The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  He looks at the computer, and realizes he’s ready. He knows now for certain what he wants to ask it, what he’s fairly sure it can answer. It’s the idea he heard earlier—about asking the computer to delve deeper into the conflict variables and tell him which are the ones most likely leading to an attack. He thinks he knows how to ask it.

  “I want to assure you of something, Jeremy.”

  “Which is what?”

  “We promised you we’d run a field test, then strung you along. I can tell you, with complete and utter confidence, they worked their asses off to make that happen. I got the calls myself, once in the middle of the night: ‘Call Stillwater tomorrow and tell him we’re a go for this weekend.’ They were damn serious. Or they gave me that impression . . .” Her voice seems to trail off.

  Jeremy turns back to his computer. Starts to, then notices a rectangular plastic card standing on its edge in a small open compartment in the dashboard, next to the left edge of the radio, the place you’d store parking quarters or mints.

  She says: “Yes, I have a hotel for the night. The International. Not far from here. I lied. I don’t have a flight.”

  “So you have a flight, or you don’t have a flight. You hated Evan, or had an affair with him. We were wrong or we were right. You are Santa. Or are the Easter Bunny.”

  She half laughs.

  He looks at the screen, the control deck of the algorithm. The guts. He thinks: I’ve got a question for you, my friend. He puts his fingers on the external keyboard and taps rhythmically.

  “I don’t think they were ever serious.”

  He blinks, trying to sort out too many inputs with a tired brain. “About sending me on a field test.”

  “About you or your computer. I don’t think they gave a damn about some wonk and his algorithm. I think it was about something else. Maybe they were testing me. Maybe he was testing me.”

  He looks at the hotel card, back at the computer.

  “Lavelle,” she clarifies.

  “I know what else I can ask it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Jeremy’s thinking of Program Princip, his latest innovation, represented by the icon in the top right of the algorithm’s menu. Could Jeremy use it to identify who to trust? Could he plug into it the names of Andrea and Lieutenant Colonel Lavelle Thomson, Harry Ives, Evan Tigeson? Could Jeremy discover which of them is the functional equivalent of Gavrilo Princip, the bit player turned assassin who ignited World War I?

  Could it identify which of the bit players in Jeremy’s life is dangerous, even deadly, maybe contributing to impending apocalypse?

  He puts his fingers on the keyboard. Tap, tapping them.

  “I need to use your room.”

  CHAPTER 28

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, they’ve parked and settled into the International. It’s vaguely Japanese themed, stone and marble, reds and blacks, double-tall glass revolving doors that lead to an expansive lobby, more marble, wood carvings and sculptured bonsai trees.

  In the elevator, there’s a television—screens everywhere—showing news headlines. A surfer with a permit to carry a concealed weapon shot the zoo lion walking along an ocean beach.

  “Crazy story,” Andrea says. “Tragic.”

  There’s a related news nugget: bloggers report that a man found dead outside the San Diego Zoo, alleged to have set free a lion there, had two tattoos: one, previously reported, of a lion standing on hind legs, and a second tattoo. One word: Custos.

  “It’s Latin,” Jeremy says.

  “What?”

  “Guardian.”

  Andrea’s not following. “I’m all for animal rights. But give me a break.”

  The elevator door opens to the twelfth floor. In the room on the twelfth floor, Jeremy asks for her phone but she scoffs.

  Jeremy says: “I can’t have you calling in my coordinates for a strike.”

  “You’re right that Evan’s a peckerhead. But he’s right that you not only think there’s a target on your back, you keep pasting one there hoping people will shoot.”

  She plops on the bed. In spite of himself, everything, he watches the black skirt inch up above her knee when she sits down. He sits at the desk. His back to her. Stands again and settles in a stiff armchair, paisley patterned, near the window. As he pulls out his iPad, he catches her giving it a look.

  It’s remarkable to him that she’s been this pliant, going along with him. Hard to believe that she’d be this accommodating just because she feels guilty for having lied to him. There’s something else going on. She wants something.

  On the car ride over, she’d told him that, over the last month, she’d grown suspicious, broadly, about something going on in her office. Lots of chatter, quiet meetings, she’d been left out. She did a little snooping around. She recalled for Jeremy one particular meeting where she asked if she was being left out because she’d somehow messed things up on the conflict algorithm, her one big assignment. A midlevel military manager had laughed. No, he told her, that wasn’t a big deal. It hadn’t been a serious attempt to predict the future. In fact, the guy said, Jeremy had been right, his computer dead-on accurate. But there’d been no point in going further with it. Really, the guy had smirked, you think we were going to entrust our war modeling to some angry geek with an iPhone?

  She told Jeremy she’d been seething. It had been an affront to him, and her. What had been the point, she’d asked the guy, of going to all the trouble? He shrugged. “We spend money on stuff.”

  She said she’d marched right into the lieutenant colonel’s office. She demanded to know why she’d been used, forced to lie, her time wasted. Simple, he said: not everything here works out, and the lies had a simple, brain-dead origin: no sense in giving an angry Silicon Valley know-it-all the sense that he understood war better than the Pentagon. In a world like this—where everyone can make a case on the Internet, and every case made on the Internet can affect funding and congressional decisions—it didn’t pay to have a second-guesser like Jeremy running loose.

  In the hotel room, Andrea fluffs a pillow, puts it behind her back, so she’s sitting upright, looking at him.

  “Lavelle is like a father to me,” Andrea had said.

  Jeremy’s trying to focus on the iPad screen.

  “You hated your father.” Jeremy remembers she’d had a mixed relationship with her father, a fire-and-brimstone blue-collar worker in northern Idaho.

  “Loved him but questioned what drove him. Same with Lavelle. Look, Jeremy, I’ve been forthright with you. It’s your turn.”

  He doesn’t dignify it with a response, not at first. He wants to talk to his computer. Finally, though: “How have you been used?”

  “I’m honestly not sure.”

  It seems sincere.

  “What do you know about tantalum?”

  She shakes her head.

  “It’s a precious metal used to make cell phones.”

  She shrugs.

  “How about Rosoboronexport?”

  “Russia’s state-controlled arms dealer?”

  “It’s a big deal.”

  “General Electric plus Honeywell plus Lockheed, and then some. Why?”

  “It’s been in the news lately.”

  She nods. “One of their former execs, the chairman, got arrested in Paris.”

  “You follow this stuff closely.”

  She gives him a look: gimme a break. It’s her job, like someone at Morgan Stanley following the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Then she says: “Tax evasion. But I wouldn’t buy it.”

  Jeremy perks up. “He was arrested for some other reason?”

  “I honestly have no idea. Rosoboronexport is scary as hell. The company makes and sells massive amounts of weaponry, traditional and nuclear. In a sense, that was once relatively comforting, the idea that a big authoritarian government had everything under one roof. But as Russia has ebbed and flowed between authoritarian and quasi-democratic-slash-capitalistic, this huge company h
as sprung leaks. Individual entrepreneurs have emerged, taking pieces of the technology, selling off assets, even aligning with rogue nations.”

  For a moment, Jeremy is caught up in Andrea, substance and style.

  “Maybe the former chairman has gone, to use your word, rogue.” He sees her eyes briefly go to the backpack.

  She looks up again, flushes. “Is that what your computer thinks?”

  “Why do you ask that?” Pointed.

  “Don’t start, Jeremy.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “We’re finally having a real conversation. I’d rather not start sparring again.”

  “Then just tell me why you’re here, plainly.”

  “I’ve told you. I owe you the truth.”

  Jeremy straightens; something passes over his face. He looks dead at her. “Get naked and start to do jumping jacks.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “You know you wanted me, someone like me, to dominate you. All those nights on the phone, jockeying, flirting. You were waiting for me to take charge.”

  She grits her teeth.

  “Just topless and push-ups.”

  She blinks.

  He shrugs. “I’m seeing how much bullshit you’ll endure,” he says. “You want something and until you tell me what and why, I’m going to play my iPad close to the vest. And until then, we can go along like we always have, with one of us in bed wondering when and whether the other’s going to join in.” Momentary pause. “Give me your phone.”

  “No.”

  “Have a nice nap.”

  He stands, takes his gear and walks to the bathroom. Turns around, walks to the minibar, grabs a handful of shit, nuts and cookies and an orange sugar drink. Back inside the bathroom, he locks the door, settles in on the marble floor. Screw Andrea. He can cuddle up with his computer. In the guts of the algorithm, he clicks on a command line: “nstd.exe.” He hits copy. Then he clicks and drops a copy of the program into a box at the bottom right of the screen labeled “rmt server.” The remote server. Jeremy hates putting a copy in the cloud, in the storage space he rents in some Google data center. He doesn’t like anyone, even as secure a company as Google, having access to his secrets.

  But he’s got to make sure he’s got a clean copy of his algorithm’s brain before he starts doing surgery.

  A message bar appears: “copying. Est time: 9 minutes, 22 sec.”

  Jeremy minimizes the box, then decides to wait until the copying is done before he tinkers. While he waits, he thinks about what the computer has already told him.

  War is imminent because of a change to: weather; shipments of tantalum; lions loosed from zoos; arrest of a Russian arms dealer; changes to conflict rhetoric in Russia, North Korea, North Korea, Mexico, Congo and the Fertile Crescent.

  Now he has time to ask the questions he’d been thinking about earlier: Which of the variables is most telling? If the weather had remained constant, would the computer still predict war? What if the conflict rhetoric in Russia had remained steady, not worsened?

  He can ask the computer those questions. He can ask it to run simulations that hold some variables steady and allow others to change, just as they’ve changed in the real world. Mix and match and change the circumstances to see which variable stands out, which is allegedly the one responsible for the projection of war.

  Nine variables: heightened conflict language in five regions, diminished war talk in the Fertile Crescent, increase shipments of tantalum, changing weather, the arrest of the Russian billionaire arms dealer.

  The number of possible outcomes: 362,880.

  Child’s play.

  The computer is done copying the file. He sets the iPad down next to him. Stands up, glances in the mirror, nearly recoils. Hollow eyes, sunken cheeks, an Edvard Munch painting.

  He splashes water on his face. Rubs the towel hard to dry himself, spur adrenaline. He opens the bathroom door and peeks outside.

  Andrea’s eyes are closed, arms crossed over her chest. Asleep. Asleep? She’s beautiful. He wants to be next to her, but not in sweaty entangle; asleep too.

  He closes the door, locks it, sits back down. Puts his fingers on the keyboard. And he becomes a blur. He’s typing and thinking at equal speeds, lightning.

  Ninety minutes later, he looks over his creation, the product of a nonstop frenzy of human processing. It’s a sea of hash marks and commands, brackets and if-then statements. He looks at the blinking cursor at the bottom. “Not fucking bad.” He hits enter, initiating the inquiry.

  He stands, wants to wash his face again. Wobbles with exhaustion. Sits back down. It’s nearly 1 A.M.

  He checks the door of the bathroom, makes sure it’s locked. He pulls out the bloody scrawl.

  A V, an upside-down triangle, numbers.

  Log cabin.

  AskIt.

  Beware Peace.

  Or Beware the Peace.

  What did Harry say?

  Beware Peace, and then it seemed that he was going to add something.

  Jeremy feels his eyes closing. He forces them open, rolls his neck in a circle. He stares up at the vent on the ceiling, wishing for a blast of cold air. He looks down at the computer, does a search on Google News for “tantalum.” He’s looking for the press release that explains how Silicon Valley companies, some consortium, have bought up a bunch of future tantalum contracts. He finds the link to the story. Clicks on it. It reads: link broken.

  “What the hell?”

  He searches again, tries other search terms, related ones. Nothing comes up. The story is no longer there.

  He stares at the screen, disbelief and exhaustion. His head lolls to the right. The next thing he sees is Kent. Unkempt hair, footsy pajamas, a puzzle piece in his hand.

  CHAPTER 29

  IT’S A NINE.” The boy holds it up in the air.

  “Why not a six?”

  The boy shrugs. “Well, let’s just put all the numbers together and we can figure it out later.”

  Jeremy looks at the jumble of puzzle pieces on the shorthair carpet. It’s not a rocket ship. It’s nothing, just pieces.

  “Look for the corner pieces, Kent. And the ones that go along the sides. Pieces with straight sides.”

  “I want to put the numbers together, and the letters. They go together. I figured out the dinosaur puzzle all by myself. You were wrong about the rocket ship. We should also find all the colors and put them into a pile.”

  Jeremy puts the toe of a scuffed brown loafer into the pile of pieces, moving them about; he can’t recall a puzzle this complex. Where’s the top of the box? He needs to know what picture they’re even trying to create. He looks at the base of the reddish armoire; it’s not there. Where is Emily? He thinks he hears voices in the other room. One sounds so familiar but he can’t place it.

  He looks down a darkened hallway. Someone standing in the darkness. Something. A creature.

  He looks at the boy. “No point in grouping by color. Almost all the pieces are red. Corners and sides.”

  “Why do we always have to do it your way?”

  He looks at Kent. The boy now has a mustache and stands nearly six feet. He blinks and Kent is himself again, adorable and boyish, red and blue pajamas with baseballs.

  “Kent, we don’t have to do it my way. We have to do it the right way. If you want to do it the wrong way, then you may as well do everything the wrong way. Good way to get a great fast-food job. You can put the Kent in Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

  “The world doesn’t have corners. It’s a circle. Besides, I’m the one that recognized the colors of the bridge.”

  Jeremy looks near the boy’s pajama-clad feet. A pile of puzzle pieces with letters, combining to make words. One of them combined into an arch. Wait, no, the span of a bridge?

  “Bad logic. Just because something doesn’t have corners doesn’t mean it can’t have sides.”

  “For goodness’ sake, Jeremy, why can’t he be right?”

  Jeremy startles at the
sound of the woman’s voice. Seized with fear of recognition, he turns slowly around Emily’s living room to find out where it is coming from. He turns his gaze from the armoire to the futon couch, the scratched end table bought at the secondhand store from that woman with the vulture’s pose. He stops on the antique chair next to the front window.

  He sees her, holding a box in her hand.

  “You’re dead,” he says to his mother.

  “Oh really,” she says, and smiles. “Then how come I’m looking right at me?”

  Kent lets out a hysterical laugh.

  “She thinks you look like an old woman.”

  “That’s not what she—” Jeremy pauses. Looks at his mother, her flowing gray curls, the blue hospice gown. “You have the puzzle box.”

  “I do.”

  “Show it to me.”

  She looks at the cover. “That won’t make you happy.”

  “Mom, this is serious. This is about the end of the world. This is about—”

  There’s a low growl. It’s coming from the other side of the room. In the darkened hallway. Jeremy looks up. Something in the shadows.

  “A lion.”

  “Calm down, Jeremy.”

  “Mom, listen!”

  “You’re losing your cool.”

  “Give me the fucking box.”

  Kent laughs. “Mom, Jeremy just said ‘fucking’!”

  “Let yourself love them, Jeremy.”

  Jeremy sighs. He hears a pounding noise. It’s the front door. Someone frantic to get in.

  “Wake up, Jeremy,” his mother says. “You’re almost out of time.”

  “To save the world?”

  His mother smiles. It’s so tender, angelic, a smile he’s never in his life seen from her.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  “I’ve seen that bridge before.”

  “Wake up!” she implores.

  Jeremy startles. Bang, bang, bang. He’s awake. A succession of thoughts. The numbers, the bridge.

  He knows where he’s seen that bridge. Exactly that view.

  Dry air courses into his nostrils, a shrill feeling bordering on painful from having slept inhaling recirculated air. How long did he sleep? The sharp artificial light in the bathroom burns his eyes. He vigorously shakes his head, willing the blood there.