The Flicker Men (19 page)

“Did you see any whales?”

“No,” I said. “We watched the coastline.”

And she nodded and went back to writing—that time on the subject of lipid systems.

Measuring a coastline is a cartological impossibility. All the ins and outs and incongruities. But you can measure its roughness—its specific frequency of irregularity. That was my mother. A wavy line. Understandable only in approximation. Her name was Gillian, but that never seemed quite right. When I thought of my mother, it was the name Julia that would, more and more, come to be her name. The Julia sets. Her appellation that even she didn't know.

Mother wasn't disappointed that I hadn't wanted to follow her into immunology. “It's an incursive field,” she once told me, by way of explanation. “And besides,” she added, “natural science and physics are both the same thing, aren't they?”

“What do you mean?” I was twelve at the time, already enraptured with physics and numbers. Turning my back on her madness.

“One has Darwin, the other, Einstein. But when it comes down to it, it's all just religion.”

“It's the opposite of religion.” I said, a little too brusquely.

She shook her head. “It comes from the same drive. The need to understand.” Her eyes gave back nothing. “The only question becomes, how bad do you need to know?”

*   *   *

I picked up the phone. How bad did I need to know?

I dialed Point Machine's number. The phone rang twice. “Hello.”

“I got your report,” I said. “Where did you get the research list?”

There was a pause on the line, followed by an explosion of words. “Jesus, Eric, are you okay? I heard about what happened. I called and left messages, and I—”

“The research,” I pressed him.

“Uh…” He seemed to flounder, trying to catch up. “The research? So you got the file then. A contact at the university put it together. But how are you doing? I heard about the fire.”

“And this is all public record?”

“Yeah, it's all public, if you know where to dig.”

“There are no dates attached.”

“I'm not sure of the dates. Why are you calling about this?”

I scanned the paper. The research I was interested in was listed halfway down. “How far back does this go?”

“Seven years.”

“And it's up-to-date?”

“Yeah, probably. I'm not sure. Listen, what's this about?”

“There's a term on the list that's very specific.”

“What do you mean, specific?”

“
Branching transforms
—the meaning's not important. It's just a mathematical function.”

“I'm not following you.”

“I made it up,” I said. “I coined the term just after college. There were only a few of us working on it.”

There was a pause on the line. “And that term is on the index of research that's been looked into for this prize.”

“Yeah.”

“When were you working on it?”

“With my old partner. Before Hansen.”

“But that was…” His voice trailed off.

“Way before we met Brighton,” I said.

There were a few more seconds of silence. “Why were they interested in this work?”

“That's a very good question.”

*   *   *

Before Einstein there was Gaston Julia.

The dictionary describes a mathematical function as a kind of system. In truth, functions are transformative—they are the if/then at the heart of computation.

I hung up the phone and placed it down on the table in front of me. The silence of the room was complete. I walked to the mirror.

The first time my mother described a ribosome to me, I'd recognized the principle. A nucleotide sequence enters one side of a ribosome, and a polypeptide chain comes out the other—a simple and ordered transformation of data. A mathematical function if ever there was one.

At the end of World War I, a French mathematician named Gaston Julia was the first to map the behavior of complex numbers under multiple iterations of a function
f
. Apply any number
z
to function
f
to obtain an output. Then apply function
f
to the output, resulting in a secondary output. Then apply function
f
to the secondary output, resulting in a tertiary output, and on and on in endless procession. Like a ribosome that ate its own product in a never-ending loop.

Graphed in three-dimensional space, these Julia sets produce complex, beautiful structures. The Julia sets. Mandelbrot fractals. Pathological curves. And stranger things, too. Things that mathematicians call monsters.

Thoughts can be monsters, too.

“I'm not going back,” I said to the darkness in the room.

I looked in the mirror and tried to believe it.

 

26

The flight to Indiana took off at 8:00 a.m. I ate bad airport food while I waited to board. Hours later I landed, rented a car, and was on the highway by midday.

The city traffic, I found, was a sieve through which some cars flowed, and others were caught. I didn't have the knack for the local grid. Progress was slow.

I thought about Satvik's gate arrays—evolution dictating the most efficient designs. If only city planners could have modeled the roads with the same technique.

Once off the highway, I navigated through the sprawl of an old residential neighborhood. One of the oldest parts of the city.

The homes were low and powerfully built, like short, stocky wrestlers. They looked well-nigh indestructible—row upon row of squat tract houses, brick and stone. Front fences crowded the sidewalk. The people on the street here were monochrome, a sign that something was working against diffusion.

Farther out, the neighborhood changed abruptly, as if I had crossed a line in the sand. Shopping malls and pharmacies and gas stations and hotels. There must be a word for this kind of neighborhood. A special zoning ordinance known only to those public officials who gerrymander these things. Then another transformation, like a final phase shift. Large box structures. Open space. Tall buildings. Small, neat office complexes built at some distinguished remove from the roadway and moated all around by a lake of parking. I checked the GPS on my phone one last time and turned left at the sign.

It was just before 2:00 p.m. when I put the car in park and turned off the engine.

I'd arrived.

The office complex itself was shorter and wider than the others. Aside from that, there was nothing about the structure that stood out. A typical commercial building that might house dozens of companies. Gold-tinged windows, lots of concrete. It's the parking that strikes you, when you've been away from the Midwest for any length of time. The luxury of open lots. Asphalt pads like salt flats—an embarrassment of parking. The coasts don't understand. In the Midwest, it can sometimes be considered rude to park next to another car. Like sitting next to the only other person in a midday matinee.

But even by Midwest standards, this lot was unusually bare. A dozen cars occupied a space that could have accommodated a high school football game. Near the front I saw a BMW parked in one of the reserved spots. Green. Stuart's favorite color, I remembered, though the car I'd last seen him drive had cost less by an order of magnitude.

I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, remembering his letter, which I'd thrown away:
We need to talk.

I climbed out and walked up to the building.

Stuart hadn't started out wanting to run a company. For him, it was always about the tech. Building the better mousetrap. Pushing the polygons. And the company was just how you funded that. He'd been good at the tech, but his heart was never in the corporate side of things. At least not back then. He'd never aspired to run an empire. I looked up at the squat building in the heart of the corporate bramble and wondered if he'd gotten what he'd really wanted.

I made my way through the front doors.

Inside was eerie. A big, open space that echoed like a mausoleum; stunted trees in wood planters—an inside courtyard meant to seem like an outside courtyard, themed vaguely Asian. There was no foot traffic. I walked across the empty anteroom and stopped in front of the placard that listed the names of the companies in the building. On the first floor were a handful of insurance and marketing companies, along with a couple of companies with names that sounded like vitamins. The second, third, and fourth floors were empty. The fifth floor listed only one company, a name I remembered well: High-throughput Technologies.

Despite myself, I smiled. I still remembered the first time he had said the name aloud.

“You can't name a company that,” I'd told him.

But he'd proved me wrong. And now here it was listed on a directory a dozen years later. High-throughput—a name with one foot in screening, the other in informatics. It was all big data when you got down to it.

I took the elevator to the fifth floor. The elevator dinged, and the doors opened to a hallway. Unsure what to do, I stepped off the elevator and followed the hall to a set of French doors on which the word
HIGH-THROUGHPUT
was glazed in small black letters. I pushed the door, and it opened.

The walls were beige. The carpet gray and industrial—the kind of dense, low carpet used in high-traffic areas like doctors' waiting rooms. But there was no traffic here. There were no chairs. No coffee table with the latest issue of
Scientific American
. I expected a receptionist. Something. There was a desk, but no one behind it. Beyond the desk, another hall.

“Anybody here?” I called out.

After a moment's hesitation, I followed the hall to where it came to a
T
, and then I took a right. Thirty feet later, the hall opened up, like the end of a train tunnel coming out of a mountain, and I suddenly found myself in a larger expanse.
Where were all the people?

Here, I realized, was the workspace. The room for the technicians and designers—the employees who actually made the company run. A cube farm that extended to the horizon. Empty. Abandoned. I kept walking.

Beyond there, the floor space was divided into a series of smaller rooms, mostly empty. Carpet, the same high-traffic gray, gave way to tile, then farther in, raw cement. The entire set of rooms had the air of a place that had once been something but was now vacant.

I continued on, exploring further. There were more desks, filing cabinets with their drawers left open, telephones, and computer monitors. In the corner I saw a photocopier with its paper tray removed. Paper sprawled around it like the guts of some disemboweled beast. I saw coffee mugs and a small trophy on which
#1 DAD
was inscribed. Second and third place were not in attendance. Here were the accoutrements of thousands of working hours. An office that had run its course, like a civilization. In the distance, I thought I heard a sound. A faint drilling.

“Hello!” I called out. “Is somebody there?”

The drilling went silent. I continued on, moving deeper into the maze.

I found him in a side room, faced away from the door, standing near an apocalypse of integrated circuitry splayed out across a huge lab bench where a dozen technicians might have once worked. But now there was just him. A small drill rested on the flat surface.

“Stuart.”

His shoulders straightened. He turned. He had a shotgun in his hand, now pointed at my chest.

“You came,” he said. “I knew you would.”

 

27

“He showed up two weeks ago.”

I followed Stuart as he led me past rows of empty offices. He carried his shotgun on his shoulder with practiced ease.

Some rooms were empty. Others still held furniture. One office was bare floor to ceiling except for a single swivel chair stationed like a sentry in the middle of the room. I wondered what had happened here. It was like walking through an Old West ghost town, everything abandoned when the gold dried up.
No
, I thought, when I saw a half-eaten sandwich moldering on a paper-strewn desk.
This wasn't an Old West ghost town; this was Chernobyl. Its inhabitants hadn't left; they'd fled.

“Satvik was here?” I said. I tried to keep my voice level, but the shock of this news seeped in.

“Yeah.”

“Nobody has heard from him.”

He nodded but didn't slow. I couldn't see his face. “That explains it,” he said.

“Explains what?”

“I expected you sooner.” The shotgun switched shoulders as he walked. “He seemed to think somebody was following him,” he said.

“Did he say who?”

“To be honest, a lot of what he said didn't make much sense. At least not at the time. He was jumpy. Seemed a bit troubled.”

He hadn't started out that way.

We came to a steel door, and Stuart hit a series of numbers on the punch pad. There was a chime, the door clicked, and Stuart pushed it open. More empty offices. Half-finished spaces. Dozens of barren cubicles.

I stared at the emptiness, then at Stuart and his gun. He'd always had a menacing profile—bony and projecting, like he carried a percentage or two more Neanderthal than average and it had all landed in his face. If anything, the years had served to exaggerate the tendency. His wide shoulders cut in front of me as we passed into the next room. “What the hell happened here?”

“We grew quickly the first few years,” he said. “Maybe too quickly. We needed the room, so I leased this place. We had a hundred and thirty employees at one point.”

“Where are they now?”

“Beaches, I hope. Lord knows I paid them enough.”

“Paid them?”

“Buy-out packages. They shouldn't have to work another day unless they want to. You remember Lisa and Dave?”