The Oracle Year(52)


“The predictions are working together. I don’t know how else to say it,” he said simply.

Neither Hamza nor Miko spoke for a moment.

“Can you try?” Miko said slowly.

Will looked at the fountain, its basin full of clear water shining in the sun. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few coins, then held one up.

“Okay. I release a prediction, either by putting it on the Site, or selling it.”

Will tossed the coin into the fountain. Circular rings radiated out from the spot where the coin broke the surface of the liquid.

“Make a wish,” Miko said.

“Oh, I did, believe me,” Will answered. He pointed at the ripples.

“Things happen in the world because the predictions are out there. People do things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. I’m changing the future.”

Will took more coins and dropped them into the fountain, a few inches apart, one after the other. Each created a new set of ripples, which interacted with the tiny waves generated by the others. Interference patterns—miniature geometries.

“There,” he continued. “Each prediction is a coin. It ripples out into the world, changing things, and sometimes those changes meet up with ripples from another prediction. They bounce off each other, and then something else happens.”

Will splashed his hand across the surface of the fountain, breaking the patterns into chaos. He pointed at the roiling surface of the water.

“It’s impossible to predict what will happen next. Unless you’re in the future looking back,” he said. “Then you can see all of it. And then you send the information back to a person in the past who will use it how you want. He’ll put some of it up on a website, sell another bit to an oil company . . . all of which you’d already know, because from your perspective, he’s already done it.”

Miko broke in.

“I know I’m new to all this, but just playing devil’s advocate, couldn’t it just have happened randomly?”

Will pulled the folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to Miko.

“Read that,” he said.

Miko unfolded the paper. Hamza stepped closer, reading it over her shoulder.

“The chocolate milk fad, right?” Will said. “It was the most popular nonalcoholic drink in the country for the three months after the Oracle made a prediction about it. Everything else took a hit—soda, iced tea, all kinds of juice—including orange, grapefruit, all of that. But we told that hedge fund . . .”

“SWBG,” Hamza said, not taking his eyes off the paper.

“Right. SWBG. We sold them a prediction that made them invest heavily in citrus groves, expecting that the Florida frost in May will drive prices up. But with the chocolate milk thing, it went the other way—no one wanted orange juice for a while, prices went way down, and SWBG had to pump in even more cash to keep things running. Even so, half of the groves went under. So did SWBG. They shut down last month. Between paying us almost half a billion dollars and the bad investments, I guess they didn’t have enough dough to keep the lights on.”

I remember that, Hamza thought. The Dow dropped four hundred points that day. But I didn’t realize . . .

He looked up, to see Will staring at him, calm.

“This is . . . this can’t be possible,” Hamza said.

“I wish it weren’t. That list is what I’ve been doing down here. Researching, figuring it out. Those fourteen connections are all I’ve found so far, but there have to be more that I just don’t see, or that haven’t happened yet. Like TransPipe. That makes fifteen, I guess.”

Hamza focused on the sheet of paper his wife was still holding. It was trembling.

“I can’t see the whole picture,” Will said, tapping the surface of the fountain’s pool with a fingertip, watching rings radiate outward, “but I think the Site’s working toward three or four minor goals at the same time. Then, I think those things are supposed to come together too, to make something else happen. There’s a tune to it, almost; like a song with most of its tracks stripped away. Just the backing vocals and the drums and the horn lines—you know there’s more.”

“So this is a puzzle?” Miko asked, her voice scaling up in pitch. “A game?”

“Not a game,” Will said. “It’s more like one of those Rube Goldberg machines, or, no . . . a giant engine. It feels like someone’s out there, driving all this forward.”

“What’s it driving?” Miko asked. “If it’s an engine, what’s it pushing?”

Will shrugged.

“The world, I think.

“And yes,” he continued, “I know I’ve never been the kind of guy who talks about stuff like this, even cared about it, but you’d be amazed how interesting it all becomes when you think you caused it.”

He scooped his hand into the fountain, filling his palm with water, letting droplets fall back into the basin.

“Will, this is insane,” Miko said. “We have to do something.”

“We can just step away,” Hamza said. “We have all the money in the world. The Coral Republic is almost done. I got a construction progress report for the capitol building yesterday. All the other places we set up are ready. We can go with the exit plan.”

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