The Doomsday Equation (3 page)

F
ORTY MINUTES LATER,
Jeremy stands at the counter of a South of Market café. In a Tumi bag slung over his shoulder is his iPad, which he’s synched with the computer at his desk. He thinks of its prediction, massive global conflict, three days and counting. More precisely: 71 hours, 15 minutes. Projected impact: 14 million killed, from not just the first hypothetical attack but, the computer estimates, the subsequent attack and counterattack.

It’s simple math, really, game theory. The computer, upon predicting conflict, then plays out the likeliest scenarios for what will follow based on the state of affairs in the world.

Jeremy looks around the hipster café, a work-away-from-the-home-office joint during the day, but, now, nine fifteen on a Wednesday, a place for first dates and people seeking them. A tapestry of the African savanna hangs on the opposite wall, hovering above closely placed tables. There’s a fireplace next to the counter, sputtering with a low flame and Wilco on the speakers.

The right amount of white noise to allow him to think; the right concentration of eye candy, chicks.

“What can I get you?” It’s a guy behind the counter with a soul patch and a flannel shirt, which are all the rage.

“Peanut Butter Mocha.” Sugar, protein, caffeine.

Soul Patch blinks: I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.

“It’s a mocha but you toss in a scoop of peanut butter. I’ve ordered it here before.”

“Not from me,” the guy says smiling. “We gotta stick to the menu.”

Jeremy smiles back.

“It’s complicated. You mix a scoop of peanut butter into the mocha.”

Guy clears his throat. “I wouldn’t know how to charge you.”

“Oh, right. I understand. Generally, the way you charge is by keying in the numbers in the cash register and then taking my money. But maybe this is one of those dummy registers with pictures, like at McDonald’s.”

Guy serves Jeremy a mocha. With a scoop of peanut butter on the side.

He sits, unpockets his phones. In a fit of pique a week earlier, he’d purged his speed dial of those he felt had betrayed him. Emily, of course, though that number he knows by heart. Evan. Harold Ives, aka Harry War, the eccentric Berkeley war historian, Jeremy’s rare equal in being a pain in the ass, whose research and, more importantly, support, proved instrumental to Jeremy’s conflict algorithm. But, really, hadn’t Harry asked for it by turning on Jeremy first?

He’d purged too the number for Andrea Belluck-Juarez, the tattooed and pierced junior officer at the Pentagon. His conduit to that whole messed-up situation.

Evan, Harry War, Andrea. The three he’d most likely have called—even as recently as six months ago—in the event his
computer made the three sharp beeps and the map glowed red. He can always find their phone numbers in his email. He flips the phone onto the table.

He’s not going to give them the satisfaction. Not even these three, once his last line of defenders. He doesn’t need to hear the recriminations, the cackles.
So, your magic computer thinks the terrorists are coming? Can it predict what they’ll be wearing? Can it guess which card they’ll be thinking about? The four of hearts?
Harry had jokingly dismissed Jeremy’s device as “iPocalypse.”

Or, if the world is in fact going to end in seventy hours and change, then what’s the point of exposing himself?

He looks around the room. To his left, two younger women, late twenties, conspiring after they appear to have gone for a late-night exercise session. One of the pair wears a ponytail with dark frizzy hair extruding around the edges. She’s got light freckles and an easy smile and Jeremy ranks her as the best-looking chick he’s seen in weeks. Not far behind in the looks category is the woman sitting to his right. Jeremy figures her at thirty-two years old, with a D-cup. She’s got light brown hair, a spiral notebook that must serve as a diary, and she’s lost in
The World According to Garp.
Relatively smart chick.

“Not okay to call them chicks.” Evan had admonished Jeremy after a business meeting with investors and their science advisors, including two female Stanford Ph.D.s. “How about using ‘hoes’?”

“Women call themselves chicks all the time. You talk like a brochure and I’ll talk like a human.”

Jeremy eyes his iPad lying flat on the blond wood table. Next to it is
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dating
. He’s purposely
half obscured the cover as if to make it look like something he’s trying to hide.

On the tablet, he opens the map. At the bottom, there’s a feature called the “countdown clock.” It reads: 70:36:05. Hours, minutes, seconds. Until attack. Or some huckster popping out of a cake and pointing at Jeremy and laughing.

At the top of the map, Jeremy clicks on a menu. Under the “view” line, he clicks “recent history.” As the screen splits in two, he briefly relives the eons he put into not just selecting each category in each tool line but learning the basic program in the minutest detail so that the user interface would be precisely how he envisioned. He left nothing to chance, automation or outsourcing. He didn’t spend much time thinking about other passionate creators, like Steve Jobs, but, when he did, he tended to think they were lazy for hiring other people to do the engineering.

On the iPad, the left window displays the current map, projecting massive conflict on the left; the window on the right is devoid of color. On a drop-down menu above the clean map, Jeremy chooses “45 minutes.” The conflict map as it stood forty-five minutes earlier appears, filled with oranges and yellows and dull reds, but absent the rampant glowing red representing the imminent onset of massive global conflict. Jeremy looks at the digital clock in the corner of his monitor. It is 9:26, Wednesday night, late March, Jeremy tries to remember the date but can’t. Forty-five minutes earlier, he thinks, his computer claims, something in the world changed. Exactly when? What?

“When” is the easy part.

Jeremy taps on “advance.” The map begins to change, at first, ever so slightly. The colors are mutating slightly around the edges, their boundaries moving almost infinitesimally.

Jeremy must admit to himself that this feature, though it is another brainchild of Evan’s, more sizzle, is pretty fucking cool. It’s like watching a storm map on the Weather Channel. Not storms, conflicts. High-pressure societies and low-pressure societies, colliding power bases, the prospect of war. A key difference is that weather maps tend to have constant motion, the clouds and weather systems swirling and moving. On the war map, the changes are very subtle, unless you bring the clock back a decade and spin it forward at high speeds to see various regions go from blue to yellow to orange to red and back again.

And then: wham. Everything turns red.

This time, watching it unfold, Jeremy is not feeling disappointed, or privately skeptical, but, for an instant, startled. This is an image for his dreams or nightmares. The world pulsing crimson; the United States and China and Russia and Europe, pinkish hues swallowing the smaller and poorer places, Africa, tiny island nations. He swallows hard, then coughs, peanut butter lodged in his throat.

Jeremy paws the device. He rewinds the map again. Now he watches it evolve in slow motion. He’s leaning forward, face inches from the screen. He sees what he’s looking for: the first sign of red. The first indication something in the world has changed or, rather, is poised to change, four days hence.

He looks at the time stamp above the map. It reads: 8:06
p.m
. He puts the cursor over the clock. An infobox pops up next to it with details. The moment he’s frozen in time on his conflict machine, the moment the clock started ticking, was 8:06:42 on Wednesday, March 29.

He eyes the first onset of red. He puts his cursor over it, even though he knows what he’s looking at. An infobox pops up: 37 degrees north, 122 west. “San Francisco.”

When they refined this infobox, Jeremy had argued with Evan that there was no need to put the name of the city. All they needed was longitude and latitude. Actually naming the place was condescending to a smart audience, and a waste of manpower to double-check.

San Francisco. Right here, he thinks, a little more than three days.

He looks up and around the café. He catches the eye of a tall woman sitting by the door, looking in his direction, a model’s figure, symmetrical features obscured by a baseball cap. She lowers her gaze.

A complete joke. Or maybe three days.

Jeremy grits his teeth and closes his eyes and discovers in his mind’s eye an image of his frail mother in hospice, six months earlier. Last time he’d seen Eleanor alive. He can’t recall much of it, just the plate of lumpy, syrupy, buttery mashed potatoes on the table next to a yellow rotary phone. She mutters something. Existential? Jeremy leans in close and realizes he’s wondering if she’s telling him that she loves him, maybe, finally. Once. She repeats herself: “Make peace.” That’s what she said. No, no nurturing words here. She’s counseling him, giving him an edict, one that she could well stand to hear herself. She was his original sparring partner. And then the huge fight in the parking lot with Emily, the intensifying pain near his neck, the lump, everything spiraling.

Three days. It’s March 29.

Three days.

“Oh shit,” Jeremy mumbles.

He opens his yes. Three days is April 1.

April Fools’ Day.

“You want war?” Jeremy suddenly mutters to no one.

He shakes his head, looks up, lands his gaze at the woman sitting to his right, with the D-cup, reading
The World According to Garp.
She peeks with light blue eyes at him over the top the book. Maybe wondering why he’s talking to himself. Maybe just making contact.

He swallows. She’s attractive, bordering on more than that. He lowers his iPad. Ready to stop being the patsy.

G
ARP IS WET,”
Jeremy says.

The woman’s hand slides slightly down the book’s spine, giving Jeremy a tingle.

Jeremy extends a napkin. “Sorry for interrupting. But you’ve got coffee on your cover. Or hot chocolate. Or whatever is your poison.”

She looks at the book. Sure enough, she’d spilled some coffee on the nurse’s hat on the cover. It’s damp but almost imperceptibly so. She takes the napkin from Jeremy. Either she’s not bright enough to see his obvious move or she fully recognizes it and is playing along anyway.

“A guy with an iPad taking so much interest in protecting the honor of a print book. You’ve got a sense of tradition.”

“May I interrupt you further with one small bit of trivia?”

“Sure.” A little wary.

“The tranny saves the day.”

“The what?”

“The transvestite.” He’s looking at the book.

“Am I to understand that you’re giving away the end of
The World According to Garp
?” Mock exasperation.

“I don’t know. I didn’t actually finish it. I saw the movie. Most of it. Fell asleep.”

Slight smile, cautious, intrigued, she’s dealing with a smart one, in a good way, feeling her brain tickled.

“So you didn’t finish the book or the movie but you know how it ends. Can you see the future? What are the odds I’m going to be discovered?”

He laughs. Genuine. Good line and she’s got no idea of Jeremy’s complicated relationship with the future. He feels suddenly serious and makes a decent attempt to cover up the wash of feelings, return to compartmentalizing, channel his irritation into something much more strategic, which he can do with the best of them. He pushes away an intruding thought about September 1939, how willing the Poles must have felt to ignore obvious signs of imminent German attack. Obviously, he thinks, his computer is being punked, not warning him of apocalypse. Right? When, Jeremy thinks and then instantly dismisses the thought, did he start doubting himself and his computer?

“I’m reasonably good with the past. With some degree of certainty, I can tell you what happened yesterday.” He delivers it well enough that she sees only witty repartee.

Twenty minutes later, they’re still at it. He’s managed to slip in just enough about himself—the entrepreneur thing and the “grad school in England thing” but not yet the Rhodes scholar thing—but also to leave room for her and her exploits such as they are. She went to law school to do good, like everyone else who went to law school, and wound up doing corporate law and then, unlike many others, scrapped the whole thing. She teaches social studies at a private high school on the theory
she’ll have a long life to try different things. The master plan involves saving enough to hike the Andes in the next three years.

The café lights flicker once. “Last call.”

As she glances about at the beehive of activity, he opens the iPad, notices the screen saver. It’s a picture of a boy sticking out his tongue. Kent, Emily’s son. Jeremy grits his teeth, closes the red cover over the top of the gadget. He puts his hand on his sternum, just inside the left shoulder, paws around, trying to feel a lump or something to explain the dull ache and occasional sharp pain. He refuses to believe the pain and the overall malaise he’s been feeling are related to stress but doesn’t like any of the other explanations, like his immune system in conflict against something serious. Like the cancers that took his father at about his current age and, later, his mother.

He’s struck with an idea. A way to figure out how to check what’s going on with this computer. Then looks up to see the woman’s packing her bag and looking at him. He shuts the cover.

“Want to get a drink?”

Ten minutes later, darker atmosphere in a danker place and margaritas. Jeremy’s trendy sneakers lightly stick to the gummy floor as his knees bounce under the table with his inexhaustible energy. The talk is witty and mundane; movies and pop culture, then a discussion Jeremy finds more than mildly interesting about historic waves of civil rights movements, not a political statement she’s making but, indirectly, one about global social systems and how they flex and bend and ebb and flow. Big-picture stuff, and he feels himself light up. She’s getting prettier, only a hair shy of beautiful. Who is using who?

“School tomorrow.” She stands to use the bathroom. He watches her confident walk in the well-fitting jeans, tingling, appreciating the good looks of a worthy foe.

He pulls out his phones. He already knows from the absence of buzzing the last two hours that he hasn’t had a call or text. But he checks anyway. He considers checking his iPad in the backpack near his feet but he risks blowing the way he’s positioned himself as laid-back enough and in-the-moment.

He glances up and finds himself catching the eye of a thin woman at the far end of the bar, near the door, her back turned to Jeremy but inexplicably with her head swiveled in his direction. Baseball cap pulled down tight over hair hanging to the middle of her back. She drops Jeremy’s gaze but not before she’s made an impression; Jeremy’s sure that he’s seen the woman before. Where? Wasn’t it in the café earlier? Jeremy feels a surge of adrenaline, a conflict cocktail. Who is this joker: some legal server, an agent of Evan, or Harry War, coming to watch Jeremy implode?

“You okay?”

Jeremy sees his new friend has returned. He looks back at the bar to see the thin woman nowhere in sight.

“Where are you headed?” he asks.

“You sure you’re okay?”

He nods. Her tone irks him.

“Want to walk me home? It’s not far.” She picks up her backpack. In the bathroom, she’s brushed the hair off her face. In spite of himself, Jeremy feels like Charlie Bucket from
Willy Wonka
looking at her full, moist lips.

At the doorway of a two-story flat on a residential block plagued by the dull hum of a nearby highway overpass, they kiss. There’s a reprieve in the chill, a stillness in the night air.
She takes his hand to guide him up the stairs. “Nice move, by the way.”

“What’s that?”

“
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dating
. Well planted. Obviously, you’re not a complete idiot.”

He feels a sizzle, the crackling inside his head. Before he can even think about it, he strikes: “Nice neon sign.”

“What?”

“Garp.”

She turns on the stair. It’s not just his words but the tone of voice, something icy, cruel.

“What about
Garp
?”

“The ultimate demand for attention. Works for the dumb guys and the smart guys. A pseudo-intellectual clarion call for attention. A quasi-literary welcome mat.”

She shakes her head, trying to bring this creature into focus.

“Instead of a bookmark, you could use a condom.”

The sounds of the slap gets absorbed by a honk from the highway overpass. The sting doesn’t hurt Jeremy. It feels like victory.

“B
ALLPARK
.”

The driver nods. His puffy loaf of curly black hair reaches nearly the roof of the cab.

Jeremy realizes his jaw hurts. Not from the slap, but from clenching. He takes a deep breath. He thinks about how he could be in coitus right now with a lovely stranger. He could’ve held his tongue and gotten his victory in the bedroom, then the couch and then the shower. He wonders whether he sabotaged it because he’s got more important stuff to think about. Or maybe he picked the fight with her because she is easier
prey than whatever else, or whoever else, is haunting Jeremy? He unzips his backpack, which rests on his knees. He pulls out the iPad. He swipes away the screen-saver image of Kent to get to the algorithm.

It’s still there, unchanged. Taunting Jeremy. But he knows how he might start fighting back. It’s a simple task, really. He needs to get someplace settled and run a test. He needs to check the List.

The List is a set of 327 statistical inputs that, Jeremy believes, together describe the state of the world. Oil prices and population density and weather systems and all the rest. No human being can possibly track and understand the collective movement of these systems, and properly weight them. No intuition—well, maybe that belonging to Warren Buffett or some other savant wasting his talents on Wall Street—can even sense, let alone pinpoint, the direction of the world. Not like Jeremy’s data set, at least when properly valued.

Jeremy’s simple questions: Has someone messed with the inputs? Has someone altered the List? Easy way to find out. Jeremy can just ask. He can run a check to make sure that the variables the computer is using as the basis for its apocalyptic prediction do, in fact, match up with the actual variables in the world.

“Just out front?”

They’re three blocks from the ballpark, passing the petering nightlife in this gentrified concentric circle around AT&T Park, home to the San Francisco Giants. The high-rise condos emerge onto the gray skyline. These are home to the future leaders of Silicon Valley and the engineers who will make them rich.

Jeremy picked the ballpark as his destination because it’s
roughly equidistant from his apartment and his office and he wasn’t sure where he’d want to wind up.

“Thirtieth and Balboa.”

“I thought you wanted the ballpark.”

“And I’ve changed my mind.”

“So now you want to go to the Richmond.”

“That’s what I said.”

Cabbie shrugs. It’s another easy fare. He’s no stranger to people wasting time in his cab doing computing. In fact, he’s managed to squeeze out a few extra bucks now and then while circling the block while the fare, oblivious, plays a video game on the phone.

He turns a sharp right, changing direction. He clicks on the windshield wiper for a single swipe at the foggy condensation.

Jeremy feels acutely for the first time the light numbing from the tequila. He doesn’t like the feeling, not tonight. He has an on-again, off-again relationship with booze. He’s in an off-again stage, one of those times it serves only social functions. Other times, he craves the taste and the feeling, but not to the point he’s ever in danger of overuse.

He looks at a young couple on the street, together but the man walking a quarter step ahead of the woman. Human nature, Jeremy thinks, the need of one creature to dominate another, even by a quarter step.

He closes his eyes. Puts his hand on the iPad. He pictures a conference table, surrounded by brass. At the head of the table, a real big shot, a lieutenant colonel, taking all the air out of the room. Flanking him, majors in uniform with the oak leaves and medals, one in khakis, white shirt, red tie. Projected onto a screen, there’s a videoconference feed. It’s an image from Berkeley of Dr. Harry Ives, the Cal scholar who
introduced Jeremy to these monkeys. The aging man looks impassive, ensconced in a white beard, old eyes hard to read. It’s at least eighteen months earlier, in a lifeless room at the Pentagon, Jeremy’s technology on trial.

“Bullshit,” Jeremy says.

A major purses his lips, not appreciating the language.

“Mr. Stillwater, they’ve taken a new village in the last twenty-four hours, their largest yet.”

“And I’m bin Laden’s pet monkey.”

Jeremy cannot believe that the rebels continue to push through the mountains. His computer, armed with a ton of rich and updated data, was all but 100 percent conclusive: this mini-insurgency should’ve died weeks ago.

“Jeremy.” It’s Andrea.

He looks at her, raven-black hair in a ponytail, a silk shirt covering the Day of the Dead tattoo on her left forearm, her whole package buttoned-down and ironed. Then turns to the head of the table, to the Army intelligence guy who must be important because he has the confidence not to have a crew cut, never carries any papers or BlackBerry or anything, and because he rarely speaks.

“You messed with my data.”

“I assure you . . .” Andrea starts.

He cuts her off with a wave. He’s not even sure how they would’ve messed with his computer. Maybe on his last visit to Washington; he got drunk with Andrea at a karaoke bar and left his computer in his room. No way; he dismisses the thought. He was the one who ran the tests, scoured the data, knows he’s right. He’s sure they’re lying.

“Where’s my iPad?”

“You surrendered your device for security reasons at the
front, just like everyone else. And you’ll get it back when you leave. This is a high-security facility and we’re all equally privileged and burdened by the trappings.” It’s one of the oak-leafed majors.

Jeremy shakes his head. “Prove it. Prove I’m wrong,” he suddenly demands of the man at the head of the table. Everyone tenses at the direct challenge to someone who clearly doesn’t hear such talk except from one-star generals, and higher.

It’s another of the majors who responds. “Mr. Stillwater, I understand you’re frustrated. You’re obviously very bright. Your technology holds promise but we’re fighting a war and we can’t afford to be your beta test.”

Could it be more condescending?

“You want the casualty reports?”

Jeremy’s eyes widen a tad. It’s a rare utterance from the man at the head of the table. His voice is near a whisper, with a very slight northeastern drawl, the stuff of the Ivy League. Jeremy had failed to find any public information on this lead dog, no official bio, no smattering of personal details; but that might not mean much since he looks to be in his late forties, at least one full generation before people started sharing everything about their lives on the web.

“They can be doctored,” says Jeremy.

The lead dog looks at everyone and no one. “Somebody get Mr. Stillwater the casualty reports, ours and theirs; show him the pictures from Patwa, the empty cache, the insurgents’ recruiting figures, everything, all the classified stuff.”

“Oh, and make it rhyme, like Dr. Seuss.”

“Jeremy.”

The lead dog puts up his hand to Andrea, looks at Jeremy.

“You know Mitchell Stevenson?”

Jeremy feels immediately defensive. He’s being sucked into a rhetorical trap, being asked to answer questions he doesn’t know the answer to, leading down who knows what path.