Seven Wonders
Praise for Ben Mezrich’s fiction:
“Like Crichton, Mezrich knows how to weave … a fast-paced story that’s fun and irresistible.” —
People
“On par with Robin Cook.” —
Kirkus
“Ben Mezrich is a rising star whose name will become as well-known as Clancy, Koontz, Grisham, and others.” —
Tulsa World
“Mezrich knows how to make science suspenseful.” —
Publishers Weekly
Praise for
Bringing Down The House
:
“A book that will surely become a classic of its genre.” —
The Sunday Express
“Part Tom Clancy, part Elmore Leonard … Gripping.” —
The Express
“The reigning cowboy of creative nonfiction.” —
The Oregonian
“What Mezrich has done, beautifully, is craft a riveting story about kids with excess brainpower taking on casinos with excess money. He has penned a gripping true-life adventure that will keep you reading well past your bedtime.” —
The Boston Globe
“Mezrich manages to incorporate solid journalism into a narrative that just plain works.” —
Publishers Weekly
To my parents, on their fiftieth anniversary.
And to Asher, Arya, and Tonya, my eighth, ninth,
and tenth Wonders of the World.
© 2014 by Ben Mezrich
Front Cover image courtesy of the Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections Flap Image: ©Thinkstock/javarman3, Back Cover Image: ©Thinkstock/pazham Interior Illustrations © 2014 Gina and Matt
Published by RatPac Press in collaboration with Running Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013957368
E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-5383-2
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Contents
First and foremost, I am grateful to Brett Ratner and Beau Flynn for sending me off on this amazing journey; this has truly been the best writing experience of my career. I am also indebted to my wonderful editor, Jennifer Kasius, and all the amazing folks at Perseus, Running Press, and RatPac. Special thanks to Chris Navratil and Allison Devlin, as well as Steve Asbell at 20th Century Fox. Thanks also for the encouragement, humor, and brilliance of John Cheng and Wendy Jacobson. Many thanks to the thorough and creative Dr. Daniel Friedman, my expert on too many things to mention, and to Gregg Selkoe, for some dancing bears. I am also eternally grateful to Eric Simonoff and Matt Snyder, the best agents in the business.
Most important, thank you Tonya, my incredible secret weapon. And to Asher, Arya, Bugsy, and my parents—you make it all worthwhile.
Three a.m.
It was five days into a fierce New England heat wave, the scattered trees lining Mass Avenue bowed and weeping, desolate sidewalks glistening, tar black asphalt leaking wisps of steam into the thick, humid air.
Fifty feet below, in a reverse-pressure, vacuum-sealed Level Four computer lab—two stairwells and one elevator ride beneath the famed, eight-hundred-and-twenty-five-foot-long Infinite Corridor that bisected the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Jeremy Grady’s world had just turned upside down.
Impossible
.
Jeremy staggered back from the flat-screen monitor on the glass desk in front of him, nearly upending his chair. The rubber of his sneakers shrieked against the vinyl floor panels, but he didn’t take his eyes off the screen, didn’t even blink as the brightly colored pixels continued to dagger out across the cave-like lab.
This has to be a mistake
.
His fingers trembling, Jeremy yanked off his thick, plastic-rimmed glasses, hoping the blur of his poor vision would somehow change the
image in front of him to something that made sense. But no amount of myopia could defang the electronic packets of light emanating from the screen. He considered running the program again, but he had already run it twice, and he knew that the results would be the same.
A bug? A problem with the code?
Jeremy put his glasses back on and then exhaled, letting the sound of his own breath compete with the hiss of the lab’s high-powered ventilation system. Jeremy had written the code himself, had already combed through it a dozen times over the past two days. There was no bug. No mistake. The image on the screen, as impossible as it seemed, was as true and certain as math itself. After all, that’s all the program really was, a complicated mathematical equation. Numbers turned into pixels. And numbers didn’t lie. Numbers were safe and certain and sure.
At twenty-eight, Jeremy had built his entire life around numbers. Not by choice—it was simply the way he was wired. The various psychiatrists his mother had consulted over the years had always tried to couch it in the gentlest terms: a
special
child, with a
special
sort of mind. Anxious, socially awkward, and closed off, preternaturally obsessed with mathematical patterns, so wrapped up in his own internal compulsions that even the most normal, easy things in life often seemed like utter torture. A trip to the grocery store, a visit to a crowded park, an invite to a birthday party—from an early age, these were things that could leave Jeremy curled up in a corner of his bedroom, trembling and in tears.
There wasn’t any one particular moment in Jeremy’s past that he could point to when he’d realized that his faulty wiring was as much a boon as it was a disability. He’d hardly noticed when his middle school math teachers had stopped assigning him homework, because he was so far ahead of the class, they didn’t have anything left to teach him. He hadn’t felt left out when his twin brother Jack—his polar opposite, a thrill-seeking extrovert, a star in every sport he played—had headed off to the senior prom, because
Jeremy was too busy putting the finishing touches on a handheld computer he’d built in their basement from scratch.
But somewhere along the way, things
had
changed. Now that he was seven years into a PhD in applied math/computer science at MIT, his proclivities seemed little more than a nuisance. Besides, he wasn’t the only doctoral candidate at the prestigious math-science mecca who chose to eat his meals in his studio apartment, meticulously stacking his silverware when he was done.
Nor, he assumed, was he the only programming guru to lock himself into his computer lab for two days crafting algorithms and running subroutines because of something he’d stumbled into that didn’t seem quite right.
Though to be accurate, the Level Four security lab wasn’t actually
Jeremy’s
; even though he’d effectively moved in over the past forty-eight hours. He didn’t actually have the proper clearance to be using such expensive and sensitive equipment. Especially on a project that had nothing to do with his PhD. But it had become evident that he didn’t have access to enough processing power at his own workstation in a shared cubicle halfway across campus. On top of that, Jeremy had needed the satellite data; and everyone at MIT knew where you went when you needed satellite data.
The warren of underground labs tucked beneath the Infinite Corridor were one of the university’s worst kept secrets—especially since some of the money the US Defense Department had set aside to fund the high-tech bunkers was earmarked to hire undergrads as lab techs and engineers. It was one of those undergrads who had loaned Jeremy his security ID to get past the guard manning the elevators that led down from the corridor. One geek with glasses looked much like the next, not that anyone treated this place like Area 51. MIT’s relationship with the defense department went all the way back to before World War II, when radar had been developed in secret campus labs much like this one. At MIT, working on the next generation of missile defense systems was like playing in the marching band, an
extracurricular to fatten up your résumé.
The last thing Jeremy was afraid of, staring at the image on the giant screen, was getting caught in the lab without the proper clearance. It was the nature of a university full of introverts that nobody knew what anyone else was doing.
To be fair, bathed in the glare of the impossible image on the screen, Jeremy was no longer sure he could even explain it to himself. Dr. Berman, the psychiatrist he’d most relied on through high school and college, might have insisted that Jeremy was having another one of his episodes—plunging deeper and deeper down the rabbit’s hole of his mind, chasing patterns that only he could see. Even a perfectly normal human brain was built around a passion for patterns; it was part of the evolutionary process, a biological survival mechanism that had driven humanity to the top of the food chain. In Jeremy’s case, the slightest hint of a numerical association could lead to near mental paralysis, as his obsessive mind searched for connections that may or may not actually exist.