Schrodinger's Gat (23 page)

“
Heller accepted the deal. He dropped the lawsuit, quit his job at Stanford and started working on the project full-time. He hired Miss Stern to help him. Every time I stopped by, they were hard at work, but ten months later they still hadn’t produced any hard evidence. I was getting pressure from the board. I gave Heller a hard deadline: I wanted firm evidence of foreknowledge of a significant event within the next week. The week passed and he still hadn’t given me anything. He pleaded with me, saying that he couldn’t
force
an event to occur. I pointed out to him that there had been a fire in Oakland two days earlier that had killed eight people. He made some excuse about the detectors in that area not working properly. I gave him another week. When that week passed and still he had given me nothing, I decided that Heller needed to be convinced of the seriousness of the matter. I had Miss Stern disappear and told Heller that he had one more week. If he didn’t give me proof by the end of the week, I’d have Miss Stern killed. Lo and behold, this time he came through with a prediction: he was sixty percent certain that on Saturday at five p.m., between five and nine people would be killed at the Fairway Mall, near the fountain in the atrium. I told him good, he’d better not be lying, because I was going to be at the mall at five p.m. and if nothing happened, I was going to shoot Tali in the head.

“
I have to tell you it was quite a relief to me when you showed up with that briefcase. Sorry for shooting at you, by the way. I couldn’t afford to be caught. I could hardly wait to tell the board the next morning that Heller had given me proof. But then I heard on the news that Heller was dead and the bomber had been apprehended at his house. No wonder Heller was able to predict the bombing, I thought: he caused it! I didn’t know at that point how he had conned you into bringing the bomb to the mall, but I knew that he was somehow responsible. There was no other explanation for why you’d be at his house.

“
But then it occurred to me that just because Heller was responsible for the bomb, that didn’t mean he didn’t have foreknowledge of it. That is, maybe Heller
did
know about the bombing in advance, but he wasn’t willing to risk that forty percent chance that he was wrong. Maybe he cared enough about Tali that he was willing to be the guy who built the bomb if that’s what it took to save her life. He couldn’t go to the mall himself, of course. Besides the fact that the bomb would likely kill him, a bombing that he personally committed wouldn’t be adequate proof. So he suckered you into doing it, figuring I wouldn’t make the connection.

“
It’s a little maddening when you think about it. I mean, let’s assume that Heller was telling the truth: that the psionic field detectors showed a sixty percent chance of a mass killing at the mall. Heller probably told himself that there was a sixty percent chance that somebody was going to set off a bomb at the mall whether he did it or not, so he really wasn’t responsible for killing those eight people. On the other hand, it was the lack of certainty that caused him to act: sixty percent wasn’t high enough for him. He wanted to be personally responsible for the bombing to increase the odds. But of course he knew beforehand that increasing the odds was impossible, because anything he was going to do would already have been factored into the odds. So should he have sat back and waited for someone else to bomb the mall? Or should he have tried to warn the people at the mall? If he had, would he get karmic brownie points for trying to do the ‘right thing,’ even though he couldn’t possible have changed the outcome? For that matter, should Heller be considered a murderer, even though those people were most likely going to die whether or not he killed them?” Carlyle seems amused by the whole situation, as if it were a brain teaser on the back of a cereal box.

“
He should have tried to stop it,” I say. “Maybe that forty percent chance was the possibility he wouldn’t send me to the mall with the bomb.”

Carlyle shakes his head. Somehow I know what he
’s going to say before he says it. “It doesn’t work like that. Virtually everything you do, every choice you make, is deterministic. In a sense, it’s meaningless to talk about what Heller should have done. There is no
should
; there is only what was going to happen and what did happen. And those two things are really the same thing, separated into arbitrary categories of past and future. I think maybe this is why Heller’s hypotheses resonated with me: I’ve always felt like morality was sort of like window dressing. It doesn’t have any effect on the underlying reality. There is no
ought
; there is only what
is
.”

“
So what’s the point?” I ask. “If there’s no free will, no morality. What are you trying to accomplish?”

“
There’s no
trying
,” says Carlyle. “There is only what is going to happen. And what is going to happen is that I’m going to become the CEO of the most powerful company in the world. And then I’m going to have some fun.” He smiles and finishes his drink.

“
Good luck running your little division without Heller,” I say.

He laughs.
“I don’t need Heller. I’ve got his data and his equipment. Not to mention the actual brains behind the operation.”

“
You’re still holding Tali?” I demand, eyeing the gun in his lap.

He laughs again.
“Holding? No.” He presses a button on his phone. “Miss Stern, could you come in here a minute. I think Paul Bayes would like to see you.”

A moment later Tali
walks in the office, looking tired but unhurt. She’s wearing a very professional looking skirt and jacket. Her curly brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail. “Hello, Paul,” she says.

“
What is this, Tali?” I ask. “Do you work for these guys?”

She nods.
“I’ve been helping them get up to speed on Heller’s system. We’ve moved the Tyche server here to the Peregrine building.” I open my mouth to object, but she holds up her hand. “It’s not as bad as it sounds, Paul. Dr. Heller and I had reached an impasse with his work. We couldn’t make any progress from a strictly scientific standpoint, because Ananke kept stonewalling us. The problem with science is that it’s a collaborative activity, and the more people who know about Ananke, the harder she fights against discovery. But in business, secrecy has value. Peregrine isn’t about to tell its competitors about Ananke, and as long as we keep the Predictive Analytics division small and swear all of our employees to secrecy, we may have a chance to do some actual good.”

I can
’t believe what I’m hearing. “Actual good? Tali, this guy just got done telling me how he’s going to revoke fire insurance policies before fires break out. How is that good? Who is that helping, besides Carlyle and Peregrine’s stockholders?”

She shakes her head.
“It’s more complicated than that. I mean, you’re right, Carlyle is a manipulative, amoral asshole. But he’s also a genius.” Carlyle shrugs and goes to get another drink. I see that he’s put the gun back in the drawer.

“
A genius!” I yell. “Tali, he had you kidnapped! He’s responsible for Heller’s suicide, for all those people dying in the mall! He’s a sociopath! How can you not see this?”

“
I
do
see it, Paul,” Tali snaps. “I’m not a child. I’ve seen more people die than I care to remember. Do you realize that when I let you live that day at the BART station, I was taking dozens of lives in my hands? There was no guarantee I would make it to the second crux in time, and even if I did, there was a fifty percent chance that cop would
still
go to the wrong restaurant for lunch. Even as things turned out, an old man was killed and a teenage girl will probably never walk again. And that was a
good
day, Paul. Half the time I fail completely. Do you understand that? I’ve gone to the sites of twenty-three tragic mass killings in order to prevent them, and I’ve failed thirteen times. That’s forty-six deaths I’ve been a part of. So don’t lecture me about my choice of business partners. I’m in insurance. That’s always what I’ve been doing, just playing the odds. It’s a lousy business filled with lousy people. And let me add that I appreciate the irony of you lecturing me on responsibility, Mr. leaves-his-life-up-to-a-coin-toss.”

She
’s right, and it hurts. A lot. What do I know about any of this, about what she’s been going through since she realized the sort of power Heller had unleashed? I’ve got no right to say anything. And yet, something still bugs me. Something doesn’t fit. “I’m sorry, Tali. I just don’t get it. This guy kidnaps you and now you’re working for him? Just like that?”

“
As Tali says, it’s a little more complicated than that, Paul,” says Carlyle. “For one thing, saying I kidnapped her is being a little overdramatic. I met Tali at her car that night, just after the Pier 39 shooting, which I understand you witnessed. I expressed to her my frustration at Heller’s apparent lack of progress with the Tyche system and I suggested that Peregrine might have to resort to legal recourse to force Heller to turn over his data. I know that Tali and Heller are paranoid about anyone finding out about Tyche …”

“
Not paranoid,” says Tali. “The more people who know specific information about the system, the less reliable it is. If you’d have dragged us into court, there’d have been lawyers, expert witnesses … who knows what Ananke would do? She’d probably have killed us all before we ever got to trial.”

“
Like I said,” says Carlyle, grinning, “paranoid. Not without reason, actually. I had one of our investigators tailing Tali. He followed her to the BART station and observed her meeting with you. He had a hard time figuring out what that was about. Tali watched you flip a coin and then called out to you when it looked like you were going to step in front of the train. Eventually we pieced together that it had something to do with trying to prevent the Pier 39 incident. I have to admit, as much as I thought about the potential of being able to predict future events, it never occurred to me to try to
stop
them. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.

“
Anyway, my investigator followed the cab you two got into for a few miles, but he lost you before you got on the bridge. I don’t know what you told that driver, but I don’t think the devil himself could have kept a tail on him. The investigator returned to the BART station and waited near Tali’s car. When she returned, he convinced her that it was in her interest to meet with me.

“
I told Tali I wanted a demonstration of what Tyche could do. I suspected that she could somehow remotely tap into the Tyche data, so I figured I’d hold onto her until she could demonstrate foreknowledge of an event.”

“
Hold onto her?” I ask. “How is this not kidnapping?”

“
She was free to leave. I put her in an empty office down the hall and kept her under watch. I even let her keep her phone, since I suspected that was how she tapped into the Tyche system. But I told her that if she left or attempted to contact Heller, I would pursue legal action against them. I suppose you could call that blackmail, but it wasn’t kidnapping.”

“
Why didn’t you want her to contact Heller?”

He laughs.
“Are you seriously asking me that? Heller convinced you to carry a bomb into a crowded shopping mall. The reason I approached Tali rather than Heller is that I think Tali is basically pragmatic and reasonable. Heller was not. Heller was a true believer. He really believes in all this Ananke bullshit.”

“
He’s not wrong,” says Tali.

“
Oh, I know,” says Carlyle, with a wave of his hand. “I mean, I believe in Ananke too, I suppose, the same way I believe in Mother Nature or Lady Luck. It’s a sort of mental crutch. But Heller literally thinks there’s some mysterious, nearly omnipotent and omniscient being out there who is conspiring against him. The point is, there was no telling what he would do, or what he would convince Tali to do. No, I needed Tali isolated from Heller, so she could think rationally about what she was doing, what she was trying to protect. As she says, she and Heller were at a dead-end. I can do so much more with the system than they could. And it’s my system! I paid for it! Legally, ethically, practically, any way you want to look at it, she was obligated to give me that data.

“
At first, she tried to stonewall me, insisting, as Heller had, that she couldn’t
make
events happen. I told her, fine, we’ll just wait until one comes up. I’ve got time. I think she thought she could out-wait me.” He smiles at Tali. She stares coldly back at him. “But then a fire broke out in an apartment building in Hayward. Eleven people died. It was exactly the sort of event that Tyche was supposed to be able to predict, but Tali had given me no warning of it. She insisted that nothing had showed up in the data, and even showed me the Tyche app on her phone. But of course I didn’t know what I was looking at; I was completely dependent on Tali to explain the readings to me. And for all I knew, she had rigged the app to give false readings. It was meaningless. So I told her I was giving her one more chance. She either gives me warning of the next event or I cut her loose and file suit against her and Heller. Then, for her next trick –”

“
God damn it, Carlyle,” Tali snaps. “It wasn’t a trick. I don’t know what happened. The data clearly indicated a high probability of an event in Alameda. If I could have thought of a way to keep leading you on, I would have, but I knew I was screwed at that point. I had to give you something. But somehow, somebody must have tampered with the outcome. There was a crux, so it’s possible that Heller somehow …”