The Cloud ni-3

by Matt Richtel

  Bullet Point: The cloud is where we keep all this data. The cloud is a complex array of millions of servers scattered across the globe, congregated in data centers, connected through wires running under oceans and through mountains. Servers, with their multiple processors, can ably juggle data. The human brain cannot. In fact, when we try to juggle, we may crash.

  Bullet point: In actuality, the Juggler will retard the development of kids’ frontal lobes. This slow-developing portion located right behind our foreheads traditionally serves as the control tower for our actions, the thing that makes us human by allowing us to establish dominion, if you will, over our impulses. If someone feels a tickling sensation in his nose while standing onstage during a wedding, his frontal lobe may keep him from sticking a digit in a nostril to scratch it; if someone’s senses come alive at the smell of doughnuts, her frontal lobe might help her choose a healthier alternative. If someone sets about to write a business plan or a love letter or a book but keeps being inundated by the ping of a cell phone, the frontal lobe helps keep his brain focused on the longer-term goal, for better or for worse.

  Sometimes, there is no better.

  If someone sees a bright color or flash of light across a street and feels an impulse to run to explore it, the frontal lobe helps her pause and say: wait, am I supposed to run into the street?

  That, I believe, is what happened to Kathryn Gilkeson. Somehow, in some way that Andrew Leviathan has to answer for, her heavy use of the early Juggling technology eroded her impulse control. She acted like a child whose sensory impulses overrode not just her training but the maturity level her frontal lobe should otherwise have achieved.

  Bullet point: Kathryn Gilkeson may not be the only victim. There were other children, at least one. Evidence suggests that Anthony Gearson, a young man from Los Altos High School who recently took his own life, may also have suffered from long-term effects of early Juggler technology.

  I pause in my writing. I drink more jet fuel. I am appreciating my sudden focus. I attribute it to the fading effects of concussion and the increasing ones from caffeine but also something else: when I’m writing, I’m less susceptible to all the outside forces, insulated somehow from the attentional whiplash my curiosity compels.

  I almost begin to type again, when I’m struck by a strange parallel between the effects of the Juggler and my concussion. The last few days, with my frontal lobe not at full strength, I’ve acted with, even for me, intense impulse, abandon, outright stupidity. It’s possible that my erratic behavior helped uncover a conspiracy but also highly possible I could’ve gotten much of this information without running headlong into the apartment building of a dead man, dark alleys, fists, shotguns, and fires. I’ve been in my own neurological cloud. Waxing a bit: Is that where we’re sending our children? Under the auspices of helping them rule the modern world?

  Bullet point: I hypothesize that Leviathan perfected the Juggler technology, and then decided to export it to China. Why? I can only, for now, speculate: he hated the authoritarian Cold War regime that nearly had him executed and so he wants to harm China, another, albeit much less authoritarian, non-democracy.

  Bullet point: He got Gils Simons, his former (???) business partner (current silent partner???), to be his point man in contact with the Chinese through companies involved with the China-U.S. High-Tech Alliance. Gils sold it to his Chinese contacts as a great new device for kids. He took on a hapless thug named Steven who helped deal with Chinese contacts and small-time errands here. For instance, he hired Sandy Vello, whose work he’d seen on a reality-TV show and who he naively felt could appeal to parents, to volunteer to teach multitasking at the Twin Peaks learning annex but where they actually tested the latest versions of the Juggler. See: blown-up learning annex and destruction of evidence.

  Bullet point: It’s all feeling too complicated. What am I missing?

  Bullet point: Alan Parsons was a drunk who used to work for Leviathan. He uncovered Leviathan’s plot and the connection to the death of Jill Gilkeson. He wanted to blackmail Leviathan. But he couldn’t put the whole thing together, couldn’t make all the pieces fit. So he came to me. He wanted me to follow the trail. He tried to email me but I didn’t respond or see his overture. Then he essentially used my innate curiosity and a woman named Faith to draw me in (???).

  Bullet point: It’s all still feeling too complicated. Time to find out what I’m missing.

  Bullet point: Bullseye, you know how much I hate to use a cliche like this: but, to repeat, if you’ve read this far, I’m probably no longer around. Send the police after Andrew Leviathan (see above). I don’t have a will. Let this serve as one. I’ve inherited some money from Polly. A lot of it. Keep a chunk for yourself and Samantha. Make sure to pay the taxes. Oh, and get yourself some season tickets to Where the Sun Don’t Shine. It’s good to occasionally go outside.

  I open my email account and send the file to Bullseye as an attachment. In the body of the email, I beg him again not to open the email unless he hasn’t heard from me for three days. He’s likely to go along.

  I close the laptop and remember a story I once heard about Palo Alto. Researchers parked a relatively new convertible by the side of the road here, leaving the top down. They did the same thing in a poor urban area on the East Coast. Within hours, the car on the East Coast had been stripped for parts by vandals. The car in Palo Alto went untouched for days, until it started to rain. Someone drove by, stopped and put the top up on the convertible.

  I put Bullseye’s laptop on the floor of the booth where I’m sitting. Someone will pick it up and make sure it gets back to him.

  I turn on my own laptop and my phone. I walk out the front of the cafe, inviting a modest chill. I take a seat on the patio, alone. I wait.

  Twenty minutes later, he shows up. The shiny bald buzzard pulls up in his black car and parks across the street. He rolls down his passenger-side window and he looks at me, at least I gather in the dark, and I at him. He rolls up the window. I wait.

  Ten minutes later, a Jaguar sedan pulls up in front of the cafe. The car is an older model, elegant but worn. Andrew Leviathan rolls down his passenger window. He smiles thinly. “Where are you parked?”

  I point a half block away.

  “Follow me.”

  We wind up the Palo Alto hills. Leviathan in front, me, the buzzard. Eerily, like a funeral caravan. We take a right onto a dirt tributary, wind along the gravel road, through the increasingly dense trees, to a place well beyond help. I expect we’ll reach a house with a towering black gate, maybe a sentry, a moat or a stone statue. But when Leviathan slows, it’s at a rustic fence. With help from the headlights, I can see two retrievers rush to the gate, barking their approval at our arrival.

  The ranch-style house spreads wide across the horizon, blocking a view of the bay behind it that I imagine makes it worth whatever Leviathan paid for this understated place, and whatever it took to amass the fortune.

  He parks in a roundabout in front of the house, and lumbers out of the car. I, with just the slightest hesitation, do the same. The buzzard stays put. Leviathan nods his head to the right, where I see a stand-alone structure, maybe a home office or guest house, cut into a break in the trees. He starts walking toward it.

  I look in the doorway and see Leviathan’s stunning wife, arms crossed, wearing a bathrobe and a grim look. I look down and away, as if embarrassed.

  Leviathan disappears into the trees, heading toward the guesthouse.

  I follow.

  56

  Boxy but distinct. The square edifice stands two stories, the gently sloped and white tile roof extending a foot over the edge of the house, like the brim of a sun hat. Separated by a grove of trees from the main house, accessible by an inlaid stone path, it also projects a less-rustic character, a home office maybe, with the emphasis on office, not home.

  The nerve center of a dark plan.

  Leviathan, still a few steps ahead of me, walking in silence, pulls open a heavy door an
d walks through it. I’m struck by the plodding character of his gait, and mine. The two of us head without relish toward an inevitable confrontation. It strikes me that I’m not the one already feeling defeated.

  Inside the door, I’m greeted by Richard Nixon. His painting hangs on the wall to the right of a ponderously heavy wooden staircase that bisects the entryway. I can’t help but pause at the former president’s brooding visage, downturned eyes, holding a pen suspended over some document as he sits in the Oval Office.

  “Hubris,” Leviathan mutters, halfway up the stairs. He plods upward. Then he says “on” and the upstairs lights ignite. I plod after him. I follow his path into a room directly across from the top of the stairs.

  When through the door, I nearly lose my breath.

  The view.

  Through a window that stretches most of the length of the backside of the house, Silicon Valley materializes. I inhale the majestic view of an airplane at low altitude. In the foreground, the hills give way to the flatlands stretching from Burlingame to San Jose, and then the three spans leading to the East Bay and the rest of the world: the Dumbarton, San Mateo and Bay bridges. From the mind of Leviathan and a handful of true pioneers, semiconductors and software roll out from here across the Earth.

  “God and his creation,” I say.

  He pulls out a chair behind his antique desk and sits, his back to the view. He gestures with an open palm for me to sit on a worn cloth love seat that looks like he picked it up for free after reading an ad on Craigslist.

  “That chair survived the bombings at Dresden.”

  “Another reminder from history, like Nixon?”

  “Overextension comes at a price.”

  The love seat sits a few feet in front of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that line the walls. As I sit, I see the gun. It sits in the middle of the desk, where I might have expected a computer. The black handgun looks inert, small, a toy thing from a movie set.

  “We could do a modified interview style.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I ask you a series of questions and then when you feel I’ve overstepped the boundaries, you shoot me.”

  He grimaces. He’s not the sort of bad guy who seems to enjoy the role.

  “You obviously discovered the Juggler. Tell me what you know and I’ll fill in the rest.”

  I look at the gun again. I can’t help but flash on the night that Leviathan as a young man spent in the jail cell in the Eastern Bloc, anticipating his execution. He plotted with all his might to survive. By contrast, I’m going so quietly.

  I could run, I suppose. I could yell “off” and command the lights to extinguish, then dive for the door. But run to what? How far would I get? They can track my movements. I knew what I was getting into when I drove here. I wonder if I’m destined to see Isaac and Polly on the other side of some spiritual barrier I’m not sure I believe exists.

  “I wrote a file that will be widely distributed in the event of my disappearance. One way or another, the world will know about what you’ve done.”

  “Maybe.”

  I don’t understand and shake my head.

  “You’re a great journalist, I mean that. But you vastly underestimate the ability of even modestly talented hackers to invade your devices, use them to do surveillance on you, control your digital output, and so forth. If you left a file to be distributed by email, I could probably kill or modify it.”

  “So I probably shouldn’t have let on.”

  “Tell me what it says and, like I said, I’ll fill in the rest.”

  “What do I have to lose?”

  “Honestly? Nothing I can calculate.”

  I tell him most of what I’ve surmised, concluding that the Juggler, scheduled for imminent distribution in China, slows development of kids’ frontal lobes, making them more impulsive, less able to focus, indulgent like children years their junior. “When it comes to frontal lobe development, age ten is the new seven and seven is the new five.”

  “See, that’s much better wordplay.”

  I tell him I don’t understand the mechanism that allows the technology to take a neurological toll. After all, I note, the Juggler doesn’t seem much different from a lot of the high-intensity phones and game machines.

  “I’m not entirely sure myself of the mechanism,” he says.

  As a matter of substance, it’s not helpful. But it is an admission I’m on the right track.

  “May I pace?” I ask.

  He nods.

  I walk on the thin area rug past his desk, pivot, make another pass. I tell him that I suspect Gils Simons, his old chief operating officer, passed the technology to the Chinese through the High-Tech Alliance. I pause from my walk and look at him, struck by something.

  “You and Gils aren’t exactly on the same page.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Different henchmen.”

  “Go on.”

  “You’re tracking me with the tall bald guy. Shiny head makes him tough to miss.” He starts to ask who I mean, and then just nods, a silent appreciation or, maybe, endorsement of the description. I continue: “He, Gils, has a closer relationship with the Chinese guy with the crooked smile.”

  Leviathan waves his hand, urging me to continue.

  I tell him I suspect that Alan Parsons learned of the plot and tried to blackmail the group. But, I say, Parsons couldn’t quite piece it together and somehow needed my help. I’m walking again, a bit lost in my own thoughts. This is where things get shaky for me. And, in addition, I’m not quite sure how to play this next bit. Do I come right out and say that I know about the death of Kathryn Gilkeson? And the recent suicide of the kid at Los Altos High?

  My reservation, I realize, is I don’t want to provoke him unnecessarily. I may be going gently into that good night but I’m not going to actually shove myself.

  “May I go out on a limb?”

  “It’s a bit late to ask.”

  “You’ve hated authoritarian regimes since you were a boy. You want to poison a generation of Chinese kids, I guess, as a way to make a political statement. But it just doesn’t seem like you, to be honest.”

  Smirk. I’m not sure how to read it.

  “Fill in the blanks, Andrew. First tell me about the girl,” he says.

  “The girl.”

  “Cut the crap. The girl. The one who died.”

  Something in the room begins to change. I’m watching the famous Leviathan composure drain from his face. In its place, a look I’ve never seen from him and, rarely, from anyone. It’s the sheer falling away of a mask. The cheek muscles go limp, eyes droop, a cascade of cells rinses downward like gravity or the final layer of base makeup washed from the face of the clown.

  “The girl,” I whisper.

  He rests his hand on the gun. “Tell me what you know.”

  57

  A hot flash seizes me and an image of death creeps into my mind’s eye. It’s the stick-thin doctor in blue scrubs telling me that Polly will not make it. “Sit here as long as you like,” she said when I looked at her with shock and silence.

  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-frag
ile 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.”