The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  The legs bend, then the body starts to rise in the dark between the cold metal containers. In an unintentionally synchronized fashion, the thin man raises the flashlight, illuminating the tall figure wearing a long black peacoat and sporting a beard in full blossom.

  “I fell asleep,” the bearded man says. He sounds surprised.

  It’s not Bryan, the thin man realizes, not anyone he recognizes. Jesus, a friggin’ stowaway. Even as he thinks it, he’s transfixed by the beard. As much as it is full and wild, it looks deliberate, like something that would’ve been fashionable in some distant biblical era.

  As neutrally as possible, the thin man says: “Come on with me. We have hot showers upstairs.” He wants to get this guy to the captain without a fuss, keep things simple.

  The bearded man looks behind him, into the near-black crevice between the containers. He makes out the outlines of the backpack, the tattered brand-name knockoff bearing an otherworldly treasure, given him in a wordless exchange in an alley in Morocco. He was surprised that so much divine power and truth could be so light.

  He turns back to find the flashlight upturned at his face. The bearded man closes his eyes, listens for other voices or footsteps. Hears none. He looks at the rail standing before him, a pasty, Earthy shell of flesh and bones. But a human being, a spark of life.

  The bearded man mutters something.

  “I can’t understand you. Bring your things. You can take them with you upstairs.”

  The bearded man takes a slow breath, processing the inevitability of the logic, the undeniable rationale. After years of modest duty, he has been summoned, like his brethren, for divine purpose. It can only be that there is a gravest threat. As a Guardian of the City, he cannot doubt. His is a life of faith. He must act with purpose. Without reservation.

  There is a flash of movement and the thin man feels himself turned, lifted. He feels intense pressure on his neck. He thinks: I should have asked her to marry me.

  The flashlight drops to the floor.

  “I said: ‘God forgive me.’”

  CHAPTER 6

  AS JEREMY STANDS in the Richmond fog, he knows that what he’s telling himself he’s doing and what he’s doing are two different things. He’s telling himself that he’s come to the Last Cup, the rarest of all-night cafés in San Francisco, a city in which the eateries tend to close by ten, infuriating East Coast visitors and giving them a justifiable feeling of superiority. Here, Jeremy tells himself, he’ll run some diagnostics on the conflict algorithm.

  It is true that Jeremy has spent more than one night lingering over a bottomless coffee at the Last Cup, working through a manic muse or dozing in a beanbag chair by the piano. It is also true that he has generally done so after a fight with Emily, who happens to live one block away from the Last Cup.

  He’s standing in front of her flat, not admitting to himself that the real reason he’s here—not the café—is to connect somehow with Emily, even just to peek into her window. Jeremy’s reality is spinning off its hinges and Emily’s always the touchstone. She used to tell him he was the same to her. She’d concede that his antagonism, his snipes and counterpunches, while antisocial, often spoke deep truths others would not speak. And she, unlike others, didn’t get threatened by them.

  Her puke-green flat, so painted by an intransigent landlord, one of innumerable stubborn men who seem to surround her, stands between flats packed with large Chinese families. Jeremy points out to Emily that he has never had a single verbal altercation with the Chins and the Chus and Emily points out that that’s because the families speak no English.

  Jeremy shivers from the chill but the feeling quickly passes. He tends to be impervious to changes in weather; Emily says Jeremy feels words and ideas, not physical conditions. She’s told him he’d endure physical torture without blinking just so long as it wasn’t accompanied by someone questioning his intellect or tousling his newly cut hair.

  Her Jetta is not in the driveway.

  Tomorrow must be garbage day, Jeremy realizes; that explains the line down the street of black trash bins, blue for recycling, green for composting. The city recently hired a group of right-minded young people at minimum wage to go block by block to see if people have properly distributed their waste. Once, Emily got a knock on the door from an earnest SF State student explaining that she’d done a “very good job” segregating her recycling. “But, if you’re up for it, it’d be great if you could be just a tad more vigilant with the newspaper. Mother appreciates it, y’know.”

  “Mother?”

  “Nature.”

  “May I?” Jeremy bellowed from the other room.

  Emily smiled, closing the door. “Too easy. This one’s beneath you. Let’s see if we can work off your venom in bed.”

  Jeremy takes a step toward the trash bins. If he looks inside, will he find evidence telling him whether Emily’s Jetta is missing because she’s on a date or a sleepover? Maybe she’s on a date with someone less like Jeremy and more like Emily, fluid and easygoing, artistic, Jewish, not that Emily ever considered religion a deal breaker in a mate. Emily finds prayer calming. She likes knowing “something bigger is out there,” an amorphous philosophy that drives Jeremy nuts. On Emily’s ankle is a Star of David tattoo, which Jeremy points out makes it impossible for her to be buried in a Jewish cemetery, and therefore, Jeremy razzes her, means she’s not consistent with her beliefs, like most of the freaking world. Inside the house, a dim light. Jeremy figures it’s the cheap standing lamp next to the couch. He pictures a babysitter on the couch, reading a trashy romance. Jeremy’s stomach sinks. Someone who is not him or Emily put Kent to bed, read him Madeline or Jamberry.

  When it comes to Kent, and virtually only when it comes to Kent, Jeremy’s emotions are precisely what they appear to be—to him and anyone else paying attention. There is a one-to-one relationship between what Kent makes him feel and what he expresses. It’s linear. It adds up. When the two boys are hanging out, Emily says, Jeremy experiences no disconnect. She loves and loathes that Jeremy feels more comfortable with her son than he does with her.

  She also cannot fully understand the phenomenon. Kent challenges Jeremy as much as or more than anyone else. “Why, why, why?” Kent asks Jeremy. Kent cries, he’s mercurial, he comes and goes, he becomes furious when Jeremy (or anyone else) can’t find his stuff, he rolls on the floor with giggles, then throws a tantrum when blood sugar fades. He’s nine and he exhibits all the behaviors of the most annoying of Jeremy’s investors. And Jeremy absolutely fucking loves him.

  Loved him. Or whatever is the correct verb tense for a situation where you’ve lost contact with someone, perhaps indefinitely, because you’ve lost contact with his mother, for at least the last three weeks. To top it off, a few nights before his breakup with Emily, he and Kent actually had a disagreement—and now Jeremy feels estranged from the boy, too.

  Jeremy takes the first step of the slick stairs at Emily’s flat. He feels a buzz in his pocket. He pulls out his phone. He examines it for incoming stimuli—a text, a call, an instant message. But there’s nothing. He pulls out his other phone, from his other pocket, even though he didn’t feel a buzz coming from it. Nothing. He rechecks both phones. They are devoid of incoming stimulation.

  Maybe I imagined it, Jeremy thinks, without finding that possibility at all remarkable. He recalls some research paper that documented the growing phenomenon of “phantom buzzing,” whereby someone feels the tug of a device even though it’s not actually beckoning. Researchers theorized that the phantom buzz might actually be serving as a reminder to the person of something he or she had wanted to do. The phone as proxy for the subconscious. The human brain and the computer becoming intertwined, even when the person is offline.

  A sharp gust of wind blows down the street, stinging Jeremy’s face. He shivers. He looks at the phone’s clock. It’s just before midnight.

  He puts his head down and walks to the café, heading into the wind. Instinctively, he realizes, he�
��s got his fingers gently pushing a fleshy spot on his left pectoral, where the nagging, pulsing pain seems to start. He rubs the spot. Then moves his fingers a few inches to the right and wraps them protectively around the key fob hanging from a chain around his neck. The key to getting into the guts of the program.

  It’s what Evan’s suing over; even though Jeremy came up with it, it was so clearly his idea, Evan contends he owns or shares the intellectual property rights to many of the underlying ideas. The user interfaces, the countdown clock, the sizzle that has so many business applications. He’s put together a well-heeled startup, SEER, to spot business trends. Evan claims the technology doesn’t work to predict war but it’s good enough to “intelligently guide” corporations about the future of their industries. His tagline: Not predicting the future, shaping it.

  Over the last year of their partnership, Jeremy and Evan were increasingly at odds. Evan seemed intent on showing Jeremy the potential business applications and Jeremy was intent on telling Evan where he could shove it.

  And so, now, in short, their relationship has devolved into a patent dispute. Jeremy thinks this is the most vile, uncivil form of conflict in the entire world, so cruelly administrative. And really, in the end, just a negotiation, not a search for truth. But it’s also utterly du jour in Silicon Valley, with companies wielding armies of lawyers to vie over who came up with what idea first. And then smiling and signing royalty contracts, one company agreeing to pay the other such-and-such licensing rights because, well, the stupid fucking court can’t really disentangle.

  At its heart, Jeremy tells himself, his opposition to such compromises is the kind of thing that drives his inability to let the little things go. One day, you let the barista at a café act like an idiot, the next you’re giving away your ideas, your soul.

  Emily tells Jeremy that it’s just an excuse to act like a jerk and that Jeremy isn’t allowing anyone else to even contribute to finding productive uses for the technology.

  And then Emily adds insult to injury: she says that Jeremy is jealous. Jealous! In particular, she says Jeremy can’t stand that Evan had become tight with Harry, who for so long was Jeremy’s advocate and mentor. Evan and Harry seemed not just to become fast friends but to consult professionally. Maybe Evan, tired of Jeremy’s antics, was consulting Harry instead. Emily says Jeremy can’t stand to see anyone get along, especially people in his inner circle.

  In any case, if Evan wants to shut down Jeremy’s efforts and get access to the technology he claims to have helped develop, then Evan’s going to have to come and get it.

  Jeremy’s working on a theory: Evan’s doing just that. He’s somehow messing with his algorithm, trying to drive a wedge between a man and his machine, to get Jeremy to give up. Take the payoff, licensing fees, royalties, and then go work on something else. Fat chance.

  Jeremy wipes the drizzle from his arms and walks into the café. He orders a decaf and nods his nod to the Jabba the Hutt, who works the overnight shift behind the counter. Jeremy plops into a blue beanbag chair in the back. The place is about half full but there’s no buzz or hum to it, the sound and energy sapped by the inclement weather, fog and drizzle as insulation. On the ratty orange couch, a guy with a beard quietly plucks a guitar and taps its face in rhythm to some song he’s polite enough to almost keep to himself. Toward the front, some college-student types bury themselves in earphones and texts. No talent, Jeremy remarks in his neurological recesses, referring to the fact that there’s not a single worthy chick.

  He plugs the iPad into an outlet, signs on to the wi-fi, calls up, sees the machine come to life, paws the conflict map to bring it to life, then hears the machine beep. Three beeps, those three beeps, the same ones from the morning.

  The war machine has an update for him.

  CHAPTER 7

  BEFORE HE CAN check the device, Jeremy feels something nag at him and looks up. He discovers he’s being stared at by the bearded guitar player, who quickly lowers his head. Jeremy recoils into his beanbag, tilting the iPad so no one else in the place could possibly see it.

  He looks at the screen. A dialogue box pops up. Inside it reads: “Impact Update. Click for details.”

  Sure, let’s see it, he thinks, clicking.

  The dialogue reads: “April’s projected deaths: 75 million.”

  In the abstract, at least, that’s not so hard for Jeremy to swallow. Just more game theory and simple probability. An attack in, say, San Francisco, triggers a counterattack, then reprisals, then the dominoes fall. The program is taking into account the hundreds of parameters and key variables that, Jeremy’s research at Oxford determined, can be used to predict the length and intensity of war.

  He looks at the map.

  Red, red, red. The only difference between the rendering of the future on this map and on the version of the map he saw six hours ago is that attack is six hours closer. That, he notices, and it looks like the red is spreading. Meaning: whatever conflict this computer has foreseen will go from hellacious to worse. The countdown clock shows 66:57:02. Hours, minutes, seconds.

  Jeremy looks up at the guitar player. It crosses his mind that if the guitar player is looking at him, Jeremy’s going to advise the guy on the problems with his chord-hand position. Just a little jab, one that will come across as possibly well-meaning and hard to interpret. But the guitar player is buried in his world, unavailable to hear unsolicited advice.

  Jeremy pulls out his phone. He’s trying to remember Evan’s cell phone number. Trying to think what he’s going to say after: Hey, fuckface!

  He pauses. Never go into a fight unarmed. He needs more evidence. He can check the inputs.

  On the phone, he calls up Nik’s number. Taps out a text: “notice anything strange?” The corpulent assistant is either asleep or glued to an infomercial. But if he does see the text, it might jar him; Jeremy doesn’t ask questions like this, not open-ended ones, not even of Nik.

  From his backpack, Jeremy pulls an external keyboard.

  Is the data coming into his machine, the data that somehow adds up to impending doom, accurate? Has it been altered?

  Jeremy rolls his neck, pre-computing calisthenics. He looks at the key fob, enters six numbers, then his password, then he begins tearing his way across the keyboard, causing symbols and lines and numbers to appear in the window. It’s less fancy than it looks. Jeremy’s simply creating a category of all of these data points—all 327 inputs—collecting them into a single file, then writing a code to send out the numbers, all of the data points, and check them against their sources around the world, and then to double-check the data points.

  Most of them largely irrelevant. In the grand scheme of predicting conflict, they are modest measures, weighted lightly relative to the handful of big ones: troop movements, demographics (specifically, concentration of males age eighteen to thirty-five), changes in income distribution (the wealth gap), weather, arms shipments insofar as they can be inferred by production and profit from companies in the military-industrial complex, and, powerfully, a “rhetoric” measure. It looks at changing use of language by politicians and media around the world but, with more emphasis, in hot zones. How are powerful “entities,” whether people or media outlets, describing their relationship to the rest of the world? Internet spiders can easily comb through mountains of publicly accessible commentary to look for phrases like “we will never surrender” or “vanquish the enemy” or “date which will live in infamy.” Algorithms Jeremy has developed and forfeited many nights of sleep perfecting can compare them with previous utterances by those politicians or outlets, looking to see if the rhetoric had been more conciliatory, and so forth.

  Those are the key variables for understanding more conventional war. But predicting and understanding localized terror attacks, insurrection, jihad, guerrilla warfare that has, in effect, become war in the 21st century, that’s even tougher. It relies on narrowing the search to a region in question, even a city or mountainous area, to the spot where
a group of insurgents are focused. It relies on looking at an additional key variable: the formation and concentration of small groups capable of carrying out attacks and creating instability. These are, in fact, mini-armies, the modern analogue to the massive buildup of troops and a war machine before the outbreak of World War II. What, the Soviets never saw it coming?

  And Jeremy’s been monkeying around with other ideas, ways to refine the conflict algorithm. Over the last several months, since everyone severed ties with him, he’s been playing with a particularly wild-eyed effort. It’s an attempt to identify a specific person whose actions, or words, are singularly important in igniting conflict. The program measures the relevance of a person’s influence to potential hostility based on that person’s network of connections. It aims to mine the mountains of data on the Internet to connect people to one another, a version of what Facebook does when it draws connections between potential friends.

  Jeremy calls it “Program Princip.” It’s named after Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, igniting World War I. Jeremy’s idea is that he’ll go beyond being able to identify someone like Ferdinand as a potential influence in an impending conflict, to identifying the tiny needles that will ignite the conflict haystack. In some ways, it’s not so far-fetched. A handful of startups have gotten big venture capital to develop software aimed at combing the Internet to determine who is most influential in, say, business or art. So why not conflict? But so far, Jeremy has only beta-tested it, showed no one, only really muttered about it to Emily.

  Jeremy finishes his latest iPad query in about twice the time it ordinarily would’ve taken, because he’s got to type so carefully in order not to make mistakes and because he’s tired. He hits “enter” on his command.

  Is the data accurate?

  If so, what data set changed? When?