write about the dangers of the technology, in general, to children. Don’t ruin a man who has done so much. Don’t make him the”—she chews on the phrase—“poster child for creating technology that bakes the brains of our babies.”

  He dangles the gun in his hand. I have this strange sense that the more she protests the more convinced he becomes of his own failings. I know what he’s thinking: he can’t believe his legacy, and the legacy of a region he helped build, will be a Brave New World. I don’t know if he’s right. I certainly agree with her that the Juggler isn’t the only device. But it is the story.

  “Andrew.” She’s pleading.

  He shakes his head, and I realize they are having a silent communication more powerful and instant than email, more intense than anything a high-definition Juggler could deliver.

  His arms fall to his sides. She looks at him, kneeling. As far as they are concerned, I am no longer in the room.

  59

  I make out the silhouette of the buzzard, willowy arms crossed over his chest, head cocked in attentiveness, at the ready to swoop, standing against a tree. But he makes no move to stop me as I drag myself to my car.

  His inaction prompts my brain to reverberate with Leviathan’s words “no malice.” The phrase practically glowers at me with its beady eyes, challenging me to justify my rabid assumptions over the last few days about the emergence of a grand conspiracy.

  Have I been subjected to terrific malice or just unfair play?

  My movements have been tracked, and I’ve been followed. A man with a crooked smile c
locked me in Chinatown but not in defense of a nefarious neurological plot. He was worried I’d expose his intellectual property and marketing plans. Love for her nephew motivated Faith.

  On my part, I plunged into a reportorial frenzy because of the wounds to my head and the ones to my heart.

  I climb into my car, Polly’s car, the Audi that belonged to my dead ex-girlfriend and for which I now owe substantial taxes. Is this why, I wonder, I shouldn’t own nice things, or date amazing women, or fall in love with them? You ultimately pay too high of a price.

  As I drive Highway 280, I chew questions. Do I believe Leviathan? And do I expose him, or just the technology he helped create?

  Forty minutes later, I arrive at my inherited flat. I walk into the living room and stare at the unused baby bouncer. I’m exhausted. I’m wired. I sit. I stare at the bouncer until my eyes glaze over. I pull out my laptop.

  I start writing.

  Three hours later, I have many pages. I’ve told the tale of the Juggler, its origin, the specific damage it may do to a generation of Chinese children and, the generally dual-edged nature of our technology.

  I expose Andrew Leviathan, the white knight of Silicon Valley—itself the white knight of industries—is spawning a new generation of devices that retard development of our brains. I conclude that these ultra-modern devices have taken us backward neurologically. Bits destroy brain cells. The more we use supercomputers to juggle, the more primitive we become.

  I put my head back, laptop still on my knees, and I begin to fall into sleep. I picture Leviathan and his wife, two truly connected people, undone by the image of him in shackles, accused of experimenting on children, causing the death of a little girl. Shame and incarceration, Leviathan’s life having come full circle from his near-death experience in a cold war jail. Outside the cell I build for him, his doting wife stands, eyes streaked with tears.

  I am not alone when I wake up. I am in an embrace, with my laptop. I’ve somehow started to cuddle it in the night. Convenient. I feel groggy but rested. It’s 7:45.