VI
Onscreen, a swarm of dots spread themselves across the black backdrop, shifting from green to orange to red. They undulated, alive, just slowly enough that Felix could track one if he didn’t blink, but one shudder of his eyelids and his target would be gone, flickering to another color and racing away.
“Let the variable go,” Naomi said.
Felix pressed a key on his keyboard. “Variable is a go.”
To the right of the screen, another dot, this one purple, joined the swirling tapestry—but at half speed and moving at right angles instead of smoothly like the rest. Instantly, beautifully, the rest of the dots adjusted. They began to move around the purple one, changing colors and parting in ripples that automatically evened themselves out. It wasn’t about cars, it was all conceptual, but Felix couldn’t help but think that ecosystem shifts still looked a little like afternoon Manhattan traffic. Chaotic harmony.
“So far, so good,” he observed, but Naomi held up a hand as if to say Just wait.
On the other side of the desk, Priya stared at the same view on her own monitor. They were all holding their breath. The dots kept adjusting, and adjusting, the balance kept . . .
Then the scenario crashed.
“This is worthless,” Priya groaned, flopping back in her chair.
The field had become a tangle of chaos. Green dots backed up everywhere, smashing into each other, flashing straight to red. The purple dot, its mission completed, ran away off screen.
Felix pulled off his headphones. “This can’t be done with our current data. It just can’t.”
Naomi poked her keyboard dejectedly. The dots disappeared from all of their monitors, remaining only on the giant, spaceship-like flatscreen overhead.
“Why did we think we could predict future endangered species? Half of those dots were for insects that haven’t even been discovered yet!” Priya grumbled. “Three months of work, down the drain.”
If they went back to the very beginning, it was even longer than that. Their team, handpicked by the founder of the company himself—the brilliant, mysterious William Haberson—had been working for almost a year now on his equally mysterious mission.
For all its hundreds, possibly thousands, of different departments, Haberson Global was at its heart a logistics and navigation company, dedicated to finding things. Missing persons, lost pets, ancestry records, old friends who had fallen out of touch, distant branches of a family waiting to be reconnected—the list went on and on. The idea was, if they could amalgamate enough data to trace something on the company’s central creation—the ever-evolving, ever-growing Haberson Map—they could find it.
And they almost always did. Felix’s team had become so good at tracking things down that the FBI often ended up asking them to consult on especially difficult or time-sensitive cases. Just last month, they had even managed to use the Haberson Map to determine that based on all the traffic data they’d ever processed, there was a 92 percent chance that a man in Phoenix, Arizona, who had carjacked a vehicle with a baby still strapped into her car seat would head west on Interstate 10, not east. And they’d been right. Local law enforcement had scrambled squad cars onto the freeway at the next westward exit and saved the child before the driver had made it three miles.
It was awe-inspiring, the might of the Haberson Map’s computing power.
But William Haberson always wanted more. More than percentages, no matter how high.
He wanted perfection.
And that was why Felix, Naomi, and Priya had been placed onto this top secret team by none other than the man himself. To perfect the Haberson Map’s algorithm, so it could operate on a scale the world had never seen.
It would be not just unfathomably gigantic, but also graceful, each piece of information so well integrated into the whole that the map would be like music. A symphony. A geographical program capable of containing in one massive depiction every single stream of data from every single arm of the company. Haberson Global had medical consultancies, urban planning teams, mass transit tracking, interior design apps, weather charts, internet search programs, social media, food and grocery delivery, sleep monitoring, flower bloom patterns, endangered species migration routes—all of it would feed into the map, more information from more sources than ever possible before, through the algorithm Felix’s team was designing.