Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel

Chapter 74

For some time, the three of us sat dazed on the front porch, trying to clear our heads. Phillip woke up with a splitting headache. Alex seemed to bounce back pretty quickly, though it was taking me a little while.

"We've got to get out of here," Alex said.

"We can go to my house," I suggested.

"And get poisoned there? Thanks, but we need to go somewhere no computer or person knows about."

"And do what?"

"Plan our next move. We can't just sit here. Chances are, Doug's men are on their way. Give me your phone, Phillip."

He handed it over.

"You going to look up hiding spots on Yelp?" he asked.

Without a moment's hesitation, Alex smashed the phone on the ground. It barely cracked the screen.

"Hey, what the hell are you doing?" Phillip cried.

"As long as this thing is intact, Doug and Ancien can keep track of us."

He slammed it on the ground again. A piece of glass snapped off, but still it wouldn't break.

"Can't I just turn it off?"

"Don't be so naïve."

With the third smash, the phone finally came apart. Alex pulled some of the guts out for good measure. Phillip looked bewildered. He sat down and put his head in his hands.

"Hey, are you all right, Phillip?" I asked.

No response.

"Come on, we're going," said Alex.

"Where?"

"Away."

We walked for nearly half an hour before we escaped the residential maze in which Phillip lived. The first place we found was a strip mall. Alex asked if any of us were hungry. I wasn't and Phillip didn't respond, so we kept walking.

The first hotel we came to was a Hilton. It looked so nice. We could just collapse in bed for a bit. But Alex kept walking, and we followed. By now, the sun had burned through the morning clouds, and the sky was clear. The only things indicating it had ever rained were the few scattered puddles and children jumping gleefully into them. The sun felt false on my face. The warm comfort only skin deep.

I thought about the people who had died for what I had built. Trying to stop what it had become. Taye. Heath. The countless faces of people who met death before their time. Who else might still be fighting for their lives thanks to what Ancien had become?

"Hey, Luna, duck," Alex pulled Phillip and me to the ground. "We need to move to side streets."

A few moments later, I looked up and saw a Google Earth car slowly turning the corner. It had an alien-like spinning camera on the roof.

Had this been inevitable? Did the infusion of technology into our everyday lives make mass murder the only possible result? Of course, Asimov, Gibson, and Hertling might say so. But this was different.

Computers were not thinking on their own, deciding who to kill. Yet, it wasn't quite people killing people either. It was a weird mash-up of the two. Nobody was deciding who would die. At least, I hadn't found any evidence in the code that would suggest as much. Nor was anyone determining how these people would die. The computer figured out those parts on its own. But whether they realized it at the time or not, it was human beings who created the intention to kill. Not the computer.

The one thing nobody seemed to be able to synthesize with computers was the creative intention. The spark of why. More and more, any discrete task could be better accomplished by computers than by humans. But the intention behind the task, the creative force. That was still as mysterious and intractable as the soul.

Then we finally stopped. Alex had walked us to the Palo Alto Police Department.