She stared at him blankly. Denny assumed she was thoughtfully calculating. She felt a rush of the distrust that pervaded her thinking, her cross to bear.
Jackie first noticed it in elementary school, this pattern. At first, she got attention. Wow, Jackie, how did you divide those numbers? Where did you learn that? Or: Did you see that little girl, clearing the entire memory board? There was the time she talked two boys out of a fistfight over an orange-and-blue Nerf football by pointing out some or another common interest, and another time where she realized her little sister was in the other room eating the whole jar of Flintstones vitamins and called 911 on her own because her parents were too busy fighting to pay attention. Nice job, young lady. Bit by bit, she saw a different side to these remarks. They implied some responsibility. Was she supposed to be something great, or do something great? Her gifts felt like liabilities. That’s what she once told her drunken father.
Impressive, Jackie, where did you learn that word?
Fuck you, Dad, you somnambulating bottom feeder.
Well, look, another pseudointellectual dipshit! Don’t you ever—
Shut your mouth, Alan. She’s not one of your whores! Jackie’s mother had gripped a vase from the table like it was a baseball.
As years had passed, Jackie tried to stay beneath the radar. She took every effort to not be noticed so she wouldn’t have to be misunderstood, underestimated, overestimated, estimated at all. No platitudes, and no expectations. She wore dark knit hats and baggy clothes to make herself indistinguishable. It was hard because she not only was so smart but attractive, with doll-like features. Delicate, a beautiful petite, if she’d have allowed it.
“Jackie?”
She settled on a wry smile.
She nodded. She thought about Dr. Martin, both flexible and firm, ultimately a model of how to be decisive, how to challenge, and be challenged, without being thrown off course. In Nepal, in that moment that could’ve gone either way, he’d saved her life, physically, even spiritually; absent his treatment, she’d not only have died, but even embraced it.
She felt light wind blowing through campus. It carried with it the feeling of uncertainty.
“Okay,” she muttered.
Downstairs, he set out two cups of coffee.
“Lantern,” he said.
Her small hands wrapped around the warm mug.
“Yes, another terrible code name from the company that brought you Project X,” Denny said. He hoped she’d smile but she wasn’t there yet.
“Bottom line, Jackie, we’re studying memory.”
She met his eye and saw truth there. He let her gaze at his sincerity until she looked down.
“What makes one image or memory stick? What causes it to fade? If you want to be blunt about it”—he was gaining steam—“we’re trying to get people to remember better and share more of the things they see on the Internet.”
“Things?”
“Advertisements. Video, banner, click-thrus, YouTube videos, et cetera. It’s all about recall and sharing, whether they’re taking something viral, like a song or a sell-crafted Nike ad, or remembering the narrative or image of a Lego set, car, washer and dryer. No one liked my idea of calling this project Hippocampus, and then we’d name our headquarters the Hippo Campus.”
Hippocampus, the memory center of the brain.
“Lantern, Jesus.” He shook his head.
Despite herself, she smiled.
“Look, Jackie, it’s not that novel. It’s a neuroscience twist on the basic Silicon Valley business model.”
He stated the obvious: the entire Silicon Valley business model was built on getting people to see and respond to advertisements. Services like Google, Facebook, Instagram—go down the list. They were “free” and, in exchange, they sought attention. Fairly, this was the attention economy, the eyeball economy. And, more recently, the sharing economy; brands, whether corporate or individual, created things to be tweeted, liked, commented on, a fluid, amorphous river filled with baited fishing poles, bobs and flies and lures to be swallowed. Denny glossed over this stuff because it was simply understood.
“What’s new is we figured out how to do it,” he said. “Or we’re figuring out how to do it.”
“That’s the data you’ve had me looking at.”
“I can’t say this strongly enough: I’m not sure we can do this without you. You filter information in a way other people don’t, or can’t. You have an unusually creative way of synthesizing data.”
She studied his face for contradictions and transgressions like a child deciding whether there was still such a thing as unconditional love. She knew how Dr. Martin must have felt sometimes; used. Somehow, he seemed able to navigate it. He dug for truth on his own terms and figured out exactly the right thing to say and do. She could dig, too.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” No sooner had Jackie said it than she hated having done so; it showed her vulnerability. So she added, “I deserve a hell of a lot better than that.”
“You do, Jackie. But we’re playing around in a gray area of”—he looked for the word—“ethics. I didn’t want to…” Another long pause.
“What?”
“I didn’t want to compromise you or put you in a bad position, or make anyone more vulnerable than they need to be.”
“I don’t need your protection.”
“Come to the desert,” Denny said. “See for yourself.”
“What’s in the desert?”
“You really do have to see it to believe it. Will you just trust me?”
“Just to be clear”—she tilted her head to the side, looking virtually coquettish—“you want me to trust you, despite having lied to me, and to trust a secret project spawned by a multibillion-dollar company more powerful than the government and that only subverts its ‘do no harm’ motto when it suits the stock price?”
“When you put it that way,” he said, smiling, “yes.”
Twelve
“What’ll it be?” a bartender at a cheesy Irish pub in JFK’s international terminal asked. He had a fresh tattoo on his beefy forearm of a New York Giants helmet that looked red around the edges. Melanie put a hand on Lyle’s shoulder, silently urging him not to get into the man’s diabetes or possible tattoo infection. Lyle flinched.
“Patrón, double, straight,” he said.
“My man,” said the bartender. “Silver, okay?”
Lyle nodded absently; sure.
“Peño…” Melanie said.
“He’s paying,” Lyle responded, gesturing with a jerk of his neck to Michael, the Tanzanian representative who stood near the front of the pub looking at a menu on a stand, giving Lyle and Melanie a wide berth. Michael had thought it would be a grand gesture to invite Melanie, particularly after Lyle had said that a chief reason he didn’t want to make the trip is because he’d just gotten settled in a new place with Melanie.
But the pair had been bickering since San Francisco. Michael was starting to wonder whether Dean Thomas had been right that Lyle was unstable to an extent that outweighed his tremendous value. Michael, standing at the menu, snuck a peek at the picture he’d taken to keeping in his right front slacks pocket. Even though it was a still shot, Michael could picture the man on the ground, panting, as if a dog gasping for breath.
“Make it two?” the bartender asked Melanie as he poured Lyle’s drink.
“I’ll have two. She’s fine,” Lyle said.