The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  Twenty minutes later, they’re still at it. He’s managed to slip in just enough about himself—the entrepreneur thing and the “grad school in England thing” but not yet the Rhodes scholar thing—but also to leave room for her and her exploits such as they are. She went to law school to do good, like everyone else who went to law school, and wound up doing corporate law and then, unlike many others, scrapped the whole thing. She teaches social studies at a private high school on the theory she’ll have a long life to try different things. The master plan involves saving enough to hike the Andes in the next three years.

  The café lights flicker once. “Last call.”

  As she glances about at the beehive of activity, he opens the iPad, notices the screen saver. It’s a picture of a boy sticking out his tongue. Kent, Emily’s son. Jeremy grits his teeth, closes the red cover over the top of the gadget. He puts his hand on his sternum, just inside the left shoulder, paws around, trying to feel a lump or something to explain the dull ache and occasional sharp pain. He refuses to believe the pain and the overall malaise he’s been feeling are related to stress but doesn’t like any of the other explanations, like his immune system in conflict against something serious. Like the cancers that took his father at about his current age and, later, his mother.

  He’s struck with an idea. A way to figure out how to check what’s going on with this computer. Then looks up to see the woman’s packing her bag and looking at him. He shuts the cover.

  “Want to get a drink?”

  Ten minutes later, darker atmosphere in a danker place and margaritas. Jeremy’s trendy sneakers lightly stick to the gummy floor as his knees bounce under the table with his inexhaustible energy. The talk is witty and mundane; movies and pop culture, then a discussion Jeremy finds more than mildly interesting about historic waves of civil rights movements, not a political statement she’s making but, indirectly, one about global social systems and how they flex and bend and ebb and flow. Big-picture stuff, and he feels himself light up. She’s getting prettier, only a hair shy of beautiful. Who is using who?

  “School tomorrow.” She stands to use the bathroom. He watches her confident walk in the well-fitting jeans, tingling, appreciating the good looks of a worthy foe.

  He pulls out his phones. He already knows from the absence of buzzing the last two hours that he hasn’t had a call or text. But he checks anyway. He considers checking his iPad in the backpack near his feet but he risks blowing the way he’s positioned himself as laid-back enough and in-the-moment.

  He glances up and finds himself catching the eye of a thin woman at the far end of the bar, near the door, her back turned to Jeremy but inexplicably with her head swiveled in his direction. Baseball cap pulled down tight over hair hanging to the middle of her back. She drops Jeremy’s gaze but not before she’s made an impression; Jeremy’s sure that he’s seen the woman before. Where? Wasn’t it in the café earlier? Jeremy feels a surge of adrenaline, a conflict cocktail. Who is this joker: some legal server, an agent of Evan, or Harry War, coming to watch Jeremy implode?

  “You okay?”

  Jeremy sees his new friend has returned. He looks back at the bar to see the thin woman nowhere in sight.

  “Where are you headed?” he asks.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  He nods. Her tone irks him.

  “Want to walk me home? It’s not far.” She picks up her backpack. In the bathroom, she’s brushed the hair off her face. In spite of himself, Jeremy feels like Charlie Bucket from Willy Wonka looking at her full, moist lips.

  At the doorway of a two-story flat on a residential block plagued by the dull hum of a nearby highway overpass, they kiss. There’s a reprieve in the chill, a stillness in the night air. She takes his hand to guide him up the stairs. “Nice move, by the way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dating. Well planted. Obviously, you’re not a complete idiot.”

  He feels a sizzle, the crackling inside his head. Before he can even think about it, he strikes: “Nice neon sign.”

  “What?”

  “Garp.”

  She turns on the stair. It’s not just his words but the tone of voice, something icy, cruel.

  “What about Garp?”

  “The ultimate demand for attention. Works for the dumb guys and the smart guys. A pseudo-intellectual clarion call for attention. A quasi-literary welcome mat.”

  She shakes her head, trying to bring this creature into focus.

  “Instead of a bookmark, you could use a condom.”

  The sounds of the slap gets absorbed by a honk from the highway overpass. The sting doesn’t hurt Jeremy. It feels like victory.

  “BALLPARK.”

  The driver nods. His puffy loaf of curly black hair reaches nearly the roof of the cab.

  Jeremy realizes his jaw hurts. Not from the slap, but from clenching. He takes a deep breath. He thinks about how he could be in coitus right now with a lovely stranger. He could’ve held his tongue and gotten his victory in the bedroom, then the couch and then the shower. He wonders whether he sabotaged it because he’s got more important stuff to think about. Or maybe he picked the fight with her because she is easier prey than whatever else, or whoever else, is haunting Jeremy? He unzips his backpack, which rests on his knees. He pulls out the iPad. He swipes away the screen-saver image of Kent to get to the algorithm.

  It’s still there, unchanged. Taunting Jeremy. But he knows how he might start fighting back. It’s a simple task, really. He needs to get someplace settled and run a test. He needs to check the List.

  The List is a set of 327 statistical inputs that, Jeremy believes, together describe the state of the world. Oil prices and population density and weather systems and all the rest. No human being can possibly track and understand the collective movement of these systems, and properly weight them. No intuition—well, maybe that belonging to Warren Buffett or some other savant wasting his talents on Wall Street—can even sense, let alone pinpoint, the direction of the world. Not like Jeremy’s data set, at least when properly valued.

  Jeremy’s simple questions: Has someone messed with the inputs? Has someone altered the List? Easy way to find out. Jeremy can just ask. He can run a check to make sure that the variables the computer is using as the basis for its apocalyptic prediction do, in fact, match up with the actual variables in the world.

  “Just out front?”

  They’re three blocks from the ballpark, passing the petering nightlife in this gentrified concentric circle around AT&T Park, home to the San Francisco Giants. The high-rise condos emerge onto the gray skyline. These are home to the future leaders of Silicon Valley and the engineers who will make them rich.

  Jeremy picked the ballpark as his destination because it’s roughly equidistant from his apartment and his office and he wasn’t sure where he’d want to wind up.

  “Thirtieth and Balboa.”

  “I thought you wanted the ballpark.”

  “And I’ve changed my mind.”

  “So now you want to go to the Richmond.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Cabbie shrugs. It’s another easy fare. He’s no stranger to people wasting time in his cab doing computing. In fact, he’s managed to squeeze out a few extra bucks now and then while circling the block while the fare, oblivious, plays a video game on the phone.

  He turns a sharp right, changing direction. He clicks on the windshield wiper for a single swipe at the foggy condensation.

  Jeremy feels acutely for the first time the light numbing from the tequila. He doesn’t like the feeling, not tonight. He has an on-again, off-again relationship with booze. He’s in an off-again stage, one of those times it serves only social functions. Other times, he craves the taste and the feeling, but not to the point he’s ever in danger of overuse.

  He looks at a young couple on the street, together but the man walking a quarter step ahead of the woman. Human nature, Jeremy thinks, t
he need of one creature to dominate another, even by a quarter step.

  He closes his eyes. Puts his hand on the iPad. He pictures a conference table, surrounded by brass. At the head of the table, a real big shot, a lieutenant colonel, taking all the air out of the room. Flanking him, majors in uniform with the oak leaves and medals, one in khakis, white shirt, red tie. Projected onto a screen, there’s a videoconference feed. It’s an image from Berkeley of Dr. Harry Ives, the Cal scholar who introduced Jeremy to these monkeys. The aging man looks impassive, ensconced in a white beard, old eyes hard to read. It’s at least eighteen months earlier, in a lifeless room at the Pentagon, Jeremy’s technology on trial.

  “Bullshit,” Jeremy says.

  A major purses his lips, not appreciating the language.

  “Mr. Stillwater, they’ve taken a new village in the last twenty-four hours, their largest yet.”

  “And I’m bin Laden’s pet monkey.”

  Jeremy cannot believe that the rebels continue to push through the mountains. His computer, armed with a ton of rich and updated data, was all but 100 percent conclusive: this mini-insurgency should’ve died weeks ago.

  “Jeremy.” It’s Andrea.

  He looks at her, raven-black hair in a ponytail, a silk shirt covering the Day of the Dead tattoo on her left forearm, her whole package buttoned-down and ironed. Then turns to the head of the table, to the Army intelligence guy who must be important because he has the confidence not to have a crew cut, never carries any papers or BlackBerry or anything, and because he rarely speaks.

  “You messed with my data.”

  “I assure you . . .” Andrea starts.

  He cuts her off with a wave. He’s not even sure how they would’ve messed with his computer. Maybe on his last visit to Washington; he got drunk with Andrea at a karaoke bar and left his computer in his room. No way; he dismisses the thought. He was the one who ran the tests, scoured the data, knows he’s right. He’s sure they’re lying.

  “Where’s my iPad?”

  “You surrendered your device for security reasons at the front, just like everyone else. And you’ll get it back when you leave. This is a high-security facility and we’re all equally privileged and burdened by the trappings.” It’s one of the oak-leafed majors.

  Jeremy shakes his head. “Prove it. Prove I’m wrong,” he suddenly demands of the man at the head of the table. Everyone tenses at the direct challenge to someone who clearly doesn’t hear such talk except from one-star generals, and higher.

  It’s another of the majors who responds. “Mr. Stillwater, I understand you’re frustrated. You’re obviously very bright. Your technology holds promise but we’re fighting a war and we can’t afford to be your beta test.”

  Could it be more condescending?

  “You want the casualty reports?”

  Jeremy’s eyes widen a tad. It’s a rare utterance from the man at the head of the table. His voice is near a whisper, with a very slight northeastern drawl, the stuff of the Ivy League. Jeremy had failed to find any public information on this lead dog, no official bio, no smattering of personal details; but that might not mean much since he looks to be in his late forties, at least one full generation before people started sharing everything about their lives on the web.

  “They can be doctored,” says Jeremy.

  The lead dog looks at everyone and no one. “Somebody get Mr. Stillwater the casualty reports, ours and theirs; show him the pictures from Patwa, the empty cache, the insurgents’ recruiting figures, everything, all the classified stuff.”

  “Oh, and make it rhyme, like Dr. Seuss.”

  “Jeremy.”

  The lead dog puts up his hand to Andrea, looks at Jeremy.

  “You know Mitchell Stevenson?”

  Jeremy feels immediately defensive. He’s being sucked into a rhetorical trap, being asked to answer questions he doesn’t know the answer to, leading down who knows what path.

  “Is he the guy who came up with the idea to pretend the insurgency is still raging? Or did he write Green Eggs and Ham?”

  “Maybe you read a feature story about him in the Times a while back. He’s one of the best mop-up guys we ever had.”

  There’s a pause. Jeremy isn’t sure what this means. Everyone can sense the cocksure geek’s lack of comprehension but no one wants to interrupt or correct the lead dog.

  “Had,” the man continues. “A sniper blew off Colonel Stevenson’s face. A sniper from a band of still-raging insurgents owning us in the mountains around Patwa.”

  After a pause, Jeremy says: “I’m not sure what that proves.” He’s lost a touch of his hostility. “I told you the insurgency was fading. I didn’t tell you no one else would die.”

  “Fair point, Mr. Stillwater. We took a calculated risk to send in one of our best men to assess whether you and your computer had been accurate. And he walked into a hornet’s nest. That doesn’t speak particularly well to our own intelligence but then again we’ve never professed to have an Oracle of Delphi.” He pauses. “You’re right, though, that our paperwork proves nothing. It can be doctored, though I doubt the military has the technology to make it rhyme.”

  He half smiles. He’s practiced, unlike Jeremy, in the art of defusing conflict. The others in the room aren’t sure whether to laugh. He continues: “The only way I can prove it to you would be to send you and your computer to the region and let you do a field test. And that’s a good way for you to wind up like Mitch, seriously and truly dead.”

  The man stands. He’s tall in the way of people who command power, with slightly slumped shoulders, and he has an emerging belly in the way of people who spend their days looking at monitors. Two of his lieutenants stand too but they stay when the man walks out.

  Just before he hits the door of the big conference room, he turns back to Jeremy.

  “Take the money.”

  “What?”

  “Take Silicon Valley’s money. Use your magic eight ball to do business intelligence, predict the future in some sector where no one gets hurt. I bet it’ll do wonders projecting the future of mobile apps.”

  He reaches the door.

  “Send me. I dare you.”

  The man pauses, turns back.

  Jeremy continues: “Send me to see for myself.”

  Now the lieutenant colonel smiles, in full. “I was hoping you’d fall for that.” He looks at Andrea. “Work out some time that Mr. Stillwater can go to the region. Let him take his computer and run the tests real-time. Maybe he could get it to work. We sure could use the technology, if it could be refined into something not decidedly at odds with reality.”

  He shuts the door.

  JEREMY FEELS THE cab slow. At the time, Jeremy wasn’t sure who had won the exchange, but he subsequently learned. The lieutenant colonel was teaching Jeremy a lesson in patient disengagement. There were a few follow-up calls, Andrea never able to get the timing together on a trip, the budget not there; at one point it seemed like he was poised to be able to study a battle in southern Iraq, preparations made, then the thing evaporated, one thing after the next, and then it all just faded away, like the rest of Jeremy’s opportunities. The crafty lieutenant colonel, the Pentagon, had slipped away from Jeremy, without even giving him the satisfaction of a fight.

  And, thereafter, Jeremy started running all the diagnostics. Programming the algorithm to test itself, run war games, simulate conflict to see if it can rightly predict the outcome. Jeremy, even if he doesn’t quite admit it, started to question his computer, started challenging it, demanding that it prove itself right. And it seems always to be so. It can see and predict things that elude all possible human foresight. Can’t it?

  “Here?”

  He nods. The outer Richmond, predictably, is foggier than downtown, fog cum drizzle. He hands the cabbie a ten-dollar bill, which represents the fare and a fifty-cent tip, but Jeremy might need the last $20 in his wallet.

  He glances at the countdown clock, 67:17:17, then puts the iPad into his ba
ckpack. He steps into the wet, the computer strapped to his back, like a papoose, or an albatross.

  CHAPTER 5

  FIVE HUNDRED MILES away, also damp, a dim light, projecting the shape and yellowish hue of a dying moon, illuminates a slick floor. Then it flickers, and dies.

  The thin man smacks the cool cylinder against his palm. The flashlight returns to its half-life. “Friggin’ thing.”

  He takes two more steps, then slides his heavy boots on the metal, imagining himself skating, breaking the monotony of the chore. He raises the angle of the light, looking at the edges of the boxes and huge containers, the mountains of white rice, cell phone screens, car batteries, undershirts, kids’ pajamas, who knows what myriad of stuff piled high to the distant ceiling of this cavernous belly.

  He looks up into blackness that, he imagines, could stretch to infinity. He thinks: I should have asked her to marry me. I should have, I should have. Now she thinks I’m on the fence. He pictures her sitting in a café in Hong Kong doing those tortuous emotional somersaults she can do, capable of deciding on an impulse to call off the whole relationship.

  And he can’t call. His cell phone hasn’t worked in two days, the signal apparently unable to find a satellite in the vastness of sea. Or maybe it’s the weather. Even in the hull, surrounded by mountains of boxes, he can hear the crashing and lashing of waves.

  He looks back down, scoots along the narrow path, flashlight lit, thinking of her, looking at nothing. He sees the pants. Not pants, he realizes, legs with pants. A pair of legs jutting into the path, extruding from between huge containers. Give me a break, he thinks.

  “Bryan.”

  The legs remain motionless. He sighs.

  Louder: “Yo, Bryan.”

  Of the handful of shipmates on the skeleton crew, it’s the sarcastic and confrontational Filipino called Bryan who is most likely to have drunk himself into a stupor. The thin man uses his right foot to nudge a leg.

  The body rouses.

  “They’re gonna be pissed if they catch you down there.”

  The thin man wants to keep it as neutral as possible, not be seen as a cop or do anything to make an enemy if they’ve got to spend another half week together at sea.