Satan's Coffeemaker

Chapter One: A Man and His Google Alert

The alert arrived at 6:14 a.m., the way it always did, because Brett Ogden had once set it to "as it happens" and had never possessed the emotional stability required to change it.

Google Alert — brett ogden fraud

He read it lying flat on his back in the dark, phone held six inches above his face, which was the position dentists warn you about and marriages don't survive. There were two hits. One was a tech blog rounding up "Portland's Ten Most Spectacular Startup Faceplants," in which HerdIt came in fourth, behind a company that had tried to sell subscription oxygen. The other was a comment on a forum thread from a user called BIG_DOG_LIQUIDITY that read, in its entirety: *the herdit guy wasnt a fraud he was just dumb.*

Brett considered that for a while. On balance, he decided, it was the nicest thing anyone had said about him in fourteen months.

He got up. He microwaved a burrito. The burrito was the kind that comes twelve to a bag and has the internal architecture of a geological core sample: molten at both ends, permafrost at the center. He ate it standing at the counter of the apartment he could no longer afford, looking out at a wet Portland street where a man in a poncho was walking a dog wearing a slightly better poncho.

HerdIt had been a good idea. Brett still believed that, in the way a man in a hospital bed still believes in ladders.

The pitch had been simple: crowdsource opinions about literally anything. Should I take this job? Is my rash normal? Is my landlord a criminal? Users posted a question, the platform surfaced it to a swarm of strangers ranked by some proprietary relevance score Brett had personally described to investors as "basically the wisdom of crowds, but with a UI," and the swarm voted. Eleven million users at the peak. Two funding rounds. A profile in a magazine that used the word *disruptive* four times and the word *sustainable* zero times, which in retrospect was the whole story.

The trouble was that people do not, it turns out, mostly want to crowdsource whether to take a job. What people mostly want to crowdsource is whether a specific named individual in their zip code is a monster.

The algorithm learned this fast. The algorithm learned it the way a raccoon learns about a dumpster. Within eight months, HerdIt's most-engaged content category was polls with titles like IS THE ORTHODONTIST ON PINE STREET DELIBERATELY HURTING CHILDREN? — 4,102 votes, 78% YES — and the orthodontist on Pine Street had a lawyer, and the lawyer had a whole personality about it. By the end, HerdIt was generating defamation suits faster than it was generating revenue, which was not a high bar, because for the last quarter it had generated no revenue at all.

Brett had stood up in a conference room with a view of a parking garage and told his co-founder, Sophie Chai, that they should shut it down. Sophie had wanted to pivot. Sophie always wanted to pivot; Sophie could pivot on wet ice in dress shoes. Brett had gotten cold feet at the exact moment cold feet were most expensive, and the company had gone down with all hands, and Sophie had landed at a venture firm in three weeks, and Brett had landed on his couch, where he remained.

He was thirty-four. He was, in the tech world, functionally unemployable, in the specific way where people still take your calls and are extremely warm and then never write back. He had been to eleven coffee meetings in a year. He had developed a low, humming dread that lived just under his sternum and only quieted when he was chewing.

At 7:40, Briony came in from her run, soaked through, radiant, smelling like rain and neoprene, and said, "Okay, don't say anything until I finish."

That was never good.

Briony Ogden was a marine biologist who studied coral reef recovery, and she had the specific joyful ruthlessness of a person whose work is losing and who has decided not to be sad about it in public. She had a laugh that started as a snort. She kept a photograph of a bleached reef on the fridge, not as decoration but, she said, "as a to-do list."

She peeled off her jacket and said, "I got the fellowship."

"Which fellowship."

"The one I told you about."

"Briony, you tell me about six fellowships a week. You tell me about fellowships the way other people talk about the weather."

"Nanukoro," she said.

Brett put down the burrito.

He knew about Nanukoro because he had once watched her look at a satellite image of it for forty minutes with the expression most men reserve for a car they cannot afford. Nanukoro Atoll: a ring of coral in the central Pacific, a green-and-white eyelash floating on a plate of blue. Total land area, if you added up every scrap, roughly the size of a shopping mall parking lot. Population eighty-three.

"There's a strain of *Porites* out there," Briony said, and she was already talking with her hands, "that's holding at thirty-one degrees. Thirty-one, Brett. That should be a graveyard and instead it's a nursery, and nobody has ever properly sequenced it, and nobody has ever properly monitored it, and the fellowship is two years, with housing, and a stipend, and a boat."

"A boat."

"A shared boat."

"How's the internet?"

Briony took a long drink of water. "There's a satellite terminal at the school."

"How's the internet, Briony."

"There's a satellite terminal," she said, "at the school."

Brett went and sat on the arm of the couch, which was a thing he did when he needed something structurally sound underneath him.

"So no phone service," he said.

"None."

"No email."

"Emergencies."

"No—" He stopped. He had been about to say *no Google Alerts*, and even in the middle of a spiral he could hear how that would sound out loud, and how it would sound was: pathetic.

Briony crouched in front of him. She had a way of doing this — getting below his eye line so he had to look down at her, which made it impossible to be grand about anything.

"Here's the thing," she said. "You hate it here."

"I don't hate it here."

"You've eaten the same burrito four hundred times."

"They're different burritos. They come in a bag."

"You get up at six to read a robot's opinion of you." She said it gently, which made it worse. "Brett. You are not going to be rescued in Portland. Nobody in this city is going to walk in here and hand you your old life back. But there is a place on this planet where nobody has ever heard of HerdIt, where nobody will ever hear of HerdIt, where the entire concept of HerdIt cannot be explained without a whiteboard, and I have been offered a job there, and I want to go, and I want you with me."

A gull went by outside. In Portland the gulls look like they have unpaid parking tickets.

"It's an adventure," Briony said.

And Brett heard, quite clearly and in his own voice: *witness protection, without the crime.*

He looked at her. She had the face of somebody who has already packed. Somewhere behind her eyes, she was underwater.

"How long is the flight?" he said.

"Flights," she said. "Plural. And then a boat."

"How long is the boat?"

"Depends on the boat," said Briony, and kissed him, and went to shower, singing, and Brett sat on the arm of the couch and looked at his phone, where BIG_DOG_LIQUIDITY had just been downvoted for defending him.

He wrote back — he couldn't help it — *thank you*. Then he deleted it. Then he wrote it again and posted it, and immediately felt worse, which by that point in his life was simply what happened after every action he took.

Six weeks later he was standing on a dock in Fiji at four in the morning, holding two duffel bags and a dry box containing eleven pounds of coral-sampling equipment and one bag of frozen burritos he had bought at the airport in a state of what he would later admit was denial, watching a rust-colored supply boat called the *Mano Lele* take on drums of diesel.

A deckhand looked at his burritos and said something to another deckhand, and both of them laughed for a really long time.

"What?" said Brett.

"No freezer," said the deckhand.

Brett looked at the bag. Somewhere in the last hour, without his noticing, it had begun to sweat.

Briony came up beside him with two cups of terrible coffee and looked out at the black water and the smear of light on the horizon, and said, "Isn't this great?"

And Brett said, "Yeah," and meant approximately eleven percent of it, which for that year of his life was a personal best.