Matt Richtel - The Cloud

“So I probably shouldn’t have let on.”

“Tell me what it says and, like I said, I’ll fill in the rest.”

“What do I have to lose?”

“Honestly? Nothing I can calculate.”

I tell him most of what I’ve surmised, concluding that the Juggler, scheduled for imminent distribution in China, slows development of kids’ frontal lobes, making them more impulsive, less able to focus, indulgent like children years their junior. “When it comes to frontal lobe development, age ten is the new seven and seven is the new five.”

“See, that’s much better wordplay.”

I tell him I don’t understand the mechanism that allows the technology to take a neurological toll. After all, I note, the Juggler doesn’t seem much different from a lot of the high-intensity phones and game machines.

“I’m not entirely sure myself of the mechanism,” he says.

As a matter of substance, it’s not helpful. But it is an admission I’m on the right track.

“May I pace?” I ask.

He nods.

I walk on the thin area rug past his desk, pivot, make another pass. I tell him that I suspect Gils Simons, his old chief operating officer, passed the technology to the Chinese through the High-Tech Alliance. I pause from my walk and look at him, struck by something.

“You and Gils aren’t exactly on the same page.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Different henchmen.”

“Go on.”

“You’re tracking me with the tall bald guy. Shiny head makes him tough to miss.” He starts to ask who I mean, and then just nods, a silent appreciation or, maybe, endorsement of the description. I continue: “He, Gils, has a closer relationship with the Chinese guy with the crooked smile.”

Leviathan waves his hand, urging me to continue.

I tell him I suspect that Alan Parsons learned of the plot and tried to blackmail the group. But, I say, Parsons couldn’t quite piece it together and somehow needed my help. I’m walking again, a bit lost in my own thoughts. This is where things get shaky for me. And, in addition, I’m not quite sure how to play this next bit. Do I come right out and say that I know about the death of Kathryn Gilkeson? And the recent suicide of the kid at Los Altos High?

My reservation, I realize, is I don’t want to provoke him unnecessarily. I may be going gently into that good night but I’m not going to actually shove myself.

“May I go out on a limb?”

“It’s a bit late to ask.”

“You’ve hated authoritarian regimes since you were a boy. You want to poison a generation of Chinese kids, I guess, as a way to make a political statement. But it just doesn’t seem like you, to be honest.”

Smirk. I’m not sure how to read it.

“Fill in the blanks, Andrew. First tell me about the girl,” he says.

“The girl.”

“Cut the crap. The girl. The one who died.”

Something in the room begins to change. I’m watching the famous Leviathan composure drain from his face. In its place, a look I’ve never seen from him and, rarely, from anyone. It’s the sheer falling away of a mask. The cheek muscles go limp, eyes droop, a cascade of cells rinses downward like gravity or the final layer of base makeup washed from the face of the clown.

“The girl,” I whisper.

He rests his hand on the gun. “Tell me what you know.”

Ahot flash seizes me and an image of death creeps into my mind’s eye. It’s the stick-thin doctor in blue scrubs telling me that Polly will not make it. “Sit here as long as you like,” she said when I looked at her with shock and silence.

Oddly, I felt for her at that moment, not me, or Polly or Isaac.

And in this moment, I feel a bit like the doctor, in the position of delivering painful news. For a journalist, this is supposed to be exhilarating, the gotcha moment. But I’ve never particularly liked the handful of times when I move from discovering a truth to confronting a bad actor with it. It’s beyond anti-climactic. It’s sad. The death of someone’s dark dream. And my own realization that my success in solving a mystery, the arrival at some analytical Mecca, has not made me whole.

“She ran into the street,” I begin.

I tell him what the girl’s mother told me. I tell him what I only suspect: that the girl had been among a handful of test subjects he’d used to develop the precursor technology to the Juggler. The girl must have grown increasingly impulsive, I speculate, unable to focus, and then one day the technology pushed her still-fragile frontal lobe over the edge.

“She acted like someone with the brain of a three-year-old, running in front of the Volvo. Maybe she saw a dog across the street she wanted to touch, or some blinking lights.” I pause, then add: “I can only imagine how much more dangerous the commercial version of the technology will be.”

He stares at me.

“Care to comment?”

He stands. He picks up the gun. It hangs in his hand. He turns his back to me and he walks to the window. Below, tens of thousands of houselights burn, creating a collective glow to rival the darkness.

He extends the hand with the gun at the window. He’s pointing slightly to his left, in the vicinity of Menlo Park.

“You can see it,” he says.

“What?”

“That’s why I built this place.”

I start walking to the window. He turns and I jump back, wondering if he’s about to shoot me. Wondering too: maybe I’m not ready to die?

He turns back to the window. “You’re right: I hate authoritarianism. I’ll give you that.”

He’s switched topics on me. I’m still not sure what he was pointing at but he appears to want to take the conversation in another direction and he’s the one with the gun.

“Hence the beef with the Chinese kids.”

He shakes his head.

“Nope. Will you grant me some literary license? About literature? About Orwell and Huxley.”

I shrug, not following. Is he going crazy?

“George Orwell and Aldous Huxley depicted distinctly different views of how the modern world could crush the human spirit. Orwell presaged the mortal dangers of authoritarian regimes. Roughly speaking, it was the kind of thing the Eastern Bloc represented.”

“Or China.”

“But in Brave New World , Huxley identified the problem not so much as the state but our own frailties. We could succumb to our own ravenous desire for entertainment, truth subverted to triviality. We could become awash in bells and whistles.”

“Okay.”

“It’s been said many times in a very flattering light that I created one of the Next Big Things. But I created the Brave New World.”

I consider it.

“The Juggler entertains us into a stupor?”

“It’s so much worse than that.” He turns to me. A deep-set wrinkle like a river on a map trails across his forehead. “The technology I helped build, the algorithms meant to serve us have tapped our worst demons, our most primitive impulses. In that respect they are so much more powerful than I ever dreamed.”

“You wanted this?”

“No. God no.”

He gestures again out the window with a jut of his chin.

“I’m not sure where you’re pointing.”

“See the tall building, with the smattering of lights on the upper floor? It’s west of the Dumbarton Bridge and a bit to the left.”

“It looks like a law firm?”

“That’s the one. Now look two blocks further left.”

I see a smear of residences. It dawns on me.

“That’s the street Kathryn Gilkeson ran into.”

Silence. Then: “When I built this house, a year later, my dear wife couldn’t understand why. We have plenty of space. I’ve never been a particularly materialistic person and certainly not fixated on real estate.”