FORTY MINUTES LATER, Jeremy stands at the counter of a South of Market café. In a Tumi bag slung over his shoulder is his iPad, which he’s synched with the computer at his desk. He thinks of its prediction, massive global conflict, three days and counting. More precisely: 71 hours, 15 minutes. Projected impact: 14 million killed, from not just the first hypothetical attack but, the computer estimates, the subsequent attack and counterattack.
It’s simple math, really, game theory. The computer, upon predicting conflict, then plays out the likeliest scenarios for what will follow based on the state of affairs in the world.
Jeremy looks around the hipster café, a work-away-from-the-home-office joint during the day, but, now, nine fifteen on a Wednesday, a place for first dates and people seeking them. A tapestry of the African savanna hangs on the opposite wall, hovering above closely placed tables. There’s a fireplace next to the counter, sputtering with a low flame and Wilco on the speakers.
The right amount of white noise to allow him to think; the right concentration of eye candy, chicks.
“What can I get you?” It’s a guy behind the counter with a soul patch and a flannel shirt, which are all the rage.
“Peanut Butter Mocha.” Sugar, protein, caffeine.
Soul Patch blinks: I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.
“It’s a mocha but you toss in a scoop of peanut butter. I’ve ordered it here before.”
“Not from me,” the guy says smiling. “We gotta stick to the menu.”
Jeremy smiles back.
“It’s complicated. You mix a scoop of peanut butter into the mocha.”
Guy clears his throat. “I wouldn’t know how to charge you.”
“Oh, right. I understand. Generally, the way you charge is by keying in the numbers in the cash register and then taking my money. But maybe this is one of those dummy registers with pictures, like at McDonald’s.”
Guy serves Jeremy a mocha. With a scoop of peanut butter on the side.
He sits, unpockets his phones. In a fit of pique a week earlier, he’d purged his speed dial of those he felt had betrayed him. Emily, of course, though that number he knows by heart. Evan. Harold Ives, aka Harry War, the eccentric Berkeley war historian, Jeremy’s rare equal in being a pain in the ass, whose research and, more importantly, support, proved instrumental to Jeremy’s conflict algorithm. But, really, hadn’t Harry asked for it by turning on Jeremy first?
He’d purged too the number for Andrea Belluck-Juarez, the tattooed and pierced junior officer at the Pentagon. His conduit to that whole messed-up situation.
Evan, Harry War, Andrea. The three he’d most likely have called—even as recently as six months ago—in the event his computer made the three sharp beeps and the map glowed red. He can always find their phone numbers in his email. He flips the phone onto the table.
He’s not going to give them the satisfaction. Not even these three, once his last line of defenders. He doesn’t need to hear the recriminations, the cackles. So, your magic computer thinks the terrorists are coming? Can it predict what they’ll be wearing? Can it guess which card they’ll be thinking about? The four of hearts? Harry had jokingly dismissed Jeremy’s device as “iPocalypse.”
Or, if the world is in fact going to end in seventy hours and change, then what’s the point of exposing himself?
He looks around the room. To his left, two younger women, late twenties, conspiring after they appear to have gone for a late-night exercise session. One of the pair wears a ponytail with dark frizzy hair extruding around the edges. She’s got light freckles and an easy smile and Jeremy ranks her as the best-looking chick he’s seen in weeks. Not far behind in the looks category is the woman sitting to his right. Jeremy figures her at thirty-two years old, with a D-cup. She’s got light brown hair, a spiral notebook that must serve as a diary, and she’s lost in The World According to Garp. Relatively smart chick.
“Not okay to call them chicks.” Evan had admonished Jeremy after a business meeting with investors and their science advisors, including two female Stanford Ph.D.s. “How about using ‘hoes’?”
“Women call themselves chicks all the time. You talk like a brochure and I’ll talk like a human.”
Jeremy eyes his iPad lying flat on the blond wood table. Next to it is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dating. He’s purposely half obscured the cover as if to make it look like something he’s trying to hide.
On the tablet, he opens the map. At the bottom, there’s a feature called the “countdown clock.” It reads: 70:36:05. Hours, minutes, seconds. Until attack. Or some huckster popping out of a cake and pointing at Jeremy and laughing.
At the top of the map, Jeremy clicks on a menu. Under the “view” line, he clicks “recent history.” As the screen splits in two, he briefly relives the eons he put into not just selecting each category in each tool line but learning the basic program in the minutest detail so that the user interface would be precisely how he envisioned. He left nothing to chance, automation or outsourcing. He didn’t spend much time thinking about other passionate creators, like Steve Jobs, but, when he did, he tended to think they were lazy for hiring other people to do the engineering.
On the iPad, the left window displays the current map, projecting massive conflict on the left; the window on the right is devoid of color. On a drop-down menu above the clean map, Jeremy chooses “45 minutes.” The conflict map as it stood forty-five minutes earlier appears, filled with oranges and yellows and dull reds, but absent the rampant glowing red representing the imminent onset of massive global conflict. Jeremy looks at the digital clock in the corner of his monitor. It is 9:26, Wednesday night, late March, Jeremy tries to remember the date but can’t. Forty-five minutes earlier, he thinks, his computer claims, something in the world changed. Exactly when? What?
“When” is the easy part.
Jeremy taps on “advance.” The map begins to change, at first, ever so slightly. The colors are mutating slightly around the edges, their boundaries moving almost infinitesimally.
Jeremy must admit to himself that this feature, though it is another brainchild of Evan’s, more sizzle, is pretty fucking cool. It’s like watching a storm map on the Weather Channel. Not storms, conflicts. High-pressure societies and low-pressure societies, colliding power bases, the prospect of war. A key difference is that weather maps tend to have constant motion, the clouds and weather systems swirling and moving. On the war map, the changes are very subtle, unless you bring the clock back a decade and spin it forward at high speeds to see various regions go from blue to yellow to orange to red and back again.
And then: wham. Everything turns red.
This time, watching it unfold, Jeremy is not feeling disappointed, or privately skeptical, but, for an instant, startled. This is an image for his dreams or nightmares. The world pulsing crimson; the United States and China and Russia and Europe, pinkish hues swallowing the smaller and poorer places, Africa, tiny island nations. He swallows hard, then coughs, peanut butter lodged in his throat.
Jeremy paws the device. He rewinds the map again. Now he watches it evolve in slow motion. He’s leaning forward, face inches from the screen. He sees what he’s looking for: the first sign of red. The first indication something in the world has changed or, rather, is poised to change, four days hence.
He looks at the time stamp above the map. It reads: 8:06 p.m. He puts the cursor over the clock. An infobox pops up next to it with details. The moment he’s frozen in time on his conflict machine, the moment the clock started ticking, was 8:06:42 on Wednesday, March 29.
He eyes the first onset of red. He puts his cursor over it, even though he knows what he’s looking at. An infobox pops up: 37 degrees north, 122 west. “San Francisco.”
When they refined this infobox, Jeremy had argued with Evan that there was no need to put the name of the city. All they needed was longitude and latitude. Actually naming the place was condescending to a smart audience, and a waste of manpower to double-check.
San Francisco. Right here, he thinks, a little more than three days.
He looks up and around the café. He catches the eye of a tall woman sitting by the door, looking in his direction, a model’s figure, symmetrical features obscured by a baseball cap. She lowers her gaze.
A complete joke. Or maybe three days.
Jeremy grits his teeth and closes his eyes and discovers in his mind’s eye an image of his frail mother in hospice, six months earlier. Last time he’d seen Eleanor alive. He can’t recall much of it, just the plate of lumpy, syrupy, buttery mashed potatoes on the table next to a yellow rotary phone. She mutters something. Existential? Jeremy leans in close and realizes he’s wondering if she’s telling him that she loves him, maybe, finally. Once. She repeats herself: “Make peace.” That’s what she said. No, no nurturing words here. She’s counseling him, giving him an edict, one that she could well stand to hear herself. She was his original sparring partner. And then the huge fight in the parking lot with Emily, the intensifying pain near his neck, the lump, everything spiraling.
Three days. It’s March 29.
Three days.
“Oh shit,” Jeremy mumbles.
He opens his yes. Three days is April 1.
April Fools’ Day.
“You want war?” Jeremy suddenly mutters to no one.
He shakes his head, looks up, lands his gaze at the woman sitting to his right, with the D-cup, reading The World According to Garp. She peeks with light blue eyes at him over the top the book. Maybe wondering why he’s talking to himself. Maybe just making contact.
He swallows. She’s attractive, bordering on more than that. He lowers his iPad. Ready to stop being the patsy.