Matt Richtel - The Cloud

“Interesting,” Sandy says.

“Why?”

“Usually we don’t get reception here, unless you stand on one foot near the window in the downstairs bathroom.” She smiles at what feels to her like a clever line. “You probably just got a text.”

From the phone’s abbreviated buzz, I’d have to concur. She reaches forward and pulls the phone nearer. It’s a surprisingly painful invasion of my personal space. She clicks with her thumb and she says: “I remember Alan Parsons.”

“You do?”

“That’s what it says.”

She slides the phone toward me. I start to raise my hands.

“Leave them on the table, palms down.” Sandy’s playing a part she once saw on TV. I have a vision of Faith being held somewhere at gunpoint, just like this.

I look down at the screen of the phone. It reads: “I remember Alan Parsons. Call me.”

It’s from Jill Gilkeson, mother of Kathryn, the girl who ran into traffic.

“It’s from a woman who works for Andrew Leviathan. Can I call her?”

“You can’t call anybody.”

She reaches forward and she pulls the phone to her edge of the table. “What’s it mean?”

“It means that another piece of evidence suggests that whatever you’re involved with-whatever we’re both involved with-points to one of the most powerful industrialists in the world.”

“Movie rights.”

I want to throw up. But I’m liking the way the psychology is unfolding; Sandy’s paranoia is giving way to her narcissism, which is the easier of the two of her prevailing traits to manipulate. And she’s feeling taken advantage of by PRISM or her Chinese handlers and humiliated that the world will see her as merely a volunteer teacher. Still, even as I try to keep her gaze, I’m glancing around for some escape hatch-a weapon, sharp object, fire extinguisher, anything I could use to throw or wield, distract, not harm or injure her so much as facilitate my exit.

Rifle trained on me, she takes two steps backward, bumps into the chest-high counter that separates the kitchen from the dining room, feels her way around its rounded edges until she, without taking her eyes from me, winds up in the kitchen. She slides open a drawer, looks down. I reach down at my feet and lift my untied sneaker with my right hand. It’s a hapless projectile I drop when Sandy returns and I see what she’s holding aloft: a black plastic device that’s shaped like a cross between a portable video-game console and a small baseball mitt. It lies in her right palm, attached by a strap that encircles the back of her hand.

“Meet the Juggler.”

My head suddenly goes light. I picture Polly holding up an empty fortune cookie poised to lay something heavy on me. I cough twice, sharply, begetting a dry heave. I raise my head, eyes watery, trying to keep a grip. Reality, memory and mystery have begun to collide. Everything feels scrambled up inside my gray matter, an omelet of imagery and emotion and I can’t seem to separate out the ingredients.

I recall where I’ve seen this device before. Piles of them sat burning at the learning annex on a long cafeteria table.

“It’s obviously a prototype.” Sandy moves to the edge of the counter to my left. She sets down the rifle but not in a way that offers me any particular advantage. She’s ten feet away from me, not close enough. If I tried to attack or flee, she’d have ample time to take aim.

Eyes still on me, she reaches to her left and lifts a second device from the drawer. It’s identical to the first. She slips the second one onto her left hand and she holds up the two Jugglers, palms facing me. I can see now in the center of each device a rectangular video screen slightly larger than the screen on a mobile phone. On each screen shines an image of a juggling ninja, an image I recall seeing on the mural inside the burning learning annex. Above their hands, these cartoonish, macho Ninja juggle tiny little clouds, not balls. What strikes me is the image quality. It’s more vivid than I’ve seen on any television or even movie-theater screen. It’s not just the colors but also the way they seem to leap from the screen like they’re combusting with the air. I can’t take my eyes from them, to the extent I’m wondering if I’m imagining it.

Sandy lightly lifts the device in her right hand. Into the air pops a high-definition image of the number 1. It arcs in the air and it lands on the device in her left hand. She holds up the device in her left hand so that I can see the screen; on it is the number 1. The image has traveled, wirelessly, from one device to the other.

She then starts moving the devices at the same time, as if she were juggling them, though they remain in her palms. But the air starts popping with images of ones and zeroes. They travel in neat little arcs from one device to the next. It’s a digital air show, 21st-century wizardry, something from the hands of a supernatural creature in a Harry Potter story. But even as I stare in wonder, I know this hardly is science fiction. It’s well within the realm of software.

“Data juggling, literally?”

“Have you ever seen anything like it?”

Her hands have stopped moving. In the air, above the devices, a static image appears: ninja jugglers with their hands beneath an arc of tiny clouds.

I shake my head.

“It’s infrared and wireless technology, Bluetooth, twelve hundred hertz image refresh, basic stuff.” She knows she’s got me. “It captures body motion like the Nintendo Wii system. I don’t even know all the technical terms. But this is just the sizzle, not the steak.”

She has grown more impassioned, her mouth slightly agape, lips moist, lost in presentation.

“You should see how excited the kids get.”

“How many kids?”

“Fifty overall, give or take. But only twenty on any given day. A totally captivated group. Taking care of struggling kids is really the wave of the future in forward-thinking communities. This is where we start building the middle class from people who might otherwise get stuck at the bottom rungs.” She’s reciting from a manual. “There’s one kid, Samuel. He’s ten, I think. Robbed a convenience store. Cutey. Loves me. Gets what I’m about. He spends hours with the Jugglers, and so fast. He can whiz through the data.”

She reaches with her right thumb and swipes the side of the device in her palm. She starts moving the device again, literally in a juggling motion. This time, a maze projects into the air; on the end of the maze near her left hand is a virtual piece of cheese while on the other hand is a mouse. She starts moving the fingers of her right hand, prompting the mouse to move in fits and starts through the maze. It’s awkward, either bad design or she’s just not very good. All of a sudden, the device in her right hand beeps. A cat appears and begins chasing the mouse, and is just about to catch its virtual prey in the maze when her left hand beeps.

“Level Two,” she says.

The maze seems to leap such that it now hovers only over the right-hand device. Over the left device, a new maze appears. It’s got a different configuration, this time with a tiny egg on one end of the maze and a dinosaur on the other. She starts glancing back and forth between the mazes, trying to move the creatures simultaneously-the mouse to the cheese and spiky-backed dinosaur to the egg.

Between the two mazes, there’s a bridge, projected about two feet in the air above her hands. A cacophony of beeps commences, marking the appearance of new images. Beep. Mouse. Beep. Cheese. Beep. Cat. Beep. Dinosaur. Beep. Bigger dinosaur chasing smaller one chasing egg. She lowers her hands, prompting the images to waver, then disappear.

“Samuel can switch and switch and switch. He’s a genius. He’s going to run the twenty-first century.” She pauses and laughs. “Just so long as there are no food trays.”