Matt Richtel - The Cloud

“Sorry, I’m not following.”

“They had three kids who jumped in front of a train. Anthony, I think that was his name, he was the first. Then two copy cats.”

“Anthony Gearson.”

“Please don’t bother them.”

“I promise.” Deep exhale. “No one should lose a child.”

“Do a nice article. Andrew has given his life to make the world a better place.”

“I will.”

Click .

I sit bewildered, five minutes, ten. The phone rings.

I answer and hear: “It’s Doc.” I don’t respond, uncertain which ghost this voice represents. “Doc Jefferson. Sorry it took so long to get back to you. It’s been crazy, right?” Then friendly laughter. It’s the warden from Twin Peaks juvenile hall, the nominal administrator of the learning annex that went kaboom. “You’re one hell of a journalist.”

“How’s that?”

“Snooping around before an explosion. Great instincts.”

He knew I was there. Must have heard my name from the firefighter.

“I’m not sure what you were doing there but you nearly got an incredible scoop,” he says.

Revelation forthcoming?

“Our diesel pump exploded. We’re going after the pump company. Cost us our whole computer lab but it’s going to be rebuilt-and NOT at city cost. You can quote me on that.”

“They were experimenting on those kids.”

“Who?”

“PRISM, Sandy. .”

“The reality-TV gal? Are you kidding me? We’re committed to training our young folks and we’re going to get right back to it. We’ll have a new computing lab built in no time. Everything else you need is in the press release.”

I’m mute.

“Gotta run,” Doc Jefferson says. “Stay in touch, big guy.”

Forty minutes later, I’m passing Peet’s Coffee on University Avenue. It’s the same place where I met Andrew a few days earlier when I wasn’t sure whether he was friend or foe. Now I’m sure.

It’s nearly six o’clock, darkness falling in that eerily temperate Palo Alto way, the suburbs 2.0.

I park and turn off my phone. I pull my laptop and Bullseye’s laptop from the trunk. I find a spot inside Peet’s with a free power outlet. On the table next to me, three Stanford MBA candidates speak in a whispered shrill about an idea they have, to bring “greater efficiencies” to television programming guides by making them more accessible through mobile phones.

It’s not quite time for the confrontation. It’s time to set it up.

I plug in Bullseye’s laptop, the one I believe is not being used to track my whereabouts, take a huge slug of acidic coffee, and start writing.

B ullseye, please don’t read this unless you haven’t heard from me for a few days. Seriously. And if you do hear from me, delete this. I’m likely to want to refine it. I should never write anything for public consumption when this heavily caffeinated.

Bullet point: Andrew Leviathan, Silicon Valley icon and tech and education investors, has in parallel and in secret been developing technology with dangerous neurological implications.

Bullet point: Over the last decade, he’s built the engine for a handheld device called the Juggler. It’s technology that marries the hologram with the Nintendo Wii, using motion capture and vivid high-definition imagery to turn multitasking into a high-octane video game and, ostensibly, a high-tech learning tool.

Bullet point: It’s about to be sold in China. The marketing of the device will promise to teach kids how to become better at switching among tasks. It’ll prepare them to be 21st — century navigators of data, supertaskers who can switch from one mental challenge to the next, ostensibly giving them overlapping capabilities. The Juggler will allow kids to balance two or three or who knows how many tasks. Email, PowerPoint, Skype, video production, brain games! Don’t let your kids be left behind! Let them master the cloud!

Bullet Point: The cloud is where we keep all this data. The cloud is a complex array of millions of servers scattered across the globe, congregated in data centers, connected through wires running under oceans and through mountains. Servers, with their multiple processors, can ably juggle data. The human brain cannot. In fact, when we try to juggle, we may crash.

Bullet point: In actuality, the Juggler will retard the development of kids’ frontal lobes. This slow-developing portion located right behind our foreheads traditionally serves as the control tower for our actions, the thing that makes us human by allowing us to establish dominion, if you will, over our impulses. If someone feels a tickling sensation in his nose while standing onstage during a wedding, his frontal lobe may keep him from sticking a digit in a nostril to scratch it; if someone’s senses come alive at the smell of doughnuts, her frontal lobe might help her choose a healthier alternative. If someone sets about to write a business plan or a love letter or a book but keeps being inundated by the ping of a cell phone, the frontal lobe helps keep his brain focused on the longer-term goal, for better or for worse.

Sometimes, there is no better.

If someone sees a bright color or flash of light across a street and feels an impulse to run to explore it, the frontal lobe helps her pause and say: wait, am I supposed to run into the street?

That, I believe, is what happened to Kathryn Gilkeson. Somehow, in some way that Andrew Leviathan has to answer for, her heavy use of the early Juggling technology eroded her impulse control. She acted like a child whose sensory impulses overrode not just her training but the maturity level her frontal lobe should otherwise have achieved.

Bullet point: Kathryn Gilkeson may not be the only victim. There were other children, at least one. Evidence suggests that Anthony Gearson, a young man from Los Altos High School who recently took his own life, may also have suffered from long-term effects of early Juggler technology.

I pause in my writing. I drink more jet fuel. I am appreciating my sudden focus. I attribute it to the fading effects of concussion and the increasing ones from caffeine but also something else: when I’m writing, I’m less susceptible to all the outside forces, insulated somehow from the attentional whiplash my curiosity compels.

I almost begin to type again, when I’m struck by a strange parallel between the effects of the Juggler and my concussion. The last few days, with my frontal lobe not at full strength, I’ve acted with, even for me, intense impulse, abandon, outright stupidity. It’s possible that my erratic behavior helped uncover a conspiracy but also highly possible I could’ve gotten much of this information without running headlong into the apartment building of a dead man, dark alleys, fists, shotguns, and fires. I’ve been in my own neurological cloud. Waxing a bit: Is that where we’re sending our children? Under the auspices of helping them rule the modern world?

Bullet point: I hypothesize that Leviathan perfected the Juggler technology, and then decided to export it to China. Why? I can only, for now, speculate: he hated the authoritarian Cold War regime that nearly had him executed and so he wants to harm China, another, albeit much less authoritarian, non-democracy.

Bullet point: He got Gils Simons, his former (???) business partner (current silent partner???), to be his point man in contact with the Chinese through companies involved with the China-U.S. High-Tech Alliance. Gils sold it to his Chinese contacts as a great new device for kids. He took on a hapless thug named Steven who helped deal with Chinese contacts and small-time errands here. For instance, he hired Sandy Vello, whose work he’d seen on a reality-TV show and who he naively felt could appeal to parents, to volunteer to teach multitasking at the Twin Peaks learning annex but where they actually tested the latest versions of the Juggler. See: blown-up learning annex and destruction of evidence.