by Matt Richtel
Then Harry. Not alone, with Andrea. Both of them, together, laughing. Laughing and laughing. He strains to hear what they’re saying but he can’t. He can just feel their laughter rippling through him.
The three chirps startle Jeremy.
He clears his throat and opens his eyes. He blinks.
The computer beeps again. Three beeps. Those three distinctive beeps.
He looks at the monitors, starting with the one that is second to his right. Data, scrolling. Then the next one with the map.
His first impulse is less curiosity than disappointment. “Monkey junk.”
Red. Bright red. The red he’s never actually seen, not this bright. And never heard these chirps, not these three. Not since he programmed the computer to make such a sound.
Three beeps that mean something very dire is about to happen. Three beeps with all this red means it’s nothing short of apocalyptic, the apocalypse.
Jeremy twirls around in his desk chair. He looks at the server, and up in the corners of the walls. He sees the door is closed.
He looks at his phone, checks the clock. He’s been asleep, or daydreaming, for just a few minutes, less than an hour. It’s a bit after eight.
“I’ll humor you.”
Jeremy scoots in, cocks his head like a bird. Looks at the map. Then begins tapping on the keyboard. On the monitor to the far right, the Scrabble board disappears.
In its place appears the web site of the New York Times. The lead headline is about a press conference in which the president is asked about the latest job figures. Below that, in the middle of the page, there’s a picture of a man wearing a robe and sitting in a wheelchair, a feature about a judge in Brooklyn who is trying out for the Paralympics. There’s something masquerading as breaking news that looks to be a roundup of technology company earnings.
Nothing to explain what’s happening on the map. Nothing to explain why his computer is predicting there is going to be a massive global conflict, engulfing the world in death and destruction—and that the calamity is imminent.
Jeremy clicks and the New York Times disappears.
He clears his throat. Taps his fingers absently on the edge of the keyboard. After a full minute, he moves his cursor onto the first monitor, the one most to his left, the one with all the scrawling data points, and, with a few keystrokes, causes the flurry of data to appear also on the fourth monitor, where the New York Times had just been.
He moves his cursor onto the fourth monitor and starts moving up and down through the data with his cursor. The data is moving too, updating with every second, the inputs changing in real time: gas prices, stock market indices, weather. It comes in so fast from around the world that even Jeremy—for as much time as he’s spent with these programs—can’t quite grasp and make sense of it. He scrolls up, looking at the various measures, looking at time stamps.
Is there some needle in this haystack? Something that changed or stands out, or explains the map?
Nothing stands out. Of course not. No way for the human brain to make sense of this flurry of data. That’s what the algorithm is for. And it speaks through the map. That’s where the predictions show up in the nice accessible way, just as Evan envisioned.
Now it’s mostly pulsing red—North America, for sure, Latin America, Europe. Even the Southern Hemisphere shows hardly a spot neither red or orange, and a few bits of yellow.
He puts his cursor onto the map. He clicks on a gauge, a cross between an odometer and a clock. He clicks on it. He reads the prediction. He clenches his teeth.
He pushes back from the desk. He stands and looks up at the corners of the room. He peers alongside the metal shelf holding the servers. No cameras. No overt signs someone is setting him up for the YouTube humiliation of the century when, finally on the verge of giving up on his creation and tossing it into the sea, he freaks and screams, “I told you so!” because the app is reporting that the world is going to end.
No signs someone has tapped into or tampered with the computer. Who could do that? Few, if any. They don’t have the password to get inside the machine. No one does. Who might want to? Start a fucking list of the let’s-turn-Jeremy-into-a-marionette. Evan the Peckerhead, Professor Harry Ives, the disgruntled investors.
How long was he gone outside at the water? Did someone get in?
Jeremy pulls out two middle fingers and shares them with the room.
He eyes the envelopes on the floor under the door. He kicks them over and confirms they are both, as he suspected, from the lawyers at Pierce & Sullivan, representing Evan, who is suing for access to the conflict algorithm so he can predict the future of mobile communications or fast food. Jeremy grinds the envelopes with his shoe.
He picks up his iPad, scrambles around the mess on the desk for the white cord. He plugs the iPad into his desktop and clicks a few keys.
While he’s waiting for it, he walks out to Nik’s cubicle. He pauses before the violation, then shuffles through Nik’s papers. Sees late-payment notifications, legal correspondence, bureaucracy.
He bends over and reaches for Nik’s computer mouse. Fiddles with it. The screen comes to life. He sees a black backdrop and a few windows open at the bottom. Jeremy clicks them. One is an email folder, left open, with mostly spam. Another is World of Warcraft, Nik’s guilty pleasure, an innocuous enough time sink, his connection to a community of shut-ins and night owls.
Emily says Nik and Jeremy are like photo negatives of one another: Nik, a quiet and deferential loner who, on the Internet, commands armies and plays war; Jeremy, aggressive and confrontational, who uses the Internet to make peace.
Taped to Nik’s desk, Jeremy finds a list of phone numbers and emails—contact info for all the big players, like Andrea, Harry and Evan. Even Emily. Nik is Jeremy’s shadow, secretary, baggage handler, designated driver, still holding out hope.
Jeremy walks back into his office.
The iPad has finished doing its thing. He stuffs it into a briefcase, snags his phones, shuts out the light and closes the door.
CHAPTER 3
FORTY MINUTES LATER, Jeremy stands at the counter of a South of Market café. In a Tumi bag slung over his shoulder is his iPad, which he’s synched with the computer at his desk. He thinks of its prediction, massive global conflict, three days and counting. More precisely: 71 hours, 15 minutes. Projected impact: 14 million killed, from not just the first hypothetical attack but, the computer estimates, the subsequent attack and counterattack.
It’s simple math, really, game theory. The computer, upon predicting conflict, then plays out the likeliest scenarios for what will follow based on the state of affairs in the world.
Jeremy looks around the hipster café, a work-away-from-the-home-office joint during the day, but, now, nine fifteen on a Wednesday, a place for first dates and people seeking them. A tapestry of the African savanna hangs on the opposite wall, hovering above closely placed tables. There’s a fireplace next to the counter, sputtering with a low flame and Wilco on the speakers.
The right amount of white noise to allow him to think; the right concentration of eye candy, chicks.
“What can I get you?” It’s a guy behind the counter with a soul patch and a flannel shirt, which are all the rage.
“Peanut Butter Mocha.” Sugar, protein, caffeine.
Soul Patch blinks: I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.
“It’s a mocha but you toss in a scoop of peanut butter. I’ve ordered it here before.”
“Not from me,” the guy says smiling. “We gotta stick to the menu.”
Jeremy smiles back.
“It’s complicated. You mix a scoop of peanut butter into the mocha.”
Guy clears his throat. “I wouldn’t know how to charge you.”
“Oh, right. I understand. Generally, the way you charge is by keying in the numbers in the cash register and then taking my money. But maybe this is one of those dummy registers with pictures, like at McDonald’s.”
Guy ser
ves Jeremy a mocha. With a scoop of peanut butter on the side.
He sits, unpockets his phones. In a fit of pique a week earlier, he’d purged his speed dial of those he felt had betrayed him. Emily, of course, though that number he knows by heart. Evan. Harold Ives, aka Harry War, the eccentric Berkeley war historian, Jeremy’s rare equal in being a pain in the ass, whose research and, more importantly, support, proved instrumental to Jeremy’s conflict algorithm. But, really, hadn’t Harry asked for it by turning on Jeremy first?
He’d purged too the number for Andrea Belluck-Juarez, the tattooed and pierced junior officer at the Pentagon. His conduit to that whole messed-up situation.
Evan, Harry War, Andrea. The three he’d most likely have called—even as recently as six months ago—in the event his computer made the three sharp beeps and the map glowed red. He can always find their phone numbers in his email. He flips the phone onto the table.
He’s not going to give them the satisfaction. Not even these three, once his last line of defenders. He doesn’t need to hear the recriminations, the cackles. So, your magic computer thinks the terrorists are coming? Can it predict what they’ll be wearing? Can it guess which card they’ll be thinking about? The four of hearts? Harry had jokingly dismissed Jeremy’s device as “iPocalypse.”
Or, if the world is in fact going to end in seventy hours and change, then what’s the point of exposing himself?
He looks around the room. To his left, two younger women, late twenties, conspiring after they appear to have gone for a late-night exercise session. One of the pair wears a ponytail with dark frizzy hair extruding around the edges. She’s got light freckles and an easy smile and Jeremy ranks her as the best-looking chick he’s seen in weeks. Not far behind in the looks category is the woman sitting to his right. Jeremy figures her at thirty-two years old, with a D-cup. She’s got light brown hair, a spiral notebook that must serve as a diary, and she’s lost in The World According to Garp. Relatively smart chick.
“Not okay to call them chicks.” Evan had admonished Jeremy after a business meeting with investors and their science advisors, including two female Stanford Ph.D.s. “How about using ‘hoes’?”
“Women call themselves chicks all the time. You talk like a brochure and I’ll talk like a human.”
Jeremy eyes his iPad lying flat on the blond wood table. Next to it is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dating. He’s purposely half obscured the cover as if to make it look like something he’s trying to hide.
On the tablet, he opens the map. At the bottom, there’s a feature called the “countdown clock.” It reads: 70:36:05. Hours, minutes, seconds. Until attack. Or some huckster popping out of a cake and pointing at Jeremy and laughing.
At the top of the map, Jeremy clicks on a menu. Under the “view” line, he clicks “recent history.” As the screen splits in two, he briefly relives the eons he put into not just selecting each category in each tool line but learning the basic program in the minutest detail so that the user interface would be precisely how he envisioned. He left nothing to chance, automation or outsourcing. He didn’t spend much time thinking about other passionate creators, like Steve Jobs, but, when he did, he tended to think they were lazy for hiring other people to do the engineering.
On the iPad, the left window displays the current map, projecting massive conflict on the left; the window on the right is devoid of color. On a drop-down menu above the clean map, Jeremy chooses “45 minutes.” The conflict map as it stood forty-five minutes earlier appears, filled with oranges and yellows and dull reds, but absent the rampant glowing red representing the imminent onset of massive global conflict. Jeremy looks at the digital clock in the corner of his monitor. It is 9:26, Wednesday night, late March, Jeremy tries to remember the date but can’t. Forty-five minutes earlier, he thinks, his computer claims, something in the world changed. Exactly when? What?
“When” is the easy part.
Jeremy taps on “advance.” The map begins to change, at first, ever so slightly. The colors are mutating slightly around the edges, their boundaries moving almost infinitesimally.
Jeremy must admit to himself that this feature, though it is another brainchild of Evan’s, more sizzle, is pretty fucking cool. It’s like watching a storm map on the Weather Channel. Not storms, conflicts. High-pressure societies and low-pressure societies, colliding power bases, the prospect of war. A key difference is that weather maps tend to have constant motion, the clouds and weather systems swirling and moving. On the war map, the changes are very subtle, unless you bring the clock back a decade and spin it forward at high speeds to see various regions go from blue to yellow to orange to red and back again.
And then: wham. Everything turns red.
This time, watching it unfold, Jeremy is not feeling disappointed, or privately skeptical, but, for an instant, startled. This is an image for his dreams or nightmares. The world pulsing crimson; the United States and China and Russia and Europe, pinkish hues swallowing the smaller and poorer places, Africa, tiny island nations. He swallows hard, then coughs, peanut butter lodged in his throat.
Jeremy paws the device. He rewinds the map again. Now he watches it evolve in slow motion. He’s leaning forward, face inches from the screen. He sees what he’s looking for: the first sign of red. The first indication something in the world has changed or, rather, is poised to change, four days hence.
He looks at the time stamp above the map. It reads: 8:06 p.m. He puts the cursor over the clock. An infobox pops up next to it with details. The moment he’s frozen in time on his conflict machine, the moment the clock started ticking, was 8:06:42 on Wednesday, March 29.
He eyes the first onset of red. He puts his cursor over it, even though he knows what he’s looking at. An infobox pops up: 37 degrees north, 122 west. “San Francisco.”
When they refined this infobox, Jeremy had argued with Evan that there was no need to put the name of the city. All they needed was longitude and latitude. Actually naming the place was condescending to a smart audience, and a waste of manpower to double-check.
San Francisco. Right here, he thinks, a little more than three days.
He looks up and around the café. He catches the eye of a tall woman sitting by the door, looking in his direction, a model’s figure, symmetrical features obscured by a baseball cap. She lowers her gaze.
A complete joke. Or maybe three days.
Jeremy grits his teeth and closes his eyes and discovers in his mind’s eye an image of his frail mother in hospice, six months earlier. Last time he’d seen Eleanor alive. He can’t recall much of it, just the plate of lumpy, syrupy, buttery mashed potatoes on the table next to a yellow rotary phone. She mutters something. Existential? Jeremy leans in close and realizes he’s wondering if she’s telling him that she loves him, maybe, finally. Once. She repeats herself: “Make peace.” That’s what she said. No, no nurturing words here. She’s counseling him, giving him an edict, one that she could well stand to hear herself. She was his original sparring partner. And then the huge fight in the parking lot with Emily, the intensifying pain near his neck, the lump, everything spiraling.
Three days. It’s March 29.
Three days.
“Oh shit,” Jeremy mumbles.
He opens his yes. Three days is April 1.
April Fools’ Day.
“You want war?” Jeremy suddenly mutters to no one.
He shakes his head, looks up, lands his gaze at the woman sitting to his right, with the D-cup, reading The World According to Garp. She peeks with light blue eyes at him over the top the book. Maybe wondering why he’s talking to himself. Maybe just making contact.
He swallows. She’s attractive, bordering on more than that. He lowers his iPad. Ready to stop being the patsy.
CHAPTER 4
GARP IS WET,” Jeremy says.
The woman’s hand slides slightly down the book’s spine, giving Jeremy a tingle.
Jeremy extends a napkin. “Sorry for interrupting. But
you’ve got coffee on your cover. Or hot chocolate. Or whatever is your poison.”
She looks at the book. Sure enough, she’d spilled some coffee on the nurse’s hat on the cover. It’s damp but almost imperceptibly so. She takes the napkin from Jeremy. Either she’s not bright enough to see his obvious move or she fully recognizes it and is playing along anyway.
“A guy with an iPad taking so much interest in protecting the honor of a print book. You’ve got a sense of tradition.”
“May I interrupt you further with one small bit of trivia?”
“Sure.” A little wary.
“The tranny saves the day.”
“The what?”
“The transvestite.” He’s looking at the book.
“Am I to understand that you’re giving away the end of The World According to Garp?” Mock exasperation.
“I don’t know. I didn’t actually finish it. I saw the movie. Most of it. Fell asleep.”
Slight smile, cautious, intrigued, she’s dealing with a smart one, in a good way, feeling her brain tickled.
“So you didn’t finish the book or the movie but you know how it ends. Can you see the future? What are the odds I’m going to be discovered?”
He laughs. Genuine. Good line and she’s got no idea of Jeremy’s complicated relationship with the future. He feels suddenly serious and makes a decent attempt to cover up the wash of feelings, return to compartmentalizing, channel his irritation into something much more strategic, which he can do with the best of them. He pushes away an intruding thought about September 1939, how willing the Poles must have felt to ignore obvious signs of imminent German attack. Obviously, he thinks, his computer is being punked, not warning him of apocalypse. Right? When, Jeremy thinks and then instantly dismisses the thought, did he start doubting himself and his computer?
“I’m reasonably good with the past. With some degree of certainty, I can tell you what happened yesterday.” He delivers it well enough that she sees only witty repartee.
