The Cloud Read Free

Isaac, everything is a curiosity to be examined, touched, tasted, understood. I’m a toddler with a pen.
    But there’s something else: real anger. I could’ve died.
    I indulge myself in that for a bit, but then my thoughts return to someone else. I’m wondering about this Sandy Vello. What if she’s a target too? What if she has a kid, spouse, partner, or general desire to live?
    I walk back to the top of the majestic stairs and pull out my phone. It’s a first-generation iPhone, which in these parts makes me a Luddite, joke fodder, recipient of sad looks on public transportation. I call up an Internet browser and finger in Sandy Vello’s name. In the customary minute it takes for the results to load, I watch a man on a bike pedal by, undaunted in the rain, a dog in his back saddle wearing a yellow slicker. Watching makes my knee ache and I wonder when I’ll get back on a basketball court, my thirty-seven-year-old joints and weather permitting.
    Google returns its wisdom, 171,000 related web pages’ worth. Big help, Google.
    I run the same search but for recent news. I get a hit. Sandy Vello has been in the news lately. Ten days ago, she was hit by a car in Woodside, a suburb in the hills half an hour south of San Francisco. She was killed.
    I’m reading an obituary.

3
    T rue to my business card, I make my living with words. Ideally getting $1.50 for each one. That’s been easier since I exposed the plot to destroy our brains.
    A year ago, I wrote a series of articles about how a venture capitalist with ties to the military was developing technology to store secrets inside fallow memory space in the human mind. The conspirators wanted to use brain capacity like computer disc space. The idea was to allow seemingly harmless humans (like the elderly or even children) to become stealth carriers of data, able to cross borders or military lines. Without knowledge of the carry or the suspicion of enemies. The brilliant conceit: the bad guys might know how to hack a password-protected supercomputer, but they won’t be able to hack the brain of an eighty-five-year-old with dementia.
    It’s not nearly as farfetched as it sounds, at least in theory, given the malleability of the hippocampus, the brain’s memory gateway. But in practice, the development of the technology entailed tinkering with and even destroying the memories of human guinea pigs, without their knowledge or permission. By happenstance, one of the guinea pigs was my grandmother, the iconoclastic octogenarian Lane Idle.
    Grandma Lane’s memory began fading in and out, failing precipitously, regurgitating memories not her own. I was scared, curious and then angry, and followed some leads. Story of my life.
    Long story short: I wrote a story about the scheme, got some notoriety, banged out a string of freelance pieces about the impact of technology on the brain, scored periodic appearances on CNN, experienced the most intense work year of my life, won an award for investigative medical journalism and—trust me that this relates—now need to borrow a tie.
    It’s not that I don’t own a tie, but it has big polka dots and probably will be seen as obnoxious at tomorrow’s journalism awards luncheon at a private room at MacArthur Park in Palo Alto.
    Sartorially, I remain unevolved, another late-thirtysomething unable to dress his age. But professionally, for the first time, I’m on solid footing. I even get a premium for my blog posts, $50 for some of them, having become something of a go-to journalist for investigations and wide-eyed tips involving neuroscience.
    Which brings me to Sandy Vello.
    According to her brief obituary in the San Mateo Daily News , the deceased worked as an administrator in the emerging neurotechnology division of a company called PRISM Corporation. She lived west of Burlingame, did regular volunteer work at the learning annex at the Twin Peaks juvenile hall, and enjoyed a modest fame in having been a contestant on an early episode