Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

“Not much to look at,” Jackie said.

And, simultaneously, she and Denny said, “I guess that’s the idea.” The idea being: don’t draw attention to this operation.

Denny smiled. “Great minds…”

“What about that?” Jackie said. She was looking out the left side of the Tesla window, noticing that farther down the road sat another building, this one concrete, almost bunker-looking. Next to it a long stretch of paved road, like a runway. And looming over the whole thing a giant metal dish, very clearly a powerful antenna.

“Have you ever seen anything so subtle?” Denny said, and laughed. “The supersecret Google space project. Not so supersecret, right?”

It was well known that Google was playing around with low-cost ways to get into space. They weren’t alone in this respect. Amazon, too, was getting into the act, and Facebook, Elon Musk, Richard Branson. The stated reason was that these companies wanted to explore the future of space travel, even for tourists. But Jackie was no dope; she and others who liked to read tea leaves suspected it had more to do with the future of much more immediate businesses, like telecommunications and even Internet commerce. If the companies could get low-cost, high-power satellites into orbit, they could become hubs to control Internet access, information, drones, who knew what else.

“Are they launching rockets?” she asked Denny.

“Satellites, I suspect,” he said. “Most of that is done in Florida.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Keep it between us. That’s not my area; this is, and I try to keep my nose out of stuff that could fuck with my ability to cash in my stock options.”

She felt relieved again. She’d asked about the rockets as a test, hoping he’d be frank with her. Opening the car door, she brushed bread crumbs off her lap onto the dusty ground and felt a wave of satisfaction. She was getting let into the inner sanctum at Google, though that was secondary to the bond she was solidifying with Denny.

She stepped out of the car and felt a gust of desert wind and she shivered. She hated wind. It reminded her of uncertainty, self-doubt, the feeling that little things could throw you off if you weren’t anchored. She pictured an invasive memory: her mother shouting at her father, her father shouting back, the pair nose to nose on the balcony, little Jackie sitting on the couch, looking over its back, feeling the breeze through the sliding door. Marissa sucking on a bottle Jackie had made for her. Wind brought memories, guilt. Wind smelled like sweat and shampoo, it sounded like anger. Jackie put her hand to her face and wiped.

For an instant, she thought about the fateful day in Nepal, nearly dying, being saved, becoming determined to live a more directed life, to not just do the right thing but figure out how to do the right thing. She thought of these moments as the yin and yang of her life: her terror, paralysis, impotence in dealing with her parents, years of self-doubt, and then a salvation and a determination to figure it out.

“Everything okay?” Denny asked.

“Bad cranberry burp.”

“Let’s go inside.”

Denny used a card key to gain them entrance to the larger of the two metal-framed buildings. Cool air greeted them, the refrigerated feel of a server farm. Inside, not racks of powerful computers. Just a few desks and a Ping-Pong table. A dartboard hung against a far wall. To Jackie’s right, a kitchenette. An industrial-size case of Red Bull still in the Costco shrink wrap sat on top of the refrigerator. It all looked like Silicon Valley lite.

Only two of the cubicles were occupied. From one of them, a man looked up. He had a scruffy goatee poking out from his hoodie. From the other cubicle stood a petite woman in a too-tight white shirt and dark pants and short-cropped hair. She looked to Jackie like a waiter—in the marines.

“These are our two Alexes,” Denny said. “Alex 1 and Alex 2, say hello to Jackie.”

“Hello, Jackie,” they simultaneously drawled but seemed mostly disinterested. Then the female Alex said: “And then there were three.”

“That’s right, three now,” Denny said. “So one of you geniuses will have to figure out how to divide the Red Bulls by thirds.”

“I only work with imaginary numbers,” cracked the male Alex.

“You’ll love it here,” Denny said and took a sharp angle to the right. Jackie followed him through the building to a staircase with metal railings and cement stairs. “Where the action happens,” Denny said in a low voice.

“They’re really both named Alex?”

“What’re the odds, but, yep.”

Denny had also explained in the Tesla what happened below. Below, testing rooms where Google sought to dial in this Lantern discovery it had made. The discovery, in essence, was that Internet users experienced sharply improved rates of memory recall depending on the speed, frame rate, and also the frequency of the delivery of information.

“Like subliminal messages?” Jackie had mused. “What Alfred Hitchcock did in Psycho .”

“Much more sophisticated and less well understood. We just know it seems to work.”

He had pulled up four images on the Tesla screen of the hippocampus, a crescent-shaped part of the brain central to memory recall. The images were taken from real-time magnetic imaging scans of a twenty-two-year-old female study subject. During the tests, the woman had been using her phone or an iPad. The tests were complex because the study subject had to look at and interact with the devices while situated in an MRI machine. The images that Denny displayed in the Tesla were similar except that some images were shaded more than others. The greater the shading, Denny explained, the more of the young woman’s hippocampus had been engaged at the time that the imaging had taken place. Where it was less shaded, less of the woman’s brain was engaged.

Jackie could see where this was all headed. “So during some of her online interactions, she remembered more than she did in some other cases.”

“That too,” Denny said. The images, he explained, didn’t necessarily mean that the subject remembered less, or more—because images can lie. But in this particular case, the images hadn’t lied at all. Far from it. After the study subject was removed from the machine, she had taken tests to see how much of her online interactions she remembered. In the same conditions in which her hippocampus had lit up most, she had the strongest recall.

“Amazing, actually,” Denny said. “Like she had eidetic memory.”

“Photographic.”

“Right.”

“So what made the difference on what she remembered?”

Denny shook his head. “We’re not sure. We were playing with placement of information, streams, also speeds and frame rates. We can’t quite get a handle on it. Enter the inimitable Jackie Badger.”

It was why they brought her here. Still, she couldn’t figure out why it was such a secret. Of course, Google would be working on getting users to remember and share more information. It was in the damn annual report, their entire raison d’être, if you knew how to read the thing.

At the bottom of the stairs, Denny used his key and did a retinal scan and a door clicked open. On the other side, a long hallway, much more nicely appointed than the upstairs, even bespoke floor runners and wood trim near the bottom. Odd, Jackie thought. A doorway marked each side every ten feet or so with keypads beside each one. The quiet rectitude of the place reminded Jackie of the psychiatrist’s offices her parents wanted her to see after she got caught hacking into the junior high school computer system to send a fake e-mail on behalf of an instructor who Jackie felt had been rude to students. It had been that confusing, interim period in Jackie’s life where she was playing with boundaries: What was the right thing to do? When should she intervene or participate in the world, and how? She thought maybe she was looking for a moral compass. But, later, she discovered a different term for what she was seeking: situational awareness. It was a term of art she read about in a psychology class that applied to how people pay attention to their surroundings. Some had terrific situational awareness, like pilots. People who had to be aware, think fast, make good decisions. She still wasn’t sure she had it but she was getting there.