“Who?” She was only half listening to Denny as she watched the toothless man become more and more entranced.
“Google, us, the tech world.”
Now she looked at him. “Why?”
“The theory is nothing all that revelatory but I guess it’s still heretical, at least in these parts. Thanks to the Internet, people have access to all this information but they seem to be gravitating to ideas that reinforce their worldviews. Maybe that’s why we’re getting more extreme, more partisan.”
Denny noticed that her right fist had balled. This conversation really bugged her.
“Jackie?”
“Things are moving so fast.”
“Exactly.”
“Everyone getting spun up. It’s really…”
“Dangerous. We’re speaking the same language.” Now he was looking again at the man behind the two-way mirror. “Anyhow…” He paused. “Now you see it. Look at him, he’s fully in the zone.”
Jackie looked at the computer monitor that showed the man was staring at Willie Mays’s famous over-the-shoulder basket catch in the World Series. He watched it four times in a row. Slowly, dumbly, he clicked a button to share the image. Then he navigated “related” YouTube videos and watched highlights from a Yogi Berra interview. He smiled and laughed quietly to himself.
“Is he drooling, Denny?”
“Hard to tell. Anything odd on the Internet speeds?”
“Similar to yesterday,” Jackie said. “Mostly, maybe a half a percent here or there.”
“Now watch this,” Denny said. He exited the room and a few seconds later, he entered the room with the toothless subject. Denny shook him on the shoulder and the man startled back to awareness. Denny offered him some water and asked him if he’d take a test about what he’d seen. Sure, the man said. Through the two-way mirror, Jackie and Denny watched him take a test on the Internet about some of the images that had appeared on the periphery of the screen and also automatically generated questions about the subject matter of his Internet experience. What did Yogi Berra say? Then there would be multiple-choice questions about his exact wording with four different options.
The man fared okay on the memory test. Not spectacularly, but better than perhaps someone with his rotted demeanor and background would suggest.
They escorted the man out.
“Are you okay to drive?” Jackie asked him.
“Of course,” the man answered, seeming offended. Then he looked around, shook his head, looking confused. “Do you guys work for the VA?”
They looked at him.
“Are you okay?” Jackie repeated.
“I goddamned told you I’m okay.” He seemed to get his bearings. “That was way more fun than last time.”
“Last time?” Jackie asked.
“You might have us confused,” Denny said.
“Whatever. Just gimme my money. I’ll do that one anytime.”
Denny handed him a check.
They stood in the dirt lot and watched the man drive away in a pickup. Something was bothering Jackie and she couldn’t put a fine point on it.
“Jackie?”
“He looked dazed.”
“One of the things we’d like to do, obviously, is minimize the intensity factor,” Denny said. They walked back inside. Jackie thought the wording choice sounded unusually like corporate bullshit from Denny. “He seemed to enjoy himself.”
She couldn’t deny that.
“Have you considered monitoring pulse or using basic medical data, something shy of the MRI.”
“Good idea,” Denny said. “Hey, let’s get out of here and discuss more on the road. I left some stuff downstairs. Can you hang here for a sec?”
Denny left and headed back downstairs and Jackie shuffled her feet and glanced around the top floor. But no sooner had Denny disappeared than Jackie poked her head back outside without shutting the door behind her. She realized what had been bugging her as the dazed man had driven off in his pickup. She looked in the distance toward the other Google complex, the one with the big antennae and the runway. What had gotten her attention was the fact that between that complex and the one where she was standing was a well-worn side road. It extended from the front of the building where she stood and then grooved the desert until it reached so far toward the other Google setting that she could no longer make out the rutted earth.
So what?
Jackie poked her head back inside the building and looked it over. She headed to the nearest cubicle. She passed her hand over the empty desk to see, as she suspected, not even a hint of dust or use. She went to the cubicle beside it. On this one sat a telephone but the cord wasn’t plugged in. She looked around and, hearing no immediate reappearance of Denny from the back, made her way to the cubicle on which she’d earlier seen manila folders. She leafed through them. Empty. Nothing in them.
She walked to the cubicles where she’d previously seen the two workers, Alex and Alex. There were ports to plug in laptops, but neither had laptops plugged in now. So maybe this was a skeleton crew, and they were planning expansion. Maybe wasted space? That didn’t seem like Google.
She bent down and looked on the floor. It was carpeted with that cheap corporate carpet, brown. That didn’t interest her. She was looking for signs of life, scuffing, wrappers from energy bars, pen caps tossed and left around. There was some of that. So maybe this was just a slow day.
Still it nagged her. She glanced around the room. For a moment, she felt a light wind blow and wondered where it had come from, and she realized it was her imagination. She knew what it meant: she wasn’t sure who or what to trust. All it took was a little gust to throw her off.
From the floor below, Denny stood in one of the experiment rooms looking at a computer monitor. He watched Jackie on a closed-circuit video feed and pursed his lips. Denny glanced at his phone screen. He pulled up his contacts and found Adam Stile, the goofy engineer in his group. Denny fired off a text and stuffed the phone back in his pocket.
Twenty-Eight
On their return from the desert, Denny dropped Jackie off at her apartment late on a Friday. Saturday, she couldn’t get out of bed. That was saying something. It was not comfortable—an actual Murphy bed with a mattress that the landlord must’ve gotten at Goodwill. Even Google money these days couldn’t buy much in San Francisco, $2,700 a month for a studio.
From the bed, she stared at the IKEA desk lodged beneath her second-story apartment window. Specifically, she looked at the router. It belonged to Comcast, her Internet provider. Lately, there had been messages on her phone telling her that she needed to replace the router. She thought about how Comcast was providing her faster Internet service, for free. Why was that? She thought about how phones had gotten bigger and pixelation denser, and how all the images were coming faster. And all of it was developed by industries built on keeping people connected ever longer. That was the business modeclass="underline" eyeballs. Was she sitting at the computer like that toothless old man, dumbly drooling to the digital drumbeat?
One other thing stuck in her craw. During her visit to Lantern, her phone service had been spotty and when she returned home, she’d discovered that she’d had three calls from private numbers. No voice mail. Probably robocallers. She decided to ignore them.
Jackie stretched her arms over her head and looked at the outdated “The Clash” wall calendar. The clownish look on the face of Joe Strummer, the front man, always made her laugh and she really wanted to laugh right now. She could hear the voices over the years telling her she was too precise, too intense, too careful. How else to get to the bottom of things?