The Oracle Year(99)
ON SEPTEMBER 4, 2022, THE GOVERNMENT OF CHINA WILL BE TOPPLED BY A REVOLUTION THAT STEMS FROM MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS OF PERSISTENT HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS.
“Whoa,” Leigh said. Her voice was hushed. “Is this real?”
“No,” the Oracle answered. “I made it up.”
Chapter 39
ON AUGUST 15, 2024, A BREAKTHROUGH IN STEM-CELL THERAPY WILL ALLOW COMPLETE REPAIR OF SPINAL-CORD-RELATED PARALYSIS.
Will tapped the screen, and the prediction went live to the Site. They were just crossing the border between Nebraska and Colorado, finally off I-80. I-76 would take them to Denver, and then it would be I-70 for all but the very last leg of their journey.
He thumbed the phone off and performed the now-familiar ritual of removing the SIM card and battery, tossing the pieces out the window as the car sped along the interstate.
Will adjusted his headphones slightly and tapped the volume control on the little MP3 player he’d bought at an Iowan travel plaza, a compromise that allowed Leigh to listen to the radio while she drove. He’d stocked it with songs ripped from the small set of CDs also available for purchase, mostly greatest hits collections. Right now, it was Prince, a bunch of the ’80s classics. Will liked the tunes, but the real star for him was always the production. No one built an arrangement like Prince.
The Oracle notebook lay open on his lap, every page covered with his cramped handwriting in various colors.
The pattern had evolved past just the blue, red, yellow, and green he’d started with. He’d added a whole new run of shades to deal with the effects of the false predictions he’d been putting up—purple, orange, turquoise. The prediction about China was just the first. He’d been kicking around the idea ever since meeting Anthony Leuchten and realizing that the government had planned to use the Oracle’s influence to affect world affairs.
Leigh’s reaction to this plan had started skeptical and shifted to hugely alarmed once she’d had a little time to think over the implications. For one thing, she thought that trying to essentially trick China into improving human rights inside its borders could backfire in any number of ways. She’d taken some Asian poli-sci courses in college and knew the country’s history much better than Will did. But it was done.
He’d put up several more false predictions since, although he’d discussed them with Leigh first. The idea was to run interference patterns across the Site’s plan, possibly disrupt it in some way. Barring that, just to help. To improve things.
Will knew he was slowly but surely burning the Oracle’s credibility—but he wasn’t sure that was such a bad thing. The Site was using that same credibility to sow chaos. Maybe it was better to try to do something good with it. If the real predictions were destroying the world, maybe a few false ones could fix it.
The spinal cord thing was designed to spur research in that area—he’d been reading about it in Wired, and it seemed like something that should be getting more money. Likewise, a prediction about large, easily accessible mineral deposits in near-Earth asteroids, and a few others.
So far, it had been a lot of effort, some extra colors for the notebook, and not much else. His new predictions generated their own streams of aftereffects but never really connected with the Site’s existing web; just dead flies on a windowsill.
He only had one untraceable phone left, and he was saving it for one last Site update—a Hail Mary pass he’d only use if he absolutely had to.
Will leaned back, looking out at the mountains through the windshield, letting his mind drift, listening to the radio edit of “Alphabet Street,” which lacked the five-minute instrumental coda. He thought about the Site, free-associating. It was strange. The web wasn’t growing the way it originally had. The nexus points that had combined early on to create what Will thought of as the “big” effects—the problems with the global economy, the Niger invasion, and so on—had stopped interacting.
The first, second, and third rounds of connection had all been relatively quick. Quick, that was, for events happening on a worldwide scale. Like dominoes falling. Now, though, it was as if everything was in slow motion, as if the gears of the Site’s great machine had pulled apart and were no longer churning the world along to some unknown destination. It felt like the Site was holding its breath, waiting.
Will sighed. He closed the notebook and reached down between his legs to the floor, where a small stack of unread newspapers and magazines awaited. The top item was that week’s copy of The Economist, on stands that morning. The cover story was about Qandustan.
He opened the magazine, looked at the article, and frowned. He was exhausted, it looked long, and The Economist used tiny type. Most importantly, he still wasn’t sure the Site had anything to do with Qandustan at all.
Virtually every event he was certain was part of the Site’s web had several Oracle-related triggers—more than one string connecting it to other sections of the web. But Qandustan only had one—the warlord T?r?kul’s decision to attack the city of Uth because the United States was too busy stepping on the forces of the Prophet in Niger to intervene. And even that was speculation—no one knew for sure if it had played a factor.
Will forced himself to dig into The Economist article. Not much new, really. The elder biys in the council were still sequestered up in the mountains above Uth, as they had been for the past several weeks. Anthony Leuchten was on the ground, talking to both sides, trying to find a diplomatic solution to an increasingly tense situation, which conjured up a nice image of Leuchten sweating in some desert hellhole surrounded by men who might kill him at any moment.