Jackie and Denny hit the Nevada border just after two on a bright Saturday afternoon in Denny’s Tesla. They’d taken the “scenic” route, Denny joked, which meant driving the flatlands east of the Bay Area, skirting the more populated route to the north, and taking two-lane highways where Denny got to test out the “autonomous driver” mode on his Tesla. The car’s new software drove itself while Denny told Jackie more about Lantern, the project they were studying in the desert. With his hands free, he could even show her slides on the seventeen-inch touch screen in the Tesla, which he’d hooked up to his iPad.
At the Nevada border and truck weigh station, they slowed at the request of a soldier who waved them to the side.
“An army checkpoint?” Jackie asked.
“I assume because of what happened last month.”
Three weeks earlier, the army had raided the home of a family in the Big Smoky Valley to the east. The family’s ranch was on federal land to be used for military exercises, but the parents had refused multiple requests and legal maneuverings to get them to move. They holed up on the property with a veritable cache of munitions, including a grenade launcher, and declared themselves sovereign. On Instagram, they posted a sign of their twin nine-year-olds, a boy and a girl, draped in the American flag, holding AK-47s. The army assault, pressed by manifold interests, including concerns about the children, used nonlethal gases and took back the house.
Three days later, in retaliation, two men attacked the guard post at the military base in Hawthorne. They killed a soldier and injured three others, before they were killed.
At the border, the grim-looking soldier looked into the Tesla’s trunk and waved on Denny and Jackie.
Martial law, Jackie thought. She said, “You never said why here—in Hawthorne.”
He explained how Nevada was about the most business-friendly place in the world. Low taxes, lax regulations. Totally hassle free, he said, sounding mostly kidding, but not totally. “In Silicon Valley, we spend more for an hour of a lawyer’s time than we do to rent an office for the month.”
Jackie listened to Denny on two different levels: on one, she was getting basic information, and on the other she was assessing whether he was being straight with her, if she could still have faith in him, follow his direction. The lines beneath her eyes told how much sleep she’d lost, some nights making lists of the evidence in his favor and against. She’d let him lead her from wilderness, pull her from two decades in shadows—and what if she’d been wrong to do that all along?
“Jackie?”
“Huh?”
“You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”
“Not really.”
Another long stretch of road and silence.
“You spent much time in the hinterlands?” Denny asked.
“Did some backpacking, after college.”
“Yeah.”
“Nepal.” She gritted her teeth. Almost didn’t come back.
“You grew up in . . .”
“Ohio.”
“Really?”
“No, but why’d you ask if you already knew?”
“Trying not to be presumptuous.”
“Salt Lake,” she said. How much did he actually know? Who was she kidding; Google knew everything.
“Family?”
“Sister.”
“Oh, yeah, what’s her name?”
Jackie gripped the leather seat next to her right leg. “Marissa.”
“Beautiful name. What’s she up—”
“I’d rather not talk about it, Denny.”
He nodded. “Were you trekking—when you went to Nepal?”
She wondered if he knew about that, too.
“Finding myself, I guess.”
“What did you find?”
“A near-death experience—rabies.”
“Say what again.”
“I got scratched by a monkey. Not that common, the monkey part. But there are lots of rabies attacks there, mostly from dogs’ bites. You know much about rabies?”
“I know you don’t want it.”
“We’ve got a winner. It is a hundred percent fatal once the symptoms set in. The good news is, it’s also preventable during the incubation period if you get the vaccine. The trick is getting it in time.”
“Which you obviously did or you’d be salivating even more than you already are.”
She laughed. “The vaccine is available there, if you get to a clinic. And I was on my way to one when there was an earthquake.”
His eyebrows raised, like Holy shit.
“Flights canceled, trains down, chaos. Long story short, I was in deep trouble when I was essentially rescued by an American doctor who was over there dealing with a cholera outbreak. He saw me waiting at an airstrip that had ground to a halt due to the earthquake. I’d never have gotten to Kathmandu in time. If not for him, I’m not here to experience”—she focused out the window—“lovely Hawthorne.”
The town now loomed, just three miles across the border. It was the kind of small highway town where the low-slung building with the red word “Motel” stood out like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And it seemed even to lean. Another business sign read classic car, which probably meant “Old.” And another, which made Jackie laugh, said wash and referred to a Laundromat but the sign was encrusted in filth.
“That’s a remarkable story,” Denny said. “Does it explain your interest in infectious disease—that class you’re taking?”
The insightful nature of the question startled her. She hadn’t even told the whole of it to Denny, and how it really had been the turning point in her life. Truth is, had it not been for the heroism of Dr. Martin—Lyle—she well might’ve let herself just die. Sitting on the ground outside the airstrip, she had actually gotten peaceful with the idea. After so much bullshit in her life, so little faith in herself and people around her, it felt in the moment like a blessing to curl up there on the ground and let the hot wind carry her away.
“The guy who teaches it is a genius,” Jackie said.
“High praise coming from you.”
“I mean the real McCoy, Denny. You ever really want someone to figure something out, Dr. Lyle Martin is the guy . . .”
“I’m starting to feel jealous,” Denny said, as he slowed at a stoplight. “Okay, it’s decision time. I figured we’d stop at the restaurant, unless you want to go straight to the shop.”
“The restaurant?”
“I guess there’s more than one. I’ve never tested the theory.”
They got turkey sandwiches with canned cranberry chunks on white bread to go and Denny drove them a half mile east of town and down a dirt road. Jackie noticed the preponderance of army trucks driving both directions. The army base here was a large munitions storage facility, located outside of town, and essentially was this place’s raison d’être. The Rocky Mountains loomed to the east. Two miles down a dirt road, and then a few serpentine turns later Denny parked his Tesla in front of a place that looked, appropriately, like a scientific outpost but one you might find in a frozen tundra. Two corrugated metal buildings with a generator by the side and a horizontal unit Jackie recognized as housing cooling equipment.
“Not much to look at,” Jackie said.
And, simultaneously, she and Denny said, “I guess that’s the idea.” The idea being: don’t draw attention to this operation.
Denny smiled. “Great minds . . .”
“What about that?” Jackie said. She was looking out the left side of the Tesla window, noticing that farther down the road sat another building, this one concrete, almost bunker-looking. Next to it a long stretch of paved road, like a runway. And looming over the whole thing a giant metal dish, very clearly a powerful antenna.
“Have you ever seen anything so subtle?” Denny said, and laughed. “The supersecret Google space project. Not so supersecret, right?”
It was well known that Google was playing around with low-cost ways to get into space. They weren’t alone in this respect. Amazon, too, was getting into the act, and Facebook, Elon Musk, Richard Branson. The stated reason was that these companies wanted to explore the future of space travel, even for tourists. But Jackie was no dope; she and others who liked to read tea leaves suspected it had more to do with the future of much more immediate businesses, like telecommunications and even Internet commerce. If the companies could get low-cost, high-power satellites into orbit, they could become hubs to control Internet access, information, drones, who knew what else.
“Are they launching rockets?” she asked Denny.
“Satellites, I suspect,” he said. “Most of that is done in Florida.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Keep it between us. That’s not my area; this is, and I try to keep my nose out of stuff that could fuck with my ability to cash in my stock options.”
She felt relieved again. She’d asked about the rockets as a test, hoping he’d be frank with her. Opening the car door, she brushed bread crumbs off her lap onto the dusty ground and felt a wave of satisfaction. She was getting let into the inner sanctum at Google, though that was secondary to the bond she was solidifying with Denny.
She stepped out of the car and felt a gust of desert wind and she shivered. She hated wind. It reminded her of uncertainty, self-doubt, the feeling that little things could throw you off if you weren’t anchored. She pictured an invasive memory: her mother shouting at her father, her father shouting back, the pair nose to nose on the balcony, little Jackie sitting on the couch, looking over its back, feeling the breeze through the sliding door. Marissa sucking on a bottle Jackie had made for her. Wind brought memories, guilt. Wind smelled like sweat and shampoo, it sounded like anger. Jackie put her hand to her face and wiped.
For an instant, she thought about the fateful day in Nepal, nearly dying, being saved, becoming determined to live a more directed life, to not just do the right thing but figure out how to do the right thing. She thought of these moments as the yin and yang of her life: her terror, paralysis, impotence in dealing with her parents, years of self-doubt, and then a salvation and a determination to figure it out.
“Everything okay?” Denny asked.
“Bad cranberry burp.”
“Let’s go inside.”
Denny used a card key to gain them entrance to the larger of the two metal-framed buildings. Cool air greeted them, the refrigerated feel of a server farm. Inside, not racks of powerful computers. Just a few desks and a Ping-Pong table. A dartboard hung against a far wall. To Jackie’s right, a kitchenette. An industrial-size case of Red Bull still in the Costco shrink wrap sat on top of the refrigerator. It all looked like Silicon Valley lite.
Only two of the cubicles were occupied. From one of them, a man looked up. He had a scruffy goatee poking out from his hoodie. From the other cubicle stood a petite woman in a too-tight white shirt and dark pants and short-cropped hair. She looked to Jackie like a waiter—in the marines.
“These are our two Alexes,” Denny said. “Alex 1 and Alex 2, say hello to Jackie.”
“Hello, Jackie,” they simultaneously drawled but seemed mostly disinterested. Then the female Alex said: “And then there were three.”
“That’s right, three now,” Denny said. “So one of you geniuses will have to figure out how to divide the Red Bulls by thirds.”
“I only work with imaginary numbers,” cracked the male Alex.
“You’ll love it here,” Denny said and took a sharp angle to the right. Jackie followed him through the building to a staircase with metal railings and cement stairs. “Where the action happens,” Denny said in a low voice.
“They’re really both named Alex?”
“What’re the odds, but, yep.”
Denny had also explained in the Tesla what happened below. Below, testing rooms where Google sought to dial in this Lantern discovery it had made. The discovery, in essence, was that Internet users experienced sharply improved rates of memory recall depending on the speed, frame rate, and also the frequency of the delivery of information.
“Like subliminal messages?” Jackie had mused. “What Alfred Hitchcock did in Psycho.”
“Much more sophisticated and less well understood. We just know it seems to work.”
He had pulled up four images on the Tesla screen of the hippocampus, a crescent-shaped part of the brain central to memory recall. The images were taken from real-time magnetic imaging scans of a twenty-two-year-old female study subject. During the tests, the woman had been using her phone or an iPad. The tests were complex because the study subject had to look at and interact with the devices while situated in an MRI machine. The images that Denny displayed in the Tesla were similar except that some images were shaded more than others. The greater the shading, Denny explained, the more of the young woman’s hippocampus had been engaged at the time that the imaging had taken place. Where it was less shaded, less of the woman’s brain was engaged.
Jackie could see where this was all headed. “So during some of her online interactions, she remembered more than she did in some other cases.”
“That too,” Denny said. The images, he explained, didn’t necessarily mean that the subject remembered less, or more—because images can lie. But in this particular case, the images hadn’t lied at all. Far from it. After the study subject was removed from the machine, she had taken tests to see how much of her online interactions she remembered. In the same conditions in which her hippocampus had lit up most, she had the strongest recall.
“Amazing, actually,” Denny said. “Like she had eidetic memory.”
“Photographic.”
“Right.”
“So what made the difference on what she remembered?”
Denny shook his head. “We’re not sure. We were playing with placement of information, streams, also speeds and frame rates. We can’t quite get a handle on it. Enter the inimitable Jackie Badger.”
It was why they brought her here. Still, she couldn’t figure out why it was such a secret. Of course, Google would be working on getting users to remember and share more information. It was in the damn annual report, their entire raison d’être, if you knew how to read the thing.
At the bottom of the stairs, Denny used his key and did a retinal scan and a door clicked open. On the other side, a long hallway, much more nicely appointed than the upstairs, even bespoke floor runners and wood trim near the bottom. Odd, Jackie thought. A doorway marked each side every ten feet or so with keypads beside each one. The quiet rectitude of the place reminded Jackie of the psychiatrist’s offices her parents wanted her to see after she got caught hacking into the junior high school computer system to send a fake e-mail on behalf of an instructor who Jackie felt had been rude to students. It had been that confusing, interim period in Jackie’s life where she was playing with boundaries: What was the right thing to do? When should she intervene or participate in the world, and how? She thought maybe she was looking for a moral compass. But, later, she discovered a different term for what she was seeking: situational awareness. It was a term of art she read about in a psychology class that applied to how people pay attention to their surroundings. Some had terrific situational awareness, like pilots. People who had to be aware, think fast, make good decisions. She still wasn’t sure she had it but she was getting there.
“Individual lab areas,” Denny said. He stopped midway down the hall. He kept his voice low. “I wanted you to see some of the current work. It’s less focused on the imaging right now and more so on recall and behaviors. What kinds of conditions lead to more social behavior, sharing, liking, endorsing, and remembering. Basically, you’ll see people using their gadgets through a two-way mirror.”
“The study subjects?”
“Local folks. There’s actually a pretty good pool from wives and girlfriends of military personnel, along with folks we draw from surrounding communities. Low income in Nevada, sadly, leaves us with people who will do experiments for what is pretty low pay, at least by our standards.”
Jackie heard a voice behind her and the female Alex appeared with a tablet.
“Door number five, boss,” she said to Denny. “Good time. We’re just finishing up.”
Alex led them inside the fifth doorway on the left. Behind a two-way mirror a woman sat in a comfortable office chair in the middle of a room, staring at her own tablet. Jackie watched to the point of gawking and now she, at last, understood why this project was a secret one.
The woman behind the two-way mirror looked so engrossed as to be catatonic.
For a long time, Jackie and Denny stared. Suddenly, the woman bolted upright.