Dead on Arrival

Twenty-Seven

During that first trip to the Nevada desert to see Lantern, Jackie spent two mornings watching study subjects interact on the computer through the thick, soundproof two-way mirror. She and Denny would be on one side and the subject on the other, using a phone or tablet, sitting at a table or a recliner, whatever felt comfortable. The instructions to the participants were open-ended and simple: visit any sites you like, however you’d spend your time on the Internet—Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, the New York Times.

“Porn?” asked the first morning’s subject, a lanky woman who commuted a hundred miles to work at Walmart. “I’m kidding!”

Jackie felt kinship with her. Something sad in the corners of her mouth, a telltale sign of bleached short hairs over her lip. The woman loved Twitter. Her first stop that morning had been to see what was trending. A monitor in front of Jackie mirrored what the subject was doing. A second monitor showed Jackie a handful of changing external variables, including the speed of the Internet connection being fed to the study subject, frame rate of the images, the pixelation. Denny sat behind her reading a hard copy of the local newspaper. It was an uneventful ninety minutes. Nothing particularly stood out. On the memory test, the woman fared little better than a control. They broke for lunch.

Upstairs in the warehouse-like setting of Google’s Lantern offices, Denny excused himself to the restroom and Jackie looked out over the office setting. It struck her as odd. The pair of Alexes was gone. Maybe it was because it was lunch. Still, the Ping-Pong table looked unused. She counted six cubicles in two pods. Only a single computer monitor gleamed with electricity. Most of the cubicles looked empty. One included a stack of manila folders. Jackie had taken a step in its direction when she heard Denny’s footsteps.

They drove Denny’s Tesla the few miles west to town on the empty stretch of highway to Hawthorne.

They found a booth in the back of a diner. The torn pleather upholstery scratched at Jackie’s calves. They shared a tuna melt and soggy fries. Denny told her how Lantern had yielded unpredictable results. Sometimes, memory retention was through the roof, other times like it had been that morning. Denny handed her more spreadsheets. “No need to look now. Maybe tonight in the luxurious confines of the Days Inn.” He paused. “You look skeptical, Jackie.”

“It’s a lot to take in. May I change the subject?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I realized I don’t know much about your background.” She already knew about it, but she wanted to hear him tell it.

Denny told her his path. Montana roots, then MIT for undergrad and a programming Ph.D. that he didn’t finish. He and a classmate launched a startup doing compression software to make video delivery faster and it got acquired and “I could’ve retired, financially, but, emotionally, I don’t know, was a lot emptier than my bank account.”

Jackie looked at him over her coffee, urging him silently to continue.

“Silicon Valley’s big secret,” he said. “After you make money, it becomes so hollow, even insulting, and then you want legacy.”

“How is Lantern legacy?”

He laughed. “Good point,” then really laughed, like he was discovering the joke. “Silicon Valley’s even bigger secret is that we get rich, want to create a legacy, and then get distracted on some side project that consumes us because it’s almost impossible to create a legacy. So, in the end, we conflate legacy with power. Influence.”

“Which is not legacy?”

“They are hard to disentangle.”

Jackie smiled.

“No family?”

He shook his head. “How about you?” he asked. “Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley for a Ph.D. What about the stuff not on your résumé? Hobbies, life dreams?”

Jackie felt simultaneously nauseated and giddy. She hated this topic but she had deliberately led the conversation this direction. She suspected he knew and he would betray it.

“Just the classes.”

“With the genius doctor. And family? Just you and your sister?”

He knew.

“Our grandmother raised us.”

He nodded. She blinked back tears.

“Like you said the other day: you don’t like to talk about it.”

“Why are you asking me if you know?”

“I don’t know know. I sense something, Jackie, I’d have to be a dim-witted asshole not to see you’re lugging something around.”

Jackie put her hand to her cheek. Had she imagined a gust of wind?

“We don’t have to—”

“Let’s get out of here,” Jackie said.

“Where to?”

“I’ll show you.”

Mostly in silence, Jackie directed Denny to and up a winding dirt road to the north of town. It was the very definition of desolate. When the road started to climb, there was a lone sign: overlook. Denny snaked on the winding road. Three-quarters of a mile later, Jackie pointed to the pullover spot on the right. Jackie exited the car without speaking and walked to the edge of the brown-and-red-dusted cliff. Denny shuffled up behind her.

“How did you know this was here?”

“Fancy program called Google Maps. Very impressive, that Google.” Before he could laugh, she said. “Do you trust me?”

“Jackie, of—”

“You asked about my family. It’s very personal.”

“We don’t have to—”

“There was an incident,” she interrupted him again, “and I was remanded to my grandmother. We both were.”

“You and your sister?”

She nodded grimly. “Right.”

“And that’s off-limits?”

Jackie looked across the plain. It was a vast stretch of brown with jags of green, a blip of town at their two o’clock, some neon sign blinking red. Now Jackie was practically leaning over the side. Denny took a rapid step forward. He reached for her.

“You trust me,” Jackie said, flatly. She sounded like she might be speaking to herself.

“This is weird, Jackie.”

“She killed herself, my sister. Marissa.”

She looked at Denny and saw that he’d blinked rapidly; whatever else he’d known about her, he hadn’t known that.

“Jumped from a high place.”

He nodded. She appreciated that he didn’t say something stupid, like I’m so sorry.

“Jackie, I’m really grateful that we’ve found each other.”

His tone startled her. He wasn’t the touchy-feely type, quietly jocular at most.

“May I explain why?”

“Because I’m helping you solidify your legacy.”

“Well, that.” He laughed, taking the edge out of the situation. “Because I spend most of my time in superficial relationships. Work, not at work. Don’t worry, I’m not hitting on you.” She thought he might laugh again to take the edge off but he remained serious. His eyes looked a touch wet, and the skin beneath them drooped slightly with age. He cleared his throat. “Anyhow…”

“I feel the same,” she said. The truth was she wasn’t sure if she did. She desperately wanted to trust Denny. Desperately. More than that, she wanted him to trust her. Much of the time, she felt he did.

“Jackie, may I ask a question?”

Her silence spoke assent.

“Do you trust yourself?”

He could see it jarred her, like she’d felt wind. She swallowed hard. “I think so.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

Again, she didn’t answer. Her thoughts had traveled to Dr. Martin. She thought of him as someone who knew his way, who could make hard decisions, measure cause and effect, detect the world’s nuances.

“There’s Lantern,” she said.

“C’mon, Jackie, it’s windy up here.”

That night, she fell asleep in the Days Inn with the spreadsheets on her chest. She dreamed of playing chess, but the pieces were vividly colored, and they had bared teeth. In her dream, she felt a presence behind her. She turned and there stood Dr. Martin, eyeing the board. She sat up sharply in bed. It was 4 a.m. and she felt wide awake. She thought about her conversation with Denny and she was struck that, at the time, her mind had drifted to Dr. Martin. She was fascinated by him and even though she understood there was something cartoonish in that—like she had idealized him, romanticized his genius—he had played an extraordinary role in her life.

She googled the office hours for Lyle Martin and wondered if he was back from Africa. She stared at his picture and imagined that he would understand her and fantasized until she felt back asleep and dreamed of screwing him until they collapsed in exhausted satisfaction.

That next morning, the study subject looked crack addled. Lucid, cogent, but nearly toothless. Maybe he’d recovered in time. He poked the tablet, visiting poker sites, playing free hands. He knocked on the glass and asked for $100 in ante money and Denny declined, saying it would upset the experiment and the toothless guy cursed and kept on with it. At one point, Jackie looked up from the spreadsheets and she noticed a change. The man had a dumb smile on his face. His eyes had glazed.

“Denny?”

“What’s up? Do you realize they’re going to give that guy the death penalty?”

“What guy?”

“Who shot up the army base. We’re getting to be like Mexico with the narcos, lawless, chaotic.” Now Denny looked up from his newspaper at the man locked into his computer screen. “I can’t help but feel like we’re responsible, in part, for the violence.”

“Who?” She was only half listening to Denny as she watched the toothless man become more and more entranced.

“Google, us, the tech world.”

Now she looked at him. “Why?”

“The theory is nothing all that revelatory but I guess it’s still heretical, at least in these parts. Thanks to the Internet, people have access to all this information but they seem to be gravitating to ideas that reinforce their worldviews. Maybe that’s why we’re getting more extreme, more partisan.”

Denny noticed that her right fist had balled. This conversation really bugged her.

“Jackie?”

“Things are moving so fast.”

“Exactly.”

“Everyone getting spun up. It’s really…”

“Dangerous. We’re speaking the same language.” Now he was looking again at the man behind the two-way mirror. “Anyhow…” He paused. “Now you see it. Look at him, he’s fully in the zone.”

Jackie looked at the computer monitor that showed the man was staring at Willie Mays’s famous over-the-shoulder basket catch in the World Series. He watched it four times in a row. Slowly, dumbly, he clicked a button to share the image. Then he navigated “related” YouTube videos and watched highlights from a Yogi Berra interview. He smiled and laughed quietly to himself.

“Is he drooling, Denny?”

“Hard to tell. Anything odd on the Internet speeds?”

“Similar to yesterday,” Jackie said. “Mostly, maybe a half a percent here or there.”

“Now watch this,” Denny said. He exited the room and a few seconds later, he entered the room with the toothless subject. Denny shook him on the shoulder and the man startled back to awareness. Denny offered him some water and asked him if he’d take a test about what he’d seen. Sure, the man said. Through the two-way mirror, Jackie and Denny watched him take a test on the Internet about some of the images that had appeared on the periphery of the screen and also automatically generated questions about the subject matter of his Internet experience. What did Yogi Berra say? Then there would be multiple-choice questions about his exact wording with four different options.

The man fared okay on the memory test. Not spectacularly, but better than perhaps someone with his rotted demeanor and background would suggest.

They escorted the man out.

“Are you okay to drive?” Jackie asked him.

“Of course,” the man answered, seeming offended. Then he looked around, shook his head, looking confused. “Do you guys work for the VA?”

They looked at him.

“Are you okay?” Jackie repeated.

“I goddamned told you I’m okay.” He seemed to get his bearings. “That was way more fun than last time.”

“Last time?” Jackie asked.

“You might have us confused,” Denny said.

“Whatever. Just gimme my money. I’ll do that one anytime.”

Denny handed him a check.

They stood in the dirt lot and watched the man drive away in a pickup. Something was bothering Jackie and she couldn’t put a fine point on it.

“Jackie?”

“He looked dazed.”

“One of the things we’d like to do, obviously, is minimize the intensity factor,” Denny said. They walked back inside. Jackie thought the wording choice sounded unusually like corporate bullshit from Denny. “He seemed to enjoy himself.”

She couldn’t deny that.

“Have you considered monitoring pulse or using basic medical data, something shy of the MRI.”

“Good idea,” Denny said. “Hey, let’s get out of here and discuss more on the road. I left some stuff downstairs. Can you hang here for a sec?”

Denny left and headed back downstairs and Jackie shuffled her feet and glanced around the top floor. But no sooner had Denny disappeared than Jackie poked her head back outside without shutting the door behind her. She realized what had been bugging her as the dazed man had driven off in his pickup. She looked in the distance toward the other Google complex, the one with the big antennae and the runway. What had gotten her attention was the fact that between that complex and the one where she was standing was a well-worn side road. It extended from the front of the building where she stood and then grooved the desert until it reached so far toward the other Google setting that she could no longer make out the rutted earth.

So what?

Jackie poked her head back inside the building and looked it over. She headed to the nearest cubicle. She passed her hand over the empty desk to see, as she suspected, not even a hint of dust or use. She went to the cubicle beside it. On this one sat a telephone but the cord wasn’t plugged in. She looked around and, hearing no immediate reappearance of Denny from the back, made her way to the cubicle on which she’d earlier seen manila folders. She leafed through them. Empty. Nothing in them.

She walked to the cubicles where she’d previously seen the two workers, Alex and Alex. There were ports to plug in laptops, but neither had laptops plugged in now. So maybe this was a skeleton crew, and they were planning expansion. Maybe wasted space? That didn’t seem like Google.

She bent down and looked on the floor. It was carpeted with that cheap corporate carpet, brown. That didn’t interest her. She was looking for signs of life, scuffing, wrappers from energy bars, pen caps tossed and left around. There was some of that. So maybe this was just a slow day.

Still it nagged her. She glanced around the room. For a moment, she felt a light wind blow and wondered where it had come from, and she realized it was her imagination. She knew what it meant: she wasn’t sure who or what to trust. All it took was a little gust to throw her off.

From the floor below, Denny stood in one of the experiment rooms looking at a computer monitor. He watched Jackie on a closed-circuit video feed and pursed his lips. Denny glanced at his phone screen. He pulled up his contacts and found Adam Stile, the goofy engineer in his group. Denny fired off a text and stuffed the phone back in his pocket.

Twenty-Eight

On their return from the desert, Denny dropped Jackie off at her apartment late on a Friday. Saturday, she couldn’t get out of bed. That was saying something. It was not comfortable—an actual Murphy bed with a mattress that the landlord must’ve gotten at Goodwill. Even Google money these days couldn’t buy much in San Francisco, $2,700 a month for a studio.

From the bed, she stared at the IKEA desk lodged beneath her second-story apartment window. Specifically, she looked at the router. It belonged to Comcast, her Internet provider. Lately, there had been messages on her phone telling her that she needed to replace the router. She thought about how Comcast was providing her faster Internet service, for free. Why was that? She thought about how phones had gotten bigger and pixelation denser, and how all the images were coming faster. And all of it was developed by industries built on keeping people connected ever longer. That was the business model: eyeballs. Was she sitting at the computer like that toothless old man, dumbly drooling to the digital drumbeat?

One other thing stuck in her craw. During her visit to Lantern, her phone service had been spotty and when she returned home, she’d discovered that she’d had three calls from private numbers. No voice mail. Probably robocallers. She decided to ignore them.

Jackie stretched her arms over her head and looked at the outdated “The Clash” wall calendar. The clownish look on the face of Joe Strummer, the front man, always made her laugh and she really wanted to laugh right now. She could hear the voices over the years telling her she was too precise, too intense, too careful. How else to get to the bottom of things?

She thought about what Denny wanted from her. She was supposed to make sense of these patterns and help figure out how to maximize memory retention. She sensed strongly that was a bunch of bullshit. She needed more information. Thinking about how angry this all made her, the helplessness of it all, caused her to gnaw absently on the tip of her thumb until it bled. This was the sort of situation that always vexed her. A few times in her teens, she’d even done little pranks, minor infractions, toying around with trying to understand the right course of action, the appropriate course, the moral one. Like hacking into the computer of a teacher accused of harassment and sending an incriminating e-mail from his e-mail account. Was that right or wrong? Years earlier, she’d swiped a tip jar from a café in high school, a split-second decision that had left a school bully accused. Then she’d piled on to him by giving testimony she’d seen him do it. Who wouldn’t believe the tearful recounting by the girl who had been forced to live with her grandmother after she’d witnessed that terrible thing?

Right, wrong? So nuanced. Especially when there wasn’t time to think it through. The one thing that gave her solace is that, it seemed, the whole world was struggling with it. Tensions flaring all over the place, the pace speeding up, conflicts, shouts, talk shows, separatists and police, dangerous decision points, escalating forward. It felt like the wind picking up steam, a tornado coming. Instead of even trying to figure out what was right, people buried themselves in their devices. People talked to you while looking at their phones, lost in entirely different realities. It was like the world was, like her, missing situational awareness. Like a blind pilot heading into a mountain. Not seeing, not hearing, as she had not seen and heard, once that diminutive sixth grader sitting on the back of the upholstered couch, watching through the sliding glass window. The argument lived inside of her.

Get up, Jackie, get up. Move. Move! Help them! Reliving the memory, blood dripped from the tip of her thumb where she counted to ten, and she breathed with each number. Eight, nine, ten. She sucked the blood and tasted it and spat it onto the comforter.

When Jackie finally got out of bed at nearly two in the afternoon, it was pouring. She felt overcome with loneliness and walked, drenched, to the movies and went to a romantic comedy about a loveless executive who fell for the Amazon delivery driver; Jackie abandoned the movie halfway through. That’s when she saw the car. It was one of those small electric vehicles. She couldn’t make out who was hunched behind the wheel. And she might not have noticed the car, or the driver at all, had it not made a mistake. While walking home, she turned onto Pine, which was a one-way street. The car turned to follow her, going the wrong direction. When Jackie heard the honks, she saw the car and realized it had been the same one she’d seen outside the movie theater, parked earlier. Just something she’d noticed, maybe having appreciated the crisp green color.

Jackie picked up her step. When she got to her apartment again, she noticed the car stopped across the street on the corner. She thought about calling 911. Was that the right move? Were her antennae lying to her?

She looked out the window and thought about the terrible movie she’d seen and about the powerful executive waiting at her front door for the Amazon delivery driver to bring her a new electric toothbrush or whatever else she’d ordered. Soon, she was ordering things just so she and this down-to-earth driver could chat. Jackie looked at her door. Then she looked out the window and saw the same car sitting there in the pouring rain. It drove away.

She closed her eyes and had a thought about what might make her feel better. It was a passing thought, and laughable at that. A few minutes later it returned to her. She let herself give life to the thought: she wanted to talk to Dr. Martin. She wanted to thank him, no, that wasn’t quite right, or not all of it. She wanted to talk to this genius, listen to him, or tell him what was happening and seek his counsel.

Sitting there, no doubt deluded by darkness and the narrative afterglow of a rotten romantic comedy, she told herself that Dr. Martin—Lyle—saw things as they were, not as they were packaged or dressed up. He was someone who would meet her halfway, be unthreatened by her power, maybe truly enticed by it. She could just tell. Maybe it was fate that he’d saved her, something more than random events that had brought them together on that airstrip in Nepal.

After a bit of considering the idea, dismissing it, considering, dismissing, she called up the UCSF Internet page and looked for the class site. And she gasped. This couldn’t be right.

Dr. Martin’s lecture section had been canceled.

“Due to unforeseen circumstances, the lecture has been postponed indefinitely. Students will be credited with a pass.”

She felt crestfallen. This wasn’t right. She knew Dr. Martin had gone to Africa and that class had been off for a few weeks. This was something else. She surfed around looking for news about whether he’d gotten sick. Nothing came up. She felt agitated, surprisingly so. She considered doing some hacking into Dr. Martin’s personal accounts, to snoop just a tad, thought better of it. So unfair to Dr. Martin. She went to the window and saw that car again. She came back to her computer and, unable to stop herself, decided to snoop on the UCSF servers. It was a task beyond her flavor of expertise computer-wise, but well within her grasp of social engineering. This was, after all, how most actual hacking happened, not by powerful computers breaking encryptions but by sweet-talking nerds who talked their way through dim-witted tech support people. Jackie called the UCSF after-hours computer support team, described herself as Dr. Martin’s administrative assistant having problems accessing the shared calendar with a key conference coming up tomorrow, blah, blah, blah. She flirted with the guy on the other end of the phone, talked about how ditzy she could be, wound up getting the password for Dr. Martin’s calendar, which in turn gave her a very good guess at Dr. Martin’s e-mail address. She figured it was the same as for his calendar. She was in.

She figured she had about ten minutes to look in his system undetected but she only needed about one. She saw what she needed in the first e-mail. It was from the dean and it had come that morning. Dr. Martin hadn’t seen it yet. “Dr. Martin, per my previous correspondence, you need to move your things out of the office immediately. I will give you until the middle of next week before I consider legal means. In the meantime, you may no longer sleep in the office under any circumstances. It is unbecoming and, regardless, violates our code of conduct.”

Jackie scrolled back through several previous messages and could see oblique references to inappropriate behavior on the “Africa trip,” and suggestions of administrative leave by the dean. Dr. Martin hadn’t responded to any of them, but Jackie could see that he’d read them.

She returned to the first e-mail, the one warning Dr. Martin to vacate the premises. She looked at it for the better part of an hour. Her hands balled into fists, her jaw tight enough to prompt a headache. She felt her muscles twitch.

Finally, she hit reply and wrote:

It had been no secret that the dean had been accused of fund-raising with abandon, giving rise to ethical questions at the medical school. The mayor and many in the city loved the dean for having overseen the massive expansion of a high-tech campus. But many on the campus saw her for what she was, someone awaiting a CEO position at Genentech or a competitor and in line for a massive payday. The last thing she needed was an enemy like Dr. Martin. Jackie decided to make her knife thrust a tad less subtle.

Jackie hit send and then deleted the initial e-mail from the dean. Dr. Martin, perhaps, would never see this correspondence. She doubted he was a dogged user of e-mail anyway. She felt euphoric. She’d gotten off her perch of indecision and given a boost to the man who had once saved her life.

Of course, she couldn’t know that Dr. Martin was the one who asked in the first place for some administrative leave. She couldn’t know the emotionally dark place he’d inhabited, or why. She pictured a defeated version of this great man, her distant crush and savior who, if she was honest with herself, she craved to be seen as his equal, someone who saw her, understood her, wouldn’t put her into a terrible position. Now left to sleep on his couch at the office? And even that being taken from him?

She stared into the dark for a long time, pondering, exploring her feelings, taking her time with an idea, rolling it around in her brain—until she felt a surge of certainty.

She slipped out the back door of the apartment building and took an Uber in pouring rain to UCSF on Parnassus. This was the old medical-school campus in San Francisco’s inner sunset neighborhood, and right near Haight and Ashbury. Much of the medical enterprise had moved down to Mission Bay, where the lecture halls were, but the main adult emergency room and hospital remained on Parnassus. So did some of the faculty and adjunct offices, infectious disease among them, and for good reason: often, when an infectious disease specialist was needed, he or she was needed in the hospital to consult with a virulent and unusual case.

Jackie took the elevator to the fifth floor in the elevator adjoining the main hospital. The setting was a far cry from the majestic new campus. This was drab and boxy, merely functional. She was looking for number 503 and figured that she’d found it when she saw from a distance down the hallway the doorway in the corner, the proverbial corner office that Lyle deserved. Colorful papers and patient reminders were carefully taped to the doorway. But that one was marked 501 and had a sign for DR. JEN SANCHEZ. The department’s darling, Jackie knew. She was the one with the sweet digs.

Jackie turned to the left, and ten feet down she found 502, right beside the echoing stairwell, and clearly a little box. Jackie felt a pang for Dr. Martin at this inglorious place; he deserved so much better.

It was so much worse when she pushed open the door.

Twenty-Nine

The smell. She recoiled. She wondered if it was disease. Was this the odor of bacteria consuming a human body? No, she quickly realized, it was the stench of ancient pizza. From the looks of the remains in the open box on the table in the small entry room, a meat lover’s special. She repressed a gag.

“Dr. Martin?”

There was just enough light from the hallway behind her, and a sliver of moon from a window across the tiny office to illuminate the mess of food remains, scattered papers, and was that a camping stove? And the light also showed the way to an opening to a second room.

She shuffled by the desk and thought, Let him be okay.

For all Jackie’s awareness, her great skills at piecing together the world, she would not have sensed how strange it was for her to be here, how impulsive. She was grasping at straws. The Google thing, Denny, the man in the car, they’d tapped into that core part of her that was emotionally flummoxed, off balance, so much less composed than she showed the world. Now she was on the verge of coming undone altogether, torn apart with uncertainty. But that’s not what she told herself. She thought, as she walked into the open doorway of the second room, Now I know what to do. I can help this man who needs my help.

There he was, in a heap. On the couch, an arm draped to the side with his hand near a half-empty bottle of clear alcohol and a piece of paper.

“Dr. Martin?”

“I’m retired. Call me Lyle,” he muttered. He didn’t bother to look up.

“Lyle?”

“Retired,” he muttered again. “Honorifics no longer applicable.”

She turned on the light. The office reminded her of the austere habitat of a shrink she once visited: a chair, coffee table, and the couch where Lyle was flopped facedown. On the table, several empty bottles and what appeared to be a half-eaten burrito.

“Uhhhh!” Lyle made an anguished sound like a vampire consumed by sunlight.

She turned it off. She didn’t want to see him like this; he didn’t deserve to be seen like this. What remained were silhouettes.

“I’ll clean it myself,” he said. “Please. Go away.”

“I’m not the cleaning crew.”

“It’ll be a new career path for me.”

“Let me get you some water.”

She glanced around for a bottle or cup. She couldn’t make out much. Some of the books on the built-in shelves had been scattered to the floor, like someone had casually pulled them off. On the table, she could make out a plastic cup. She picked it up and sniffed the contents and shivered with disgust. Cheap swill.

“Are you hungry?”

No answer. She couldn’t imagine what had dragged him to this abyss. She also knew, in her gut, she knew, that she couldn’t ask him outright. That wasn’t how these things worked. Not with the proud and brilliant. She knew because she wouldn’t respond to direct questions, either. She’d been low. She understood Dr. Martin, and he probably would understand her.

“May I take a liberty?” she said, and she sat.

“Have a seat.” He laughed, some odd private joke because she was already sitting. He was half mad, at least half, she thought.

“You are a great man.”

Lyle turned his head, slightly, curiously, like a bird hearing a sound, such that he could make out her edges through the hair. She wondered if he imagined her as an apparition or dream.

“Are you good or evil?” he asked.

“What happened in Africa?” she asked.

“Africa?”

“Tanzania?”

“How do you know about that? Am I dreaming?”

He was obviously drunk and exhausted, but she wasn’t sure he could be quite that out of it to not know whether he was dreaming. His question almost sounded metaphorical, like Is this all a dream? She went with it. “Yes.”

“To dream, the impossible dream…” he sang, and then said, “Well, then let me tell a story.”

“You tell beautiful stories.”

“Once upon a time, there was a man who decided to be an infectious disease doctor and he had this idealistic vision that he could take on viruses and disease and find cures and then you know what would happen?”

“The world would be a better place.”

“He’d get laid.”

She laughed.

“Don Quixote tilting at viruses,” he continued, slurring. “Holding them off from attacking all the people he was protecting, including the princess. Year after year, he tilted, and the viruses kept coming and that was interesting and good work, tilting or not. And then the young doctor, who wasn’t so young anymore, heard something behind him. He turned to see all the people he arrogantly told himself he was defending from the viruses.”

Lyle looked down at the bottle standing on the carpet and tipped the vodka back and forth idly. Then he picked up the piece of paper and clutched it.

“They were killing each other,” he finally said. “Shooting, maiming, terrorizing, drinking and driving, stealing each other’s land, finding tax loopholes and racking up speeding tickets, building narco empires, filing lawsuits and countersuits, cloaking themselves as decent and moral and, all the while, doing more damage than any virus. Just one big difference.”

“Dr. Martin?”

He roared, “At least the virus declared itself: I am here to kill. I will consume you. It was forthright with its intentions. It was true. Not the people. Not the princess!”

Another long pause.

“People, they put you in the worst positions, y’know.” He sighed. “Anyhow,” he said, facedown, harder to hear now, “the doctor had picked the wrong side. Obviously. So he retired and decided, just now, that he might become a janitor.”

With that, Dr. Martin seemed to make one last effort to raise his head. He shrugged, out of energy, nothing left to say. He fell back down and started to snore.

Jackie felt momentarily dazed and realized she’d been holding her breath. The moment had captivated her. It had, in a certain manner, seduced her. She felt such kinship and intimacy.

Whatever fantasy she’d had before that she and Dr. Martin were on the same page had now been multiplied, practically exponentially. What a man.

“Let me tell you a story,” she whispered. He was out cold now.

“Once upon a time there was a girl. I bet you can guess, that girl was me!” She laughed slightly at her own silly little joke. Then she cleared her throat and swallowed quickly. “Her parents fought and fought and fought. Her dad drank and cheated and her mom drank and yelled and hit and probably cheated, too.”

“The little girl sat on the back of the couch watching through the sliding glass window. She could see it coming. But she didn’t move. The little girl, me, I… I saw my mom take two bold steps forward. I still couldn’t move. People say these things happen in slow motion, but it’s not so. It’s so fast that you can’t stop it. It only feels like slow motion looking back on it. She shoved him just… just at the right angle, I guess. The wrong angle. His slipped and he fell against the glass wall. It was cheap, fractured, breaking, then broken. My dad teetered there. That was slower. I could see it. I couldn’t move. She pushed him again.”

Jackie had her hands balled along the sides of her cheeks. She rocked. Silence for nearly five minutes. She counted. She looked up.

“My dad was an asshole philanderer but I’m not sure he deserved to bounce off the cement from eight stories up. In fact, I can say now assuredly that my mother wasn’t supposed to be judge and jury, conflict of interest and all that. The trouble is, you can’t really know that in the moment. She couldn’t. Maybe I should have. I had the gift to intervene and there I stood.”

She was more composed now. She started talking a bit more philosophically, what it was like to walk through a world where people saw what they want to see and not what really is, people lost in their perspectives and devices, buried in their escapes and perversions, whereas a gifted few could truly see and hear. She told him about the various people who wanted to use her, had used her. She told him not to pity her.

She dropped her head. “You deserve complete honesty, Dr. Martin.” She paused and swallowed. “My sister, I had a sister, her name was Marissa. Two years younger. She was there that day. We went to live with my grandmother.”

Jackie explained that she and Marissa were close. Marissa went away for college, to Cornell.

“She said she couldn’t be around me all the time, that I was too intense. But, obviously, she was wrestling with demons—who wouldn’t, after our childhood—and she had to get away. I could take the blame. I loved her, dearly. We talked all the time,” Jackie said. She swallowed. “In her sophomore year, she jumped from a bridge and killed herself.”

A tear slipped from Jackie’s right eye.

“I’d talked to her hours before. I knew she was in trouble. But I did nothing. I couldn’t stop it.” She simultaneously laughed and cried and threw up her hands. “My self-pity has grown tiresome.”

When she stood, she walked over to Lyle, pulled the piece of paper from his hand, and turned him on his back. She wondered for a moment whether he might be better off dead, as she’d wondered of herself a few times in her life. She propped a pillow under his head so that he might sleep comfortably.

“I am better now, Lyle. Thanks to you. You saved me, turned my life around.” She told him a story about how she’d gone to Nepal, a tattered soul with a backpack. She’d gotten the monkey scratch, and then came the earthquake. At the chaotic airstrip, she lay down and let fate take over, expecting to die in the hot wind. But fate brought her Lyle, who was in the area building a pop-up clinic to help with a cholera outbreak. That day, of course, he was dealing with chaos at the airstrip, tending to various wounded.

“I’m sure I was just another warm body to you,” Jackie said. She stroked his hair. She pictured the scene, the hot air blowing dust, people running, a doctor like a superhero seemingly unfazed. He knelt beside her, examined the monkey scratch on her left forearm, asked a few questions. I’m not worth saving, she recalled telling him. I’m unhinged, if you want to know the truth. Better off gone.

“Nonsense,” he had muttered. He looked up from her at a square, red-painted building with a wall curving in from earthquake damage. It stood to the right of the airstrip’s “parking lot,” which was a dirt area free of brush, and the so-called terminal, where Jackie sat, which consisted of a cement roof held up by pillars, without sides. The whole operation could’ve passed in the States for a half-built bus station.

Weakly, Jackie had watched Lyle walk to the red-painted building. As Lyle had gotten close to the building, Jackie saw him get intercepted by a uniformed man rushing by. They had a brief exchange.

“No, no. Too dangerous!” the man had said. Jackie thought she heard the word collapse. Then she watched Lyle ignore the man, walk to the building, open a cellar door beside the collapsing wall and descend stairs. He had returned five minutes later, covered in dust. He’d found the vaccine, administered it, told her she now had three days to get to Kathmandu for a second one, but could even make it a week. He told her she’d be fine and then went on to help someone else.

Now, back in the office, she stroked his hair again. She stared at him. “I’m so glad you did,” she said.

Then she knelt beside him and she put her lips onto his lips. She felt his warmth and let her tongue slip into the crevice of his mouth and tasted his sour breath and felt sharp arousal. She pulled back.

“You are a great man. The world needs you. I need you,” she repeated. “And I am here for you, as you were for me. You will rise.”

Walking down the stairwell, she let herself look at the piece of paper that Lyle had been clutching. It was the result of a medical test. She took a moment to make sense of it. But then it was clear. Dr. Lyle Martin was infertile. He could never conceive a child.

Thirty

In the weeks after Jackie returned from her first Hawthorne trip with Denny, things settled down. She took the Google bus to work, did her putative day job, met with Denny every few days to look at new data on Lantern, went home, and dug. She looked for everything she might find on Lantern, including any incorporation, mentions on the Internet, affiliates, real estate licenses or purchases in Nevada, and so on. She came up blank. But she felt such exquisite purpose.

She was careful to cover her snooping by using basic hacking techniques to bounce her inquiries from server to server. If anyone cared to be monitoring her, they’d not have been able to do it. She started to doubt anyone cared what she was doing: whoever had been following her hadn’t reappeared. Maybe she’d imagined it.

She pursued a parallel path into the science of memory and its relationship to the use of technology and the Internet. There wasn’t much out there. A few behavioral studies had found that the bombardment of the brain with information had an impact on memory, but it wasn’t the impact that she was expecting. Memory didn’t get better, as the Google tests suggested, it got worse. For instance, a study from the University of Michigan involved teaching people information and then having them go on a walk. Some study subjects took a walk in a dense urban area and a comparison group walked in a serene rural setting. The ones who walked in nature remembered information much better than those whose brains had been clouded by all the incoming stimulation from the urban setting.

A more scientific study had been done with rats at the UCSF lab. The rats were hooked up to leads that measured brain activity. Researchers found that rats who were constantly stimulated with new activities—say, presented with new challenges—did not generate as much electrical activity in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. They were having experiences, but not generating new memories (at least that was the presumption; the rats, obviously, could not be asked their own opinion).

One Saturday, Jackie walked through Union Square. It stunned her to see the extent to which people had their faces buried in their devices. She’d always known it, of course, but as she studied the behavior, she felt like an alien landing on Earth and discovering a race of people with two arms, two legs, and a rectangular metal appendage they stared at as if it brought life. She watched a guy in a wheelchair staring at his phone lose track of his surroundings and roll down a ramp until he toppled.

As she walked, she sometimes got lost in her own virtual reality. It involved Dr. Martin. She imagined how proud he’d be of her in her investigations. She pictured them walking together, talking about how they were dissecting the world, their fingers touching lightly, a union of hearts and minds. She wanted to find him, talk to him, but she knew he needed to heal. Only at the most lucid moments did she realize she herself was unhinging. Her growing uncertainty about Denny, who had treated her like a beloved little sister, was particularly irksome. He continued to apply only the gentlest pressure to have her help him solve the Lantern problem. You’re my quarterback, he’d say, and my star wide receiver and my entire defense.

It’s just that things didn’t quite add up.

Then one day when she was home sick with a head cold, watching Sneaky Pete on Amazon, her cell phone rang.

“Ms. Tether?” a man’s voice said.

She almost hung up when she remembered that Tether was one of the fake surnames she’d used when calling around Hawthorne—realtors, the local tax office, et cetera—looking for indirect information about Lantern.

“Yes, it’s Jennifer Tether,” she said. “I hope you’ll forgive my head cold.”

She felt a moment’s gratitude that she was sick; it always helped when massaging someone to look a tad helpless.

“I’m with the utility district; you left a message.”

“Yes, thank you for calling back. I’m the administrator for Denny Watkins at Google. We’re moving our payment system. I need to change the account.”

“I thought that was handled out of the Intel account.”

“Jesus,” she said, trying to sound as exasperated as possible. “Too many damn chefs. Oh, excuse my language, it’s the cold medicine.”

He laughed. He gave her a name and number of his current contact; she promised him that she’d get it ironed out.

Intel?

That was just the beginning. From there, she did a reverse directory search to find the origin of the contact and phone number held for the Lantern account. She followed one digital bread crumb after the next and wound up finding that it led to a WhoIs directory—which lists the administrators of Internet domain names—for a group called TechPacAlliance, or TPA. There was an e-mail address: TPAadministrator@TPA.net, which she dared not e-mail for fear of outing herself. She could only find one other reference to the TechPacAlliance. It was from a tech policy conference brochure from three years earlier, a mention of the sponsorship by the TPA and its partners: Google, Apple, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Verizon, AT&T, and Sony. And several international affiliates, big-name telecommunications affiliates, like China Telecom and Orange from France.

Not a mention before or since. It just disappeared, this veritable who’s who of tech and telecom companies.

She clicked back and stared at the names. They were giants, obviously, competitors, direct and indirect, not all in the same businesses, not exactly. With many common interests—in everything from technical standards to the mutual value of spreading the digital culture and gospel. She lost the afternoon surfing the Internet and came out none the wiser for it.

She slept more poorly, ate little, became obsessed with understanding the game, the falsehoods. Dr. Martin had put it so well: people put you in terrible positions. More than once, thinking of Denny’s sleight of hand, his failure to disclose, it was as if her mother had asked her to help push her father off the balcony.

She thought often about Dr. Martin—Lyle she called him when she had her internal conversations with him—and wished she might ask him what to do. She wouldn’t be plaintive, of course, he’d hate that. She’d be his peer, with a hint of protégée, knowing that he’d been through times in his life where he’d had to buck the conventional thinking, fight through idiocy, get to the truth.

After work the next day, she felt well enough to go for a walk along the wetlands near Google’s campus. It was late February and still getting dark relatively early. A half mile from campus, now well into dusk, she heard a bicycle come up behind her. She turned and saw Adam Stiles, the nerd who couldn’t keep his eyes off her, despite the fact she tried to never engage.

“Hi, Jackie. It’s nice out here.”

He dismounted and stood beside his bike. “You want some company?”

He was so awkward.

“I’m good, Adam, thank you for the offer.”

Adam swallowed hard and glanced at the surroundings.

“You think you’re so special.”

Her alarm bells exploded, her throat constricted, the hot blaze of terror. She thought back to a self-defense class in college and looked at Adam’s windpipe.

“Adam…” She looked around. The spot was oddly isolated, given the otherwise wide-open terrain. They stood at the bottom of a hill, a cement retaining wall to the right and the bay on the left.

“I think you’re special, too,” he said.

“Okay…” Maybe he was just being awkward, not aggressive. What to do? What to do?

“I know you’re special. I’m not talking about working with Denny, that’s cool or whatever. You’re special special. I bet you’re the smartest person in the whole Googleverse.”

Her heart slowed. He was confessing, that’s all.

“Adam, I have a boyfriend.”

“Bullshit!”

She reflexively put up her hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you don’t. You think you’re the only one who can snoop around.”

She reached into her pocket and felt for her phone. She could hit him with that.

“Help!” she suddenly screamed. “Hel—”

“I wish you wouldn’t lie to me!” Adam said. “You don’t have a boyfriend. But you want a boyfriend.

“I’ll be your boyfriend.”

He stepped forward. It all happened so fast. Did he fall into her, or did she push him? They were entangled, falling, scrambling. He was scraping at her, or defending himself and she was doing the same thing. She pushed and hit, and Adam covered and hit or defended himself, a nerdy scuffle of confused intentions. Jackie saw a dark shape standing over Adam. Almost comically, she thought Batman and wondered if she were imagining things in her happy place. Then her vision further righted and she could see that it was Denny. He plunged his meaty fist into Adam’s face. Then he put a knee onto Adam’s chest.

“You’re going down, you son of a bitch,” Denny said.

A moment later, Jackie was sitting up, refusing to cry.

“I saw him follow you,” Denny said. “Okay, okay, okay, okay,” he added, looking at her terror, and reached to touch her shoulder and she let him. On his phone, he dialed 911 and told Adam not to move a goddamned muscle.

In Jackie’s first act after her salvation, she took Denny’s phone from him and pressed end to sever the distress call. If there was one thing she knew, it was this: she’d rather solve things herself. All of it.

A week later, she returned to her job. Adam had been let go by the company, nothing more said about it. She had news for Denny, big news.

“I figured it out,” she whispered. Then went into the Basement in the Google X building. They sat at the conference table and Jackie spread out the various data sets comparing memory retention to Internet speeds, pixelation, frame rates, and so on and so forth.

“Tell me,” Denny said. He paused. “Are you getting enough sleep?”

She dismissed the question. “What’s the common theme?” she asked him rhetorically.

“Was it the thing with Adam?” He ignored her question.

She grit her teeth so hard that it hurt in the back of her skull. She kept her hands in her pockets, so as not to show the little scars where she’d chewed on her fingers. No, she shook her head.

“I have your back, Jackie. Always. Adam, he was socially awkward, sure, but harmless, right? Trust me, it’s taken care of.”

A deep breath, one, two, three. She counted. She discovered herself smiling. She was so sure that Denny was full of shit now and it was nice to be sure of something.

“Of course,” she said. “What’s the common theme, Denny?”

He shrugged. “That’s what we can’t figure out.”

It struck Jackie that Denny had used the pronoun “we” but she ignored it. She took a red pen and circled some of the numbers.

“It’s so obvious that I’m surprised I’d not seen it earlier.”

He looked blankly at her. It wasn’t obvious to him.

“All the transmissions where the memory changed—they’re wireless. All the ones where it didn’t change, or very little, were hardwired Internet connections. Some study rooms used wireless, some wired, some either or. We didn’t think it made a difference.”

“But I thought it had to do with speeds or something like that?”

“Of course, so did I.” She tried not to exclaim it excitedly but that’s how she felt, like she really had pieced something together. “We were looking for some subtlety instead of the big fat thing under our noses.”

Denny picked at his beard and looked at the pieces of paper.

“Doesn’t that leave us little further along than we were before? I mean, I don’t want to diminish your finding. It’s great. It’s just that we’re still stuck not knowing what circumstances lead to what outcomes.”

She didn’t answer him right away. She didn’t want to rebuff his silly objection; of course this was a revelation. She also wanted to keep some of her ideas to herself. If some of her budding hypotheses were right, this was explosive stuff. Something was being triggered inside the brain by the telecommunications transmissions. If she was right, it wasn’t just Wi-Fi connections but, broadly, radio transmissions. When they were sent in certain bursts, certain patterns, these ubiquitous transmissions had the impact of putting people into a kind of catatonic state. It left her totally freaked out and it was also, perversely, somewhat obvious; the human brain was, fundamentally, fueled by electrical impulses. It was how cells moved information. Now, she—or the people she was working for—had muddled into a discovery about how the bombardment of the brain by certain pulses could distort neurological activity.

The more Jackie thought about it, the more it had her rethinking the entire way people were interacting with their devices. They would stare at the screen, slack-jawed. She’d just assumed that resulted from the capturing of their attention. Now she was thinking about it differently. The electrical impulses might be stuttering their brains. And when those impulses were “perfected,” so to speak, when they were sent in bursts, it had the effect of capturing the brain altogether. Putting them on hold. Hijacking a moment of reality, erasing it, in a way.

“Let’s keep at it,” she said to Denny in as noncommittal a way as possible, declining to elaborate on her theories.

She couldn’t read Denny’s face. Maybe he suspected she had figured out more than she was letting on or maybe he wasn’t sure to trust her just as she had no clear handle on him—this man who had hand-plucked her from a class, shown her the bowels of a secret project, saved her from a stalker, but also was not coming fully clean with her about what the hell they were doing.

She had every intention of figuring it out.

Less than a week later, sitting over an uneaten frozen pizza in the middle of the night, it hit her. She understood how it all worked. Then, almost as instantly, she understood the power of it, and maybe why they’d kept it from her. This wasn’t something you shared with just anyone. Holy shit—she stood up so quickly with revelation that she tripped over the back of her chair.

Thirty-One

Denny lived like a tech millionaire—in a modest one-bedroom Mountain View condo sparsely appointed and littered with take-out food wrappers. Blackout shades over his bedroom window let him sleep late—engineer’s hours—and helped keep out the noise from El Camino Real, a blazing thoroughfare two blocks north. This was what $1.3 million bought you in this market. His clock said 3:14 a.m., and he slept with earplugs and eyeshades in the pitch black.

Jackie sat next to the bed in a chair.

“Ahem,” she said.

Denny squirmed and turned. In the red light of the clock’s digital numbers, she made out the outlines of a small pill bottle. Benadryl, she surmised, the over-the-counter nightcap of champions. It was dulling Denny’s senses. Jackie tapped on his bulky shoulder. He stirred, made our her foreign shape, bolted up.

“Jesus!”

“Nope, just Jackie,” she said.

He swallowed, trying to make sense of it.

“Jackie of Nazareth,” she said. “I like the sound of it.”

“What are you—”

“Savior complex.”

“Jackie, what time is it?” He knew, he could see, but he was trying to make sense of this. “Turn on the light.”

“Let’s leave it like this,” Jackie said. “Darkens the mood.”

She knew the darkness left open the possibility in his mind that she was armed or something. Clearly he wasn’t all that concerned: he reached over to the nightstand and clicked on a lamp. Dim light took over the small, square room. Denny studied her. She wore a gray sweatshirt, zipped up high, and a Giants cap.

“Is everything okay, Jackie?”

“More or less. I’ve come to talk about Lantern.”

“I don’t mean to be glib but can it wait until morning?”

“It’s waited long enough.”

He ran his hand over his hair, pushing the sleeping mask off, then blew air out, a kind of silent concession. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

They sat at a dark, round wood-laminate table off the kitchen and drank from “Google” mugs. Low sounds of a melodic symphony performance leaked from the Google Home device on the near end of the kitchen counter. They sat quietly for a few minutes, Jackie happy to let Denny figure out how to express himself, content that she held a lot of cards and he knew it.

“You could’ve asked me during daylight hours,” he finally said.

“I’ve asked you on multiple occasions. You’ve bobbed and weaved.”

He sipped his coffee. “I’ve told you the truth.”

He saw her ball her fists, open them, ball again. Anger, tension.

“Just not all of it,” he conceded. “There are a bunch of different applications that we’re toying with.”

“Bullshit, Denny. You’re holding people in a stasis state.”

He let the words settle over them.

“It doesn’t have to do with memory or attention, or advertising, any of our usual business,” she continued.

“It does, Jackie.”

“Maybe I should just tell Kara Swisher, or Wired.”

“Jackie, I’m really not allowed—”

“What? Not allowed to tell me? Or to use me without telling me what I’m being used for? Or experiment on innocent Walmart employees trying to make an extra buck signing up for a test that freezes their brains? Lantern.”

“Calm down.”

She laughed.

“We’re not hurting anyone, Jackie. We’re exploring the idea of doing just the opposite—keeping them from getting hurt. Honestly, I’ve been largely frank with you but for a few details. If it’s this important to you”—he saw how ticked she was starting to look and withdrew his passive-aggressive language—“I’ll indulge you with the fuller theory of Lantern. But you have to bear in mind it is just a theory. It is embryonic. And it is well intended and will likely come to nothing.”

He told her the story.

Several years earlier, Denny was tasked by higher-ups at Google with exploring the way in which heavy use of devices was impacting the brain. Much work was already being done at academic centers in subjects like attention and addiction. But an executive at Google became curious about the hypnotic power of the device, the way it seemed to pull people into a kind of alternative universe, essentially robbing them of the reality around them.

“I got to set up a small team and it wasn’t long before I brought you on, Jackie.”

“So far you’ve told me almost nothing I don’t already know.”

“I’m getting there. With your help, we discovered that certain radio waves, sent in certain combinations—staccato bursts at different frequencies—could elicit a seizurelike response. This wasn’t deliberate, in the sense we didn’t want to hurt anyone. It is science, though, and it does inform a”—he considered his next words—“higher purpose.”

“What could be a higher purpose than giving people seizures?”

“That’s neither the end, nor the point. Look, Jackie, believe it or not, Google and…” He paused.

“And the companies you’ve partnered with on Lantern, all the big boys; yes, I know about that.”

Denny raised his eyebrows. She knew a lot. More than that, he noticed the twitch in her left eye. It was more than exhaustion; the twitch revealed her feeling of being betrayed, and crimson intensity, the tendency that made her valuable but also gave Denny pause.

“Jackie, it’s no secret that this country, the world, stands on the brink. We’re barreling into conflict and it’s closer than anyone realizes.” He sipped his coffee. “It’s worse than anyone realizes.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Look, we’ve analyzed a ton of data, social media, buying habits, changes to political leanings and demographics. We’ve looked at the patterns of explosive rhetoric on the Internet. We’ve seen the…” He wasn’t sure whether to add the next phrase, then went ahead with it. “We’ve seen data from the military, too, about hostile communications, profoundly concerning statements from foreign leaders, militant groups, and so forth.”

“This is government blessed?”

“No. Not officially, anyway. The truth is, the real truth is, I have no idea. But you’re a fool if you don’t think that Google, Facebook, et cetera, have very close relationships with the spy agencies. I’m not telling you anything, or alleging, anything. I just suspect data sharing is much, much closer than anyone fully knows. It’s in the interest of all parties.”

“But you digress.”

“Maybe. You want more coffee?”

“Please. So what you’re telling me is that Lantern has something to do with people being at each other’s throats, a world bordering on hostilities, and…” Suddenly, she closed her eyes, tightened her jaw, lightly shook her head. She’d been struck by a thought, even revelation. Denny turned around from the coffeemaker.

“Things are adding up for you. Do tell,” he said.

“I’d rather hear you tell it.”

He topped off her coffee, put the Mr. Coffee carafe on a hot pad on the table, sat.

“You haven’t made the connection between a hostile world and Lantern,” she said.

“It’s not that direct a connection. I’m giving you background. There’s one more important piece. Look, Jackie, the tech industry is in no small part to blame for the… intensity in the world today. We’re not idiots. We can see that the pace of media, the onslaught of conflict-centric communications, stokes the flames of hostility. Hell, we elected a demagogue last election in this country. People made some comparisons to Hitler. There are many differences. But a key one is the fact that when Hitler rose to power, there was a deep, deep economic crisis in Germany. By contrast, we’ve had economic challenges in this country but nothing like hyperinflation and massive unemployment. It’s just the media could make it feel that way. The hammering of negative messages, sensationalism, coupled with people feeling keyed up by their interaction with devices, leads to a world fertile for conflict. Then add in a lot of high-powered, easily accessible weapons and—”

“Now you are definitely digressing.”

“Probably,” he said, smiling. “Look, one of the reasons why we’ve explored Lantern is to see if there just might be a way to…” He looked for the words. “Slow things down.”

She thought about it. “A seizure-like state. Not just slowing things down, slowing people down,” and then after another moment: “It’s like a human pause button.”

“What?” Now he seemed as if he were genuinely not following.

“You’re putting people on pause. That’s what you’re talking about.”

“It’s just a theory, something we played with, a kind of fail-safe. What if the world started to really get out of control?”

“You’re kidding me.”

He put his hands up, as if to say: guilty as charged. “Yes, it sounds like a joke and that’s how it probably will remain. We felt, though, it was worth exploring. Maybe, just maybe, we can use the same tools that fuel the flames to interrupt them, for just a few minutes, stop the fury from spilling over. If and when things truly come to a head, we can hit pause, as you say, reboot. We can hold people still, for a moment.”

“Wow.”

“Look, we still don’t know how it works. Maybe what you’ve identified, this electrical mechanism, it’s like the spinal cord acts as some kind of electrical antenna. I’m way out on a limb now. But it’s not so far-fetched. The cord sends electrical impulses through the body. Hell, like I say, it’s all very basic, and new. So you can see why I didn’t say anything. This will likely not go far, and you’re not compromised and…”

“No, no, no, no.” She slammed a hand on the table. Coffee spilled. “No!”

“Jackie, calm down.”

“First of all, I still don’t believe you’re telling me the full extent of it. You’ve got satellites out there, and a team. A small team, so you’re trying to keep it on the down-low. And other companies are involved. And that’s why you didn’t tell me all of it, and why you’ve still not told me.” She was shaking.

“Jackie!”

She glared at him.

“I didn’t tell you because of what’s happening right now,” he said.

“What’s happening right now? I’m just trying to get to the bottom—”

“You’re unhinged, Jackie. You’re unstable.”

She blinked rapidly. She put her palm to her right eye to will it to stop twitching. She could see that Denny regretted what he’d said. He hung his head then looked up again.

“You’ve been like a sister…”

“Don’t.”

“You’re a brilliant woman, Jackie.”

“Fuck you.” She stood up. She felt her hands once again involuntarily tightening into fists at her side. She flashed on the memory of her mother, little hands just like hers, shoving her father through and over the balcony. She turned the memory in another direction and saw herself, the little girl, watching, impotent.

“I trusted you,” she muttered.

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have. That’s the worst part of this. I made yet another stupid decision. Helpless Jackie, no compass.”

“I’m honestly not sure what you’re talking about.”

She looked down at her shoes, noticed a lace untied, tried to focus on that single image, and count. She begged herself to find control and let go of the fury. By the time she reached the number ten, she had regained herself.

“Jesus, Denny, I’m sorry. I… I was just so disappointed. I wanted you to trust me.”

“I know, Jackie. I understood that. I could see that. I tried to tell you as much as I felt it made sense.”

“I understand.” It was such an about-face that Denny couldn’t tell whether she meant it or not. “Maybe I just need to sleep this off,” she said.

“You and me both. How about you consider tomorrow a day off.”

“You mean today. Today already is tomorrow.”

He laughed. But he sensed this wasn’t over, not remotely. When Jackie left a few minutes later, he watched her walk down the stairs and frowned—because he could see, in the lamplight over the staircase, that she smiled.