Read Online The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

why there had been no pickup that day at Easy’s Packages and no word from him since.
    But of course I didn’t say any of this to Sue.
    She went on, “Well, I made a kind of mental note of it, but that was that, at least until recently. What you have to understand, Scotty, is that the evolution of this crisis has made everyone a lot more paranoid. Maybe
justifiably
paranoid. Especially since Yichang; Yichang just drove everybody completely bugfuck. You know how many people were killed by floodwater
alone
? Not to mention that it was the first nuclear device detonated in a kind-of-sort-of war since before the turn of the century.”
    She didn’t have to tell me. I’d been paying attention. It was not even slightly surprising to learn that the NSA or CIA or FBI was profoundly involved with Sue’s research. The Chronoliths had become, at bottom, a defense issue. The image lurking at the back of everyone’s mind—seldom spoken, seldom explicit—was of a Chronolith on American soil: Kuin towering over Houston or New York or Washington.
    “So when I saw your name again… well, it was on a different kind of list. The FBI is looking into witnesses again. I mean, they’ve been sort of keeping an eye on you since the word go. Not exactly
surveillance
, but if you moved out of state or something like that, it would be noted, it would go in your file…”
    “Christ, Sue!”
    “But all that was harmless busywork. Until lately. Your work at Campion-Miller came up on the radar.”
    “I write business software. I don’t see—”
    “That’s way too coy, Scotty. You’ve done some really sensitive work with marketing heuristics and collective anticipation. I’ve looked at your code—”
    “You’ve seen Campion-Miller source code?”
    “Campion-Miller elected to share it with the authorities.”
    I began to put this together. An interrogatory FBI visit at Campion-Miller could easily have alarmed management, especially if it was core code that had come under scrutiny. And it would explain Arnie Kunderson’s strange intransigence, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell atmosphere that had surrounded the firing.
    “You’re telling me you got me fired?”
    “It was nobody’s intention for you to lose your job. As it happens, though, that’s kind of handy.”
    Handy
was about the last word I would have used.
    “See, Scotty, how this hooks together? You’re on the spot when the Chumphon Chronolith arrives, which marks you for life all by itself. Now, five years later, it turns out you’re evolving algorithms that are deeply pertinent to the research we’re doing here.”
    “Are they?”
    “Trust me. It flagged your file. I put in a good word for you, and that kept them off your tail a little bit, but I have to be frank with you, some very powerful people are getting way too excited. It’s not just Yichang, it’s the economy, the riots, all that trouble during the last election… the level of nervousness is indescribable. So when I heard you got fired I had the brilliant idea of getting you placed
here
.”
    “As what, a prisoner?”
    “Hardly. I’m serious about your work, Scotty. In terms of code husbandry, it’s absolutely fine. And very, very pertinent. Maybe it doesn’t seem so, but a great deal of what I’ve been looking at lately is modeling the effect of anticipation on mass behavior. Applying feedback and recursion theory to both physical events and human behavior.”
    “I’m a keyboard hack, Sue. I’ve grown algorithms I don’t pretend to understand.”
    “You’re too modest. This is key work. And it would be much nicer, frankly, if you were doing it for
us
.”
    “I don’t understand. Is it my work you’re interested in, or the fact that I was at Chumphon?”
    “Both. I suspect it’s not coincidental.”
    “But it is.”
    “Yes, in the
conventional
sense, but—oh, Scotty, this is too much to talk about over the phone. You need to come see me.”
    “Sue—”
    “You’re going to tell me you