BEFORE HE CAN check the device, Jeremy feels something nag at him and looks up. He discovers he’s being stared at by the bearded guitar player, who quickly lowers his head. Jeremy recoils into his beanbag, tilting the iPad so no one else in the place could possibly see it.
He looks at the screen. A dialogue box pops up. Inside it reads: “Impact Update. Click for details.”
Sure, let’s see it, he thinks, clicking.
The dialogue reads: “April’s projected deaths: 75 million.”
In the abstract, at least, that’s not so hard for Jeremy to swallow. Just more game theory and simple probability. An attack in, say, San Francisco, triggers a counterattack, then reprisals, then the dominoes fall. The program is taking into account the hundreds of parameters and key variables that, Jeremy’s research at Oxford determined, can be used to predict the length and intensity of war.
He looks at the map.
Red, red, red. The only difference between the rendering of the future on this map and on the version of the map he saw six hours ago is that attack is six hours closer. That, he notices, and it looks like the red is spreading. Meaning: whatever conflict this computer has foreseen will go from hellacious to worse. The countdown clock shows 66:57:02. Hours, minutes, seconds.
Jeremy looks up at the guitar player. It crosses his mind that if the guitar player is looking at him, Jeremy’s going to advise the guy on the problems with his chord-hand position. Just a little jab, one that will come across as possibly well-meaning and hard to interpret. But the guitar player is buried in his world, unavailable to hear unsolicited advice.
Jeremy pulls out his phone. He’s trying to remember Evan’s cell phone number. Trying to think what he’s going to say after: Hey, fuckface!
He pauses. Never go into a fight unarmed. He needs more evidence. He can check the inputs.
On the phone, he calls up Nik’s number. Taps out a text: “notice anything strange?” The corpulent assistant is either asleep or glued to an infomercial. But if he does see the text, it might jar him; Jeremy doesn’t ask questions like this, not open-ended ones, not even of Nik.
From his backpack, Jeremy pulls an external keyboard.
Is the data coming into his machine, the data that somehow adds up to impending doom, accurate? Has it been altered?
Jeremy rolls his neck, pre-computing calisthenics. He looks at the key fob, enters six numbers, then his password, then he begins tearing his way across the keyboard, causing symbols and lines and numbers to appear in the window. It’s less fancy than it looks. Jeremy’s simply creating a category of all of these data points—all 327 inputs—collecting them into a single file, then writing a code to send out the numbers, all of the data points, and check them against their sources around the world, and then to double-check the data points.
Most of them largely irrelevant. In the grand scheme of predicting conflict, they are modest measures, weighted lightly relative to the handful of big ones: troop movements, demographics (specifically, concentration of males age eighteen to thirty-five), changes in income distribution (the wealth gap), weather, arms shipments insofar as they can be inferred by production and profit from companies in the military-industrial complex, and, powerfully, a “rhetoric” measure. It looks at changing use of language by politicians and media around the world but, with more emphasis, in hot zones. How are powerful “entities,” whether people or media outlets, describing their relationship to the rest of the world? Internet spiders can easily comb through mountains of publicly accessible commentary to look for phrases like “we will never surrender” or “vanquish the enemy” or “date which will live in infamy.” Algorithms Jeremy has developed and forfeited many nights of sleep perfecting can compare them with previous utterances by those politicians or outlets, looking to see if the rhetoric had been more conciliatory, and so forth.
Those are the key variables for understanding more conventional war. But predicting and understanding localized terror attacks, insurrection, jihad, guerrilla warfare that has, in effect, become war in the 21st century, that’s even tougher. It relies on narrowing the search to a region in question, even a city or mountainous area, to the spot where a group of insurgents are focused. It relies on looking at an additional key variable: the formation and concentration of small groups capable of carrying out attacks and creating instability. These are, in fact, mini-armies, the modern analogue to the massive buildup of troops and a war machine before the outbreak of World War II. What, the Soviets never saw it coming?
And Jeremy’s been monkeying around with other ideas, ways to refine the conflict algorithm. Over the last several months, since everyone severed ties with him, he’s been playing with a particularly wild-eyed effort. It’s an attempt to identify a specific person whose actions, or words, are singularly important in igniting conflict. The program measures the relevance of a person’s influence to potential hostility based on that person’s network of connections. It aims to mine the mountains of data on the Internet to connect people to one another, a version of what Facebook does when it draws connections between potential friends.
Jeremy calls it “Program Princip.” It’s named after Gavrilo Princip, the nineteen-year-old who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, igniting World War I. Jeremy’s idea is that he’ll go beyond being able to identify someone like Ferdinand as a potential influence in an impending conflict, to identifying the tiny needles that will ignite the conflict haystack. In some ways, it’s not so far-fetched. A handful of startups have gotten big venture capital to develop software aimed at combing the Internet to determine who is most influential in, say, business or art. So why not conflict? But so far, Jeremy has only beta-tested it, showed no one, only really muttered about it to Emily.
Jeremy finishes his latest iPad query in about twice the time it ordinarily would’ve taken, because he’s got to type so carefully in order not to make mistakes and because he’s tired. He hits “enter” on his command.
Is the data accurate?
If so, what data set changed? When?
He should know in the next six hours. It’s well past 1 a.m. He pulls the iPad to his chest, folds his arms around it. Pulls it back off his chest. He opens a browser. Googles: Evan Tigeson.
Lots of hits. He clicks on the web site for SEER, Evan’s latest thing. And then a mission statement about not merely predicting but driving global trends using proven, patented algorithmic technologies. Yeah, Jeremy thinks, my fucking technologies. He clicks on Evan’s bio. Sees the picture, a black-and-white photo, square features, an almost seductive eyebrow raise undercut with a geeky subtext that Evan can’t bury. To Jeremy, he’s a “51 percenter”; just on the other side of slick. Like so many in the Valley, he’s just shy of fully slick, geeky enough to come across as authentic. This type of businessperson in Silicon Valley is like the do-gooders from college who go to Washington, D.C., and it becomes impossible to tell the difference between their ambitions for the world and for themselves.
Jeremy clicks back to the home page. Sees an infobox that catches his eye. “Sign up for SEER 2013, an initiative for the future.” A conference, the typical way to jump-start a new business, a networking opportunity. He clicks for more information. None comes up, other than a list of current conference partners. It’s impressive, Google, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard. The very biggest tech companies. Slick Peckerhead.
And there’s an email: InfoSEER@seer.com.
Jeremy closes his eyes, pictures one of his last meetings with Evan, at least the last one with any pretense of civility. Down in the Valley offices, where Jeremy visited with increasing infrequency, he ducked into Evan’s glass-walled office to find his partner playing around on the conflict map. At first Jeremy blanched, but then he realized Evan wasn’t actually inside the guts of the algorithm, not changing it or able to, just running various scenarios: what if this business were located here, or this one located there; what if flat-panel television manufacturing plants continued to decline in profit margins, blah, blah.
“What happens if Walmart gets into the widget business? I hear that’s going to be huge,” Jeremy said. “Get that one right and you can move to Atherton.”
Evan managed a smile. He always could. Nothing seemed to ruffle him, something he’d point out in speeches was owed to his upbringing in northern Minnesota, where twenty below was balmy. He’d say that his quaint upbringing in Moorhead, population forty thousand, was like the Internet: if you tried you could connect to everyone, live a more intertwined life.
“This is the future.”
“Business applications are my passion.”
“It’s so much more than that, Jeremy.” A slight hint of edge in his voice. “Look what happened when they developed Ireland and rural China. Huge economic prosperity. What if your machine could be more powerful than you ever even imagined?”
“Whatever, Peckerhead.”
“Don’t take my word for it. Ask Harry.”
This one stopped Jeremy in his tracks, a rare comment for which Jeremy didn’t have a quick retort.
“You’ve been talking to Harry?”
“It’s impolite to have lunch with someone and not talk.”
It was the moment that Jeremy learned that Evan, the business partner he was learning to loathe, had cozied up to Harry. Jeremy became instantly convinced the pair were conspiring behind his back. Maybe they were just two people interested in the world, Emily said, and she tried to broker a peace.
She arranged a picnic, held at the log cabin, a beautiful setting in San Francisco’s Presidio, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. The setting was also intended as symbolic; the Presidio was a former military base turned gorgeous public sanctuary. A place where the machinery of war, its essence, turned decidedly tranquil. And a favorite place of Harry’s to come think big thoughts about peace and conflict.
But so much for symbolism: no sooner had Harry and Jeremy arrived than they went right to war, each firing rhetorical ICBMs turbo-powered by his immense ego, each accusing the other of disloyalty and stupidity. After all Harry’s generosity over the years, Jeremy spat the ultimate insult—all the while, Harry was seeking to discredit Jeremy and his computer so that Harry, and Harry alone, would be the ultimate authority on conflict and its causes. Harry, Jeremy was saying, was little more than a power-hungry conflict-monger himself.
And here Jeremy sits now, in the café, ties severed from Harry, and Evan—and wondering if the two are somehow in league against him.
He stares at Evan’s new web site. He pulls up his phone and scrolls through old emails until he finds a phone number for his ex-partner. He pushes a button to dial. It rings and rings. Voice mail picks up. Jeremy hangs up.
His eyes are glazing over. He closes the browser, pulls the iPad to his chest.
He thinks back to what Evan had said in their last conversation at the office: “Your machine can be more powerful than you ever imagined.”
What had he meant by that? Something Jeremy didn’t realize?
The words and ideas blur and jumble together as Jeremy falls asleep.