Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

“You’re going down, you son of a bitch,” Denny said.

A moment later, Jackie was sitting up, refusing to cry.

“I saw him follow you,” Denny said. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, ” he added, looking at her terror, and reached to touch her shoulder and she let him. On his phone, he dialed 911 and told Adam not to move a goddamned muscle.

In Jackie’s first act after her salvation, she took Denny’s phone from him and pressed end to sever the distress call. If there was one thing she knew, it was this: she’d rather solve things herself. All of it.

Aweek later, she returned to her job. Adam had been let go by the company, nothing more said about it. She had news for Denny, big news.

“I figured it out,” she whispered. Then went into the Basement in the Google X building. They sat at the conference table and Jackie spread out the various data sets comparing memory retention to Internet speeds, pixelation, frame rates, and so on and so forth.

“Tell me,” Denny said. He paused. “Are you getting enough sleep?”

She dismissed the question. “What’s the common theme?” she asked him rhetorically.

“Was it the thing with Adam?” He ignored her question.

She grit her teeth so hard that it hurt in the back of her skull. She kept her hands in her pockets, so as not to show the little scars where she’d chewed on her fingers. No, she shook her head.

“I have your back, Jackie. Always. Adam, he was socially awkward, sure, but harmless, right? Trust me, it’s taken care of.”

A deep breath, one, two, three . She counted. She discovered herself smiling. She was so sure that Denny was full of shit now and it was nice to be sure of something.

“Of course,” she said. “What’s the common theme, Denny?”

He shrugged. “That’s what we can’t figure out.”

It struck Jackie that Denny had used the pronoun “we” but she ignored it. She took a red pen and circled some of the numbers.

“It’s so obvious that I’m surprised I’d not seen it earlier.”

He looked blankly at her. It wasn’t obvious to him.

“All the transmissions where the memory changed—they’re wireless. All the ones where it didn’t change, or very little, were hardwired Internet connections. Some study rooms used wireless, some wired, some either or. We didn’t think it made a difference.”

“But I thought it had to do with speeds or something like that?”

“Of course, so did I.” She tried not to exclaim it excitedly but that’s how she felt, like she really had pieced something together. “We were looking for some subtlety instead of the big fat thing under our noses.”

Denny picked at his beard and looked at the pieces of paper.

“Doesn’t that leave us little further along than we were before? I mean, I don’t want to diminish your finding. It’s great. It’s just that we’re still stuck not knowing what circumstances lead to what outcomes.”

She didn’t answer him right away. She didn’t want to rebuff his silly objection; of course this was a revelation. She also wanted to keep some of her ideas to herself. If some of her budding hypotheses were right, this was explosive stuff. Something was being triggered inside the brain by the telecommunications transmissions. If she was right, it wasn’t just Wi-Fi connections but, broadly, radio transmissions. When they were sent in certain bursts, certain patterns, these ubiquitous transmissions had the impact of putting people into a kind of catatonic state. It left her totally freaked out and it was also, perversely, somewhat obvious; the human brain was, fundamentally, fueled by electrical impulses. It was how cells moved information. Now, she—or the people she was working for—had muddled into a discovery about how the bombardment of the brain by certain pulses could distort neurological activity.

The more Jackie thought about it, the more it had her rethinking the entire way people were interacting with their devices. They would stare at the screen, slack-jawed. She’d just assumed that resulted from the capturing of their attention. Now she was thinking about it differently. The electrical impulses might be stuttering their brains. And when those impulses were “perfected,” so to speak, when they were sent in bursts, it had the effect of capturing the brain altogether. Putting them on hold. Hijacking a moment of reality, erasing it, in a way.

“Let’s keep at it,” she said to Denny in as noncommittal a way as possible, declining to elaborate on her theories.

She couldn’t read Denny’s face. Maybe he suspected she had figured out more than she was letting on or maybe he wasn’t sure to trust her just as she had no clear handle on him—this man who had hand-plucked her from a class, shown her the bowels of a secret project, saved her from a stalker, but also was not coming fully clean with her about what the hell they were doing.

She had every intention of figuring it out.

Less than a week later, sitting over an uneaten frozen pizza in the middle of the night, it hit her. She understood how it all worked. Then, almost as instantly, she understood the power of it, and maybe why they’d kept it from her. This wasn’t something you shared with just anyone. Holy shit —she stood up so quickly with revelation that she tripped over the back of her chair.

Denny lived like a tech millionaire—in a modest one-bedroom Mountain View condo sparsely appointed and littered with take-out food wrappers. Blackout shades over his bedroom window let him sleep late—engineer’s hours—and helped keep out the noise from El Camino Real, a blazing thoroughfare two blocks north. This was what $1.3 million bought you in this market. His clock said 3:14 a.m., and he slept with earplugs and eyeshades in the pitch black.

Jackie sat next to the bed in a chair.

“Ahem,” she said.

Denny squirmed and turned. In the red light of the clock’s digital numbers, she made out the outlines of a small pill bottle. Benadryl, she surmised, the over-the-counter nightcap of champions. It was dulling Denny’s senses. Jackie tapped on his bulky shoulder. He stirred, made our her foreign shape, bolted up.

“Jesus!”

“Nope, just Jackie,” she said.

He swallowed, trying to make sense of it.

“Jackie of Nazareth,” she said. “I like the sound of it.”

“What are you—”

“Savior complex.”

“Jackie, what time is it?” He knew, he could see, but he was trying to make sense of this. “Turn on the light.”

“Let’s leave it like this,” Jackie said. “Darkens the mood.”

She knew the darkness left open the possibility in his mind that she was armed or something. Clearly he wasn’t all that concerned: he reached over to the nightstand and clicked on a lamp. Dim light took over the small, square room. Denny studied her. She wore a gray sweatshirt, zipped up high, and a Giants cap.

“Is everything okay, Jackie?”

“More or less. I’ve come to talk about Lantern.”

“I don’t mean to be glib but can it wait until morning?”

“It’s waited long enough.”

He ran his hand over his hair, pushing the sleeping mask off, then blew air out, a kind of silent concession. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

They sat at a dark, round wood-laminate table off the kitchen and drank from “Google” mugs. Low sounds of a melodic symphony performance leaked from the Google Home device on the near end of the kitchen counter. They sat quietly for a few minutes, Jackie happy to let Denny figure out how to express himself, content that she held a lot of cards and he knew it.

“You could’ve asked me during daylight hours,” he finally said.