Free The Doomsday Equation by Matt Richtel

in the language of conflict, or where in the world it has changed. That level of abstraction will take more research, another command to the server, easily enough done when he gets upstairs. He’ll be able to tell if the language of conflict has intensified in, say, the Baltics, or among Greek bankers, or in Iran.
    All Jeremy can tell from this column is that there has been a sharp uptick, 14 percent, in the last few days, of the collective language of conflict, material enough for the computer to care about.
    There’s been an even sharper rise in the Random Event Meter. It’s up 430 percent. Jeremy shakes his head, mostly annoyed, vaguely curious. The meter measures whether there has been some event or series of events that, in historic terms, would seem far outside the standard deviation. And the event can be anything. An alien landing. All Major League Baseball games being rained out, or being decided by more than 30 runs. Statistical anomalies unconnected to any of the other variables.
    Jeremy clicks on the line. He sees a story from the Associated Press. The headline: “Lions Freed in Three Zoos, Leaving Man Dead.”
    He glances at the article. Lions loosed over the last twenty-four hours at the San Francisco Zoo, and in Oakland and in San Diego. Outside the San Diego Zoo, an old man found dead from claw wounds. Police speculate the man wasresponsible for freeing the lion. They speculate further that this is some effort coordinated among animal rights activists but acknowledge the theory is for the most part conjecture.
    An off-duty cop shot the lion in San Diego. Animal control managed to dart and subdue the one in Oakland. The one in San Francisco remains at large.
    It’s all Jeremy can do to stop himself from rolling his eyes. Fucking computer, fucking nonsense. Maybe the three lions were planning to get together to cause the apocalypse.
    He turns to the third variable, tantalum. That’s up 4,017 percent.
    The precious metal is integral to the making of cell phones. Tantalum, Jeremy recalls, comes from refining a raw material called coltan, which, in turn, is found in mines in Uganda and Rwanda.
    Jeremy knows this not because he knows a bunch about how cell phones are made. Rather, he knows it because he knows how wars are made. And the battle for coltan once set off a rash of insurgencies in Africa. Simply: demand for coltan, which sold for $100 a pound when Jeremy was studying the conflict region in 2001, fueled efforts to control the mines and the municipal governments by guerrilla bands. It was a great place to explore localized conflict, even inspiring a visit once by Jeremy, then a graduate student, to try to put a human face on the variables measured by his computer brain.
    Jeremy looks at his phone, sensing this might be further evidence of a hoax. After all, what difference could tantalum make in the possible onset of conflict? The sharp rise in shipments of tantalum, 4,017 percent, is certainly material, at least to the brokers and buyers and suppliers of the metal. But it could hardly, Jeremy imagines, have anything to do withtipping the balance of massive global conflict. He can imagine himself talking to some news blogger explaining he thinks that there’s going to be a nuclear holocaust because of an increase in the shipment of some precious metal. Oh, and the release of some zoo lions.
    You don’t say, Mr. Stillwater? And for a follow-up question: are you still taking your meds?
    The bus slows. Jeremy hears the doors open. He hears the rain. As he stuffs his iPad into the backpack, he sees the slick streets and smells the wet air.
    How long has it been raining? How come he hadn’t noticed? Is the rain the forest, or the trees?
    Fucking Emily. And that guy, there was something about him that didn’t add up. Something deliberate. A too on-point jacket, like a costume, but with shoes from an entirely different circus trunk. No, that’s too simplistic. Was he too handsome, too deliberate in some