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.