The Oracle Year(4)
Not easy to stage, but naysayers on blogs and message boards came up with all sorts of ways it could have been done. The most popular was that the CIA ran the Site and had induced labor in a number of women at a secret facility near the hospital, lining them up like brood mares to make sure everything worked out as planned, sending out the lucky lady to the hospital a little bit before midnight.
Never mind that the CIA worked exclusively outside the United States, and inducing labor was far from a precision maneuver subject to split-second timing, and why would any woman agree to something like that, and and and.
The next prediction was dated about two weeks after the births:
PACIFIC AIRLINES FLIGHT 256 LOSES CABIN PRESSURE ON ITS DESCENT FOR LANDING IN KUALA LUMPUR. ALTHOUGH THE PLANE LANDS SAFELY, SEVENTEEN PEOPLE ARE INJURED. THERE ARE NO DEATHS.
Again, the Site was dead-on. A bird hit a window weakened from lack of maintenance, and it cracked just enough to cause a blowout. Exactly seventeen people were hurt, no more, no less. And even that could have been faked, people claimed, but the world was much less willing to take the conspiracy theorists seriously on that one, because that event had been caught on film.
A crew of enterprising Indonesians brought a camera out to the airport and filmed Flight 256 as it came in for a landing. The clip was online within hours, and it very clearly showed the flock of birds entering the frame. Most turned at the last minute. A few didn’t. When you started asking people to believe that the CIA had developed the ability to remotely control birds, and had somehow rigged the plane so that only seventeen people would get hurt, it became easier to just believe that the Site was real.
Someone out there could predict the future. The Oracle.
Most religious groups either denounced the Site or pointedly ignored it. A few embraced it. Politicians and pundits incorporated the Site into their rhetoric without a blip. Invitations to the most exclusive events, offers of sexual favors, payments, employment were extended to the Oracle, all of which were, as far as anyone knew, ignored.
Fads appeared based on the content of the predictions—chocolate milk was the drink of choice for children and adults alike due to:
APRIL 24-MRS. LUISA ALVAREZ OF EL PASO, TEXAS, PURCHASES A QUART OF CHOCOLATE MILK, SOMETHING SHE HAS NOT HAD IN TWENTY YEARS, TO SEE IF SHE STILL ENJOYS THE TASTE AS MUCH AS SHE DID WHEN SHE WAS A CHILD.
Bartenders across the country had learned to mix Brownouts: chocolate milk, amaretto, and vodka.
And if the Oracle wouldn’t make him-or herself known, the public satisfied itself with the people named in the predictions. Luisa Alvarez had been snapped up as a spokesperson for Hershey’s. She seemed to enjoy the spotlight immensely, until some sort of fanatic tried to assassinate her at a press event. The would-be killer’s motive: to prevent the Oracle’s prediction from coming true. To “save the world” from the pernicious influence of a false prophet.
Luisa had been placed under heavy security after that, her public appearances drastically curtailed. Hershey’s didn’t want anything to interfere with her ability to buy that milk when the big day came.
The word from Anonymous and its various allied hackery organizations was that the Site had been set up using simple, existing anonymization tools that all but guaranteed that no one but the Oracle would know who the Oracle was, or be able to issue new predictions. Their current verdict: whoever set things up for the Oracle was extremely conversant with the ins and outs of modern data security. Beyond that, they didn’t have much to say.
The world’s markets endured a series of roller-coaster climbs and reversals. The outcome of the next presidential election was suddenly thrown into doubt when Daniel Green, the incumbent, fumbled his first few opportunities to comment on what the Site’s emergence meant to the country.
There were no answers—not yet, really, just the hope that at some point, all this would make sense. Clearly, a plan was at work, but what, how, where, when . . . and most importantly, why . . . no one knew. Not yet.
Leigh settled back into her chair as she read the last few lines of her article. It was better than she remembered. Not perfect, but at least as good as most of what Urbanity published on what passed for their news desk. Eddie needed to relax.
A ping—an e-mail hitting her work account. Leigh pulled it up
From: [email protected].
Upstairs, please.
—Reimer
Leigh stared at her monitor for ten seconds or so. Her hand reached out slowly and clicked her mouse, minimizing the e-mail app and revealing a previously hidden browser window behind it. Showing the Site. Of course it was.
Reflexively, Leigh’s hand moved. She hit refresh, even though she cringed a little bit inside as she did it. The Site never changed.
But it had.
At the bottom of the page, after the last prediction, six new words had appeared:
THIS IS NOT ALL I KNOW.
Below that, an e-mail address.
Chapter 3
“PLEASE TELL ME WHEN MY DAD WILL COME BACK.”
“GOD WILL PUNISH YOU, DEMON. REVEREND BRANSON SAYS—”
“COMBIEN D’ANNéES JUSQU’à CE QUE LA FRANCE GAGNE LA COUPE DU MONDE?”
Will replaced the sheet of paper on the stack piled against the wall of his apartment, one of three, each about four feet high, totaling thousands of pages. Every sheet was densely covered with small-font text, both sides. Questions, mostly—for the Oracle. Since the e-mail address had gone live on the Site, millions of messages had come through, which could be broken down into variations on three questions: