by Matt Richtel
“No,” Andrea says.
“What?”
“No, you were not right.”
“You want a prediction I’m absolutely one hundred percent correct about?” Jeremy says into the phone.
“Sure.”
“I’m hanging up.”
He pulls the phone from his ear to end the call, hears: “Wait.”
Something in the intensity of the plea causes him to pull the phone back.
“I’m in town. Visiting another asset. Let’s get a drink.”
He rolls the logic around in his mouth, the change in data, the statistical significance of this call. And of the proposition. A drink, from the woman who seduced him into service.
He pictures Andrea, an unlikely cocktail: born in Mexico City of a local and an American doing executive kidnap recovery work for insurance companies, then raised in Idaho, forged with a kind of quiet and abiding patriotism. And undeniably beautiful, and quirky; encyclopedic about the nearest karaoke bar, blessed with a powerful soprano and no fear of showing it off. To inform his standard holier-than-thou worldview, Jeremy wanted to dismiss her as an affirmative action hire, some favor to her father—the kidnap specialist with CIA ties. But she just kept proving herself too smart for that.
After an introduction by Harry, she recruited Jeremy to the Pentagon, got him to let his guard down, put him and his computer in a position to be humiliated. The flash passes and he’s back to his head, wondering why in the world he’s hearing at this moment from a case officer in the Department of Defense.
“Andrea, do you know why they made me your asset?”
“Why?”
“Because they suspected I was a hack, a blowhard. You’re a junior case officer, an affirmative action hire, an effort to doll up an agency, a skirt they could send to low-level meetings on the Hill. They figured they could waste your time with me.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Ta-ta.”
“But you are right.”
He doesn’t respond to her vague provocation. She clarifies. “You’re right about why they hired me. I’m good at dealing with assholes.”
“Ta-ta.”
“Does tonight work? It’s too small of a world to burn bridges. You never know when we might need each other.”
He grunts something noncommittal, which she takes as assent. “Not the usual spot. Let’s try somewhere new. I’ll call you later.” She hangs up.
He had deliberately chosen the most provocative, childish, offensively sexist language to infuriate Andrea, test her, and still she didn’t hang up or even challenge him. Why not? Because she’s used to dealing with him and has tuned out his bullshit, or for some other reason?
Is she part of some scam?
He’s had his questions from the start, that night she recruited him, consummated his commitment. The government had flown him to Washington, which didn’t seem so odd. Everyone was flying Jeremy everywhere at this point. Consult on this, speak at that, Jeremy finding himself at the gooey center of the world of peace and conflict studies. At his hotel in Georgetown, there was a knock on the door and there stood Andrea, so in opposition to what Jeremy had expected. He’d let down his guard. At a swanky restaurant downstairs, they’d eaten oysters and drunk martinis, which she could put away. She was neither overly flirty nor remotely shy in showing him the edges of the bird tattoo above her left breast. She didn’t mention a thing about the algorithm, his reason for visiting, the thing they’d ask him about at a briefing the next day at the Pentagon.
So when she went to the bathroom, he felt suddenly nervous. He patted his pockets, discovered he was missing the key fob, the access code for the conflict program. He left the table before she returned from the bathroom, rushed up to his room. There was the fob, on the desk, right next to the computer.
He exhaled, felt a kind of shame—not because he’d freaked but because of something in this woman’s power. When she showed up at his door, she’d caused him to forget himself, forget to take his precious fob. Thereafter, he’d worn it around his neck, an amulet, a veritable locket.
After that, over the months, he’d alternately opened himself to Andrea and protected himself from her. Did she like him or was she just recruiting him? Their last in-person interaction, the last time they’d had a drink, was at the usual place, South of Market. She was hemming and hawing about another last-minute cancellation of a trip to send Jeremy to the Middle East. I’m doing my best for you, Jeremy. I believe in you, and it. His computer.
So much brown in her eyes and promise in her voice. Jeremy wondered if this was the night Andrea would finally invite him back to her hotel, allowing him the pleasure of declining, or deciding whether to decline. Then, a surprise interloper: Evan. The slickster happened into the same bar, with a twenty-something date. An awkward moment among the three of them, shattering the rhythm of the night. Andrea petering out, professing to share Jeremy’s distrust of his MBA backer, but whatever momentum he imagined had been there, totally lost.
Back in the present, Jeremy remembers himself, his habit of getting lost in his head, especially lately. He can’t stop puzzling through so many little moments the last few years, these Hansel and Gretel crumbs that have led him to this isolated place. He looks up. The café bristles; a man in a fashionable red rain jacket chomps half a donut in a single bite, then looks around furtively, suggesting to Jeremy that the man’s guiltily wondering if someone might catch him eating too many carbs of the inorganic variety.
Fucking San Francisco. Maybe it should get nuked.
He looks at the phone, then hits the cursor. Yes, he fucking wants to see the results from the program he ran the night before. Just how full of shit is his conflict algorithm? He hits enter.
The screen reads:
327 variables checked.
327 variables accurately reported.
Jeremy feels a painful pulse in his clavicle. The computer has based its results on accurate information.
So that means that the problem isn’t what’s being fed into the computer. It might be that the algorithm itself has been tinkered with, not the inputs, but the equations. The guts.
Jeremy looks up, scans the café. He’s looking for faces that might be looking at him. Some trickster, someone getting even. That, weirdly, he realizes, is his first impulse at this moment. He doesn’t quite put it together that there’s something else compelling this action: he’s feeling humiliated. This fucking computer, this life’s dream turned nightmare, might just be out-and-out wrong. It’s like the Pentagon all over again. Worse than that; a realization not just that his computer is screwing up, but that someone is messing with it, just like messing with the inside of his own brain.
At least that’s got to be the working assumption, that someone is messing with the computer. Who? How?
He looks at the countdown clock, then below it. At the bottom of the screen, Jeremy sees a query: Would you like to see a list of the variables?
Jeremy clicks yes. Yes, he wants to see which variables have changed such that this computer is predicting the end of the world.
CHAPTER 10
A LITTLE OVER AN hour later, and poorer by eight dollars spent on a ham-and-cheese croissant and coffee and the bus, he looks up from the iPad and watches a raven-haired woman apply makeup to her pale face with help from a pocket mirror. Pale like his mother on that last visit, her head rolled to the side, dry lips, Jeremy wondering whether someone is going to say something, anything, something conciliatory, or maybe one last twinkle-eyed parry on her way to eternity.
The bus slows. It mostly emptied on the circle through downtown. Just two stops now until Jeremy’s condo. To-do list: shower, change clothes, get a backup battery, walk to the office, go deeper into this list of variables.
He looks down at the iPad to see what it’s already given him: a list of 327 parameters that the computer used as a basis for predicting an attack.
A column on the left on his iPad window lists the name of a partic
ular variable; then, in the next column, the variable is quantified, like the number of oil barrels shipped or produced. Next to that, one column shows how much the variable has changed in the last day and another column shows how much it’s changed in the last week. Finally, a column on the far right shows the extent of the change.
Jeremy scrolls up and down this dense, text-heavy list. Three of the lines of variables are blinking. The blinks signal that the variables in those columns have seen a significant change.
When he first built the program, he’d look every few hours at the variables, looking for changes, like a hopped-up day trader or, Emily once observed, like a psychology student who, a few days into class, starts imagining that he and everyone around him has everything from clinical depression to multiple personality disorder to attention deficit disorder. Jeremy was seeing conflict everywhere.
But he quickly realized that changes to the variables, even the most weighty ones, did not mean imminent war. Much more important is the combination of changing factors, their relative and combined influence in waging war. The precise right amount of sugar and butter and chocolate makes delicious cookies; the wrong amount, combined with arsenic, makes something that tastes like shit and kills you.
What he’s looking at, even if the data is accurate, still is likelier to be a predictor of a hoax than a war. Jeremy looks at the blinking columns. One is Tantalum. The second is Conflict Rhetoric. The third is the Random Event Meter, known as REM.
The bus slows again. Jeremy glances at the countdown clock: 57:40:00.
57:39:59.
57:39:58.
He looks up. The raven-haired woman applying makeup, sitting two rows ahead, is looking at Jeremy in her tiny handheld mirror. Isn’t she? As the bus comes to a stop, she hastily stuffs her makeup kit into an oversize purse and exits out the front.
Jeremy looks down at the variables. Rhetoric. The computer is programmed to see changes in language, to see nuances even in hyperbole. But from the column, Jeremy can’t tell exactly what has changed in the language of conflict, or where in the world it has changed. That level of abstraction will take more research, another command to the server, easily enough done when he gets upstairs. He’ll be able to tell if the language of conflict has intensified in, say, the Baltics, or among Greek bankers, or in Iran.
All Jeremy can tell from this column is that there has been a sharp uptick, 14 percent, in the last few days, of the collective language of conflict, material enough for the computer to care about.
There’s been an even sharper rise in the Random Event Meter. It’s up 430 percent. Jeremy shakes his head, mostly annoyed, vaguely curious. The meter measures whether there has been some event or series of events that, in historic terms, would seem far outside the standard deviation. And the event can be anything. An alien landing. All Major League Baseball games being rained out, or being decided by more than 30 runs. Statistical anomalies unconnected to any of the other variables.
Jeremy clicks on the line. He sees a story from the Associated Press. The headline: “Lions Freed in Three Zoos, Leaving Man Dead.”
He glances at the article. Lions loosed over the last twenty-four hours at the San Francisco Zoo, and in Oakland and in San Diego. Outside the San Diego Zoo, an old man found dead from claw wounds. Police speculate the man was responsible for freeing the lion. They speculate further that this is some effort coordinated among animal rights activists but acknowledge the theory is for the most part conjecture.
An off-duty cop shot the lion in San Diego. Animal control managed to dart and subdue the one in Oakland. The one in San Francisco remains at large.
It’s all Jeremy can do to stop himself from rolling his eyes. Fucking computer, fucking nonsense. Maybe the three lions were planning to get together to cause the apocalypse.
He turns to the third variable, tantalum. That’s up 4,017 percent.
The precious metal is integral to the making of cell phones. Tantalum, Jeremy recalls, comes from refining a raw material called coltan, which, in turn, is found in mines in Uganda and Rwanda.
Jeremy knows this not because he knows a bunch about how cell phones are made. Rather, he knows it because he knows how wars are made. And the battle for coltan once set off a rash of insurgencies in Africa. Simply: demand for coltan, which sold for $100 a pound when Jeremy was studying the conflict region in 2001, fueled efforts to control the mines and the municipal governments by guerrilla bands. It was a great place to explore localized conflict, even inspiring a visit once by Jeremy, then a graduate student, to try to put a human face on the variables measured by his computer brain.
Jeremy looks at his phone, sensing this might be further evidence of a hoax. After all, what difference could tantalum make in the possible onset of conflict? The sharp rise in shipments of tantalum, 4,017 percent, is certainly material, at least to the brokers and buyers and suppliers of the metal. But it could hardly, Jeremy imagines, have anything to do with tipping the balance of massive global conflict. He can imagine himself talking to some news blogger explaining he thinks that there’s going to be a nuclear holocaust because of an increase in the shipment of some precious metal. Oh, and the release of some zoo lions.
You don’t say, Mr. Stillwater? And for a follow-up question: are you still taking your meds?
The bus slows. Jeremy hears the doors open. He hears the rain. As he stuffs his iPad into the backpack, he sees the slick streets and smells the wet air.
How long has it been raining? How come he hadn’t noticed? Is the rain the forest, or the trees?
Fucking Emily. And that guy, there was something about him that didn’t add up. Something deliberate. A too on-point jacket, like a costume, but with shoes from an entirely different circus trunk. No, that’s too simplistic. Was he too handsome, too deliberate in some way? Jeremy can’t pinpoint what nags him.
Outside the bus, he walks against the foot traffic to his apartment complex cum condo, all steel and sharp corners, modernity that is San Francisco’s version of urban renewal. The high-rises near the ballpark are beautiful. What twenty-something could resist? Perfect for the Trustafarians and stock option babies able to throw down 20 percent of $1.2 million for nine hundred square feet that serves as nest and résumé. The elevator ride is a networking opportunity and a speed date.
He takes the elevator to the eleventh floor. Feels a sense of relief as he reaches his floor, maybe a chance for a catnap. He slips his key into 1117 and opens the door.
He sees the innards of the couch. They’re strewn all over the living room. Someone has gutted his sofa.
He peers to his right. Papers tossed on the counter that separates the kitchen from the living area. A stainless-steel spatula, an egg beater, lying beside their ceramic container, upside down on the counter.
Magazines on the floor.
Someone has overturned his apartment.
Someone still inside?
Jeremy backs out and shuts the door. He catches the eye of a young woman coming out of the apartment next door. He hates this woman, a bubbly, friendly, sycophantic thing, working at a startup in South Park. Actually, he once made an overture. When she first moved in. She rejected him in such an indirect but insurmountable way that it infuriated Jeremy. He has slipped several notes under her door asking her to turn down her music and, one night when particularly piqued at the sounds of sex coming from next door, anonymously warning her that it will set a bad precedent in her relationship if she fakes orgasms. Lies beget lies, he warned her. The building manager got involved but nothing could be proved, quiet warnings issued; the thing blew over.
“Excuse me, Tara.” He sees that her umbrella, while it isn’t unfurled, has Mickey Mouse prints.
“Hey.”
“Strange question. Have you seen anyone coming into my apartment? Anyone not me?”
Her mousy face, beneath a bob haircut, registers a genuine concern.
“Did someone take something?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not su
re. I might have had an unwanted visitor. Did you see anyone? Last night?”
“Did you tell Aaron?” The building manager.
He’s starting to get irritated. Just answer the question, pixie. She must sense it.
“No,” she says. “I went to bed after Idol. It was quiet last night.”
He looks at the lock. No signs of forced entry. He opens the door.
CHAPTER 11
HE SLIPS INSIDE the doorway. He inhales, smells something, an alien presence. Wonders if it’s gas but only momentarily. A perfume of some kind, heavy, no, a cologne. Like inhaling the Polo counter at Macy’s.
He can hear Emily’s voice inside his head and, for a second, he can clearly see the difference between the forest and the trees or, rather, tree. The tree is his desire to kill whoever was in his place, who overturned it. The forest is his safety. Call the cops, Jeremy, or the building manager. Get out of here.
He takes a few steps inside.
“I’ve called the police!” he yells. He paws his phone. He listens. Nothing, no sound. False bravery, he’s realizing; of course no one is waiting for him. It would be a tactical error of the utmost stupidity, ransacking his apartment and then waiting around to get caught.
How did someone know he wasn’t home last night?
What could someone want from him?
He feels the weight of his iPad on his back.
He takes in the condo, an open kitchen and living area with a fifty-inch Internet-connected TV hanging on the far wall. A massive window that would look onto the drizzle-shrouded bay if the curtains weren’t pulled shut. Jeremy knows that’s not his doing; he rarely remembers to shut the blinds; if people can see inside and don’t like what he’s doing, that’s their problem.
The condo is mostly empty of furniture, edging on desolate. Jeremy hasn’t had a chance to furnish the place; at least he tells himself he hasn’t been able to afford the time, but it’s more that he can’t afford the cost of the things he’d like. He takes his furniture as seriously as his haircut. He likes things just so. And now they’re ransacked.
