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Authors: Matt Richtel
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new. I’ll call you later.” She hangs up.
He had deliberately chosen the most provocative, childish, offensively sexist language to infuriate Andrea, test her, and still she didn’t hang up or even challenge him. Why not? Because she’s used to dealing with him and has tuned out his bullshit, or for some other reason?
Is she part of some scam?
He’s had his questions from the start, that night she recruited him, consummated his commitment. The government had flown him to Washington, which didn’t seem so odd. Everyone was flying Jeremy everywhere at this point. Consult on this, speak at that, Jeremy finding himself at the gooeycenter of the world of peace and conflict studies. At his hotel in Georgetown, there was a knock on the door and there stood Andrea, so in opposition to what Jeremy had expected. He’d let down his guard. At a swanky restaurant downstairs, they’d eaten oysters and drunk martinis, which she could put away. She was neither overly flirty nor remotely shy in showing him the edges of the bird tattoo above her left breast. She didn’t mention a thing about the algorithm, his reason for visiting, the thing they’d ask him about at a briefing the next day at the Pentagon.
So when she went to the bathroom, he felt suddenly nervous. He patted his pockets, discovered he was missing the key fob, the access code for the conflict program. He left the table before she returned from the bathroom, rushed up to his room. There was the fob, on the desk, right next to the computer.
He exhaled, felt a kind of shame—not because he’d freaked but because of something in this woman’s power. When she showed up at his door, she’d caused him to forget himself, forget to take his precious fob. Thereafter, he’d worn it around his neck, an amulet, a veritable locket.
After that, over the months, he’d alternately opened himself to Andrea and protected himself from her. Did she like him or was she just recruiting him? Their last in-person interaction, the last time they’d had a drink, was at the usual place, South of Market. She was hemming and hawing about another last-minute cancellation of a trip to send Jeremy to the Middle East. I’m doing my best for you, Jeremy. I believe in you, and it. His computer.
So much brown in her eyes and promise in her voice. Jeremy wondered if this was the night Andrea would finally invite him back to her hotel, allowing him the pleasure ofdeclining, or deciding whether to decline. Then, a surprise interloper: Evan. The slickster happened into the same bar, with a twenty-something date. An awkward moment among the three of them, shattering the rhythm of the night. Andrea petering out, professing to share Jeremy’s distrust of his MBA backer, but whatever momentum he imagined had been there, totally lost.
Back in the present, Jeremy remembers himself, his habit of getting lost in his head, especially lately. He can’t stop puzzling through so many little moments the last few years, these Hansel and Gretel crumbs that have led him to this isolated place. He looks up. The café bristles; a man in a fashionable red rain jacket chomps half a donut in a single bite, then looks around furtively, suggesting to Jeremy that the man’s guiltily wondering if someone might catch him eating too many carbs of the inorganic variety.
Fucking San Francisco. Maybe it should get nuked.
He looks at the phone, then hits the cursor. Yes, he fucking wants to see the results from the program he ran the night before. Just how full of shit is his conflict algorithm? He hits enter.
The screen reads:
327 variables checked.
327 variables accurately reported.
Jeremy feels a painful pulse in his clavicle. The computer has based its results on accurate information.
So that means that the problem isn’t what’s being fed into the computer. It might be that the algorithm itself has been tinkered with, not the inputs, but the equations. The guts.
Jeremy looks up, scans the café. He’s
He had deliberately chosen the most provocative, childish, offensively sexist language to infuriate Andrea, test her, and still she didn’t hang up or even challenge him. Why not? Because she’s used to dealing with him and has tuned out his bullshit, or for some other reason?
Is she part of some scam?
He’s had his questions from the start, that night she recruited him, consummated his commitment. The government had flown him to Washington, which didn’t seem so odd. Everyone was flying Jeremy everywhere at this point. Consult on this, speak at that, Jeremy finding himself at the gooeycenter of the world of peace and conflict studies. At his hotel in Georgetown, there was a knock on the door and there stood Andrea, so in opposition to what Jeremy had expected. He’d let down his guard. At a swanky restaurant downstairs, they’d eaten oysters and drunk martinis, which she could put away. She was neither overly flirty nor remotely shy in showing him the edges of the bird tattoo above her left breast. She didn’t mention a thing about the algorithm, his reason for visiting, the thing they’d ask him about at a briefing the next day at the Pentagon.
So when she went to the bathroom, he felt suddenly nervous. He patted his pockets, discovered he was missing the key fob, the access code for the conflict program. He left the table before she returned from the bathroom, rushed up to his room. There was the fob, on the desk, right next to the computer.
He exhaled, felt a kind of shame—not because he’d freaked but because of something in this woman’s power. When she showed up at his door, she’d caused him to forget himself, forget to take his precious fob. Thereafter, he’d worn it around his neck, an amulet, a veritable locket.
After that, over the months, he’d alternately opened himself to Andrea and protected himself from her. Did she like him or was she just recruiting him? Their last in-person interaction, the last time they’d had a drink, was at the usual place, South of Market. She was hemming and hawing about another last-minute cancellation of a trip to send Jeremy to the Middle East. I’m doing my best for you, Jeremy. I believe in you, and it. His computer.
So much brown in her eyes and promise in her voice. Jeremy wondered if this was the night Andrea would finally invite him back to her hotel, allowing him the pleasure ofdeclining, or deciding whether to decline. Then, a surprise interloper: Evan. The slickster happened into the same bar, with a twenty-something date. An awkward moment among the three of them, shattering the rhythm of the night. Andrea petering out, professing to share Jeremy’s distrust of his MBA backer, but whatever momentum he imagined had been there, totally lost.
Back in the present, Jeremy remembers himself, his habit of getting lost in his head, especially lately. He can’t stop puzzling through so many little moments the last few years, these Hansel and Gretel crumbs that have led him to this isolated place. He looks up. The café bristles; a man in a fashionable red rain jacket chomps half a donut in a single bite, then looks around furtively, suggesting to Jeremy that the man’s guiltily wondering if someone might catch him eating too many carbs of the inorganic variety.
Fucking San Francisco. Maybe it should get nuked.
He looks at the phone, then hits the cursor. Yes, he fucking wants to see the results from the program he ran the night before. Just how full of shit is his conflict algorithm? He hits enter.
The screen reads:
327 variables checked.
327 variables accurately reported.
Jeremy feels a painful pulse in his clavicle. The computer has based its results on accurate information.
So that means that the problem isn’t what’s being fed into the computer. It might be that the algorithm itself has been tinkered with, not the inputs, but the equations. The guts.
Jeremy looks up, scans the café. He’s
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