Now, back in the office, she stroked his hair again. She stared at him. “I’m so glad you did,” she said.
Then she knelt beside him and she put her lips onto his lips. She felt his warmth and let her tongue slip into the crevice of his mouth and tasted his sour breath and felt sharp arousal. She pulled back.
“You are a great man. The world needs you. I need you,” she repeated. “And I am here for you, as you were for me. You will rise.”
Walking down the stairwell, she let herself look at the piece of paper that Lyle had been clutching. It was the result of a medical test. She took a moment to make sense of it. But then it was clear. Dr. Lyle Martin was infertile. He could never conceive a child.
Thirty
In the weeks after Jackie returned from her first Hawthorne trip with Denny, things settled down. She took the Google bus to work, did her putative day job, met with Denny every few days to look at new data on Lantern, went home, and dug. She looked for everything she might find on Lantern, including any incorporation, mentions on the Internet, affiliates, real estate licenses or purchases in Nevada, and so on. She came up blank. But she felt such exquisite purpose.
She was careful to cover her snooping by using basic hacking techniques to bounce her inquiries from server to server. If anyone cared to be monitoring her, they’d not have been able to do it. She started to doubt anyone cared what she was doing: whoever had been following her hadn’t reappeared. Maybe she’d imagined it.
She pursued a parallel path into the science of memory and its relationship to the use of technology and the Internet. There wasn’t much out there. A few behavioral studies had found that the bombardment of the brain with information had an impact on memory, but it wasn’t the impact that she was expecting. Memory didn’t get better, as the Google tests suggested, it got worse. For instance, a study from the University of Michigan involved teaching people information and then having them go on a walk. Some study subjects took a walk in a dense urban area and a comparison group walked in a serene rural setting. The ones who walked in nature remembered information much better than those whose brains had been clouded by all the incoming stimulation from the urban setting.
A more scientific study had been done with rats at the UCSF lab. The rats were hooked up to leads that measured brain activity. Researchers found that rats who were constantly stimulated with new activities—say, presented with new challenges—did not generate as much electrical activity in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. They were having experiences, but not generating new memories (at least that was the presumption; the rats, obviously, could not be asked their own opinion).
One Saturday, Jackie walked through Union Square. It stunned her to see the extent to which people had their faces buried in their devices. She’d always known it, of course, but as she studied the behavior, she felt like an alien landing on Earth and discovering a race of people with two arms, two legs, and a rectangular metal appendage they stared at as if it brought life. She watched a guy in a wheelchair staring at his phone lose track of his surroundings and roll down a ramp until he toppled.
As she walked, she sometimes got lost in her own virtual reality. It involved Dr. Martin. She imagined how proud he’d be of her in her investigations. She pictured them walking together, talking about how they were dissecting the world, their fingers touching lightly, a union of hearts and minds. She wanted to find him, talk to him, but she knew he needed to heal. Only at the most lucid moments did she realize she herself was unhinging. Her growing uncertainty about Denny, who had treated her like a beloved little sister, was particularly irksome. He continued to apply only the gentlest pressure to have her help him solve the Lantern problem. You’re my quarterback, he’d say, and my star wide receiver and my entire defense.
It’s just that things didn’t quite add up.
Then one day when she was home sick with a head cold, watching Sneaky Pete on Amazon, her cell phone rang.
“Ms. Tether?” a man’s voice said.
She almost hung up when she remembered that Tether was one of the fake surnames she’d used when calling around Hawthorne—realtors, the local tax office, et cetera—looking for indirect information about Lantern.
“Yes, it’s Jennifer Tether,” she said. “I hope you’ll forgive my head cold.”
She felt a moment’s gratitude that she was sick; it always helped when massaging someone to look a tad helpless.
“I’m with the utility district; you left a message.”
“Yes, thank you for calling back. I’m the administrator for Denny Watkins at Google. We’re moving our payment system. I need to change the account.”
“I thought that was handled out of the Intel account.”
“Jesus,” she said, trying to sound as exasperated as possible. “Too many damn chefs. Oh, excuse my language, it’s the cold medicine.”
He laughed. He gave her a name and number of his current contact; she promised him that she’d get it ironed out.
Intel?
That was just the beginning. From there, she did a reverse directory search to find the origin of the contact and phone number held for the Lantern account. She followed one digital bread crumb after the next and wound up finding that it led to a WhoIs directory—which lists the administrators of Internet domain names—for a group called TechPacAlliance, or TPA. There was an e-mail address: TPAadministrator@TPA.net, which she dared not e-mail for fear of outing herself. She could only find one other reference to the TechPacAlliance. It was from a tech policy conference brochure from three years earlier, a mention of the sponsorship by the TPA and its partners: Google, Apple, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Verizon, AT&T, and Sony. And several international affiliates, big-name telecommunications affiliates, like China Telecom and Orange from France.
Not a mention before or since. It just disappeared, this veritable who’s who of tech and telecom companies.
She clicked back and stared at the names. They were giants, obviously, competitors, direct and indirect, not all in the same businesses, not exactly. With many common interests—in everything from technical standards to the mutual value of spreading the digital culture and gospel. She lost the afternoon surfing the Internet and came out none the wiser for it.
She slept more poorly, ate little, became obsessed with understanding the game, the falsehoods. Dr. Martin had put it so welclass="underline" people put you in terrible positions. More than once, thinking of Denny’s sleight of hand, his failure to disclose, it was as if her mother had asked her to help push her father off the balcony.
She thought often about Dr. Martin—Lyle she called him when she had her internal conversations with him—and wished she might ask him what to do. She wouldn’t be plaintive, of course, he’d hate that. She’d be his peer, with a hint of protégée, knowing that he’d been through times in his life where he’d had to buck the conventional thinking, fight through idiocy, get to the truth.
After work the next day, she felt well enough to go for a walk along the wetlands near Google’s campus. It was late February and still getting dark relatively early. A half mile from campus, now well into dusk, she heard a bicycle come up behind her. She turned and saw Adam Stiles, the nerd who couldn’t keep his eyes off her, despite the fact she tried to never engage.