The Doomsday Equation (12 page)

I
CALLED
911.”

Tall woman, black sweat suit, a student-athlete maybe, one hand over her mouth, now pointing at Jeremy. Some primal accusation.

“Help!” she screams. Wails. “Heeeeeeeelp!”

“No,” Jeremy says, repeats: “I called for help.”

“Heeeeeelp!” She steps backward.

Jeremy looks at the scene, sees what she sees, a suspect covered in blood.

He looks down, then at the woman, and back down. Yanks his backpack toward him, and, as he does so, pulls the calendar, tears it, obscuring the part with the blood scrawl. Hoping to scramble the coded message, if that’s what it was. He looks at the woman.

“I called 911.” He repeats, implores.

Harry emits a low, feral moan. The intruding woman blinks, calculating, her reboot nearly finished, coming back to life.

“I’m going for help,” Jeremy says.

The woman steps forward to Harry. She’s going to take some action, Jeremy thinks; she took a lifesaving class.

Jeremy looks at the calendar, the message. He rips the top page of the calendar, sliding the torn top page from beneath Harry’s evaporating life.

He runs.

Past the woman, into the anteroom. Hears the bloody squeak of his own sneakers. He scrambles off the shoes and socks. Folds and stuffs the calendar page and the bloody scrawl into his back pocket. Takes off out the door, curls into the hallway, suddenly slows when he sees several students, hand in hand, quickly approaching, drawn by the sound they thought they heard of someone yelling for help.

“Dr. Ives is hurt. I’m going for help.”

The students start to jog forward. Jeremy walks past them, a half jog, and, when he’s past, jogs. Looks down, sees his feet leave no marks. Runs.

When he reaches the stairwell, he pauses. Heads down the stairs to the back.

Seconds later, he’s outside, in a lonely parking lot. He sees a short building to his right, Dwinelle Annex. He hears sirens.

His heart slams in his chest. He could turn around; it’s not too late to go back and explain to the police that he went looking for help and has returned. He has an alibi, right, evidence someone broke into his condo, the surveillance tape with the building manager, logical explanations. Justice will be served.

But there are Jeremy’s fingerprints, on his own knife, in Harry’s back.

He looks ahead, sees the grove of ancient, leafy trees that surround a creek-side path leading to the south of campus. Over the path, the trees converge, their leaves intermingling, taking a shape, something circular.

A clock.

The countdown clock.

Jeremy shakes his head. Blinks. Just trees.

The log cabin.

Ask it. The computer.

Is it right? There will be war. Is that what Harry was telling him? Maybe Harry thinks there’s going to be a conflict and he wants Jeremy to ferret it out on the computer. Maybe Harry thinks the computer knows something. Everything?

Ask it.

Not if he’s in jail.

And something nags him, a factor in this instant algorithm his brain is running: what if the computer’s right, partially right, about the apocalypse? Ask it.

He puts his head down and walks to the grove, the path. When he hits it, he sprints.

T
EN MINUTES LATER
, at a drugstore on Shattuck, he spends $6.95 for flip-flops. He walks outside, peers across the street in the drizzle to the entrance to the subway, the way to San Francisco. A beat cop stands outside, eyeing people descending into the escalator to the subway tunnel. One tall fellow, thin, wearing a hoodie, passes the cop, gets stopped, questioned.

Jeremy curls back into the drugstore. He buys a red rain slicker, with a hood. He retreats into the bathroom. He pulls on the slicker, looks in the mirror. Sees the smear. Blood, turning brownish, stains his cheek beneath his left eye. He must’ve scratched himself. He looks at his hand. Both hands. Stained. With Harry. He rinses them in the sink.

He rubs his hands on his pants to dry them, feels the phone
in his pocket. The phone. Still connected, presumably, to the police. Shit. He yanks it out. He swipes to disconnect the call. Then thinks the better of it. He turns off the phone.

They can’t track him. Not with the phone off. Can they?

Back at the door of the drugstore, he watches the officer. Watches, watches. He hears a screech. The driver of an SUV approaching the nearby light has slammed on his brakes. A bicyclist shouts, unhurt, unhit, but spilled. The officer shakes his head, annoyed at the little things, begins a reluctant walk to the intersection. Jeremy bolts for the subway entrance.

Inside, downstairs, another cop, chatting with a heavyset woman inside the ticket box.

Jeremy walks unnoticed through the turnstiles.

Minutes later, he sits in the empty train, regretting that there are few commuters this time of day, little cover. But he’s made it through the first, most crucial line of defense. The officer at the mouth of the subway will tell people he saw no thin man without shoes trying to escape west.

Likely, Jeremy thinks, he’ll face curious officers, even a dragnet, at the other side of the trip. The subway exit providing a perfect bottleneck through which potential murderers will have to pass.

He exhales, expelling stale air, his senses returning, slides lower into the filthy fabric of the subway seat, stares at the grubby carpet beneath his flip-flops.

Log cabin. What does that mean, Harry? A code? Who else would know of the symbolism of the log cabin, the day when the last pieces of Jeremy’s life fell apart. He pictures it, the day, the group: Emily, Harry, fried chicken and white wine, and Jeremy. Sitting on a blanket under a tree, the Golden Gate
Bridge in the distance, Harry casually asked whether the algorithm might be improved and Jeremy, without missing a beat, said, “Are these your suggestions or the ones Evan gave you when he had his puppet hand up your ass?”

Harry just looked at him. Then said: “Early in the day to go nuclear against your last ally.”

And that’s just what Jeremy had done. Without warning, he’d severed ties with his last ally. It was, Emily said, so plainly self-destructive, an act by Jeremy to distract himself from the fact he was no longer in control, no longer the center of attention. Or worse: that when it comes down to it, Jeremy feels more comfortable in a state of conflict than in anything approaching vulnerability.

Or, as Harry put it that day at the log cabin: Jeremy, you prefer fighting.

“To what?”

“To truth,” the old man said, shook his head and walked away. He was done fighting.

What truth?

What did Harry mean when he said: “Beware Peace.” And “Statis pugna.” Same thing, really. Something is too calm. Is that what Harry means? Things are too calm? It was one of Harry’s landmark theories that the world actually is safer when there is a constant level of low-level conflict. In fact, while Harry hated war, he did not hate conflict; he thought conflict was a simple way of life, a reality of a world filled with competition for limited resources. The key, he said, was to accept it and manage it, allow it to simmer, just not boil.

Was Harry saying things are getting too peaceful? And thus poised to boil and explode?

Ask it.

Jeremy glances at the two other passengers in his car, a stringy-haired man with a cane standing near the door, bent at the waist, neck craned, eyes downcast, defeated. And another man, seated, locked in a mass-market paperback, wearing a mass-market prefab, no-wrinkle blue shirt.

Jeremy extracts his iPad. He clicks it on. As it comes to life, he paws cautiously at the message in his back pocket. He looks around, pulls the hastily folded paper and shifts it between his legs, outside anyone’s view. He unfolds the deadly origami, glancing up and down, furtive, making sure no one sees. He can make out the message, sort of; the blood has smeared. Jeremy tastes vomit.

Forces himself to look at the symbol, the message. A shape, likely a
V,
but not totally clear, with numbers on the points; 972, 970 on the top points, and 218-650 at the bottom.

Along the sides: 7, 1, 41, 212, 986, 86.

He finds scratch paper in his backpack and uses a blue pen to copy onto it the symbol and the numbers. He shoves the calendar, the bloody evidence, into his backpack. He looks at the symbol.

A code, obviously. A riddle? A taunt?

218-650 at the bottom.

Not binary. Not computer language, probably. Harry didn’t talk that language, didn’t like anything about computers, even argued they made the world more dangerous by diminishing in-person contact.

And what of the symbol. Is it a letter, or a shape?

Harry was never much into the code-cracking part of war and conflict. He found it boring—the Enigma machine, the efforts by the Allies to crack Nazi and Japanese codes, the use of encryption schemes and misdirection and words born of
adding together the first letters of various sentences or paragraphs, dead drops and back-alley whispers.

Is this a message for Jeremy, or for anyone?

Jeremy, feeling intensely self-conscious, looks up, sees his iPad is alive. He looks at the time. It’s just after 4
P.M
. It takes a second to pinpoint the significance of the time. He’s supposed to meet Andrea shortly. He pictures the meeting place, Perry’s, an eatery cum pickup joint on the Embarcadero.

He clicks down to the countdown clock. Fifty-one hours, and a half.

Ask it.

Ask it what, Harry?

Who attacked you? Will there be a war?

The computer beeps. Beep, beep, beep. An update. Jeremy doesn’t have to ask it anything. The computer has something to tell him.

T
HE SHRILL UPDATE-BEEP
is one of those features that Evan had insisted on including in the product. The feature announces any changes to major data points, the key parameters that affect the timing or gravity of impending conflict, like weather or troop movements or major leadership changes.

“Think of it as our version of IM,” Evan would say to prospective customers over lunch at One Market or some other trendy downtown restaurant. Often, he’d be speaking not to prospective buyers in military or government procurement but to executives from the private sector, like the insurance or wireless industries. They were interested in the business applications of the digital oracle but they couldn’t help being sucked in by the sexy lure of the conflict algorithm. And that was the point, really, Evan would tell a chagrined Jeremy: the conflict machine is our brochure but business intelligence is what will make us rich.

“IM?” one of the lunching executives would invariably ask Evan. “Instant messaging?”

“Instant Menace,” Evan would say. “It tells you when there’s been a change to a variable that could change the world.”

They’d laugh, invariably.

“Of course, I shouldn’t joke,” Evan would continue. “Not when it comes to predicting global conflict. And not even when it comes to your business. You’ve got to know when a market is moving, or might move, or a competitor is transforming. It’s a cliché, but business is war and you can’t afford to be a second behind, not a
millisecond
behind, or you wind up on the defensive, maybe in an irreversible position.”

Jeremy looks at the bottom right of the screen. He sees four little flags, all red, meaning four key parameters have changed. Four of the 327 variables have shifted. More data, or more lies.

A voice comes over the train loudspeaker. “City Center. Transfer to San Francisco.”

The train slows, wheels screeching on the track. Outside Jeremy’s window, the passing of blurry walls at the station entrance. He shoves his iPad into his backpack and puts the rain slicker over the top.

The train whines to a stop. Jeremy stands, looks out the window, sees the cop. She’s descended the stairs at the far end of the platform. Then he loses sight of her as the train lurches ahead to its next destination.

Jeremy’s pectoral aches, pounds. Just to the left of the key fob hanging on the silver chain. He looks down at his flip-flops, calculating. Is this a cop-cop, or a subway cop checking to make sure passengers have their passes—a routine measure at the first of the month? He pictures the conflict map. Red, red, red. The first of the month. Just a few days away. April 1. Armageddon or system bug or joke. He looks up. It’s a cop-cop.

The subway doors open. Across the platform, a train, Jeremy’s train, right there, spitting distance, sprinting distance. Its doors open too. He has to get on that train.

He pokes his head out the door. The portly cop, only fifteen feet away, has her back turned, looking at a handful of commuters making their way from one train to the other. She turns in his direction. He recoils.

A horn sounds. The other train set to go. He sucks in his breath. He peers out the doors. The cop is one car down, entering his train.

He runs.

Seconds later, he slips into the closing doors of the westbound train. He feels like he’s got a scarlet letter, telltale flip-flops and a bright red slicker. But none of the half dozen commuters seems to take notice.

He sits in an empty row, yanks out his iPad. He clicks on the first flag. A dialogue box pops up. “Mover-shaker update re: Russia. Click for details.”

“Mover-shaker.” That’s the program’s vernacular for news involving a leader, someone with enough clout or importance to potentially have a material impact on the timing and nature of conflict. To move markets or shake up geopolitics. It could mean something as extreme as an assassination, or the change of a lesser ingredient, like an outspoken hawk in some inflamed area losing an election, or winning one.

Before he clicks for details, he runs his cursor over the second flag. A dialogue box pops up: “Rhetoric. Decline. Re: Fertile Crescent. Click for details.”

A fall in hostile language. A further decline in the semantics in the Fertile Crescent. That’s only good news. Would that all the world’s conflict rhetoric would decline.

He clicks on the third flag: “Weather update. Click for details.”

Jeremy tastes bile. Weather, a major factor in the onset of conflict; better weather can allow troop movements or beach landings; clear skies can permit air attacks. He clicks on the box for details.

There is a link to a web site called AccuWeather. The page is for the Hawaii weather forecast. On top of the page is a satellite image, clouds swirling above the Hawaiian Islands. Below that, radar images showing incoming weather and short forecasts for the individual islands, Maui, Oahu, Kauai, and so on.

In the middle of the page, he finds what looks to be an update. It reads: “Tropical Storm Serena downgraded. Westernmost islands, Pacific fisheries spared heavy rains as low-pressure system dissipates.”

That’s it. On this page of links and charts and graphs, a single sentence that might or might not be pertinent.

So what? What could the computer be inferring from this? He scrutinizes the page again, unable to make any clear associations or inferences.

He clicks on the fourth flag. Inside the dialogue box: “Update, Random Event Meter.” And he mutters: lemme guess, more lions. A
Washington Post
headline pops up: “Three More Lions Set Loose.”

Kooks have freed lions from zoos in Seattle and Portland and one from a traveling circus act stationed in Reno, serving a casino there. The article says police continue to investigate the acts as potentially involving animal rights activists. The article notes that the vigilante acts have left one person dead, an older man in San Diego who apparently was responsible for the
freeing of the lion there. An unnamed official from San Diego said the man had on his back a curious tattoo: a lion standing on its hind legs, its tail up in the air.

“Thanks, computer,” Jeremy mutters under his breath. “Let me know every time someone in San Francisco takes their dog for a walk.”

But he can’t help wondering. Something about the image pulls at him.

Harry, is this what you want me to ask it? About lions?

He moves his cursor onto the other flag, the one about movers and shakers, clicks for details. A new window pops up. In it materializes a link to an Associated Press story with the headline “Russian Arms Exec Arrested in Paris.”

            
Marat Vladine, a billionaire who was former chairman of Russia’s state-controlled arms dealership, was detained in Paris today by French state police. The French said that he’d been held at the request of the Russian government investigating charges of tax evasion and money laundering.

                
However, one French authority said that Mr. Vladine’s detainment was instead related to an intensifying domestic political squabble inside Russia.

                
In recent days, Russian politicians at the highest levels of government have been in a public spat about the heavy foreign-policy influence played by the state-backed munitions dealer, Rosoboronexport State Corporation. Mr. Vladine was the longtime chairman of Rosoboronexport until earlier this year but is still thought to be heavily involved in the company’s strategic direction.

                
Opponents of the current government say the multibillion-dollar munitions corporation has encouraged policies that are in the interest of its shareholders and political backers, not the nation at large.

                
These opponents have seized on rumors that Rosoboronexport allowed nuclear-grade bomb materials to escape in recent years into terrorist hands—or sold such materials to rogue elements. Rosoboronexport vigorously denies the charges and dismisses them as political misdirection and, thus far, there has been no independent verification that such dangerous materials ever were sold or wound up in the wrong hands.

                
Erik Soliere, a Paris-based attorney retained by Mr. Vladine, declined to comment on the detainment of his client.

Jeremy scrolls down but discovers that he’s read the full article. He reads it again, feels a pinprick of disappointment at the lack of direct or helpful evidence. Where’s the smoking gun—an assassination or an attack on a capital city or something. Something that would make sense of the dire predictions. Something that would explain what’s happening—to him, to Harry. To his computer.

Looking at the AP news story, he’s wondering why the computer bothered to update him about such minutiae. Then he remembers. It is designed to report any new information, small or large, related to the larger variables that may be contributing to impending conflict.

Previously, the computer had reported changes to the level of conflict rhetoric in Russia and related to Rosoboronexport. So, Jeremy reasons, the computer is sending what it determines
to be a related update, however tangential. The feature was Jeremy’s brainchild; the algorithm uses artificial intelligence to make decisions about whether two ideas are sufficiently related to send an update. But now Jeremy is mourning an update about one more seemingly meaningless data point.

“Say something useful,” he mutters to his iPad.

The computer, as if in response, beeps. Another different sound, or, rather three beeps, in quick succession, brief and shrill. And, at the same time, a box materializes in the middle of the window on his iPad. In the box, big letters, “Conflict Clock Reset. Click for details.”

It’s a feature that, as much as he chided Evan for demanding it, he quietly relishes. It provides an alert that the computer’s basic prediction has changed. It could mean that conflict is less likely, or more likely, or, if conflict is already ongoing, that the computer now predicts it will last longer or be more quickly resolved.

As Jeremy clicks on the dialogue box, he feels an eerie calm. He’s sure that the computer will rescind its dire prediction, the jig will be up, the dire prophecy revoked or revealed as a hoax.

A new box appears.

“CONFLICT TIMETABLE ACCELERATED. 27 HOURS, 17 MINUTES.”

Without moving his head, he glances at a woman in a Giants cap chewing her nails, looks down and taps his index finger against the screen, on the warning in the dialogue box. He puts his finger on “27 HOURS.” Some part of him wants to feel that this is real, not just some virtual, ethereal thing, the digital ranting of a box that Jeremy helped create, his cyber-subconscious taunting him.

He does the math. Previously, the computer had projected
the outbreak of conflict in less than three days. As little as ten minutes ago, that was the prediction. Now, suddenly, it’s down to little more than one.

He taps the edge of the countdown box, bringing up another infobox. It shows the longitude and latitude of the project attack, the
ostensible
project attack. Still San Francisco. Right here, Jeremy thinks, tomorrow night, just after 7
p.m.

Then he realizes what’s bothering him. It’s no longer projecting April 1. If this is an April Fools’ joke, someone has mixed up the dates.

“What can it answer?” he mutters.

“Are you talking to yourself?”

The voice belongs to a boy in the aisle, little more than four years old, jacket zipped up to the bottom of his lip, holding his mother’s hand, staring intently at Jeremy. The woman looks at Jeremy with a sheepish smile, as if to say: from the mouths of babes. Jeremy looks down at his iPad but all he sees is the face of Kent. Dissolving into bullet points:

              
A computer warning about the end of the world. Here, in a few hours.

            
Log cabin: a rustic and homey setting for a final clash of wills between him and Harry

            
A message from Harry, symbols and numbers

            
A break-in at his apartment, at his office. Everything strewn.

            
Someone, more than someone, following him. Setting him up?

            
AskIt

In sum, clues left by an inscrutable computer and a
geniusally turned foe. Can it add up the clues for him? What can he ask the computer that it can answer?

The train screeches into San Francisco. It’s 4:20. Should be crowded on the platform, thick with commuters, but easy enough for a cop to stand at the top of the escalator. Jeremy stuffs his iPad into the backpack. He looks at the mom, holding hands with the child, absent a wedding ring, in her early thirties. A
New York Times
tucked under her arm, the right audience.

“Caught in the act,” Jeremy says to the woman. “Talking to myself. I promise it’s not habitual. Something I only do in public places.”

She laughs.