Page 109 of Lone Wolf

Evan pictured the phone she’d left upstairs, a portal to the insane, beeping and chiming and beckoning with no one to hear it.

He crossed to one of the weapon lockers and extracted a fresh ARES 1911 and three magazines. He seated the mags one after another, dropping them, loading them, checking for snags and hitches. There were none.

He slotted the pistol into his appendix carry and hid the backup mags in the pockets of his Harvard professor trousers. It was time to go face-to-face with Nathan Friedhoff.

All around Evan, the Vault hummed with movement, scrolling logs, progress bars, and blinking CPU and GPU meters. He started out.

Joey stayed locked in.

He didn’t say good-bye.

He didn’t have to.

48

The Permanent Hypnotic Drugging of the

American Mind

Nathan Friedhoff was a confusion of disjointedness, pacing in the great shelf of a living room jutting out over a sheer cliff in the Hollywood Hills. Evan’s faux interview on the nature of genius had been desultory at best. Friedhoff’s two teenage daughters had streamed in and out with their faces adhered to their phones, along with a trio of Latina cleaning ladies, and a Slavic manservant of sorts who drifted through at intervals tidying up and then standing obsequiously with his hands clasped at the small of his back awaiting instructions that never came. Friedhoff was too busy pacing to take note of any of them, yammering in circular loops of logic that suggested the need for a med adjustment or shock treatment. No topic was too small for him to opine about, and he ladled out each declamation with theatrical heft as if anticipating its transcription for a Wired article.

There was way too much foot traffic in the house for Evan to kill him now, even if he did manage to pry loose incriminating information, so he had to buckle down and see what fuel he might gather for future ignition.

A bar with uplit shelves climbed to a raised ceiling, showing off an array of fine bottles. Friedhoff sipped rum, a substandard spirit, from a rocks glass that he refilled as liberally as if he were pouring apple juice. As the sun dimmed over the thump and pulse of Cahuenga Boulevard way below, he moved to scotch as was befitting the hour.

He swung a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue toward Evan and then the shelves. “Want anything?”

Evan remained perched on a barstool with academic delicacy, pretending not to eye the squat bottle of VDKA 6100. Made of only two ingredients, whey and spring water locally sourced near Lake Taupo on New Zealand’s North Island, it had been brought to international awareness by an American actor. It was smooth as the action on a vintage SIG P210, and it finished on a note of white pepper along the sides of the tongue.

But now was not the time or place. Friedhoff wasn’t just drinking hard; it was the wrong kind of drinking, steeped in grief and toxins. The booze had gone into him, hit bottom, and was now seeping out, clogging his pores, suffusing his clothes, riding his breath.

“No, thank you,” Evan said.

Friedhoff slopped scotch into a glass. “Johnnie Walker Blue doesn’t have the character of a single-malt,” he declared, “but you can always count on it. Like a top-notch Parisian whore. You get your money’s worth.”

Though he was well into his fifties, Friedhoff wore board shorts and a T-shirt with a Pied Piper logo. A glass-fronted mini-fridge behind the bar was stocked full of bottles of Soylent, a trendy Silicon Valley plant-based protein drink, and he wore one of those ridiculous Leatherman Tread multitool bracelets from which you could extract a screwdriver or a hex drive or a heat-pump assembly for your Tesla Model Y. Studiously tousled hair, neatly manscaped two-day growth, boyish wire-frames at odds with the lines of maturity etching his temples—he was one of those boy-men or man-boys who’d never figured out how to grow up and yet despite that or because of it had plummeted into the depths of a midlife crisis.

Luke Devine had hinted about some kind of breakdown, but Friedhoff was even more fragmented and rambling than Evan had anticipated.

He resumed his woe-is-me rant about the technology he’d helped unleash upon the world: “I wasn’t some will-to-power person from the gate, you know? I was a sweet kid who loved coding, who wanted to express himself, to share what I learned with everyone. But it gets into you. Power —the roar of it.”

Time and again, Evan had heard a variation of this speech. Of course it was men like Allman and Friedhoff who did the most damage. The ones with so much to offer who’d fallen into the gravitational pull of their own ego. People who were solely motivated by power rarely got far enough to do real damage.

As Evan sat blinking and pretending to take notes, Friedhoff slammed back the scotch and moved out to the short balcony that looked down a forever drop to scrubby brush and stone.

“When we started, it was fucking beautiful, man. We were changing the world, creating prosperity, and we were nice to people at work. Everything was possible. Smart prosthetics for amputees, VR PTSD therapy in the meta, AI diagnostics to identify cancer nodules from a voiceprint, low-carbon cities, you name it, man.”

Evan tried to imagine someone this unimpressive building a multibillion-dollar company and then ordering the execution of a key competitor. Nothing seemed real about Friedhoff, but perhaps that was the point. Maybe nothing was real to him outside a screen. Maybe everything was a VR simulation. Maybe he just punched a button on his joystick and deployed the Wolf with a throw-down .22 and a flex-tie sized for a seventeen-year-old girl’s neck.

“Now it’s all about maximization. Work product. Time. Profit. We measure our workers by metrics of how much they load in our warehouses down to fractions of seconds. Wearable tech, handheld scanners, performance-tracking software, cameras everywhere, algorithm-driven performance system metrics. Charting time-off tasks like snack and bathroom breaks. I mean, we know the percentage our employees slow down when they’re chewing a FreeWillPower bar and the percentage by which they speed up when chewing one of our caffeinated Youtropical bars. I think: How did we get here? And then I remember: I aimed at this. I did. And now … what if it’s too late?”

“For you?”

“For everyone.” Friedhoff slumped into a stool, despondent. “There’s no going back.” He spun his glass on the bar and then spun it again. “We can’t put the tech back into the box. When I was in college I used to bike through the rain. To read fucking Kierkegaard. In a library. That was open all night. Real-world dedication, right? And me, I’m a shitstain on the heel of what my grandfather was. And these kids now? Who we’re creating? Who we already created? And are powerless to stop? They’re so … softened in luxury. Eroded. I have two daughters, man. If I admit what I’ve done to them? To the kids of this world? If you teleported me in from a few decades ago to behold my work? Faces stuck to screens, anxiety skyrocketing, FOMO and body image, the permanent hypnotic drugging of the American mind. No—global mind. Not anymore. I’m out, man. I’m out.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” Friedhoff’s eyes held equal parts remorse and pleading. “I’m tired of being disgusted with myself. Like a lot of people. But the sin I carry, my burden, it just seems … heavier. Our way of life is dying. Human life. And I helped oversee its demise. The singularity’s bearing down on us like a freight train.”