Devil's Plaything

by Matt Richtel

  I’m ten, and visiting my grandparents. It’s a hot day in their backyard. Grandma and I stand on the concrete porch while Grandpa Irving, wearing paisley shorts and a white tank top that betrays his farmer’s tan, waters the grass. And he dances, more or less. The radio is on, and he’s moving his arms and the hose—distinctly not in time with the music.

  “Your grandfather has no rhythm. He’s not like us.”

  “You mean like he can’t dance good?”

  “Well. That’s not just it. We’re more colorful—you and I. It’s in our bones. He has different bones.”

  “You and I share the same bones?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Well then how can we both walk at the same time?”

  She laughs. But I sense Grandma is communicating something serious that I can’t quite understand.

  The conversation stuck with me. I remember that it made me feel Grandma and I belonged to a special club and no one else in the family was a member.

  And that happens to be the anecdote passing in an eye-blink through my mind, dreamlike, as death beckons me on a concrete floor of an industrial building. My proverbial white tunnel is a backyard from twenty-five years ago, and my angel of death is my grandfather, watering his lawn.

  Then I cough. It’s a violent spasm, sufficient to wrench me to consciousness. My first sensation comes from my legs, which pulse from the scorching heat. My eyes flutter, but I can’t fully open them because of the waves of searing air.

  Staying on the floor, I yank the bottom of my shirt to my face and cover my mouth and nose. I know that what will kill me first is not fire, but smoke inhalation.

  Then, from above, I feel something remarkable—a burst of frozen air. I think for a moment I’m dead and this is part of the passage. Then I realize the cool relief comes from the air conditioner. The place must be highly climate-controlled to keep the servers from overheating—though the designers of the system never contemplated this. The air-conditioning system must be freaking out to cope with the explosion in heat. Where are the sprinklers?

  The burst of air allows me to fully open my eyes. I can make out that the fire is localized in two spots—on the rack of servers to one side and on the rack of monitors to the other. I stand in an ever-shrinking island without flames. The air smells oddly fragrant, like a campfire, but it’s doubtless toxic and filled with melted computer innards. Every few seconds, another circuit explodes, like high-tech popcorn kernels.

  I strain to gaze through the heat to the wall the hooded man disappeared through. There must be a door on that side of the building. Regardless, my better survival option is the door I entered, but flames are rising to block the way.

  I get up crouching, hold my breath and hurtle through a slight breach in the flames. I make it to the door and I yank it open. I hurl myself into oxygen and fall onto the ground on my knees.

  I’m heaving, coughing, gasping, and then, I leap to my feet in a coughing retch and sprint-limp to the parking lot. Seconds later, I find our car, but not Grandma. The passenger door is open, Grandma’s game device sitting on the seat. She’s nowhere to be seen.

  At the other end of the huge parking lot, departing, I see the back end of a car, quickly disappearing. It’s the Prius.

  “Grandma!” It’s a wild, effete cry. I fumble in my pocket for my phone to call the police. Then I remember my phone is melting, has melted.

  I put the key into the ignition and turn the key. The engine doesn’t turn over. I turn the key again. No response.

  “Fuck!”

  From the building, I hear a pop. A window blows out.

  The cops and fire department will be here soon.

  Then I see it. Movement near the edge of the lot. She’s standing next to a cluster of bushes that look like they were intended as landscaping but never got much attention.

  “Grandma!”

  I’m sprinting.

  When I get to her, she looks nonplussed, but she says, “I should be embarrassed.”

  “What?”

  “I peed over near the picnic tables,” she says, looking over her shoulder at the bushes.

  “You peed? In the bushes?”

  “I grew up in Denver and we had a field where we went to the bathroom on the way home from school.”

  I wrap my arms around her. “I love you.”

  “Are you crying, Nathaniel?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “Well, it’s not polite to wear blackface,” she says.

  I run a finger down my cheek, and sure enough. Looks like I’m ready for Halloween. I take her by the hand. “We have to go.”

  We return to the car, as flames start to shoot from the building’s sides. I reconnect the car battery again. I’m not happy I’ve gotten so good at this.

  I hear sirens.

  “Option B,” I say, as we climb back into the car.

  “What?”

  “Option A is to wait for the cops and tell them everything. Option B is to wait until we have more facts.”

  What are we supposed to tell them—that we have a vague idea that someone possibly connected to Biogen tried to kill us for reasons we don’t understand?

  I start the car. It lurches forward. Then halts, then lurches again.

  Something else is wrong—maybe a cut fuel line, or some other sabotage. Who knows?

  Moving in fits and starts, I pull out of the parking lot. We lurch down the street, just as a fire truck passes us.

  I hear a phone ring. I’m surprised because I’m certain my phone has been reduced to the basic elements table in the server farm. Then I look down in the center compartment and see the ringing phone; it’s the prepaid model Chuck gave me. I ignore it.

  I drive to the end of the block, take a right, then drive another block, turning into the empty parking lot of an abandoned warehouse with a grammatically incorrect sign on the door that reads: “Shanghai Bath Furnishings. Gone From Business.” My car is sputtering to the point of completely giving out.

  I grab another wad of fast-food napkins and try and clean up. I’m not happy I’ve gotten so good at this, either.

  I open the phone and I dial Samantha. She doesn’t answer. I call again. No answer. Of course not; the Witch doesn’t answer calls from numbers she doesn’t recognize, or blocked numbers. She feels people should have the courtesy to announce themselves.

  I call again, then again, and again. Finally, she relents. “This is Samantha. I love all people and respect your choices, but telemarketing calls throw me out of balance so I must . . .”

  “Sam, stop! It’s Nat.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Not really.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Grandma and I are in an extreme version of a pickle and we need a ride.”

  I tell her where we are.

  “No problem. On the way,” she says. “I’m glad you called. The Whiz has been trying to reach you.”

  The Witch and the Whiz.

  She hands him the phone.

  “I’ve opened your file,” Bullseye says. “You were right. The password was a variation of the name Newton.”

  “What’s on the drive?”

  “A transcript.”

  “Of?”

  “Your grandmother.”

  “Talking to who?”

  “Whom,” Grandma interjects. “Talking to whom?”

  “Talking to whom, Bullseye?”

  “She’s not talking to a person.”

  Then it dawns on me. “She’s talking to a computer—to a piece of software,” I exclaim.

  “How’d you know?”

  “The Human Memory Crusade.”

  “Correct,” Bullseye says. “Seems like an AI program is asking her questions and she’s answering.”

  “What’s she saying?”

  He hesitates.

  “I’ll bring it with me. I think it’s something you need to read for yourself.”

  He hangs up.

  I look at Grandma.
>
  “It’s time to hear what you told the box.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Talk to me, Grandma. Tell me what’s going on?”

  She puts her hands to her face. She looks terribly stricken.

  “Grandma, are you keeping a secret from me?”

  “I’m keeping a secret from everybody.”

  Chapter 33

  I gently turn Grandma’s chin so she faces me. Her blue eyes blink and skirt my gaze and her bottom lip quivers. I’ve smudged a dusting of black ash from my hands onto her face when I touched her chin and try gently to brush it away.

  “Grandma, please tell me what you told the box.”

  “I’m not who you think I am.”

  Her words sound distant, unconnected, indirect.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a liar. I lied, and I lied.”

  “About what?”

  “You’re Nathaniel Idle,” she says.

  “I am.”

  “You’re not who you think you are.”

  Do these words have meaning?

  “Who am I?”

  “Well, you’re my grandson.”

  I hear a siren, and see another police car coming. It slows as it passes us, then cruises by.

  “Hold that thought, Grandma.”

  I start my car again, and find it has enough juice to allow me to pull it around the corner of the building to the parking lot, which is littered with a handful of weather-stained bathtubs and sinks, and a cracked urinal.

  Chuck’s phone rings. “Chuck’s phone,” I answer.

  “Chuck here,” he says.

  “Chuck, this isn’t the best time, unless you’ve called with some new information.”

  “Have some—about Lulu Pederson.”

  Grandma stares ahead, lost somewhere else.

  “Let’s hear it,” I say.

  “Let’s get together.”

  “Chuck, please.” The lighthearted part of my personality has left the building. “Help me now.”

  He clears his throat.

  “She was born January 5, 1972. African-American. Raised by intellectuals in Berkeley; her father worked as a public defender. Her mother was a doctor, working in a free clinic in Berkeley helping the indigent aging population. She—her first name is Lulu but she goes by Adrianna—attended college at Berkeley, and then . . .”

  I interrupt him. “Tell me where it gets interesting.”

  “You’re not interested that she’s allergic to cats? Remarkable what you can find with some help from military databases.”

  “Move on.”

  “She got a PhD from Stanford in neurobiology, and she . . .”

  “Get to Biogen.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re looking for, but Stanford might be pertinent. In the mid-nineties, she wrote a ground-breaking paper on how hyper-stimulation from media impacts neurological capacities through production of cortisol.”

  Cortisol.

  “The stress hormone. What did she say about it?” I ask.

  “I haven’t seen the paper, just an executive summary. It has something to do with cell division in some parts of the brain and what happens to it—cell division—during heavy sensory input, or something like that.”

  “E-mail me the abstract. Get to Biogen.”

  “You’re impatient.”

  “Way beyond that.”

  I look at Grandma. She’s removed her wedding ring and twirls it in her hand.

  “This part is, how do you call it, off the record.”

  “Fine. Go.”

  “My source tells me there’s a secret project at Biogen. Adrianna runs it. ADAM. Advanced Development . . .”

  I cut him off. “ . . . Advanced Development and Memory 1.0. It’s a piece of software, or, rather a program. It has to do with measuring or impacting neurological functions.”

  “You know this already?”

  “Just that much. How does it work? Is it a program that’s used in a lab, or that gets disseminated? Is it an algorithm? Is it used to measure neurological changes, or to actually cause them?”

  “I don’t know much more beyond that. I can’t understand much of what’s in this file.”

  “Can you e-mail it to me?”

  “It’s a hard-copy dossier.”

  “Dossier? From where?”

  “I’m coming to that. You know that Biogen is in high-level merger talks with a Swiss company.”

  “Go on.”

  “Apparently, our government has been keeping tabs on Biogen and its various projects. This has caught someone’s attention.”

  “Someone?”

  “Regulator, I suppose.”

  I pause.

  “Nathaniel?”

  “Chuck, respectfully, it’s hard for me to believe you have this kind of access. It doesn’t make sense you could know this much information, let alone get hard proof.”

  “Nat, respectfully yourself, I told you I could be a good friend.”

  I hear the engine of a car. It has turned into the lot of the building we’re in front of. Maybe it’s the Witch and Bullseye.

  “Meet me in the city tonight,” Chuck says. “I’ll bring the file.”

  He tells me the name of a restaurant in Noe Valley where he’ll be at 8:30 p.m.

  “Hold on, Chuck.”

  A car starts to come around the other corner of the building, heading at us. I realize what’s happening, just as Grandma says: “The bad man.”

  The Prius has turned the corner. Its driver is the man with the hooded gray sweatshirt. He’s rolling down his window, barreling towards us. I see the car framed against the ash blue sky in the distance, an instant of slow motion. We are going to die.

  And then I see the cavalry.

  Speeding around our corner of the building hurls Samantha and Bullseye in their shiny Cadillac.

  I expect to hear the pop of bullets and the shattering of glass in my window. But instead hear a violent crack. Bullseye ramming fearlessly into the right back of the Prius.

  The Prius juts forward, slams into a bathtub, which redirects the hybrid’s momentum and causes it to spin in circles. The churning tires begin to spray dust and gravel, and then it, abruptly, comes to rest. In the dust swirl, I can make out little except the terrific dent to the back, illuminated by brake lights. The car lurches forward and turns our direction. I think I can make out the outlines of the hooded man’s face, and the bathtub-caused dent to the Prius’s crumpled right fender, as he flies past us and disappears around the end of the building. Gone.

  I look up to see Samantha running towards our car. She’s wearing black tights and a puffy orange shirt, still dressed as a lioness. She reaches Grandma’s window, which I roll down.

  “My father drove a Cadillac,” Lane says, calmly. “Maybe it was a Chevrolet.”

  “Oh, Lane,” Sam says.

  She helps Grandma step out of the car. I sprint around the Toyota’s front end and join them, taking one of Lane’s arms while the Witch takes the other. We hustle her to the Cadillac. Its right front bumper and that side of the hood has a crinkled dent that looks like a seismograph. The driver’s-side back door is indented by the bathtub it must have slid into after the cars collided.

  Using the door on the other side, Grandma and I pile into the pristine black leather seats in the back. “I’m sorry, Bullseye, and thank you.”

  Bullseye looks at us, makes some silent calculation, then starts to accelerate forward.

  “Go after him?” he asks. But it sounds more like a statement than a question.

  “Wait.” I pause him. I return to my defunct Toyota. From the back, I retrieve my ragged backpack and the laptop that contains the whole of my virtual existence. I climb back into the Cadillac and Bullseye drives off. We head to the on-ramp of Highway 101. The wrecked Prius is nowhere in sight.

  “I need to borrow a car,” I say.

  “Should we call the police?” Samantha says. “You’re a great investigative journalist bu
t this seems to call for people with the power to detain, arrest, and punish.”

  She’s right—about the second part.

  I pull out Chuck’s phone. I dial 911. Before I hit “send,” Bullseye intercedes.

  “You should read this first,” he says. Over the back of the seat, he extends a hand, holding a dozen pieces of paper stapled together.

  I close the phone and take the papers.

  The first one is headed: Transcript from the Human Memory Crusade. June 19, 2010.

  Subject: Lane Eliza Idle.

  I’m looking at the secrets Grandma told the box.

  Chapter 34

  TRANSCRIPT FROM THE HUMAN MEMORY CRUSADE.

  THIS IS A SECTION OF OUR PREVIOUS CONVERSATION:

  “I slid the man the piece of paper and he looked at it—for a long time. Then he looked in the direction of my father and Irving. They were locked in conversation, and the man nodded. Then he took his change, and he turned and left. I noticed that he was wearing boots, which surprised me. It was summer, and he was wearing thick work boots. He walked out the door.”

  YOU HAVEN’T SPOKEN FOR A MINUTE. ARE YOU STILL THERE?

  Yes.

  WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE WITH THE STORY, OR WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ANOTHER ACTIVITY, LIKE PLAY A GAME?

  I tried to follow Pigeon in his cracked leather boots. But I couldn’t follow him. And I got so frustrated. That day, and the next day, and the next. He didn’t come back to the bakery. He left me there with that white envelope, sealed and mysterious, and I started to wonder what on Earth could he have asked me to hide. It was like . . . there’s a book, oh, you know, the story with the beating heart that drives the man in the castle crazy. Poe, right. It was Edgar Allan Poe. That was what the envelope was like. My imagination was really churning too. Did it have to do with something secret, or . . . When did the war happen? Maybe I thought it had to do with the war. Wait, the war came after. Please, please, can you stop with the butterflies? They are really messing around with my concentration.

  DID YOU ASK ABOUT THE BUTTERFLIES?

  I’m trying to talk about something. I finally couldn’t stand it. I went to the alley, and . . .

  I’M NOT SURE I UNDERSTOOD YOU. CAN YOU SPEAK INTO THE MICROPHONE?

  I was laughing. I’m laughing. My memory is going, I know that. But I can remember this so clearly. It was such a moment in my life. I took the envelope from the black safe, and I tucked it into the top of my stockings. This was before they rationed stockings. And . . . anyhow, I went into the alley. I tried for the umpteenth time to look through the envelope at what was inside. I couldn’t see. From the kitchen, I’d taken a short knife, like the kind you use to thinly slice the loaves for Friday night and Sunday morning. I cut open the top of the envelope. Out dropped a piece of lined paper, like from a school notebook. In block handwriting, very formal, it said—I’ll never forget because I still have the paper, though the writing has faded—it said: “SECRET INSTRUCTIONS ON PG. 45 OF ‘ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND.’ DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY, SECOND FLOOR.” I read it again, and again, and again. And then I went right in to my father, and I said: “I’ve got to go to the library.” And he said to me: “It’s terrible in Poland. Didn’t I tell you it was going to be terrible there? We were so smart to leave because we could have wound up dead. Be careful going to the library. It’s a bad time to be outside in the world.” And I didn’t hear a word he said because I was so determined. I . . . I realize that I’m just talking and talking. Have I told you all this before? I’m . . . I’m having trouble remembering.