“I should have brought donuts,” Jackie said, seeking composure. She unzipped a light jacket.
“Have a seat, Jackie,” said Alex.
“I left something in my car,” Jackie said. “Can I go grab it?”
“Get it later,” said a man she recognized as belonging to Microsoft.
Jackie had vacillated about responding to the request for her presence. In the end, she decided she held plenty of cards.
“I thought Lantern was disbanded.”
Alex cleared her throat. She had evidently been christened here to take the lead. Maybe she’d always been in the lead. It looked to Jackie like an intervention.
“Jackie, we know about Steamboat.”
Jackie blinked several times rapidly.
“Excuse me?”
“We know,” Alex said.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Damn it!” One of the men slapped the table. “We need to know what happened.”
“Alex,” Jackie said, glowering at Alex, “what is this? You… you took out Denny so that you could, what, take over?”
“Jackie, I’m not sure you realize how serious this is. You’ve effectively beta tested a very powerful, very dangerous system, and you’ve taken it over from the inside. We need you to remand control, and walk away, or…”
Jackie looked at the other members of the group, swerving her head.
“I have no idea what Alex—is that your name, Alex?—is talking about. Steamboat? Where is that even? Colorado, if memory serves. Something happened there?”
Alex pursed her lips.
“Jackie, this is pointless. I’ve prepared everyone here for your manipulations and cons. I’ve also prepared them for your genius, which is the better part of what is dangerous here. When I realized the system had been used, co-opted, I, we, did a lot of homework. It’s clear that you chose a time and a place remote enough that it might not be traced through news reports. You monkeyed with flight logs—or someone did—and must’ve taken a dozen other steps to cover your tracks, not the least of which was deploying technology that appears to have turned to mush the memories of people on the ground there.”
“My God, Alex, listen to yourself. You sound like someone with intimate knowledge of whatever it is you’re accusing me of. Is anyone else hearing what I’m hearing? It sounds like an outright confession. Something very, very sinister is going on, and I’m out of here.”
“Jackie, who is Dr. Lyle Martin?”
Jackie reddened, froze like a strawberry-colored ice statue.
“You’re in cahoots with him somehow, right?” Alex said.
“Who is—”
“Some doctor who was on the plane, and that Jackie appears to be following, or communicating with,” Alex said, then looked at Jackie. “That’s right. I can do my own sleuthing.”
“He’s a friend. This has nothing to do with—”
“This is how this is going to go down, Jackie. You are dismissed from Google, put on notice that we will, even at the risk to this group, go public with your beta or alpha test, or whatever you want to call it, and pursue murder charges in Denny’s death. Let this end here.”
Faces turned to Jackie. She took a long pause.
“Before any of you reach any conclusion here, I want to offer you an alternative version of events. Alex is evidently the real genius here, and she is scapegoating me. I suspect she wrested control of this from Denny, maybe took him out. I think I know why, too.”
“Jackie, I can’t even get into the system. Somehow, you’ve locked us out.”
“Lies. You know I’m on to you. You’re testing, preparing. You’re worried you might actually have to use Lantern. Denny explained it to me. Look at what’s happening in the world; it’s just as you worried: an authoritarian got elected, separatists storming Capitol Hill armed to the teeth, or a gunman indiscriminately killing toddlers at a preschool field trip— the list goes on.”
She directed her voice to the speakerphone. “Overseas, too. What nation-state is safe? Right?” she said. “I’m not sure if it’s altruism driving you, or the business of self-interest in keeping a relatively calm world. In any case, Alex, you’ve taken full advantage of your partners. What would China Telecom or Orange do if they knew you’d been toying around with their access points?”
“You’re done, Jackie,” Alex said. “This is not a toy. This is dangerous, even deadly, and it was in Steamboat.” Alex shook her head. “Don’t pretend you don’t know that, Jackie.”
“Wait until I go public. Wait until I tell people that we—the tech world—are responsible for the problem in the first place.” Jackie suddenly stood, her voice rising.
“You’re done, Jackie,” Alex repeated.
Jackie refused to back down. She dug in. “Everyone in this group knows what I’m talking about, Alex. You came together initially because we felt we had a duty to deal with side effects of the digital world we’ve created.”
“Enough!”
Jackie put up a hand. “Maybe it was more selfish than that, but that’s at least partly true—an altruism, an effort to deal with the side effects of our own work, your work. Our industry, our spectacular innovation, has led us to this place, this culture of fury. With all these devices, people are gorging on ideas that reinforce their political and social views. They are getting instant reminders when someone has affronted these precious perspectives, and, all the while, they are so facedown in their gadgets, they are losing their ability to empathize, cooperate, compromise. We’ve created a path of least resistance for people to escape and disengage. That’s precisely what Denny thought.”
Alex pushed herself back from the table, an indication she’d had enough. “Regardless of the half merits to what you’re saying, you’re not wriggling out of this.”
“You’ve created a fail-safe, and you evidently tested it, and you want a fall guy, or fall woman,” Jackie said. “You need to get rid of me because I’ve put it all together. I know that you and your partners have been swapping out individual wireless routers to ones with faster speeds—ones that can send the kinds of arrhythmic radio bursts that lead to hypnotic states. You know what I’m talking about: the cable or phone company calls and offers to upgrade your model, promising faster speeds. People are gobbling up the free new modems and routers. They love faster service from upgraded radio and cell-phone towers. Oh, but do they know that Lantern will put them on hold and erase whatever grieves them?”
“This sounds a lot like a confession, Jackie.”
“Hardly. I’m telling you everything I know, and that can endanger you.”
Alex stood. “I have proof,” she blurted. She looked solemnly at her colleagues. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. It’s personally very disturbing, painful.
“Let me direct your attention to my screen.” The brushed silver Apple laptop had been sitting in front of Alex the entire time, top closed. She leaned over and opened the top, clicked some keys, and turned the device to face the table.
“What is this?” asked the man from Microsoft.
“It’s a video taken from the day that Denny died.” On the screen, Denny sat in a chair in the room downstairs, outside the testing chamber. Alex moved the cursor over the virtual play button and pressed down. The video began. Denny appeared to be reading some papers. He leafed through the papers, underlined a passage with a pen, read some more. It went on for a minute.
“What the hell?” Alex said.
“I’m not sure what this tells us,” said a woman to Alex’s left.
“What’s going on there?” said a voice from the speaker.
“This isn’t the right video,” Alex said. The image remained innocuous, Denny reading away. “It must be a mix-up.” Alex looked at Jackie, who shook her head and smirked. “I’ll find the right one. In the meantime, I have something much better.