The Chronoliths

Catchphrases of the day, now all but forgotten: “Now give me mine.” “Brutal but nice!” “Like daylight in a drawer.”

Names and places we imagined were important: Doctor Dan Lesser, the Wheeling Courthouse, Beckett and Goldstein, Kwame Finto.

Events: the second wave of lunar landings; the Zairian pandemic; the European currency crisis; and the storming of the Hague.

And Kuin, of course, like a swelling drumbeat.

Pyongyang, then Ho Chi Minh City; eventually Macao, Sapporo, the Kanto Plain, Yichang…

And all the early Kuin mania and fascination, the ten thousand websources with their peculiar and contradictory theories, the endless simmering of the crackpot press, the symposia and the committee reports, the think tanks and the congressional inquiries. The young man in Los Angeles who had his name legally changed to “Kuin,” and all his subsequent imitators.

Kuin, whoever or whatever he might be, had already caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more. For that reason, the name was treated with gravitas in respectable circles. For the same reason, it became popular with comedians and T-shirt designers. “Kuinist” imagery was ba

I followed it all closely.

For two years I worked at the Campion-Miller research facility outside of St. Paul, writing patches into self-evolved commercial-interface code. Then I was transferred to the downtown offices, where I joined a team doing much the same work on much more secure material, Campion-Miller’s own tightly-held source code, the beating heart of our major products. Mostly I drove in from my one-bedroom apartment, but on the worst winter days I rode the new elevated train, an aluminum chamber into which too many commuters shed their heat and moisture, mingled body odors and aftershave, the city a pale scrim on steaming white windows.

(It was on one of those trips that I saw a young woman sitting halfway down the car, wearing a hat with the words “TWENTY AND THREE” printed on it — twenty years and three months, the nominal interval between the appearance of a Chronolith and its predicted conquest. She was reading a tattered copy of Stranger Than Science, which must have been out of print for at least sixty years. I wanted to approach her, to ask her what events had equipped her with these totems, these echoes of my own past, but I was too bashful, and how could I have phrased such a question, anyway? I never saw her again.)

I dated a few times. For most of a year I went out with a woman from the quality-control division of Campion-Miller, A

But I was able to impress her on at least one occasion. She had used someone’s credentials at Campion-Miller to wangle us admission to an academic conference at the university — “The Chronoliths: Scientific and Cultural Issues.” (My idea as much as hers this time. Well, mostly mine. A

Her name was Sulamith Chopra. I had known her at Cornell. Her career had taken her deep into the fundamental-physics end of the Chronolith research.

I introduced Sue to A

A

“Well, I’ve done some work.”

“I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise.” But Sue hadn’t taken her eyes off me. “Strange I should run into you here, Scotty.”

“Is it?”

“Unexpected. Significant, maybe. Or maybe not. We need to catch up on our lives sometime.”

I was flattered. I wanted very much to talk to her. Pathetically, I offered her my business card.

“No need,” she said. “I can find you when I need you, Scotty. Never fear.”

“You can?”

But she was gone in the crowd.

“You’re well co

But that wasn’t right. (Sue didn’t call me — not that year — and my attempts to reach her were rebuffed.) I was co

Being called to Arnie Kunderson’s office was never a good sign. He had been my supervisor since I joined Campion-Miller, and I had learned this about Arnie: When the news was good, he would bring it to you. If he called you into his office, prepare for the worst.

I had seen Arnie angry, most recently, when the team I was leading botched an order-sort-and-mail protocol and nearly cost us a contract with a nationwide retailer. But I knew this was something even more serious as soon as I walked into his office. When he was angry, Arnie was ebulliently, floridly angry. Today, worse, he sat behind his desk with the furtive look of a man entrusted with some repellent but necessary duty — an undertaker, say. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I pulled up a chair and waited. We weren’t formal. We had been to each other’s barbecues.

He folded his hands and said. “There’s never a good way to do this. What I have to tell you, Scott, is that Campion-Miller isn’t renewing your contract. We’re canceling it. This is official notice. I know you haven’t had any warning and Christ knows I’m incredibly fucking sorry to drop this on you. You’re entitled to full severance and a generous compensation package for the six months left to run.”

I wasn’t as surprised as Arnie seemed to expect. The Asian economic collapse had cut deeply into Campion-Miller’s foreign markets. Just last year the firm had been acquired by a multinational corporation whose management team laid off a quarter of the staff and cashed in most of C-M’s subsidiary holdings for their real-estate value.

I did, however, feel somewhat blindsided.

Unemployment was up that year. The Oglalla crisis and the collapse of the Asian economies had dumped a lot of people onto the job market. There was a tent city five blocks square down along the riverside. I pictured myself there.

I said, “Are you going to tell the team, or do you want me to do it?”

The team I led was working on predictive market software, one of C-M’s more lucrative lines. In particular, we were factoring genuine as versus perceived randomness into such applications as consumer trending and competitive pricing.

Ask a computer to pick two random numbers between one and ten and the machine will cough up digits in a genuinely random sequence — maybe 2,3; maybe 1,9; and so on. Ask a number of human beings, plot their answers, and you’ll get a distribution curve heavily weighted at 3 and 7. When people think “random” they tend to picture numbers you might call “unobtrusive” — not too near the limits nor precisely in the middle; not part of a presumed sequence (2,4,6), etc.