Dead On Arrival

by Matt Richtel

  “You have no right.”

  “Oh, Jane, you’d give your mother TB if it would lead to matching funds. Just own up to your motives for once.” He said it with a shrug, making it more funny than mean. And Michael chuckled.

  Across the room, through the far doorway, the slight woman who had asked the question about doctor-patient privilege—the same one who had talked during the lecture—watched rapt. Then, just as Lyle looked her direction, she spun out of view.

  A few minutes later, Lyle came barreling out of the room and she stood not a few feet away, pretending to glance at a corkboard with various school announcements. She couldn’t help but turn and look at him. They caught eyes. She smiled.

  “Sorry you had to overhear that,” Lyle said.

  “I didn—”

  “Anyhow, no biggie.” He was talking in an offhanded way, but he looked so sad to her.

  “Everything all right, Dr. Martin?”

  “Fine. Thank you for asking,” he said without enthusiasm. “Nice job today. You . . .” He cocked his head to the side. “Are you a med student?”

  She flushed. “No.” She wanted to ask how he intuited it. “I’m in tech. I work at Google. They encourage us to develop outside areas of interest so I’m auditing—”

  “Well, regardless, well done. I’m not sure most med students would’ve been as willing as you were to put themselves out like that. Whatever you do, you’ve got a bright future.”

  He turned away, started to, when she cleared her throat.

  “Do you recognize me?” She couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out, though they did so at a whisper, a veritable mumble.

  “Pardon?” he said.

  “I said: thank you.”

  “Okay, great, good luck to you.”

  He turned and she was glad that he couldn’t see her face. It was a jigsaw of embarrassment and doubt. She willed it into conviction. She had impressed a man who was an embodiment of action, who didn’t shrink, and, more than any of that, a man who once had saved her life.

  Ten

  The ceilings at Google reached to the sky. The open-air offices and workspace of one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and envied companies could feel like a military air hangar. A vast cubicle den that could fit a 747. As Jackie entered, a voice echoed through the cavern.

  “Hey, this isn’t gluten free. Look at this, Jackie, this isn’t gluten free! How can we possibly concentrate when there are only ten free energy bars and fully 10 percent aren’t gluten free? Eh, waif like you probably doesn’t even eat. Oopsy, I’m gonna get sued! You won’t sue me, will ya?”

  Jackie Badger shook her head and half smiled at the sarcastic rant of fellow Googler Adam Stile. The geeks ran deep here, the brightest young minds in the world figuring out how to serve Internet users and make sure they stayed attuned to their screens. Some of the engineers were so geeky they redefined the concept. Adam fit the bill. If Google had a vote for most-likely-to-be-not-so-funny-as-he-thinks, he would win it.

  Jackie set down her backpack in her cubicle and caught Denny’s eye. He was standing a few desks away in the vast cubicle den, clearly feeling the same way about Adam. Denny Watkins ran the department. Much more than that: he ran the Basement. That’s what Denny told Jackie he called it the first time he’d invited her down there, after several lunches and drinks. Just telling her about the Basement was an admission she’d been vetted. That she now knew.

  Denny jerked his head to the side. She understood what it meant: Meet me downstairs.

  Jackie sat at her desk and unzipped her backpack. She grabbed two clementines and put the tiny oranges next to a framed picture of her dog, Sadie. She reached into the backpack and started to pull out the big medical text. Then she thought better of it. Why bring any attention?

  She felt a pang of frustration that the lecture had been canceled this morning. Now, they said, he was “on assignment.” There was a lot of speculation about what that meant, chatter in an online group of class members. He’s battling a seventy-foot microbe with just his stethoscope and flip-flops.

  She knew better. Dr. Martin was heading to Tanzania. She’d overheard it through the doorway. Then she’d done a little harmless hacking to track his whereabouts. Greater good and all that. He’d said so himself when she’d asked about the ethics of disclosing the Saudi minister’s cause of death. She couldn’t wait for his next class and then his after-hours.

  You’ve got a bright future. Clichéd, sure. But he even took time to single her out when he was fighting with that wretched dean. Jackie had risked putting herself out, asking him about patient privacy, and he’d perceived her as real, not as some showy kiss-ass med student trying to prove she was as smart as the teacher. She’d vacillated later whether she should’ve thanked him more clearly for what happened in Nepal and decided that would have come off as insincere. She’d rather be seen now as a full-bodied, able person than a self-doubting supplicant.

  “I know when you’re this lost in thought we might have a patent coming,” said Denny, startling her. He was standing over her shoulder. “What gives, genius?”

  “Wondering if we can patent your stealth gait. Who can walk that quietly?”

  “You mean at two hundred thirty pounds?” Denny smiled jovially.

  “Have a gluten-free bar.”

  Nobody else would talk to Denny like that. Everyone in the department wondered about it—how Jackie talked so casually to the big Russian bear. It was hard not to see the warmth between them, less like friends or siblings, more like doting father and precocious daughter.

  “How’s your audit class going? What is it again: remember-to-wash-your-hands 101?”

  “It’s infectious disease . . .” Of course he knew. “Jackass.”

  He laughed. “Can I talk with you about the protocol on that search tool?” he said.

  It was thinly veiled code. Nothing specific. Just nonsense. When he said a nonsense sentence to her, it meant they were headed to the lab over at Google X. Sometimes, he said the most comically inane stuff, like Let’s optimize that engine, or Can I speak to you about the spreadsheet database? This time, Jackie could see from Denny’s eyes that, despite his innocuous code, he had something significant on his mind.

  “Catch you in a bit,” Denny said.

  Jackie snagged one of the shared bicycles outside Lemon-Lyme, the name of the three-story glass-plated building at Planet Google where she worked. It was hard not to feel a little excited by the prospect that they had some new data. For six months she’d been going over the same incremental reports on a handful of projects, one about Internet use habits, another about reaction times of Internet users. It was also hard for her not to feel a little used. Story of her life on some level: always with the extraordinary talent and often feeling like others were using it for their ends. It took a lot for her to trust the rare individual who now made it through her screening.

  One such person was Denny. At Stanford, he plucked her from an engineering class where he’d lectured a single day, and, from the back of the room, she drilled him with a question that contorted his face into wonder and then laughter. After class, he beelined for her, took her to coffee at Peet’s, asked her to come work for Google. Less than a year later, he invited her to join on as a consultant for Project X, which was a catchall name for big, speculative ideas at Google that may or may not pan out, like the driverless car, clean water projects, interstellar communications technology. Her job, he told her, “was to use that overly developed antenna to ask the questions others don’t think about or are too haughty to ask.

  “Jackie, I like you, but that’s beside the point. What’s important is that you see patterns other people don’t see. I’ll ignore the fact you’re not sure whether you like me.”

  Jackie liked Denny’s candor and the fact that he seemed to put things in the right context. He was real. He always had food crumbs somewhere on his shirt or beard and he sometimes just stopped in the middle of a conversation and stood silently
until he thought through what he wanted to say. He could live with taking his time, however awkward that might appear. It had taken her a long time to find someone she could invest in, and who she felt invested in her; three months after she joined Project X, Denny told her he trusted her enough to show her what was really going on. Not Project X, but the experiments in the Basement, the ones that didn’t get discussed in the media, or anywhere. Her confidence grew, and her willingness to insert herself, like in Dr. Martin’s class.

  She rode her yellow bicycle off the campus sidewalk and onto the street. The move prompted her to glance in the rearview mirror, which is where she saw Adam Stile, the goofy punster from her engineering pod. He was seemingly riding in her path, following. When she glanced back, he put his head down. Then took a sharp right that landed him in a planter. Jackie, lost in the stupidity, nearly tipped over herself when slipping against a curb. She righted herself and accelerated. Something about Adam threw her off.

  Or maybe, she thought, looking back, Adam, ever the gadfly, was following to see where she was going. But so what? It was no secret she worked with Denny at Project X. And there was no way Adam would get into the Project X building, let alone the lower offices. That would mean passing the human security upstairs, then taking the elevator using a key card and voice recognition protection to get to the floor, then the retinal scanner and the other stuff below that Denny said was “just best practices these days.”

  Google, she often thought, was a multibillion-dollar labyrinth, an overflowing font of money, and power. And secrecy. It was insinuated in every facet of people’s lives, from work and driving, music, television, every form of communications. In the mazes of projects here, a collection of brilliant engineers who tinkered with, fine-tuned, intensified that power click by click.

  She looked back. No sign of Adam. She pulled outside the Project X building and slipped the bike into an empty slot in the rack. She marveled at the line of electric cars in the lot. She had little doubt it forecast a future filled with battery-powered vehicles piloted by algorithms not humans. The line of cars reminded her of one of her prouder intellectual moments. Early on at Google, she’d suggested developing a program for Google Maps that entailed recommending driving routes to motorists that minimized the number of left turns and maximized right turns. It turns out that such a route can reduce global warming because drivers who take left turns have to wait before turning, thus burning more gas. On an individual basis, that is meaningless. In the aggregate, it adds up to tons of carbon emissions. Google eventually took up her idea, allowing drivers to opt for “eco” map mode.

  At the door to the Project X building, Jackie, sensing something, turned to look behind her at the bike rack. There stood Adam wearing his yellow slicker. As soon as he saw her, he looked down. Then he peered back up and gave her a look she interpreted as a challenge of some sort. She looked one more time at Adam, found her better angels, cleared her throat, and turned inside. After passing security, she walked through the cavernous hall with scattered pods of desks and sixty-foot ceilings. It couldn’t possibly feel cramped in here, even with a dozen driverless cars on mounts, their wheels spinning as engineers put them through various simulations. Easy to get lost in here, which was fine with Jackie. She walked by unnoticed, not that she really knew anyone here, then behind the well-stocked kitchen, into the foyer that protected Denny’s office, where she was let through by a receptionist to the elevators. Key card, voice recognition to “B,” and a retinal scan and she let herself into the “lab.”

  Anyone at Google who asked was told this room kept some internal servers, redundancies cooled by an alternate generator system, blah, blah, blah. Nonsense that fell on deaf ears. Not that the term “lab” was any more appropriate or accurate. The room downstairs was rectangular with built-in desk counters lined against the walls, computers at every second seat. A floor-to-ceiling screen hung on the far wall, receiving a bland Google logo from a projector mounted on the ceiling. Any accountant would be proud to work here. Denny sat in a chair at a conference table in the middle sipping tea. Jackie glanced at crumbs next to the button of his plaid shirt. She pulled out the chair where she usually sat. A blue folder sat in front of her.

  “Take a look,” he said. “New formatting but same idea; AI mode on the X-axis, varied by its response time, and then on the bottom are individual responses. The dotted lines map response by key word and the bars by duration of interaction.”

  So today they were doing the AI project. The idea was to develop and tweak new artificial intelligence modes and then map them against human response intensity and duration of interaction. They’d learned that certain words and fluidity of responses by humans could indicate the extent to which people thought the programs were “real.” Over the months, Jackie had found some interesting patterns but, on the whole, she couldn’t understand why this merited secrecy or was considered particularly valuable. Maybe the AI was that profound. She looked at the first piece of paper.

  It caught her attention.

  Could this be right?

  She looked at the second, and the third. All similar results. She flipped through the pages again. Duration had spiked, the rhetorical measures were off the charts. But with some heavy zigzags. Her first thought was that something marked had changed in people’s responses to the computer. She wondered whether the study subjects had, for the first time, started to really be convinced that the program was another human being, not an algorithm. But the zigzags threw her off. Maybe people felt the computer was alive, then got confused, then felt connected again. Or maybe that was how people—

  Too many questions. She looked up at Denny, who was studying her. She felt a flutter of uncertainty, tinged with anger.

  “What do you need me for, Denny?”

  “What am I missing?” he asked.

  She looked back at the pages.

  “What do you see?” he asked.

  It was how he always asked her about patterns. The answer hit her hard, finally. She swallowed. She put her hands underneath the table and she gripped her legs. It kept her from screaming.

  She stared down at the pages. They had nothing to do with artificial intelligence or human response time and rhetorical measures. Denny had been lying to her the whole time.

  What the hell was this project about?

  She looked down, forced herself to count to ten and fought to find a smile. It wouldn’t come. Before she knew it, her legs took over: she stood up and made for the door.

  Eleven

  “Jackie. Stop.”

  She kept walking to her bike. Her stomach ached. Where had Denny appeared from? She’d seen the numbers on the paper, the bullshit diagram he’d tried to pass off as related to their artificial intelligence program. She indulged him with a few platitudes and then said that she was feeling ill, which was true but also owed entirely to the fact she was almost sure he was lying. Denny, Christ, even Denny. No, count, Jackie.

  “Jackie,” Denny said, lowering his voice, “I can tell that you know. I was hoping you’d figured it out.”

  She turned. “I trusted you.”

  The virulence in her voice caused him to step back.

  “You have to come back inside. I’m not purposely . . .” He bowed his head in her direction and he spoke even more quietly. “Please, come back inside. I’m glad we’re at this point.” Now at a genuine whisper. “I can justify the clearances. We need you. Come inside.”

  She stared at him blankly. Denny assumed she was thoughtfully calculating. She felt a rush of the distrust that pervaded her thinking, her cross to bear.

  Jackie first noticed it in elementary school, this pattern. At first, she got attention. Wow, Jackie, how did you divide those numbers? Where did you learn that? Or: Did you see that little girl, clearing the entire memory board? There was the time she talked two boys out of a fistfight over an orange-and-blue Nerf football by pointing out some or another common interest, and another time where she realized her little siste
r was in the other room eating the whole jar of Flintstones vitamins and called 911 on her own because her parents were too busy fighting to pay attention. Nice job, young lady. Bit by bit, she saw a different side to these remarks. They implied some responsibility. Was she supposed to be something great, or do something great? Her gifts felt like liabilities. That’s what she once told her drunken father.

  Impressive, Jackie, where did you learn that word?

  Fuck you, Dad, you somnambulating bottom feeder.

  Well, look, another pseudointellectual dipshit! Don’t you ever—

  Shut your mouth, Alan. She’s not one of your whores! Jackie’s mother had gripped a vase from the table like it was a baseball.

  As years had passed, Jackie tried to stay beneath the radar. She took every effort to not be noticed so she wouldn’t have to be misunderstood, underestimated, overestimated, estimated at all. No platitudes, and no expectations. She wore dark knit hats and baggy clothes to make herself indistinguishable. It was hard because she not only was so smart but attractive, with doll-like features. Delicate, a beautiful petite, if she’d have allowed it.

  “Jackie?”

  She settled on a wry smile.

  She nodded. She thought about Dr. Martin, both flexible and firm, ultimately a model of how to be decisive, how to challenge, and be challenged, without being thrown off course. In Nepal, in that moment that could’ve gone either way, he’d saved her life, physically, even spiritually; absent his treatment, she’d not only have died, but even embraced it.

  She felt light wind blowing through campus. It carried with it the feeling of uncertainty.

  “Okay,” she muttered.

  Downstairs, he set out two cups of coffee.

  “Lantern,” he said.

  Her small hands wrapped around the warm mug.