The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  Part of a larger embrace of Big Data, aimed at predicting the stock market, of course, but also forecasting political tastes, weather, consumers’ susceptibility to pricing changes and their shopping desires.

  Just before Jeremy’s fall from grace, there was a party held in his honor at a two-tone mansion off Fillmore. It was hosted by one of the handful of Silicon Valley socialites with that knack for convening, at a moment’s notice, fifty interesting and smart people, along with journalists. The evite heralded: “Make PC, Not War.” Computers, not conflict.

  Partygoers came mostly for the interesting cocktails, using pomegranate juice or fresh leaves picked from such-and-such garden. But also to connect to, or stay connected to, Jeremy, just in case he became the next Zuckerberg. His own vertical, his little satellite world, opportunists, but also, given the highly politicized nature of the quest, ideologues, academics, curious government officials domestic and international and, of course, venture capitalists with military backgrounds—a staple in Silicon Valley going back to the creation of the region by the military brats who started Hewlett-Packard.

  What they didn’t know, or some may have only sensed, was that Jeremy soon would be not the next Zuckerberg but, rather, the next Hindenburg. A week before the party, the Pentagon had told him the conflict algorithm had failed. He was waiting for Andrea to call to tell him when he could get on an airplane to Iraq, or Afghanistan, to check the results for himself, do the field research. He’d already packed a bag so, per Andrea and the Pentagon’s admonitions, he could pick up and climb on a plane at any moment.

  Meantime, he pacified himself with figs and goat cheese and high-potency frozen vodka.

  Drunk, in the shadows, he overheard the half dozen late-night stragglers descend into an argument about whether Big Data could be used to predict individual behaviors, like the likelihood of suicide. For instance, could someone’s communications or movement patterns—as measured by a mobile phone—be a predictor of whether the person is getting depressed or uncommunicative, suggesting eventual suicidal ideations?

  Could it predict whether someone is becoming hostile, or even homicidal?

  Jeremy heard one of them say: “I have a prediction. Sometime soon, Stillwater will let loose with a hostile outburst.”

  Another said: “You don’t even need a calculator to tell you that.”

  Lots of hushed laughter.

  Jeremy, unseen, receded to the basement, to a guest room. He called Emily, who told him to calm down. He hung up and slammed the iPhone down on the bed. I’ll fucking show them.

  He passed out that night, furious, with an idea, the seeds of “Program Princip,” the algorithm named for the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Jeremy’s idea was to try to go deeper than merely understanding when a conflict might start, to understanding who might spark it. Not the obvious person—like an aggressive and politically motivated President Bush—but someone lesser known. Could Jeremy take all the increasingly public information about the connections between and among people and figure out who belongs at the center of a conflict?

  Another brainstorm, a terrific one, marketable, at least. But personal too. At its heart, Jeremy wondered if he might be able to use the program to figure out who was lying to him—Andrea, Harry, Evan. Who, even then, was undermining him? Who is Jeremy’s enemy? Or who is his most central enemy?

  It never dawned on Jeremy that night that the very problem might be Jeremy.

  In the present, his computer beeps. It is returning the data. Unfolding before him, the report on where the rhetoric of the world has changed so much that the computer now projects Armageddon. T minus three days. Fighting off fatigue, he takes in the screen, a menu at the top. It reads: “five entities.”

  Jeremy purses his lips. There has been a material change in the language of conflict in five different categories. The categories materialize:

  North Korea (related), + 14 percent

  Moscow (related), + 9 percent

  Mexico (related), + 46 percent

  Congo (related), + 6 percent

  Fertile Crescent (related), − 12 percent

  He taps his right toe on the ground, nervous energy. With an index finger, he points at the word “Mexico.” His finger is so close it nearly touches the screen. Forty-six percent—a veritable explosion in conflict language coming from Mexican authorities or from other figureheads around the world relating to Mexico. Something’s going on to the south.

  He calls up another window with the map. It’s seething red, pulsing around the globe. He runs his mouse over Mexico. A pop-up box shows: 112,336,538, 8.8 percent. The population and its annual growth.

  He looks on the bottom right of the map, at the countdown clock. 55:19:27. Hours, minutes and seconds.

  Jeremy startles at the buzz in his pocket. Private number. He picks it up from the desk. “I’m on the Do Not Call Registry and have retained a legion of rabid plaintiff attorneys to enforce it with threat of lawsuit and execution.”

  He hears nothing on the other end of the phone. Then a sound in the background, a horn or loudspeaker, maybe a hint of breathing from a caller. Then the line goes dead.

  He recalls the list of regions with changing rhetoric: North Korea, Moscow and Congo experiencing rising tensions. Might mean something. The Fertile Crescent, the Middle East, experiencing dulling tensions. That’s at least one variable he can toss out.

  He slips the phone into his pocket. On his tablet, in the window with the Rhetoric statistics, he swipes the line about Mexico, and discovers a place consumed by the language of war.

  CHAPTER 15

  JANINE FEELS THE Earth move. The San Andreas Fault. A nuclear blast. Judgment Day.

  Her phone.

  She opens an eye.

  She’s been dreaming. She’s drenched. There’s a vibration, something deep. Where is it coming from? Not the end, not yet. It’s from beneath her pillow.

  “Okay, okay.” She reaches underneath the sweaty pillow and feels the vibrating phone. She registers the darkness. How long has she been asleep?

  She flips open the phone. It’s 12:17. There are two texts. That’s very bad. One text is bad news. Two, worse.

  Both from a private number. The first reads: “Rouge.”

  She doesn’t let herself acknowledge it, or its meaning. She reads the second: “Maintenant. Hier.”

  Red.

  Now. Yesterday.

  She picks up the pillow and uses it to wipe the sweat from her face. She searches for images from her dream, something about a boy shooting a dog in a field. She flips on the light. She swings her jeans-clad legs over the bed and stares at the fax machine. Maintenant. It won’t be long.

  She takes a voracious slug from the tea next to the bed. It both quenches her thirst and prompts a gag. No training, no will, she thinks, can allow the body to work if it gets only a few hours of sleep each day. She places the tea back on the worn copy of The Killer Angels, which she picked up for the title and discovered had nothing to do, really, with murderers or angels. But was about the Battle of Gettysburg. She can’t put it down, and it is in some minor part responsible for her insomnia. Brothers fighting brothers, courage, but all the blood spilled in vain, by a godless nation. This is her guilty pleasure. The last few years, emotionally isolated, often out of communication with anyone she can trust, traveling from one bed to the next, the only common thread her books.

  Of course, there is only one book, the Bible, the word.

  She thinks back to how the Guardians first enlightened her about The Book, when they found her, covered in filth, starving, a child of war, in ruins on the border of Lebanon. She couldn’t have been twelve years old, and she’d been in a terrible fight with two older boys, and routed them—over ownership of a water bottle. Just another day in the refugee camps; she’d been raped, her mother too, among the other daily indignities. Then a man lifted her from the dirt. He had bad teeth, smelled of American cheese but had an angelic face, a thick cross around his neck, and
a Bible. She flailed and kicked at him too. And he took her attacks, and smiled, what’s the word, “beatifically,” and he filled her water bottle. And then, trite as she’d come to think of it, he filled her soul.

  He was a Guardian, of course. And he eventually trusted her enough to tell her the truth about him and the Guardians. Their secret work, how the network was sworn to protect the Holy Land, The City, Jerusalem. To keep it from being “compromised.”

  That was the word the Guardians found most distasteful, evil—compromise.

  If there is compromise, if the God-fearing do not truly adhere to the word of God, then the Messiah will not return.

  She knows by heart the passage the man read her from Genesis:

  I will be with you and will bless you, for to you and to your offspring I will give all these lands, and I will establish the oath that I swore to Abraham your father. I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and will give to your offspring all these lands. And in your offspring all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.

  But, she asked: aren’t the enemies the Jews, the deadly army of the Israelites, the Muslims, and the other heretics?

  He smiled.

  Of course not, he said. Not the true believers, the ones who favor and follow the true word of God.

  Think of the biblical passage, he told her: all nations on Earth will be favored if the Bible is truly adhered to. When he explained the meaning to her, she immediately understood the equation. Israel must be reestablished as a Holy Land, one in which the God-fearing descendants of Abraham embrace the covenant. Only then will all the nations be blessed. Only then will the Messiah come. Only then will there be no more hunger, no more rape, no more fruitless tribalism.

  The Guardians gave her truth, meaning, safety. Hope.

  And, over the years, deadly training.

  She shudders with awe when she thinks of her transformation. She was raised to trust only Syrian Christians. But what good did they do her? Weren’t they just as responsible for the rape of her dusty village, her rape? Weren’t her supposed brothers and sisters just as culpable as the Muslim hypocrites and the pious but heathen Israeli army? All the generals and politicians, all the king’s men.

  Not so the Guardians. They are not one ethnic group. But they are connected in their belief. They are a true family, his children. Her siblings.

  She will do anything to protect them, help save them. And now they ask a new task.

  The woman called Janine closes her eyes and allows herself to imagine she’s got one big eye on the top of her head, like a Cyclops. She’s mere hours from helping to open up the Earth. Throw the ugly parts into it, like the Cyclops, scrape things clean, then let God, the one and only, sort things out.

  The fax machine beeps, answers, begins to print.

  Janine reaches beneath the bed. She pulls out a small suitcase, a flee bag, she calls it, just enough stuff to let her survive if she has to go on the lam. She pulls out her last clean shirt, her last clean not-whore shirt, a green blouse she made sure was loose enough not to accentuate her breasts or attract attention. Still, she thought, almost too flattering. She pushes it aside, finds a long-sleeve gray T-shirt with a University of Arizona crest.

  She lifts and smells it. Not clean but dry.

  The fax is halfway through its printing.

  She takes off her shirt, pulls out a bra from the flee bag, clasps it, pulls on the gray T-shirt. She opens the first text. She responds: “And a good morning to you too.” She knows any vague response will suffice to acknowledge receipt.

  Rouge. Red. Blood. A simple, juvenile code. Kill.

  Maintenant, hier. Now. Yesterday. Translation: No time to plan. Act.

  And, within that, an unstated implication: Something is going wrong. Very, very wrong.

  The printing is three-quarters done. She begins to make out the face coming through on the fax. She begins to recognize it. She whispers: “No. Gracias.” Not this man, this fierce individualist, with a big brain and a divine spark. He takes no side, other than his own, and his truth. Still, there are no noncombatants.

  This is the target and this is her job. And this man, the one appearing on the fax, is, apparently, the source of sudden and acute trouble. He’s doubtless begun to piece it together.

  The face fully appears, the fax near complete. And now, with a tight, bitter smile, she thinks she understands the dream she just awoke from. This man is the mongrel shredded by bullets. She’s the boy with the gun.

  At the edge of the facsimile, a scrawled note: Make it amateur.

  She feels new sweat beads on her brow. On top of everything else, it needs to be messy.

  CHAPTER 16

  LA PRENSA (MEXICO CITY). Hector Gonzalez, secretary of the National Action Party: “We may not yet declare victory, but with drug war casualties falling for the first time since 2006, we may say we have this menace in our sights. Now we go for the kill.”

  La Prensa. Unnamed drug cartel executive: “The corrupt right wing has soaked this nation’s poor and downtrodden while we have employed and fed and clothed them. The government wants war, then it shall have war.”

  Economista, cover: Hector Gonzalez murdered. WAR!

  @ForthePersonas (Twitter): Rise Muertos. It’s the SPRING of the dead. Rise and retake our land!

  La Opinion (Veracruz): Garden Rodents Chewing Lawns; Mayor Declares War on Varmints.

  Jeremy shakes his head, making sure he is reading this correctly, then leans back and laughs. The algorithm, sensitive though it has been programmed to be, can’t distinguish a rhetorical attack on drug lords or politicians or terrorists from one on weasels.

  It’s merely looking for a broad-based increase in the intensity of language as measured by use of hundreds of keywords identified as either threatening or conciliatory.

  He looks up at the packed subway car. Hears the moans. People somehow shocked that a quasi-governmental transit system could be stuck in a tunnel under the ocean, awaiting the re-clearing up of problems on the other end that had been solved and now need resolving. He’d be among the haters but he finds it easier to dismiss his disgruntled fellow commuters than the transit system. Besides, the guy next to him smells like a fucking fish sandwich.

  He glances down the list of phrases the program has identified as material from Mexico. In the last few days, the words and phrases have grown so intense as to sound comical: “war,” “eradicate,” “threat to our way of life,” “purge,” “terrorist,” “scorched earth.”

  As the words begin to blur together, Jeremy starts to get the picture. He sees the rhetoric spark catch and spread into wildfire; the right wing renews its pledge to end the drug war, the cartels strike back and reinforce their words with attacks, begetting more arrests, tougher language, cycle of violent language. Then the left wing kicks in, condemning the violence, but also, at first, tacitly accusing the United States of fostering the drug market, failing to police its urban demand; then the cartels weigh in, taunting America and, by proxy, the right-wing politicians who ally with hard-liners in the United States.

  Cartel: “The United States has jailed our brothers and enslaved our sisters in menial shit jobs. You have feasted on Mexico too long. Beware the riders from the south. We can take down your towers too.”

  Jeremy isn’t quite sure if he’s got the exact language, given the fact it goes through a translation program. But, even if it’s close, it’s both insane and loosely cryptic, and the “towers” clearly a reference to 9/11. In fact, the computer has picked it up, highlighting in bold the word “towers.”

  He looks closer at the citation. It comes from Diario de Morelia, a small daily in Michoacán. The location strikes Jeremy as mildly noteworthy because it is such a central feeder of cheap labor to the United States. He looks for more on the person quoted. It refers only to an anonymous high-ranking captain in Los Negros, the armed contingent of the Sinaloa dru
g cartel, involved in the border wars.

  Jeremy looks at the screen, feels his exhilaration trumped by a wave of exhaustion, perspiration. He wipes his forehead, feels the glisten.

  Jeremy looks back at the garble of intensifying language from Mexico. He does a Google search on the threat about the “towers.” He’s wondering if it elicited any response. It materializes slowly, the bandwidth being sucked by the frustrated subway companions.

  He finds, in a communiqué from the U.S. State Department, that an undersecretary of state’s office has put out a short press release condemning the use of “inflammatory and irresponsible language.” The release thanks the Mexican government for its “forceful efforts” to shut down the drug trade, which the release characterizes as a “cancer” attacking North America and Central America and their free people.

  Jeremy’s seen hundreds of such releases in the past. This one seems unremarkable in every way. It feels like a response the U.S. government was required to make, given the inherently inflammatory nature of the “towers” language. It’s like the geopolitical version of the “n-word” to describe black people. Always gets a response. And, he suspects, American journalists saw the State Department release as perfunctory and nothing more. No one has written about this.

  Rather than setting off bells for Jeremy, the lack of interest by the American press confirms a suspicion that he is harboring. The flare-up in physical and rhetorical attacks coming from Mexico might well be insignificant—not insignificant to those involved, but insignificant as a predictor of global conflict. After all, Jeremy thinks, looking at the texts of the carping Mexicans, the drug war on the border there has raged for a decade. A slow-materializing Wikipedia search tells him that casualties started to grow around 2001, then escalated until the late part of the decade and then, after hitting more than thirty thousand total, began to decline.