Internet Kill Switch (3 page)

4

Dalton’s 475 horsepower, 0-60 in 3.3
seconds, black Porsche 911 GT3 cruised down Mercury Road on the way home. The top was down, the evening warm. In other words, perfect.

The Porsche
purred as he wove through traffic. He revved the engine a bit at a light, just to feel the power under the hood. Dalton didn’t buy the car as a status symbol; he didn’t care about status. He did buy the car because of the speed; he liked speed. He raced the car, which he named Ellie for reasons never explained to anyone, on weekends.

Dalton wasn’t driving fast today. His mind was on the phone. The phone that he’d soon be testing. The phone that, as Nelson correctly pointed out, would change everything.

The phone on the seat next to him was the pinnacle of a brilliant career, that rare career that delivers fully on its promise. Mobiligent showed the greatest interest in Dalton out of graduate school, and gave him surprising autonomy from the beginning. They also paid him very well and gave him great perks, like a penthouse office. It made choosing this company among the eight or nine having fistfights to hire him relatively easy.

Neither side regretted the decision.
Almost from the day he was hired, Dalton showed an exceptional ability in the area of artificial intelligence, or A.I. He had a way of thinking about
thinking
, and could translate it to code. He contributed substantially to Mobiligent products that involved speech recognition, including the best verbal note-taking application anyone had ever seen. It was almost eerie, users said, how quickly the program could figure out their accents and patterns of talking and copy down their words almost perfectly. That included using the right words based on the context; the program knew with near-flawless accuracy, for example, if a speaker meant “their”, “there” or “they’re”.

Very early on, Mobiligent’s president, Mortimer Sacks, knew he had somethin
g special – maybe even unique – in the introverted, ponytailed genius. Dalton was more intuitive, more insightful, and tons smarter than anyone else in the company. So when Dalton came to him in 2002 with the seed of an idea for a new kind of communication device, one that would combine the functions of a phone with lightweight applications that would give it computer-like abilities, Sacks had no problem pulling him off all other projects and giving him the freedom to devote 100 percent of his time to developing what he called “the A.I. Phone.” It became known internally as AIP, or “Ape.”

Dalton worked with a  near-maniacal intensity
on Ape, regularly putting in 100-hour workweeks, to design and construct the phone. Nelson, Dalton’s manager, tried for two years to get progress reports on the device. Dalton refused to give any: “It’s coming along” was always his response. When Nelson objected to Sacks about getting more detail, Sacks told him to let the matter go; some things couldn’t be rushed.

For 10 years, Dalton worked on the phone.
For him, building Ape was not a job, but rather a calling. It consumed him to the point that in that decade, he took two vacations; one of them was ordered by Nelson when Dalton approached the cliff of a nervous breakdown from overwork. Dalton thought about little else, and several times his hygiene became an issue for co-workers, as Dalton forgot to shower for days at a time. Sacks didn’t care, though; a mind like Dalton’s, working with such purpose for so many years, could create nearly anything.

Of course, other Silicon Valley companies eventually caught wind
that some secretive genius was making a game-changing device at Mobiligent. Nothing can stay a secret forever, and secretaries like to gossip with delivery drivers, who gossip with other secretaries, who pass along the juiciest rumors to their bosses in exchange for raises.

The
first major executive to put the puzzle together was Steve Jobs. By that time he’d returned to Apple from his exile, and had just announced the iPod, the device that saved the company. Hearing rumors about the development of a magical phone, he immediately suspected that Greavy was the mind behind it; the number of people who could pull off what the whispers said was small.

He
put together a surreptitious meeting with Dalton. Over dinner, Jobs offered Dalton a $1 million signing bonus if he’d join him at Apple headquarters in Cupertino; he even had a check already made out and ready to hand over. Dalton was flattered, but declined; he was unimpressed with Jobs’ ham-fisted attempts at dinner to pump him for information. He also thought the Apple CEO was a bit dim.

Jobs was tremendously disappointed that he couldn’t lure Dalton to Apple; he
was used to winning. Shortly after the meeting, though, he gathered his best engineers together and told them to start working on a new device: a phone that could also run applications.

Dalton didn’t care that Jobs stole the idea of a smartphone from him; that was the way of the computer industry. Besides, he knew Apple’s engineers couldn’t create what he could. The iPhone was a nice toy, and Dalton appreciated certain things about it. But what he was working on was a whole different level
; a different universe, if truth be told.

And the others, as Dalton knew they would, also came knocking. Bill Gates offered him carte blanche at Microsoft to do the same thing. Dalton liked Gates more than he liked Jobs. Jobs was more charismatic, but Gates was smarter, and Dalton liked smart people. Also, Gates could write serious code, something Jobs
couldn’t do if his life depended on it. But Dalton turned down Gates just as firmly as he did Jobs.

Google called
, too. But when chairman Eric Schmidt broached the subject of a new phone, Dalton laughed at him. He hated Google, especially its incredibly stupid and hypocritical “Don’t be evil” slogan. In Dalton’s mind, no company was more evil than Google, with its desire to control information and use the tracking information it collected from searches to spam users with ads.

The last tech mogul to approach Dalton was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook led the social media revolution, but completely missed the boat on the potential of smartphones. Zuckerberg wanted in on the game, and wined and dined Dalton for two weeks.
But Dalton thought Zuckerberg was a smarmy little twerp with a Napoleon complex.

While Dalton appreciated
all the attention, he never seriously considered leaving Mobiligent. For one thing, he liked the fact that the company was based in Austin, rather than Silicon Valley. It was closer to his family, and he hated the dog-eat-dog mentality and artificiality that enveloped everything in the Valley. Austin had a thriving technology industry as well, but with the small-town feel he liked; the commute in from Miles Forge was trivial. Dalton was also a lifelong fan of the Dallas Cowboys, a legacy passed down from his Dad, who’d left Dalton his season tickets in his will. Going to those eight games per year was the one non-phone-developing activity Dalton always made time for.

And now Mobiligent would get the payoff. After the meeting with the Chinese tomorrow, the company would take off. There would probably be a record-breaking
initial public offering -- IPO -- within six months, and Mobiligent would take its rightful place alongside the Apples, Googles, Samsungs and Microsofts as one of the most important tech companies in the world.

In fact, thought Dalton as he reached over and grabbed the pouch, pulling the phone out, it just might put Mobiligent on top. Not that he cared about such things; but others did, and
he didn’t mind obliging.

Dalton looked at the phone
as he sped down the road; he liked the way the setting sun glinted off the chrome, flashing crimson as he turned it.

As he admired
his creation, Dalton forgot, for a moment, about the road around him. He sped through a
STOP
sign without noticing. Suddenly, he heard a loud horn. Dalton looked up from the phone in time to see a huge, brown UPS truck barreling toward him.

He didn’t have time to turn, stop or cry out before the truck was on him.

Metal screamed as the black Porsche was t-boned. The car skidded sideways, then flipped over.

And over.

Dalton, securely belted in, wasn’t ejected. But the phone he gripped flew out of his hand and across the intersection, bouncing in the street once before landing under a bush next to a sidewalk, 40 feet from the car.

T
wo of the tires on the upside-down Porsche spun slowly, as gas flowed out onto the ground. Dalton, amazingly, was still alive. Gravely hurt, but alive. He looked around for the phone. He didn’t see it.

As he wondered what had happened to his
beautiful phone, the Porsche 911 GT3 exploded.

5

The next morning, Tony was on his way to school
, still bemoaning the loss of his phone. The sun had just started to peek over the horizon and shine through the leaves of trees lining the street. It had been gray and rainy most recent mornings, and Tony enjoyed the change, the warmth lifting his spirits.

Toward the end of the block,
he caught a glint under a bush. Kneeling, he peered under the bush and was startled to see a phone of some kind there. He had no idea what kind of phone it was; most of his friends had smartphones, and although this looked at first glance like one of those, when he looked closer he realized it was like nothing else. Bright silver -- chrome, Tony thought it might be. Without a doubt the most gorgeous phone he’d ever seen.

Tony looked around for some kind of “On” button. He didn’t see any buttons
at all -- no volume rockers, no holes for speakers or headphones. Weird. What kind of phone didn’t have speakers or let you use earbuds?

Was it even a phone, then? It sure looked like one, except for all the missing stuff. Could it be some other kind of device, like a GPS?
He wasn’t sure.

Tony looked around at nearby houses. Someone probably dropped it, or
maybe it slipped out a purse or pocket. He went to the three closest houses and asked. People were home at two of them, but both said they’d never seen it before. Tony left a note at the third house, asking them to call his house if they’d lost a phone.

After leaving the note, Tony noticed the time. He hastily put the phone in his backpack an
d started jogging to the school, worried about being late. He didn’t have time to worry about the phone, or whatever it was, now.

6

This just can’t be happening,
Nelson thought over and over. This just can’t be happening.

He sat next to
Sacks, the CEO, who continued to look at his watch. Unfortunately, his  Rolex refused to lie about the time: 12:18. The meeting should have started 78 minutes ago.

Across from them
in the boardroom sat the six executives from the Beijing-based multinational conglomerate, eager to see if the “miracle phone” they’d been pitched was as good as advertised. Instead of being impressed by Dalton’s presentation, however, they were answering email or playing games on their smartphones.

“I’m not sure what could be keeping him,” Nelson said for at least the fourth time in the last half-hour. “We’ve got half the com
pany looking for Dalton,” he added by way of unnecessary explanation. By this time, the executives didn’t even acknowledge his presence.

If Dalton
could
be found, he
would
be found. A secretary had been dispatched to Dalton’s condo. Other employees scoured Dalton’s few haunts, including an upscale bar and a gym near his place in Miles Forge. Nelson didn’t have much hope he’d turn up at any of those places, but they had to at least check.

As the wait continued, Nelson’s stomach started to
roil. He excused himself. On his way past another secretary, he stopped briefly.

“Nancy, start calling local hospitals. He must be hurt or something.”

Nancy opened a web browser and started Googling hospitals in Austin.

Nelson went into the executive bathroom, wondering why God hated him.
He washed his face. Where was Dalton? He knew one thing, and one thing only: that man would not miss this meeting for anything in the world. Even if “Ape” had some terrible glitch he’d discovered, Dalton would have told them. He would never have abandoned them to the stares of businessmen who’d flown halfway around the world to see a phone.

Could Dalton have been kidnapped?
The engineer was worried about stuff like that all the time, and took incredible measures, like that ridiculous scanner, to protect his work.

To a degree, he was right to be paranoid: i
t was possible that rivals would do anything to get their hands on the information, or the man behind it all. Unlikely, perhaps, but smartphones were a trillion-dollar business. That kind of profit potential might tempt competitors to do all sorts of things.

Whatever had happened, Dalton wasn’t here. That reality churned his stomach like a blender.
He opened a stall door and barely made it to the bowl before he started throwing up.

After cleaning himself off, Nelson took a minute to regain his composure. He sucked on a breath mint, straightened his tie, and walked shakily to the bathroom door. He rested his hand on the knob for a moment, took a deep breath, and walked through.

As he walked toward the boardroom, hoping he hadn’t missed any vomit stains, he saw the back of the last of the Chinese executives, walking toward the elevators. Following behind was Sacks, near tears as he begged them to stay just a bit longer. They ignored him like he wasn’t there.

The pleading continued as the executives waited for, then got on, the elevator. Sacks had his hands out toward them, like a panhandler on the street. He was halfway on the elevator with them. A Chinese hand pushed him back out. The door slid closed. Sacks hung his head.

Nelson turned on his heel and headed back to the bathroom.