The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  A guy who Andrea claims disappeared a few days ago. And now purportedly is dead.

  Could the lieutenant colonel have switched sides?

  Or could he have been killed and forced to divulge key information about Project Surrogate? To whom? To what end?

  Jeremy tries to keep himself from making the leap that he, a milli-instant later, makes: somehow, the bomb provided by the United States to attack Iran is about to be used to attack San Francisco.

  And it’s a bomb tied to Russia, to Rosoboronexport, a connection that somehow his computer pieced together. Or was the computer just making leaps in logic involving the sorts of influential entities—companies, executives, politicians—likely to affect the fate of the world?

  Jeremy shakes his head. There’s no way to know, exactly, what the computer was “thinking.” It might have connected the dots between the arrest of a Russian munitions executive, unrest at Rosoboronexport, and a potential conflict. Or it might have simply added those developments to a larger body of evidence, creating more weight behind the computer’s prediction of conflict. Regardless, it is seeing connections the rest of us don’t see.

  He thinks: The rest of us, except Harry. He must’ve pieced this together. He got hold of the top-secret memo. How?

  Of course, Jeremy thinks. He worked with the government, was a consultant.

  Harry put the pieces together, just like the computer, maybe more ably. More quickly?

  And he died for it.

  Harry, I’m sorry.

  Jeremy feels pain pulse near his neck, now excruciating, at the bony protrusion of his clavicle.

  Jeremy has a sudden urge to pace, to walk. To think and move, to synthesize. He looks at the clock. It’s just after seven in the morning. His legs are wet from the damp ground, his joints aching from exhaustion, but he’s alert, coursing with adrenaline.

  Just after 7 A.M. There’s an attack coming, tonight, here. Where? Nik will alert the media, and Jeremy will follow suit. The media, in turn, will alert the authorities, the cops, the army. They’ll watch the airports and the ports, guard the landmarks. Ten hours, an eternity. It was right. I was right.

  I can stop the attack. Redemption.

  He starts to stand, when he realizes there’s one more thing to do on the computer. Jeremy glances around, calls up a browser. Puts in “area code” and “218.” He gets northern Minnesota.

  He looks at a map of the area. There’s nothing up there, except Duluth. Places called Hibbing, Moorhead, Fergus Falls.

  His eyes trail back to the western edge of the state, Moorhead.

  Evan.

  It comes back to Jeremy. That’s where Evan grew up. Jeremy recalls that, after high school, Evan attended Carleton College, in southern Minnesota, studied engineering, interned at some big data center there, went to Harvard for his MBA, then Silicon Valley, a couple of IPOs.

  218-650.

  “A phone number, the start of a phone number,” Jeremy mumbles. He recalls that Harry’s blood trailed off after the last number. The dying professor was trying to write more, trying to point Jeremy to Evan without showing his hand to someone else. Figuring Jeremy might figure it out.

  He blinks, thinks, nice theory, but that’s it. No endless number of Google searches under “218-650” will yield an exact phone number, presuming Jeremy’s right. He pulls out his external keyboard, pops it in, and indulges in one search for “218” and “Tigeson,” Evan’s last name. He gets a hit. It’s for Eileen and Frank Tigeson, an address in Moorhead. Must be Evan’s parents. There’s a phone number starting with 218 but the rest doesn’t match.

  No matter, further confirmation. He’s got to find Evan. That seems to be the key to connecting the dots on the message from Harry, the V. A whole bunch of country codes and then, connecting them together, 218, Evan. The Peckerhead. Identified by Harry Ives, Harry War, the greatest conflict prognosticator in human history, as the fulcrum.

  And, now, Evan connected to Andrea.

  Could this be less an attack from the outside than one from within?

  Evan, Andrea, Lavelle Thomson, Harry.

  A brainstorm rocks Jeremy. His hands begin blazing across the keyboard. Seconds later, he’s entered his password and gotten himself into the guts of the conflict algorithm. Clicks until he finds a subdirectory, Program Princip. Clicks on it.

  On the tablet screen materializes a beta, beta, beta program, an alpha program, the product of a forty-eight-hour creative binge. Jeremy drawing on research he commissioned from an intern from Berkeley, a protégé of Harry’s. Jeremy trying to create a living example, or a dead one, of what he believed eminently possible in the Internet era: a machine to predict not just the onset of conflict but the seemingly insignificant actor pulling the trigger.

  On the top right corner, he clicks a pull-down menu, then “New Test.” The Princip web disappears and a spiderweb appears, absent names and faces and places. In the center, a blinking cursor. And a command: “Enter Name(s).”

  No harm in trying.

  In the command line, he types: Andrea Belluck-Juarez. Even before the word is finished, a panel opens on the right. In it, the results of an evolving Internet search. With each letter Jeremy types, the search engine, using keystroke intelligence, tries to keep up with, even anticipate, his search.

  Are you looking for:

  Andre Agassi

  Then

  Andropov, Yuri

  Then

  Andrea Bocelli

  He manages to get her full name typed.

  “For Andrea Belluck-Juarez,” the search engine reads. He hits enter. In the panel on the right, beneath the name “Andrea Belluck-Juarez,” a dozen or more options to people with the name. Third on the list is Andrea Belluck-Juarez, born in Mexico City; raised in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; resides in Bethesda, Maryland; referenced on Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Twitter, WashingtonPost.com, dozens of others. Network: 10,000-plus connections.

  Jeremy pridefully takes it in. This part of the algorithm is telling him that it can draw lines between Andrea and many, many people and ideas using publicly accessible databases and an underlying technology built from a search engine kernel. The special sauce, Jeremy’s brainchild, is that it does the search in a context of conflict. How, if at all, do Andrea’s connections bind not just to bad actors, or suspect ones, but to ones that themselves are connected to a prospective conflict?

  Jeremy clicks on her name and it appears on the panel in the left, in the middle of the spiderweb. Next to her name, in the center of the web, a new dialogue box opens with a question: connect this person to what event?

  Shit, he hasn’t input the conflict predicted for mere hours from now.

  He works in a flurry, clicking and typing, telling Program Princip which part of the larger conflict algorithm to tap into. Within less than two minutes, the command is complete: the computer will ask whether Andrea has some connection or connections that the naked eye can’t see to an impending attack in San Francisco.

  It’s almost as if he’s asking the computer the most human of questions: can I trust Andrea?

  He feels a gust of wind. Looks at the clock. It’s 7:37. He calculates he’s got just more than an hour to find his way to Nik, who, in turn, might be able to help find Evan.

  Into the spiderweb he enters Lavelle Thomson, discovering, at first, hundreds of potential matches for the name. He narrows it down by refining the search to the Washington, D.C., area and West Point, from where, he vaguely recalls hearing, the lieutenant colonel graduated.

  Next, into the spiderweb Jeremy enters Harry Ives. Even as he does so, he doubts that Harry could be the culprit. Harry was warning Jeremy, not duping him. Then, on a whim, he enters the president. He’s about to click on the button at the bottom of the web to start Program Princip from doing its thing, when his computer beeps and an icon appears at the bottom. Incoming mail. He runs his cursor over it. A message from the office manager at his building. He ignores it, returns to the algorithm.

&n
bsp; He enters Evan’s name.

  Looks at the screen.

  Enters Nik.

  And, finally, he clicks on a pull-down menu and chooses from it “Computer-generated Princip.”

  This, in effect, is asking the computer to attempt to identify a person or persons most responsible for the potential attack, to draw connections between all the variables—rising and falling conflict rhetoric, arrest of an arms dealer, and on and on—with specific individuals. It’s a complete wild-eyed effort. But why not?

  He puts the curser over the button to launch the query. Something nags at him. What’s he forgetting? Then it hits: he needs to give Program Princip some baseline against which to measure the potential threat posed by Andrea, Harry, the lieutenant colonel, the president, Evan, some random individual the computer divines. Otherwise the program can only compare their threat potentials against one another. That could be useful, but not necessarily, not positively, not if, for instance, they’re all implicated in some way.

  Who can he pick? Donald Duck? Emily? Who is the most innocent person he knows?

  Of course. He puts himself into the spiderweb. He hits enter. He watches the web begin to whirl, doing its calculations. Will this add any evidence? He has no idea, not the slightest fucking clue. It’s another appendage of his digital self, this computer that he feels he can’t fully control, that is bigger than himself, so much more powerful, but so mysterious. A savant that can communicate only results, not the emotions or even the reasons behind its predictions. It’s a brilliant black box, but still, a black box. And it leaves Jeremy feeling an instant of hatred. Is he like this box? All analytics, no ability to really connect—assessing people at a distance, performing some kind of game theory on them without really understanding them? Or they him?

  A last computing stroke. He asks the algorithm to email him when the results come back. That way, he won’t have to log on to the program every fifteen minutes to see if the results are back.

  He throws all his stuff into the bag, and he starts jogging.

  Fifteen minutes later, he stands behind a eucalyptus, looking out onto one of the main roads that wind down and through the Presidio. He swallows hard and peers behind the tree, wanting to make sure that a van toting a killer isn’t among the cars dribbling by. Or among the three cars he can see parked fifty yards down on a gravel outcropping where cyclists pull their high-tech bikes from the top of the Subaru and burn two thousand calories before work.

  A couple, already finished with their morning workout, load back up.

  Jeremy pulls out his iPad, looks both ways, jogs down the side of the road. When he gets within ten yards, he waves his hand, the one holding the iPad.

  “Pardon me, fellow travelers.”

  They look up. Windbreakers, spandex, short haircuts, wedding rings.

  “What’s up?” the man asks, glances briefly at his wife, closing the hatchback, and then glances back at Jeremy.

  “Made a huge mistake on my morning hike,” Jeremy says.

  “Got lost?”

  “Took my . . . this . . . albatross, wound up under a tree and lost track of time surfing for who knows what. Some story about Putin.” Jeremy sighs. “Just looking for a lift down the hill so I can get to the office at some reasonable hour.”

  A pregnant pause. Enough for Jeremy to panic. What if the guy has heard reports of police seeking someone looking like Jeremy for the murder of a Berkeley professor? Then, he thinks: would that be so bad—to be in police custody, where he could show evidence of the attack, work in protected confines to discover the who, what, when and where?

  The guy shrugs. “Could drop you at Divis.”

  Ten minutes later, Jeremy stands at the corner of Divisadero and Bay, then minutes after that, goes into the Starbucks at the Safeway, where he scrounges enough for a supersize coffee and, when the barista turns her head, pockets a banana and some chocolate cookie thing from the counter.

  Then he hops an inbound bus and waits for the caffeine to take effect. And waits. But the act of sitting, ensconced among jacketed commuters and dulled by the putt-putt sound of the bus engine, seems to have only the opposite effect. He can’t think, let alone process and synthesize. He’s down to a few basic mantras:

  Find Evan.

  Call the media. Call the police. Report the attack.

  Of less significance:

  Debrief with Andrea. What does she know? Is she even part of this equation? She knows what Harry knows.

  Near Geary, the bus door opens. A wholesale exchange of commuters. Exiting is a group of a half dozen twenty-somethings wearing blue scrubs beneath their jackets as they head out to the handful of medical clinics. Getting on, khakis and pressed shirts, social climbers in North Face outerwear, heading downtown.

  Jeremy presses himself against the window, still waiting for the caffeine buzz, vaguely aware that the neurochemical cocktail that his body is delivering him to keep him awake and let him cope with the stress is way more powerful than anything even Starbucks can cook up. He remembers overhearing some study about how a growing number of people check email first thing when they get up in the morning, even before downing coffee, thus getting a mild buzz, a contact high. Maybe the conflict machine will wake him up.

  Or is Jeremy just rationalizing an urge to look at the clock, see what news his gadget has delivered him?

  The lumbering vehicle circles left on Geary, bodies swaying with the turn. Jeremy pulls out the iPad and pulls it close. Thinks better of it. Puts the device back into the leather bag and pulls out his iPhone. He’ll be able to see if there’s an email telling him Program Princip has finished its business; if he turns the phone on for only a few seconds, he can’t imagine anyone could triangulate the signal and find him.

  They’re nearing Japantown, not far from the café with the view, a running joke, the place where he’s supposed to meet Nik. It’s got no view at all, the worst view for a café in the whole world. They used to meet here, sometimes with Evan, to talk business, a coffee shop outside the orbit of cool coffee shops, where no one could overhear, at least no one with any business acumen.

  Jeremy pulls the plastic wire to signal the bus to stop.

  He glances at his email. No update from the algorithm. But another email from the office manager at his building. “Asswipe,” Jeremy mumbles, climbing off the bus.

  Ignoring drizzle, or, rather, too tired and distracted to realize it’s drizzling, he starts walking south on Fillmore. Behind him, the faux glitz of Japantown, a few-square-blocks commercial tribute to an ethnic community with deep visceral ties to this city. And on the sidewalks next to him, just ahead, liquor stores, a pawnshop, a Laundromat, a descent into one of the remaining yet-to-be-gentrified neighborhoods. And, in a block, the café with the view.

  Jeremy swivels his head, looking for Nik, any followers. Then back to his phone, and the message from the office manager. It says, simply, “See attached (fuck the pigs).” The building manager, an unlikely ally, probably feeling harassed himself by the police. There’s a file, .mov. A video clip.

  He clicks on it. As it loads, he looks up to sees Nik standing in front of the shithole café, under a torn black awning.

  Jeremy looks down at the device, the grainy video. It’s a snippet from the surveillance cameras in the entry to his building. There’s a time stamp. The middle of the night from two nights ago, when his apartment was broken into.

  He sees the doors swing open, then the interloper looks for a second up at the camera. Jeremy feels his clavicle burst with pain, dopamine surging, his eyes physically bulging. Can’t be.

  He puts his finger over the phone to show the face again. Hits pause. Looks at the image.

  At the top of his lungs: “No!”

  CHAPTER 39

  WHO LIKES SUNSHINE?”

  Emily closes the front door, unlatches the chain, opens the door. Feels the bristle brush of damp air.

  “You’re a persistent one,” she says.

  “You think I’
m persistent. What about this fog?”

  Emily takes in this new friend, met, what, ten days ago, two weeks? One date, a few phone calls. Charming, sure, walking a very careful line between being too aggressive and trying to communicate his interest. That’s not novel for Emily. She’s a magnet, even though she doesn’t fully recognize it in herself. But she’s usually a magnet for the wounded and angry, the eventual drug user who will lose a job and spend a year packing fat bowls on the couch, not this self-possessed, put-together entrepreneur. There’s not a speck of dirt inside his car, the CDs arranged in the middle compartment alphabetically, as if he showers twice a day and then gets professionally vacuumed—him and his car.

  And then there’s Jeremy’s warning about him, about how his jacket didn’t match his shoes. Probably envy, right? Probably just Jeremy taking a shot. But, the thing is, Emily knows that what makes Jeremy so dangerous, so potent, is that even his offhand jabs are based on a whiff of truth. It’s like the best comedy; it’s funny because it’s true. When Jeremy insults the guy behind the counter of the pharmacy, or at the café, he’s articulating something frank and fair, even if it’s totally socially awkward, wholly inappropriate. Like a child, like Kent, trying to get his mother’s attention. And Jeremy saw something bad in this guy. Jealousy, truth, or both?

  It makes her think, secondarily, about how much she misses Jeremy. This suitor, this slightly odd, nice guy, feels so inauthentic by comparison.

  “You can make the fog go away?” Emily asks him.

  He laughs. “I can put it in the rearview mirror. I took the audacious risk of packing a picnic lunch for the three of us. There’s a spot on the other side of the bridge where the Marin County supervisors have outlawed fog.”

  She almost laughs. “You’re serious.”

  “Kent’s not in school today, so I thou—”

  She cuts him off. “Deal, Liam.”

  He smiles.

  “Do me a favor. I could really use a cup of coffee, and I’d like to get Kent ready, which will require some reorientation of his expectation that we’re spending the day playing board games in the fog. Would you mind picking me up a coffee on the corner, and some sugar snack for Kent?”