The Doomsday Equation Read Online Free PDF Page B

hurt. I bet it’ll do wonders projecting the future of mobile apps.”
    He reaches the door.
    “Send me. I dare you.”
    The man pauses, turns back.
    Jeremy continues: “Send me to see for myself.”
    Now the lieutenant colonel smiles, in full. “I was hoping you’d fall for that.” He looks at Andrea. “Work out some time that Mr. Stillwater can go to the region. Let him take his computer and run the tests real-time. Maybe he could get it to work. We sure could use the technology, if it could be refined into something not decidedly at odds with reality.”
    He shuts the door.
    J EREMY FEELS THE cab slow. At the time, Jeremy wasn’t sure who had won the exchange, but he subsequently learned. The lieutenant colonel was teaching Jeremy a lesson in patient disengagement. There were a few follow-up calls, Andrea never able to get the timing together on a trip, the budget not there; at one point it seemed like he was poised to be able to study a battle in southern Iraq, preparations made, then the thingevaporated, one thing after the next, and then it all just faded away, like the rest of Jeremy’s opportunities. The crafty lieutenant colonel, the Pentagon, had slipped away from Jeremy, without even giving him the satisfaction of a fight.
    And, thereafter, Jeremy started running all the diagnostics. Programming the algorithm to test itself, run war games, simulate conflict to see if it can rightly predict the outcome. Jeremy, even if he doesn’t quite admit it, started to question his computer, started challenging it, demanding that it prove itself right. And it seems always to be so. It can see and predict things that elude all possible human foresight. Can’t it?
    “Here?”
    He nods. The outer Richmond, predictably, is foggier than downtown, fog cum drizzle. He hands the cabbie a ten-dollar bill, which represents the fare and a fifty-cent tip, but Jeremy might need the last $20 in his wallet.
    He glances at the countdown clock, 67:17:17, then puts the iPad into his backpack. He steps into the wet, the computer strapped to his back, like a papoose, or an albatross.

C HAPTER 5
    F IVE HUNDRED MILES away, also damp, a dim light, projecting the shape and yellowish hue of a dying moon, illuminates a slick floor. Then it flickers, and dies.
    The thin man smacks the cool cylinder against his palm. The flashlight returns to its half-life. “Friggin’ thing.”
    He takes two more steps, then slides his heavy boots on the metal, imagining himself skating, breaking the monotony of the chore. He raises the angle of the light, looking at the edges of the boxes and huge containers, the mountains of white rice, cell phone screens, car batteries, undershirts, kids’ pajamas, who knows what myriad of stuff piled high to the distant ceiling of this cavernous belly.
    He looks up into blackness that, he imagines, could stretch to infinity. He thinks: I should have asked her to marry me. I should have, I should have. Now she thinks I’m on the fence. He pictures her sitting in a café in Hong Kong doing those tortuous emotional somersaults she can do, capable of deciding on an impulse to call off the whole relationship.
    And he can’t call. His cell phone hasn’t worked in two days, the signal apparently unable to find a satellite in the vastnessof sea. Or maybe it’s the weather. Even in the hull, surrounded by mountains of boxes, he can hear the crashing and lashing of waves.
    He looks back down, scoots along the narrow path, flashlight lit, thinking of her, looking at nothing. He sees the pants. Not pants, he realizes, legs with pants. A pair of legs jutting into the path, extruding from between huge containers. Give me a break, he thinks.
    “Bryan.”
    The legs remain motionless. He sighs.
    Louder: “Yo, Bryan.”
    Of the handful of shipmates on the skeleton crew, it’s the sarcastic and confrontational Filipino called Bryan who is most likely to have drunk himself into a stupor. The thin man uses his right foot to nudge a