Tom had a roster of technicians who worked at the laboratory in the basement. A group of engineers and former graduate students specializing in computation who’d slipped down the social ladder were now working as the anonymous employees of a large chain, giving instructions to customers about the complex updated machines that were sold in the stores of Best Computer Co.
It was only a few days until Christmas, and so the place was filled with clusters of families moving around the shopping area. Freezing night air entered the hall every time the glass doors slid open; cars came and went through the parking lot. The gull flew past, high above, and came back down to the concrete ground of the parking lot.
The woman in the green scarf approached the red Honda with a folder in her hand. She looked young and had on sunglasses in spite of the darkness; she was wearing a beige overcoat and a fur cap that covered her ears. She opened the car door, placed the folder on the back seat, and took off her jacket; under the light inside she looked like a doll in a box; when she sat down at the wheel and started the engine, there was a jolt, a small burst of light, and a bang.
An old man in a long gray cloak who was pushing a shopping cart paused in front of the car for a moment and then kept going, speeding up his pace. A woman leading a boy by the hand turned around and then walked off sideways, dragging her son, but didn’t stop either. The gull took flight with a swift beating of its wings and slid away into the darkness, toward the highway. A minute later everything went on as before.
What leaves the greatest impression on him is that he exits the mall, crosses the parking lot, gets into his car, drives slowly through the lit-up streets of the city, and no one knows that it was he who killed that woman.
At a talk at Harvard, Gödel described how, after constructing the theorem that would make him immortal, he spent the night traveling on the subway, thinking of how the lives of everyone there would change because of him, though no one yet knew it.
He recorded that first experiment in his Diary. A feeling of omnipotence, of having crossed some sacred line. He moved among people with a feeling of being invisible and unique.
His next attack was meant to prevent—or delay—the merging of digital and biological systems that would allow for retroactive DNA intervention on millions. Hanz Frinkly of the Minnesota Biological Lab was a tall German with a ruddy face and a large mustache, a kind and very effusive man who had survived a Russian concentration camp during the Second World War, which was where his “Stalin-style” mustache came from, he said. “I look at myself in the mirror, and the memory that I’ve outlived the Georgian makes me feel younger.” He was a widower and wanted to remake his life; he went running through the woods in the summer and in the winter jogged through the underground tunnels that spanned the campus, illuminated by artificial light.
That morning, his receptionist had left the day’s mail on the table for him. It would be better to look at it a bit later, but he couldn’t resist the temptation to check whether someone had written to him about his recent and extraordinary article published in the prestigious Science magazine. When he opened an envelope that had supposedly been sent to him by a colleague at MIT, a bomb exploded, gravely injuring him.
The lesions had caused him cerebral damage, and ever since then, he’d been living shut away in a rehabilitation center on the outskirts of the university. From the windows he could observe young people crossing the park on their way to class, but this spectacle turned out to be so unbearable to him that he preferred to remain in his room with the door open, facing the hallway where other patients struggled by, propped up on crutches or gliding past in their metallic chairs.
The mathematician John Breedlove, who held the Peano professorship at the University of Chicago, went out early in the morning after breakfast wearing a surgical mask to stop him from breathing in the contaminated air because he was trying to avoid the spring sickness, which befell him more and more often due to so-called allergies that forced him to go to Memorial Hospital every April. He was on the point of finalizing his project on the unstable logic of information in open series and was afraid, in a superstitious and slightly ridiculous way, that an illness would prevent him from completing his calculations. He hadn’t accomplished any of the modest social obligations that a man of his age and status might be expected to have reached: he had never married, never had any children, but had instead dedicated his life to his career and felt well appreciated by his colleagues. The letter, which came to him in the 11 a.m. mail delivery, falsely sent by a mathematician from California whom he knew, exploded in his face and killed him instantly.
An engineering student (John Hauser) found a package under a chair in the computer lab in Cory Hall at the University of California and was killed when he picked it up. He was twenty-two years old, was married, had a daughter, and was an anti-Gulf War activist. Menéndez took it upon himself to deliver the news to the murdered boy’s wife, a young African American woman. She lived in a house with an open porch in the residential area of the ghetto, and when she saw the official car approaching, she took a while to open the door,
