PeaceNik.” Jeremy pauses. “Email me that stuff, pronto. Not from here.” Another pause. “Go to the gym. Lay low around some guys with big jabs.”
Jeremy starts walking to the subway, more convinced now someone is fucking with him. Rattling Nik too, or looking for something, business intelligence. Harry will enlighten Jeremy.
One of Jeremy’s phones buzzes. He pulls both from his crowded pocket. It’s the iPhone, with a reminder: dr.panckl.
He stares at it. He feels the tightness in his left pectoral, where the pain has been intermittent, sometimes severe. Coupled with night sweats and tired bouts during the day. Might be stress, his doctor tells him, but, just in case, she orders tests. His phone is reminding him to call and schedule the MRI. He’s told no one, not even Emily. She knows, of course, that Jeremy’s dad died young from the bad kind of Hodgkin’slymphoma, but that was before you could treat anything under the sun. And that his mother, notwithstanding the wrenching chemo near the end, lived to be fairly ripe.
He pockets the phone, looks up, sees the woman. Thin, perfect. And definitely familiar. From the café the night before, and then again from the bar.
C HAPTER 14
H EY!”
She looks up.
Jeremy starts to run. “Hey!”
He picks up steam, steps into the bicycle lane on the edge of the street to avoid a half dozen colleagues walking, spilling out from under two shared umbrellas.
The woman slips around to the driver’s seat, hops in. The car starts to peel away. It’s something bland, Jeremy thinks, a blue-gray Hyundai. He’s in the street now, fully unleashing healthy, practiced legs, decent lungs, and DNA that made him a sufficiently capable track athlete to win a Rhodes. Not sufficiently capable to catch a sedan, accelerating. He recognizes the woman, right? Same person from the night before?
He hears the horn. From behind. Another car approaching. It swerves, splashing rainwater onto Jeremy’s jeans.
It dawns on him he might want to get a ride from the car passing him, try to chase the sedan. Instead, he finds himself yelling: “Watch it, asshole!”
Brake lights go on in the car, a BMW. The driver slides down his window, then thinks better of it. Takes off.Jeremy yells: “The prom queen called. She wants her low-end Beamer back!”
Ten minutes later, damp, furious, Jeremy descends into a packed BART station to head to Berkeley. Discovers train delays. Thirty minutes due to some refuse on the tracks near City Center in Oakland.
Jeremy forces his way onto a bench in the tunnel and pulls out his iPad. He looks at the map. Red, red, red. He opens a new window and clicks on a link that will let him delve further into the variables that, allegedly, have prompted the computer to predict war. Chief among those variables: changes in conflict rhetoric, language that presages war.
While the computer whirs, calling up the data, Jeremy marvels at this particular capability—the one that allows him to track the language of the world. It is, to Jeremy, one of the most powerful tools afforded by the Internet. It is the equivalent of giving the world a blood test, taking its temperature, assessing its mood. Or, rather, it will become that. Eventually. For now, the Internet is remarkable at capturing what everyone is saying, and even organizing that data—by region, topic, media (Twitter versus blog versus newspaper), communicator (politician versus CEO versus activist).
It was amazing for Jeremy to watch the Arab spring and the protests in Russia, organized around Twitter feeds, and social networks, spontaneous calls to action in which the language elicits, organizes and stokes conflict. An amazing nearly one-to-one relationship between words and thoughts and action.
More broadly, Jeremy thinks that this development of mining and sifting the world’s conflict rhetoric could help answer an age-old philosophical question about the relationship between language, thought and
Jeremy starts walking to the subway, more convinced now someone is fucking with him. Rattling Nik too, or looking for something, business intelligence. Harry will enlighten Jeremy.
One of Jeremy’s phones buzzes. He pulls both from his crowded pocket. It’s the iPhone, with a reminder: dr.panckl.
He stares at it. He feels the tightness in his left pectoral, where the pain has been intermittent, sometimes severe. Coupled with night sweats and tired bouts during the day. Might be stress, his doctor tells him, but, just in case, she orders tests. His phone is reminding him to call and schedule the MRI. He’s told no one, not even Emily. She knows, of course, that Jeremy’s dad died young from the bad kind of Hodgkin’slymphoma, but that was before you could treat anything under the sun. And that his mother, notwithstanding the wrenching chemo near the end, lived to be fairly ripe.
He pockets the phone, looks up, sees the woman. Thin, perfect. And definitely familiar. From the café the night before, and then again from the bar.
C HAPTER 14
H EY!”
She looks up.
Jeremy starts to run. “Hey!”
He picks up steam, steps into the bicycle lane on the edge of the street to avoid a half dozen colleagues walking, spilling out from under two shared umbrellas.
The woman slips around to the driver’s seat, hops in. The car starts to peel away. It’s something bland, Jeremy thinks, a blue-gray Hyundai. He’s in the street now, fully unleashing healthy, practiced legs, decent lungs, and DNA that made him a sufficiently capable track athlete to win a Rhodes. Not sufficiently capable to catch a sedan, accelerating. He recognizes the woman, right? Same person from the night before?
He hears the horn. From behind. Another car approaching. It swerves, splashing rainwater onto Jeremy’s jeans.
It dawns on him he might want to get a ride from the car passing him, try to chase the sedan. Instead, he finds himself yelling: “Watch it, asshole!”
Brake lights go on in the car, a BMW. The driver slides down his window, then thinks better of it. Takes off.Jeremy yells: “The prom queen called. She wants her low-end Beamer back!”
Ten minutes later, damp, furious, Jeremy descends into a packed BART station to head to Berkeley. Discovers train delays. Thirty minutes due to some refuse on the tracks near City Center in Oakland.
Jeremy forces his way onto a bench in the tunnel and pulls out his iPad. He looks at the map. Red, red, red. He opens a new window and clicks on a link that will let him delve further into the variables that, allegedly, have prompted the computer to predict war. Chief among those variables: changes in conflict rhetoric, language that presages war.
While the computer whirs, calling up the data, Jeremy marvels at this particular capability—the one that allows him to track the language of the world. It is, to Jeremy, one of the most powerful tools afforded by the Internet. It is the equivalent of giving the world a blood test, taking its temperature, assessing its mood. Or, rather, it will become that. Eventually. For now, the Internet is remarkable at capturing what everyone is saying, and even organizing that data—by region, topic, media (Twitter versus blog versus newspaper), communicator (politician versus CEO versus activist).
It was amazing for Jeremy to watch the Arab spring and the protests in Russia, organized around Twitter feeds, and social networks, spontaneous calls to action in which the language elicits, organizes and stokes conflict. An amazing nearly one-to-one relationship between words and thoughts and action.
More broadly, Jeremy thinks that this development of mining and sifting the world’s conflict rhetoric could help answer an age-old philosophical question about the relationship between language, thought and
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