The Doomsday Equation Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Meredith

  All my love

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Matt Richtel

  Credits

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  SALAM, YOUR MAJESTY.”

  The woman taps on the quadruple-paned glass, thick enough to swallow her whisper and the greeting of her index finger.

  The beast behind the glass does not stir. It is rolled on its side, heavy eyes closed, heavy paws stretched out, lazy with confidence, even in sleep.

  A hat pulled tightly over the woman’s short black hair does little to protect her from the predawn chill. Nor detract from her radiance. From the pocket of a black wool knee-length coat, she pulls a hard-earned skeleton key.

  Without taking her eyes from the animal, she takes three steps to her left. She stops in front of the tall bars of the cage door. She inhales the scent of damp fur and old meat. She inserts the key. The lion twitches.

  She thinks: San Francisco is supposed to be so humane. A zoo is a zoo. She turns the key. The lion lifts its head. It draws open an eyelid. Blinks.

  The woman slightly bows her head. “Guardians of the City. At your service.” Her accent carries generations of migration, ports of call, millennia of weariness and duty.

  The lion flops over, facing the woman now, but still in repose. The woman smiles. She understands this to be the most docile time of the lion’s day. She pushes open the door.

  The lion springs. The door slams against its liberator.

  “Salam,” she expels the word with a laugh.

  Feels razor claws reaching her through the bars.

  Salam, she thinks. At last. Peace.

  CHAPTER 1

  TO DO.

  Jeremy rolls the pencil in his fingers. Lets the tip fall on a jagged scrap of paper. He looks at the words. To do.

  He hears Emily’s voice. How about cleaning up your desk?

  Next to the paper scrap an iPad rests on two books, Superstring Theory: Volume I, and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Dating. In their shadow, on a rectangular black mat covering the blond wood desk, sit two cell phones. A sweetness floats in the air, owing to something starting to turn in a Chinese food takeout container over the small fridge.

  Jeremy squeezes the pencil, feels its rubbery vulnerability. It could snap. He flips it to the floor, where it lands beside a crumpled Inc. magazine with a headshot Jeremy had nearly deigned to smile for.

  How’s that for clean, Em?

  With his right thumb, he rubs circles on the tender spot just inside his left shoulder, suppresses a wince. He closes his eyes. When he opens them again, a long moment later, he finds his gaze aimed at the computer’s on/off switch. It’s right beneath the second from the left of four computer monitors, the one with the map.

  To do.

  Options: Jog; spend the last sixty-five dollars on clothes or a haircut; pick up a thirty-something subverting hunger for children into some exotic erotic position? In the morning, maybe he’d put too fine a point on her transparency to find out if truth inspires yelling or tears.

  Nobody, Emily tells him, is less qualified to predict and prevent armed conflict, war. “It’s like M&Ms crusading against childhood obesity,” she said.

  She had pointed this out in their last conversation—not the last last conversation but the one before that. They were parked in front of Walgreens and she also pointed out that, in the prior few days alone, Jeremy had proved himself smarter than (and infuriated): a former congressman turned big-name Silicon Valley investor; his former business partner; the guy behind the counter at Walgreens.

  “One percent hydrocortisone is not the same as 0.05 percent hydrocortisone. He works at a pharmacy, Em. It’s like a zookeeper not knowing the difference between a snake and a bird.”

  “Maybe. But you needn’t have said so. A guy at Walgreens looking at me and smiling is not the same as the guy being a jackass.”

  “It’s bad parents.”

  “What?”

  “Stupid, lazy parents cause childhood obesity, not M&Ms. It’s one of many flaws with the simile.”

  Silence creeps heavy through the front seat, then Emily says: “I’m a world-class mom.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  Jeremy shakes his head and looks at the monitors. The one on the far left has all the data, scrolling, 327 precious inputs constantly updating; next to it, the map with the countries pulsing mostly green with a few yellows and oranges, Libya and Syria; then the magic, the genius, the monitor that shows what it all means, what all the data adds up to; and then the fourth monitor, the one with online Scrabble. It’s the one he’s paid attention to lately.

  He scans back across the screens and sees beneath them the off button for the whole contraption, and quickly averts his eyes.

  They fall on a picture of a boy wearing overalls and a grin. Transparent tape holds the four-by-six, unframed, against the base of the second monitor, a faint thumbprint smudge beside the bookcase next to the boy. Words pop into Jeremy’s head, skirt across his mind’s eye. “My bad, bud,” but he swallows the whisper that would carry contrition. He looks at his iPhone, Emily and Kent a call away.

  A crunching noise pulls him from his thoughts, sounds he hears before realizing the door has opened with a visitor.

  “You move well for a big guy.” He turns to find Nik. “But your snacks precede you.”

  Nik stands in uniform, his lumpy corpus—six foot two and 260 pounds—loosely covered in a T-shirt and sweatpants. A thick brushed metal cross hangs around his neck. Over his shoulder hangs a pregnant leather gym bag, a sweatshirt poking through the zipper.

  “Go look for a job,” Jeremy says.

  Nik raises a greasy eyebrow. Nik, short for PeaceNik, christened Perry Dutton, nicknamed by Jeremy not long after he wandered into the Oxford lab and joined the team. Now he’s the last loyalist, the final Templar, a deckhand waiting with the captain for the last part of the stern to sink. Jeremy imagines Nik goes to the little boxing gym where he spends his off- hours, suits up, then lets people hit him and never falls down.


  Emily, while she likes Nik—who doesn’t?—says he’s a man so devoid of Earthly ambition that Jeremy can’t possibly conflict with him. Still has a clamshell flip phone. And Evan once joked that if Jeremy was Richard Nixon, Nik was like that muted, bizarre version of his wife, Pat, in the famed Checkers Speech, named for the Nixon dog. Nik’s got a mutt, a big, plodding white girl called Rosa, slobbery jowls, droopy eyes, currently lumbering behind him, loyal to Nik as Nik is to Jeremy.

  “You’ve got unopened mail,” Nik says.

  Jeremy half nods. “Jesus can’t save you from disodium guanylate.”

  Nik pops a Cool Ranch Dorito into his mouth, turns and plods away, Rosa in tow.

  Jeremy notices that slid beneath the door is the unopened mail. Bills or something from Evan’s lawyers.

  Jeremy rubs the spot inside his shoulder. He stands and pushes away from the desk.

  OUTSIDE THE OFFICE, on the waterfront, Jeremy ignores after-work commuter foot traffic and the rules and steps over the railing.

  He sits on a concrete slab beside an iron boat tie. Waves lap the slab, splashing the bottom of Jeremy’s feet.

  Genius was supposed to pay off better than this.

  His paper, “Conditions of Conflict,” published in the Journal of Dispute Settlement, was seminal in its combination of two disciplines: computer science and history. Over eight years of doctoral study at Oxford, Jeremy used original algorithms to break down the conditions of the world before, during and immediately after conflicts from World War I to Vietnam to the Rum Rebellion in 1808, the Pastry War with France and Mexico and on and on.

  To crunch the numbers, Jeremy persuaded the CS department to lend him hours of time with the supercomputer. Later, Jeremy managed to streamline the algorithms so that he no longer needed the supercomputer and could instead run them on regular-strength desktop computers jerry-rigged to perform multiple streams of concurrent parallel processing.

  At first, a prestigious journal called Peace had rejected Jeremy’s paper (not on merit so much as on charges he sought to intimidate a peer reviewer), so Jeremy approached the Journal of Dispute Settlement, a decidedly not prestigious journal and a competitor of Peace. It had the desired effect—at least in the academic community. How, people wondered, had Peace failed to land research that, within days, would generate a mountain of media and, within weeks, millions in prospective investment dollars? He was invited to travel the world to lecture, talk about conflict, how to avoid it.

  There were media mentions, and plenty of cheap turns of phrase. Popular Mechanics asked hyperbolically if Jeremy Stillwater had invented the Digital Messiah.

  The editor of Peace sent a congratulatory email to Jeremy, who responded by proposing a resignation letter that the editor send to his bosses.

  The editor got the last laugh.

  Something catches Jeremy’s eye. A boat, The San Francisco Experience, brimming with tourists.

  Jeremy looks down at the water. It doesn’t look that cold.

  The investors insisted he take on Evan. That’s just Silicon Valley. The creative types get paired with the money types, the marketers who spin gold into a lot of gold. But at a price of input, especially on the marketing.

  Jeremy grudgingly admitted some of Evan’s ideas were good. Evan came up with the map with the hot spots lit up, changing with the changing conditions of the world, changing by the minute. On a typical day, Libya, yellow and mellowing; Iraq the same, but tinged with orange; Iran and Syria, a light, almost pulsing orange; central Africa deeper orange still, inflaming but not in flames; the cool blue of Norway suggesting terminal calm; and, always, the 38th parallel fluctuating between a deeper orange and red. Next to each hot or warm spot, a gauge, like the gas gauge in a car, suggesting the direction in which conflict is headed. Lots of arrows headed near north, meaning: conflict ongoing or looming.

  The map had people at hello. The second that customers or investors saw the map, they were ready to listen.

  Then Jeremy could talk about the data, a flurry of hundreds of inputs pouring in from around the globe. Specifically, 327 inputs. Oil and food prices, temperatures and tides, population density, migrations from rural areas to cities and back, birthrates, election cycles, high-level executive movements, stock market indices, news reports and a “rhetoric” measure, which reports the language used in speeches by major political and business leaders and in headlines from newspapers and blogs around the world.

  More eyes lighting up. Can it really work?

  “The data, that’s monkey junk,” Jeremy would say. With the Internet, anyone can collect data. “It doesn’t mean anything without this.”

  And then he would talk about the algorithm. It took all that data, all the inputs, and collated the incoming data, mashing and weighing it, giving it relative value. A change in leadership in a relatively stable country is valued at X, while a change in an unstable country equals X-plus-some-quotient. Prices for commodities or oil get a baseline given weight that is subject to changes in value depending on time of year and other variables, like precipitation; it is astounding, Jeremy thought, how much the weather dictates the likelihood that certain conditions will lead to conflict, because, when it comes down to it, invaders and attackers prefer clear skies. See: D-Day.

  Sometimes, he’d get applause.

  Part of him knew he was a show pony, a hub for the spokes of idealistic thinkers about the nascent field of data-driven peace and conflict studies, someone awesome to invite to and point out at parties.

  Now Evan is trying to sue Jeremy’s pants off to get access to the guts of the algorithm. He was never interested in conflict stuff. Jeremy knew it. Evan, PowerPoint Peckerhead, as Jeremy calls him (not completely without affection), and the investors wanted to apply the technology to predicting what would unfold in the world of business.

  They wanted to sell it as a consulting tool to help Verizon understand how telecommunication was likely to change or to McDonald’s to presage the next trends in food production or consumption. They wanted real, predictable revenue streams.

  And who could blame them? It didn’t take a supercomputer and a genius man-child to realize that investors make money by helping companies and other investors make money, not by predicting the outbreak, length and nature of a conflict in some island in the Sea of Cortez, or where-the-fuck-ever, as one of the big Valley investors had put it.

  Besides, there was another problem, a kind of basic one. Jeremy’s fancy invention didn’t appear to be actually working for its stated purpose: predicting conflict.

  He looks down at the water. He stands and raises himself over the iron barrier, and looks into the murky distance.

  He glances back at the water. Not that cold. Not for a computer.

  CHAPTER 2

  BACK IN THE office, Jeremy sits. He checks the two phones, the iPhone and the other one. Same old story. Nothing, as it has been for more than two weeks, excepting unrequited badgers from the law firm of Pierce & Sullivan, and a call from a debt collector with a wrong number looking for Song Yung Li. With that one, Jeremy played along for three minutes until, just for fun, he duped the caller into revealing the debtor’s Social Security number and then let her have it with both barrels.

  After the paper came out in the Journal of Dispute Settlement, Jeremy worked briefly on a contract for the Pentagon and the Department of Defense, took in a mountain of their data about the conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq and made two decidedly horrific projections.

  While working for the DoD, he predicted an insurgency in the Al Anbar province that never happened. And, separately, he had a 98 percent certainty that guerrilla movements in a particular mountain range near the Afghan-Russian border would subside within three months. They went on for two years, the unsettling and unconvincing back-and-forth with the military.

  The initial paper had provided ironclad proof of the validity of the method. But then when it came time, when the opportunity came to do it for someone other than academics, it flopped
. It didn’t add up. None of it added up.

  Jeremy looks around the room. Academic papers and newspapers and trade journals and a Wired and a Maxim on the rack of servers to his left, power cords jumbled on the floor and, everywhere, that smell. Emily, you can take a bite out of my ass if you think it’s because I fear order that I don’t want to clean up. It takes more than a bachelor’s degree and single-motherhood experience to play armchair analyst.

  The office was supposed to be Jeremy’s think pad away from the main office down in Silicon Valley—walking distance from the ballpark and the swanky condo Jeremy bought at the peak of the market. A perk afforded a genius that has turned lease waiting to expire.

  He rubs the inside of his shoulder, then his pectoral.

  The fourth monitor shows the Scrabble board where he spends his hours playing people he’s never met at the highest levels of the virtual Scrabble world.

  He almost never wins. Because he never finishes a game. He’s usually ahead but then he makes some suggestions to his opponents about the word they probably should have played, and they disappear. Many just won’t play him anymore, even though, at Emily’s counsel, which he took in this case, he prefaces his suggestions to opponents by asking if it’s okay if he offers up an idea.

  Jeremy catches his reflection in the Scrabble monitor. Something in the dull image reminds him that his monthly haircut is forthcoming. That’s forty-five dollars that is not currently falling off the trees, but is also nonnegotiable. When it comes to his hair and other personal grooming, Jeremy subscribes only to the strictest ergonomics. He still doesn’t understand that, even without a great haircut, he’d get the girls. He’s muscular with long, toned runner’s legs, and a sturdy, full face that hints more at the handsome qualities of a rugby player than an actor, having long since shed the slump-shouldered geeky kid who formed a chunk of his self-image.

  He closes his eyes.

  It’s something between a catnap, daydream and slide presentation. His mom is there, bony and wispy and still totally in control of her emotions. There’s Kent, just the opposite, childlike, a child, smiling and asking Jeremy to come over to build a fort. There’s Peckerhead waving a pen, and there’s Emily. Her eyes are red but dry.