The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  He should know in the next six hours. It’s well past 1 a.m. He pulls the iPad to his chest, folds his arms around it. Pulls it back off his chest. He opens a browser. Googles: Evan Tigeson.

  Lots of hits. He clicks on the web site for SEER, Evan’s latest thing. And then a mission statement about not merely predicting but driving global trends using proven, patented algorithmic technologies. Yeah, Jeremy thinks, my fucking technologies. He clicks on Evan’s bio. Sees the picture, a black-and-white photo, square features, an almost seductive eyebrow raise undercut with a geeky subtext that Evan can’t bury. To Jeremy, he’s a “51 percenter”; just on the other side of slick. Like so many in the Valley, he’s just shy of fully slick, geeky enough to come across as authentic. This type of businessperson in Silicon Valley is like the do-gooders from college who go to Washington, D.C., and it becomes impossible to tell the difference between their ambitions for the world and for themselves.

  Jeremy clicks back to the home page. Sees an infobox that catches his eye. “Sign up for SEER 2013, an initiative for the future.” A conference, the typical way to jump-start a new business, a networking opportunity. He clicks for more information. None comes up, other than a list of current conference partners. It’s impressive, Google, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard. The very biggest tech companies. Slick Peckerhead.

  And there’s an email: InfoSEER@seer.com.

  Jeremy closes his eyes, pictures one of his last meetings with Evan, at least the last one with any pretense of civility. Down in the Valley offices, where Jeremy visited with increasing infrequency, he ducked into Evan’s glass-walled office to find his partner playing around on the conflict map. At first Jeremy blanched, but then he realized Evan wasn’t actually inside the guts of the algorithm, not changing it or able to, just running various scenarios: what if this business were located here, or this one located there; what if flat-panel television manufacturing plants continued to decline in profit margins, blah, blah.

  “What happens if Walmart gets into the widget business? I hear that’s going to be huge,” Jeremy said. “Get that one right and you can move to Atherton.”

  Evan managed a smile. He always could. Nothing seemed to ruffle him, something he’d point out in speeches was owed to his upbringing in northern Minnesota, where twenty below was balmy. He’d say that his quaint upbringing in Moorhead, population forty thousand, was like the Internet: if you tried you could connect to everyone, live a more intertwined life.

  “This is the future.”

  “Business applications are my passion.”

  “It’s so much more than that, Jeremy.” A slight hint of edge in his voice. “Look what happened when they developed Ireland and rural China. Huge economic prosperity. What if your machine could be more powerful than you ever even imagined?”

  “Whatever, Peckerhead.”

  “Don’t take my word for it. Ask Harry.”

  This one stopped Jeremy in his tracks, a rare comment for which Jeremy didn’t have a quick retort.

  “You’ve been talking to Harry?”

  “It’s impolite to have lunch with someone and not talk.”

  It was the moment that Jeremy learned that Evan, the business partner he was learning to loathe, had cozied up to Harry. Jeremy became instantly convinced the pair were conspiring behind his back. Maybe they were just two people interested in the world, Emily said, and she tried to broker a peace.

  She arranged a picnic, held at the log cabin, a beautiful setting in San Francisco’s Presidio, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. The setting was also intended as symbolic; the Presidio was a former military base turned gorgeous public sanctuary. A place where the machinery of war, its essence, turned decidedly tranquil. And a favorite place of Harry’s to come think big thoughts about peace and conflict.

  But so much for symbolism: no sooner had Harry and Jeremy arrived than they went right to war, each firing rhetorical ICBMs turbo-powered by his immense ego, each accusing the other of disloyalty and stupidity. After all Harry’s generosity over the years, Jeremy spat the ultimate insult—all the while, Harry was seeking to discredit Jeremy and his computer so that Harry, and Harry alone, would be the ultimate authority on conflict and its causes. Harry, Jeremy was saying, was little more than a power-hungry conflict-monger himself.

  And here Jeremy sits now, in the café, ties severed from Harry, and Evan—and wondering if the two are somehow in league against him.

  He stares at Evan’s new web site. He pulls up his phone and scrolls through old emails until he finds a phone number for his ex-partner. He pushes a button to dial. It rings and rings. Voice mail picks up. Jeremy hangs up.

  His eyes are glazing over. He closes the browser, pulls the iPad to his chest.

  He thinks back to what Evan had said in their last conversation at the office: “Your machine can be more powerful than you ever imagined.”

  What had he meant by that? Something Jeremy didn’t realize?

  The words and ideas blur and jumble together as Jeremy falls asleep.

  CHAPTER 8

  TWINKLE, TWINKLE.”

  He feels someone kick his foot. “Twinkle, twinkle.”

  Jeremy cracks open his eyes. “Twinkle, twinkle little fart,” Jeremy manages.

  “How I wonder where you fart.”

  Standing before him, a boy with light brown hair, spilling out unkempt from the sides of his red wool hat with earflaps. He’s got black rain boots and the trendy puffy blue ski jacket that Jeremy had given him at the beginning of the school year. Kent bobs his head and torso side to side, herky-jerky, as if moving to some unheard music, the rhythm of an energetic boy.

  “You look like a collage,” Jeremy says. He’s getting his bearings. He’s sitting in a beanbag, arms wrapped around an iPad.

  “Did you sleep here? You seriously smell like a fart. Seriously.”

  Jeremy inhales. Boy’s got a point. Kent and Emily must be here on the way to school and work. How many times has Jeremy told Emily to make coffee at home to save the money; and pastries aren’t good for the boy: even the raisin bran muffin brims with sugar.

  Still, he smiles. His last interaction with Kent was the worst they’d ever had. Some stupid disagreement as they sat on the living room floor, trying to make sense of the strewn pieces of a rocket ship puzzle. Jeremy suggested looking for the corners first.

  “I have a better idea,” said Kent. He was sorting the pieces by color, looking for the ones that might go together.

  “Only if you want to be here all day,” Jeremy said.

  “Get your own puzzle.” Kent said it absently, something from the mouth of a babe. But Jeremy laughed haughtily. Something cruel. But he at least was able to check the counterattack that nearly spilled from his mouth, even though the bad taste didn’t leave Jeremy for days.

  Kent turns and Jeremy follows his gaze to the counter. With a modest smile, Emily orders coffee. She’s got high black boots and a long black skirt and a light purple blouse, her shoulders covered by her near-black hair, and Jeremy can practically taste the pheromones across the café. He thinks: Emily, something bad is happening. Someone’s messing with me.

  And, then: But just in case no one’s messing with me, just in case something really bad is happening, get away from here. Take Kent to your brother’s house in Reno.

  Emily tilts her head toward the guy standing next to her at the counter, listening to him. She laughs.

  The guy is tall and wiry—built not unlike Jeremy, fuller brown hair suggesting he’s younger. Brownish skin, one of those hybrid ethnicities, half something and half something else. Is he seriously wearing a stone-washed jean jacket?

  He puts a hand on Emily’s shoulder, friendly, close to intimate, maybe not quite there.

  Kent says: “Ready?”

  Jeremy looks at the boy.

  “Old McDonald Had a Fart.”

  Part of their ritual, turning Mother Goose rhymes and songs into potty humor. Relief washes over
Jeremy; whatever tension is long since past.

  “Eee-eye, eee-eye-oh. And on that farm he had a cow,” the boy continues, off pitch, a little self-conscious. “With a poo-poo here and a poo-poo there.”

  Emily looks over. Jeremy watches the cascade of analysis and emotion: why is my son talking to this strange man unfurled on the beanbag chair; oh shit, that’s not a strange man. Her face turns to puzzle pieces. One looks like anger, one like pity, and one like fear, not from the threat of a stranger but of the familiar.

  She turns and says something to the guy she’s with—the guy she spent the night with?—then clears her throat and begins her last-mile walk to Jeremy.

  Jeremy represses an urge to stand to meet her. Realizes he wants to save that movement for when it might really count. Before Jeremy can look down, in an effort to communicate his fake nonchalance, the old flames lock eyes.

  “We’re late, bunny. Let’s get a move on.” Emily’s balancing her coffee and a juice and a couple of pastries on a compostable brownish takeout tray. “What are you doing here, Jeremy?”

  “You can’t be serious,” Jeremy says. He juts his chin toward the guy. “The 1980s called. It wants the denim jacket back.”

  “Let’s go, bunny, we’re late.” Then to Jeremy: “Let’s do this later.”

  “There isn’t going to be any later.”

  Typically obtuse for Jeremy; he must be setting up some line of attack. But Emily senses that it’s dramatic in a way that Jeremy usually avoids until he’s launched his final verbal offensive. Which is why moisture glistens in her brown eyes, sympathy, yearning for understanding, not recrimination. His heart thump-thumps, a drumbeat urging him forward into an embrace or confession. He clears his throat.

  “Kent, bunny, can you go wait by the piano while I talk to Jeremy.” She extends a raisin muffin to the boy. He holds it, but doesn’t move. Emily grits her teeth at this impossible situation, her stubborn son and stubborn former lover. “It’s not healthy for you to be here.”

  “Not healthy?”

  “Jeremy . . .” She knows the essence of what’s coming, if not the exact words.

  “What’s not healthy is that raisin bran muffin. Tons of sugar. What’s not healthy is bringing home some strange man. It’s in all the literature. You’ve got to be sure he’s the guy. It’s sending Kent really confusing messages.”

  “I’m right here,” says Kent. “She didn’t bring him home.”

  “Not healthy, Jeremy? Like starting a fight in front of Kent? Like showing up at a café blocks from where we live; there’s a café every half block in this city. Like . . .” She pauses. She looks around, happy that no one seems to be paying attention, but still lowers her voice further. “I’m not doing this.”

  “He’s definitely not Jewish.” He’s looking at the guy who was with Emily and who now sits in a ratty high-backed chair near the front trying hard to pretend he’s flipping through a broadsheet.

  “That’s sheer desperation, and obnoxious, and neither, for that matter, is Kent’s dad, or you.” She pauses. “But you do need a coping mechanism.”

  He’s fighting for footing. “Did you notice his shoes?” Emily looks at the guy for a lingering second, looks back at Jeremy.

  “You are brilliant, Jeremy. I’m not disputing that. You are so kind when you want to be. Kent cherishes you. But you have the biggest blind spot of anyone I’ve ever known. You only see trees.”

  “The shoes and the jacket don’t match. Something’s off about that guy. There’s a lie in him. I’m guessing he picked you up at the gym, or after work. You fell for his apparent goofiness. You like a project. But this guy is a charade. He’s using you for something.”

  “All trees. No forest.” She shakes her head. She’s practically seething. Enough so that Jeremy lets himself look at her directly, another move he tries to avoid when in a heated conversation because it also can send the message: okay, I’m listening; you might have a point.

  “You can’t see the big picture, Jeremy. It’s pathological. You nit and pick and nitpick and nitpick. Challenge and refute. Then, when you finally let down your guard, whenever we got so close, you’d nit and pick and then go nuclear. You destroy everything in your path, tree by tree by tree.”

  Jeremy has to pause before responding. He’s impressed by her reasoning, flawed though it is. Usually, she’s led by succinct, true emotion, famous for such profundities as “I’m feeling sad.” It’s how she prefaced the final breakup with Jeremy, after lovemaking on the futon in her living room that was, on its face, intense, but in which Jeremy sensed her absence.

  “I know you’re bitter about how things turned out,” Jeremy says, which is true but also ridiculous because Jeremy’s equally bitter.

  She ignores his bullshit. She looks up to see, thankfully, that Kent has receded to the piano bench, where he’s munching his muffin.

  “It’s not me, Jeremy. It’s everyone. Jeremy, to be blunt, I don’t think you’ve got a friend left. Not a single ally. Not that people wouldn’t help you. You won’t let them. Remember the log cabin?”

  “Harry’s messing with me, Emily.”

  She laughs. She bursts out. It’s a genuine laugh, a honey drip of irrepressible amusement.

  “Harry didn’t want to fight with you. He wanted to help you, and you just attacked him. Get out of the trees, Jeremy. And probably you should stay out of this neighborhood. It’s really not healthy for you.” She looks at Kent. Unstated: It’s really not healthy for Kent. He loves you. You know how much he loves you.

  Jeremy feels a vibration in his pocket. He extracts his phone. It’s a call from a private number. He’s about to send the call to voice mail. A call from a private number. He remembers what’s going on with his computer. Who is calling?

  He swipes his finger across the screen. “Hold on,” he says into the phone. He cups his finger over the microphone.

  “Kent is the forest, Jeremy,” Emily says. She looks him in the eye, draws him in. He wants to put his head on her lap. “Please don’t bother us.”

  Jeremy’s arm shoots up. He holds up his hand as if to say: wait, please. With his other hand, he cups the phone against his chest so that whoever is on the other end of the line can’t hear what he’s going to say. He looks at Emily, the slight cherub in her cheeks, the emerging crow’s-feet around her deep brown eyes, a picture of softness and beauty, someone he, when he’s feeling charitable and condescending, likens to the Giving Tree in the book by Shel Silverstein that he often read to Kent. She gave, Jeremy took, and it seemed to work for everybody.

  She senses something powerful in him. “Is everything okay?”

  Now is the moment, he thinks. Now he can tell her that he needs to tell her something.

  “Where were you last night?”

  She raises her eyebrow. Are you kidding me?

  “I was on a date. I didn’t spend the night at his house. He came by this morning to take me to coffee. He’s a nice guy, a friend, and nothing more. For now. And you are not entitled to know anything further about my life, Jeremy. If not for Kent, please, do it for me. I need to be able to live without fighting.”

  She shakes her head and starts walking away. Jeremy feels his heart thump, unable to respond. So he switches his attention away from it, and to his head. “Hello.”

  CHAPTER 9

  WHAT’S WRONG, ATLAS?”

  The sound of the voice sends electricity shooting through him.

  Jeremy watches Emily usher Kent out the front door without a look back. Trailing behind, Emily’s suitor. He peeks back at Jeremy, seems to smile. Does he look familiar?

  “Why are you calling me?” Jeremy demands.

  Andrea Belluck-Juarez laughs. “Just as hostile as I remember. Do you wake up that way or does it usually take enough caffeine to fell an elephant?”

  “Calls from blocked numbers make me hostile.”

  “You’re the one who answered, Atlas.” Her moniker for Jeremy, deriving partly from an inside joke betwee
n them that Department of Defense contractors deserve code names and partly because, she told him, he likes to think he believes he can carry the whole world to safety; he, she jokes, and he alone.

  “What’s up?” He’s trying to sound nonchalant, feel her out. But his antennae are bristling. It’s a big coincidence that she’d call mere hours after his computer warned of impending doom.

  “I should be asking you that question.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Andrea laughs again. Then explains: “Usually your hostility comes thick with sarcasm and witty repartee. Maybe you really haven’t had your caffeine.”

  “Hanging up now.”

  “Easy, Atlas. I’m calling because you’re a week late.”

  Jeremy swallows, still getting his bearings.

  Every two weeks or so for the last eighteen months, Jeremy has called Andrea to ask one question: are you ready to admit I was right? It’s a question referring to his predictions—or, rather, the predictions of his conflict machine—about the length and intensity of conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ever since the military brass there dismissed him as a quack, he’s regularly hounded Andrea to own up to the fact that they somehow duped him. They promised at one point to send him overseas so he could do a real-time test, pitting his algorithm against reality on the ground in Iraq, but the trip never materialized. It was further evidence to Jeremy that they were afraid to allow him to see firsthand the breathtaking value of his technology.

  “I was worried you’d lost faith in yourself,” Andrea says.

  He looks down at the iPad, swerves his finger across the screen to awaken it, sees the map covered in red.

  “So was I right?”

  “That’s the Jeremy I know and have some grudging appreciation for.”

  He doesn’t answer. On his iPad, he looks at the countdown clock: 59:15:32.

  He swallows thickly, flicks away the map and pulls up a window from the background. It shows the calculations he was running overnight, the requests for whether the list of 327 global parameters was accurately reported. The screen reads: “Action complete. Would you like to see the results?”