The Cloud

57

A hot flash seizes me and an image of death creeps into my mind’s eye. It’s the stick-thin doctor in blue scrubs telling me that Polly will not make it. “Sit here as long as you like,” she said when I looked at her with shock and silence.

Oddly, I felt for her at that moment, not me, or Polly or Isaac.

And in this moment, I feel a bit like the doctor, in the position of delivering painful news. For a journalist, this is supposed to be exhilarating, the gotcha moment. But I’ve never particularly liked the handful of times when I move from discovering a truth to confronting a bad actor with it. It’s beyond anti-climactic. It’s sad. The death of someone’s dark dream. And my own realization that my success in solving a mystery, the arrival at some analytical Mecca, has not made me whole.

“She ran into the street,” I begin.

I tell him what the girl’s mother told me. I tell him what I only suspect: that the girl had been among a handful of test subjects he’d used to develop the precursor technology to the Juggler. The girl must have grown increasingly impulsive, I speculate, unable to focus, and then one day the technology pushed her still-fragile frontal lobe over the edge.

“She acted like someone with the brain of a three-year-old, running in front of the Volvo. Maybe she saw a dog across the street she wanted to touch, or some blinking lights.” I pause, then add: “I can only imagine how much more dangerous the commercial version of the technology will be.”

He stares at me.

“Care to comment?”

He stands. He picks up the gun. It hangs in his hand. He turns his back to me and he walks to the window. Below, tens of thousands of houselights burn, creating a collective glow to rival the darkness.

He extends the hand with the gun at the window. He’s pointing slightly to his left, in the vicinity of Menlo Park.

“You can see it,” he says.

“What?”

“That’s why I built this place.”

I start walking to the window. He turns and I jump back, wondering if he’s about to shoot me. Wondering too: maybe I’m not ready to die?

He turns back to the window. “You’re right: I hate authoritarianism. I’ll give you that.”

He’s switched topics on me. I’m still not sure what he was pointing at but he appears to want to take the conversation in another direction and he’s the one with the gun.

“Hence the beef with the Chinese kids.”

He shakes his head.

“Nope. Will you grant me some literary license? About literature? About Orwell and Huxley.”

I shrug, not following. Is he going crazy?

“George Orwell and Aldous Huxley depicted distinctly different views of how the modern world could crush the human spirit. Orwell presaged the mortal dangers of authoritarian regimes. Roughly speaking, it was the kind of thing the Eastern Bloc represented.”

“Or China.”

“But in Brave New World, Huxley identified the problem not so much as the state but our own frailties. We could succumb to our own ravenous desire for entertainment, truth subverted to triviality. We could become awash in bells and whistles.”

“Okay.”

“It’s been said many times in a very flattering light that I created one of the Next Big Things. But I created the Brave New World.”

I consider it.

“The Juggler entertains us into a stupor?”

“It’s so much worse than that.” He turns to me. A deep-set wrinkle like a river on a map trails across his forehead. “The technology I helped build, the algorithms meant to serve us have tapped our worst demons, our most primitive impulses. In that respect they are so much more powerful than I ever dreamed.”

“You wanted this?”

“No. God no.”

He gestures again out the window with a jut of his chin.

“I’m not sure where you’re pointing.”

“See the tall building, with the smattering of lights on the upper floor? It’s west of the Dumbarton Bridge and a bit to the left.”

“It looks like a law firm?”

“That’s the one. Now look two blocks further left.”

I see a smear of residences. It dawns on me.

“That’s the street Kathryn Gilkeson ran into.”

Silence. Then: “When I built this house, a year later, my dear wife couldn’t understand why. We have plenty of space. I’ve never been a particularly materialistic person and certainly not fixated on real estate.”

“You wanted to be able to see where she died.” I whisper it. I’m wondering: Is Leviathan some kind of sociopath, a serial killer who has created a view to his kills, a virtual collector with a window through which to ogle his conquests?

But then, in an instant, something else replaces that thought.

“You didn’t mean for her to die.”

“It has crushed me, Nathaniel. Destroyed me.” It seems his voice might break but he clears his throat. He tells me that he introduced a new generation of multitasking software to the kids, like little Kathryn, who came to free day care and after-school programs at Leviathan Ventures. He jerry-rigged handheld devices, nothing fancy and commercial like the current Juggler. But the devices were years ahead of their time, combining crisp video and motion detection to allow the kids to move from one task to the next. The kids were entranced. He thought he was preparing them for the future.

“I used to sit in class and marvel at their immersion. It was like watching baby kittens bat balls around-endlessly excited and with preternatural dexterity. I could see their reaction times increasing. But they were moving data, refining their multitasking, becoming more competitive, not less.”

“So it worked.”

“In one respect. They did show increased visual acuity. They could pick up amid the clutter of images the ones they needed to focus on. At least that’s what I could discern through my unscientific observations. And research has since backed me up on that.” He pauses. “Then it turned dark.”

“When Kathryn got hit by the car.”

“Months before, the kids started getting agitated. They hated disconnecting. One kid hit another. A few parents started complaining that on the days after, their kids came acting like they were back in the terrible twos-impulsive, unwilling to take direction, highly susceptible to being startled.”

He says the teachers looked at whether they were serving too much sugar, providing insufficient rest time. The complaints never reached Leviathan. But after Kathryn’s death, he started asking questions and surmised that something wasn’t right.

“I buried the technology.”

“You knew it was problematic.”

“I suspected.”

“More than suspected. You built a bunch of charter schools. You became a firebrand for improving education. You. .” I pause, thinking it through; Leviathan’s schools limited the use of technology in instruction. I look at him. “But the technology resurrected.”

He nods grimly. “That’s what I needed you for.”

“Me?”

A sound comes from the direction of the stairs. I look up to see Leviathan’s wife step into the room. She stops, and looks at her husband, stricken, as if suspended mid-step, a horrified puppet.

“Please no.”

“My fair lady.”

“A gun.”

“It’s over, sweetheart.”

“You don’t have to do this, Andrew.”

“I’ve already done it.”