The Doomsday Equation by Matt Richtel Read Free Book Online

but there’s no buzz or hum to it, the sound and energy sapped by the inclement weather, fog and drizzle as insulation. On the ratty orange couch, a guy with a beard quietly plucks a guitar and taps its face in rhythm to some song he’s polite enough to almost keep to himself. Toward the front, some college-student types bury themselves in earphones and texts. No talent, Jeremy remarks in his neurological recesses, referring to the fact that there’s not a single worthy chick.
    He plugs the iPad into an outlet, signs on to the wi-fi, calls up, sees the machine come to life, paws the conflict map to bring it to life, then hears the machine beep. Three beeps, those three beeps, the same ones from the morning.
    The war machine has an update for him.

C HAPTER 7
    B EFORE HE CAN check the device, Jeremy feels something nag at him and looks up. He discovers he’s being stared at by the bearded guitar player, who quickly lowers his head. Jeremy recoils into his beanbag, tilting the iPad so no one else in the place could possibly see it.
    He looks at the screen. A dialogue box pops up. Inside it reads: “Impact Update. Click for details.”
    Sure, let’s see it, he thinks, clicking.
    The dialogue reads: “April’s projected deaths: 75 million.”
    In the abstract, at least, that’s not so hard for Jeremy to swallow. Just more game theory and simple probability. An attack in, say, San Francisco, triggers a counterattack, then reprisals, then the dominoes fall. The program is taking into account the hundreds of parameters and key variables that, Jeremy’s research at Oxford determined, can be used to predict the length and intensity of war.
    He looks at the map.
    Red, red, red. The only difference between the rendering of the future on this map and on the version of the map he saw six hours ago is that attack is six hours closer. That, henotices, and it looks like the red is spreading. Meaning: whatever conflict this computer has foreseen will go from hellacious to worse. The countdown clock shows 66:57:02. Hours, minutes, seconds.
    Jeremy looks up at the guitar player. It crosses his mind that if the guitar player is looking at him, Jeremy’s going to advise the guy on the problems with his chord-hand position. Just a little jab, one that will come across as possibly well-meaning and hard to interpret. But the guitar player is buried in his world, unavailable to hear unsolicited advice.
    Jeremy pulls out his phone. He’s trying to remember Evan’s cell phone number. Trying to think what he’s going to say after: Hey, fuckface!
    He pauses. Never go into a fight unarmed. He needs more evidence. He can check the inputs.
    On the phone, he calls up Nik’s number. Taps out a text: “notice anything strange?” The corpulent assistant is either asleep or glued to an infomercial. But if he does see the text, it might jar him; Jeremy doesn’t ask questions like this, not open-ended ones, not even of Nik.
    From his backpack, Jeremy pulls an external keyboard.
    Is the data coming into his machine, the data that somehow adds up to impending doom, accurate? Has it been altered?
    Jeremy rolls his neck, pre-computing calisthenics. He looks at the key fob, enters six numbers, then his password, then he begins tearing his way across the keyboard, causing symbols and lines and numbers to appear in the window. It’s less fancy than it looks. Jeremy’s simply creating a category of all of these data points—all 327 inputs—collecting them into a single file, then writing a code to send out the numbers, all of the datapoints, and check them against their sources around the world, and then to double-check the data points.
    Most of them largely irrelevant. In the grand scheme of predicting conflict, they are modest measures, weighted lightly relative to the handful of big ones: troop movements, demographics (specifically, concentration of males age eighteen to thirty-five), changes in income distribution (the wealth gap), weather, arms