A few minutes later, Lyle came barreling out of the room and she stood not a few feet away, pretending to glance at a corkboard with various school announcements. She couldn’t help but turn and look at him. They caught eyes. She smiled.
“Sorry you had to overhear that,” Lyle said.
“I didn—”
“Anyhow, no biggie.” He was talking in an offhanded way, but he looked so sad to her.
“Everything all right, Dr. Martin?”
“Fine. Thank you for asking,” he said without enthusiasm. “Nice job today. You…” He cocked his head to the side. “Are you a med student?”
She flushed. “No.” She wanted to ask how he intuited it. “I’m in tech. I work at Google. They encourage us to develop outside areas of interest so I’m auditing—”
“Well, regardless, well done. I’m not sure most med students would’ve been as willing as you were to put themselves out like that. Whatever you do, you’ve got a bright future.”
He turned away, started to, when she cleared her throat.
“Do you recognize me?” She couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out, though they did so at a whisper, a veritable mumble.
“Pardon?” he said.
“I said: thank you.”
“Okay, great, good luck to you.”
He turned and she was glad that he couldn’t see her face. It was a jigsaw of embarrassment and doubt. She willed it into conviction. She had impressed a man who was an embodiment of action, who didn’t shrink, and, more than any of that, a man who once had saved her life.
Ten
The ceilings at Google reached to the sky. The open-air offices and workspace of one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and envied companies could feel like a military air hangar. A vast cubicle den that could fit a 747. As Jackie entered, a voice echoed through the cavern.
“Hey, this isn’t gluten free. Look at this, Jackie, this isn’t gluten free! How can we possibly concentrate when there are only ten free energy bars and fully 10 percent aren’t gluten free? Eh, waif like you probably doesn’t even eat. Oopsy, I’m gonna get sued! You won’t sue me, will ya?”
Jackie Badger shook her head and half smiled at the sarcastic rant of fellow Googler Adam Stile. The geeks ran deep here, the brightest young minds in the world figuring out how to serve Internet users and make sure they stayed attuned to their screens. Some of the engineers were so geeky they redefined the concept. Adam fit the bill. If Google had a vote for most-likely-to-be-not-so-funny-as-he-thinks, he would win it.
Jackie set down her backpack in her cubicle and caught Denny’s eye. He was standing a few desks away in the vast cubicle den, clearly feeling the same way about Adam. Denny Watkins ran the department. Much more than that: he ran the Basement. That’s what Denny told Jackie he called it the first time he’d invited her down there, after several lunches and drinks. Just telling her about the Basement was an admission she’d been vetted. That she now knew.
Denny jerked his head to the side. She understood what it meant: Meet me downstairs.
Jackie sat at her desk and unzipped her backpack. She grabbed two clementines and put the tiny oranges next to a framed picture of her dog, Sadie. She reached into the backpack and started to pull out the big medical text. Then she thought better of it. Why bring any attention?
She felt a pang of frustration that the lecture had been canceled this morning. Now, they said, he was “on assignment.” There was a lot of speculation about what that meant, chatter in an online group of class members. He’s battling a seventy-foot microbe with just his stethoscope and flip-flops.
She knew better. Dr. Martin was heading to Tanzania. She’d overheard it through the doorway. Then she’d done a little harmless hacking to track his whereabouts. Greater good and all that. He’d said so himself when she’d asked about the ethics of disclosing the Saudi minister’s cause of death. She couldn’t wait for his next class and then his after-hours.
You’ve got a bright future. Clichéd, sure. But he even took time to single her out when he was fighting with that wretched dean. Jackie had risked putting herself out, asking him about patient privacy, and he’d perceived her as real, not as some showy kiss-ass med student trying to prove she was as smart as the teacher. She’d vacillated later whether she should’ve thanked him more clearly for what happened in Nepal and decided that would have come off as insincere. She’d rather be seen now as a full-bodied, able person than a self-doubting supplicant.
“I know when you’re this lost in thought we might have a patent coming,” said Denny, startling her. He was standing over her shoulder. “What gives, genius?”
“Wondering if we can patent your stealth gait. Who can walk that quietly?”
“You mean at two hundred thirty pounds?” Denny smiled jovially.
“Have a gluten-free bar.”
Nobody else would talk to Denny like that. Everyone in the department wondered about it—how Jackie talked so casually to the big Russian bear. It was hard not to see the warmth between them, less like friends or siblings, more like doting father and precocious daughter.
“How’s your audit class going? What is it again: remember-to-wash-your-hands 101?”
“It’s infectious disease…” Of course he knew. “Jackass.”
He laughed. “Can I talk with you about the protocol on that search tool?” he said.
It was thinly veiled code. Nothing specific. Just nonsense. When he said a nonsense sentence to her, it meant they were headed to the lab over at Google X. Sometimes, he said the most comically inane stuff, like Let’s optimize that engine, or Can I speak to you about the spreadsheet database? This time, Jackie could see from Denny’s eyes that, despite his innocuous code, he had something significant on his mind.
“Catch you in a bit,” Denny said.
Jackie snagged one of the shared bicycles outside Lemon-Lyme, the name of the three-story glass-plated building at Planet Google where she worked. It was hard not to feel a little excited by the prospect that they had some new data. For six months she’d been going over the same incremental reports on a handful of projects, one about Internet use habits, another about reaction times of Internet users. It was also hard for her not to feel a little used. Story of her life on some leveclass="underline" always with the extraordinary talent and often feeling like others were using it for their ends. It took a lot for her to trust the rare individual who now made it through her screening.
One such person was Denny. At Stanford, he plucked her from an engineering class where he’d lectured a single day, and, from the back of the room, she drilled him with a question that contorted his face into wonder and then laughter. After class, he beelined for her, took her to coffee at Peet’s, asked her to come work for Google. Less than a year later, he invited her to join on as a consultant for Project X, which was a catchall name for big, speculative ideas at Google that may or may not pan out, like the driverless car, clean water projects, interstellar communications technology. Her job, he told her, “was to use that overly developed antenna to ask the questions others don’t think about or are too haughty to ask.
“Jackie, I like you, but that’s beside the point. What’s important is that you see patterns other people don’t see. I’ll ignore the fact you’re not sure whether you like me.”
Jackie liked Denny’s candor and the fact that he seemed to put things in the right context. He was real. He always had food crumbs somewhere on his shirt or beard and he sometimes just stopped in the middle of a conversation and stood silently until he thought through what he wanted to say. He could live with taking his time, however awkward that might appear. It had taken her a long time to find someone she could invest in, and who she felt invested in her; three months after she joined Project X, Denny told her he trusted her enough to show her what was really going on. Not Project X, but the experiments in the Basement, the ones that didn’t get discussed in the media, or anywhere. Her confidence grew, and her willingness to insert herself, like in Dr. Martin’s class.