The Chronoliths

In other words, there is something you might call intuitive randomness which differs dramatically from the real thing.

Was it possible to exploit this difference to our advantage in high-volume commercial apps, such as stock portfolios or marketing or product price-placement?

We thought so. We’d made a little progress. The work had been going well enough that Arnie’s news seemed (at least) oddly timed.

He cleared his throat. “You misunderstand. The team isn’t leaving.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s not my decision, Scott.”

“You said that. Okay, it’s not your fault. But if the project is going forward—”

“Don’t ask me to justify this. Frankly, I can’t.”

He let that sink in.

“Five years,” I said. “Fuck, Arnie. Five years!”

“Nothing’s guaranteed. Not anymore. You know that as well as I do.”

“It might help if I understood why this was happening.”

He twisted in his chair. “I’m not at liberty to say. Your work has been excellent, and I’ll put that in writing if you like.”

“What are you telling me, I made an enemy in management?”

He halfway nodded. “The work we do here is pretty tightly held. People get nervous. I don’t know if you made an enemy, exactly. Maybe you made the wrong friends.”

But that wasn’t likely. I hadn’t made very many friends.

People I could share lunch with, catch a Twins game with, sure. But no one I confided in. Somehow, by some process of slow emotional attrition, I had become the kind of guy who works hard and smiles amiably and goes home and spends the evening with the video panel and a couple of beers.

Which is what I did the day Arnie Kunderson fired me.

The apartment hadn’t changed much since I moved in. (Barring the one wall of the bedroom I used as a sort of bulletin board. News printouts and photos of Chronolith sites plus my copious notes on the subject.) To the degree that the place had improved, it was mostly Kaitlin’s doing. Kait was ten now, eager to criticize my fashion sense. Probably it made her feel grown up. I had replaced the sofa because I had gotten tired of hearing how “uncontemporary” it was — Kait’s favorite word of derision.

At any rate, the old sofa had gone; in its place was an austere blue padded bench that looked great until you tried to get comfortable on it.

I thought about calling Janice but decided not to. Janice didn’t appreciate spontaneous phone calls. She preferred to hear from me on a regular and predictable schedule. And as for Kaitlin… better not to bother her, either. If I did, she might launch into a discourse on what she had done today with Whit, as she was encouraged to call her stepfather. Whit was a great guy, in Kait’s opinion. Whit made her laugh. Maybe I should talk to Whit, I thought. Maybe Whit would make me laugh.

So I did nothing that evening except nurse a few beers and surf the satellites.

Even the cheap servers carried a number of science-and-nature feeds. One of them was showing fresh video from Thailand, of a genuinely dangerous expedition up the Chao Phrya to the ruins of Bangkok, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and a half-dozen corporate donors whose logos were prominently featured in the start-up credits.

I turned off the sound, let the pictures speak for themselves.

Not much of Bangkok’s urban core had been rebuilt in the years since 2021. No one wanted to live or work too close to the Chronolith — rumors of “proximity sickness” frightened people away, though there was no such diagnosis in the legitimate clinical literature. The bandits and the revolutionary militias, however, were quite real and omnipresent. But despite all this there was still a brisk river trade along the Chao Phrya, even in the shadow of Kuin.

The program began with overflight footage of the city. Crude, canted docks allowed access to rough warehouses, a marketplace, stocks of fresh fruits and vegetables, order emerging from the wreckage, streets reclaimed from the rubble and open to commerce. From a great enough altitude it looked like a story of human perseverance in the face of disaster. The view from the ground was less encouraging.

As the expedition approached the heart of the city the Chronolith was present in every shot: from a distance, dominating the brown river; or closer, towering into a tropical noon.

The monument was conspicuously clean. Even birds and insects avoided it. Airborne dust had collected in the few protected crevices of the sculpted face, faintly softening Kuin’s abstracted gaze. But nothing grew even in that protected soil; the sterility of it was absolute. Where the base of the monument touched ground on one bank of the river a few lianas had attempted to scale the immense octagonal base; but the mirror-smooth surface was ungraspable, unwelcoming.

The expedition anchored mid-river and went ashore for more footage. In one sequence, a storm swirled over the ancient city. Rainwater cascaded from the Chronolith in miniature torrents, small waterfalls churning plumes of silt from the river bottom. The dockside vendors covered their stalls with tarpaulins and sheet plastic and retreated beneath them.

Cut to a shot of a wild monkey on a collapsed Exxon billboard, barking at the sky.

Clouds parting around the promontory of Kuin’s vast head.

The sun emerging near the green horizon, the Chronolith shadowing the city like the gnomon of a great bleak sundial.

There was more, but nothing revelatory. I turned off the monitor and went to bed.

We — the English-speaking world — had by this time agreed on certain terms to describe the Chronoliths. What a Chronolith did, for instance, was to appear or to arrive… though some favored touched down, as if it were a kind of stalled tornado.

The newest of the Chronoliths had appeared (arrived, touched down) more than eighteen months ago, leveling the waterfront of Macao. Only half a year earlier a similar monument had destroyed Taipei.

Both stones marked, as usual, military victories roughly twenty years in the future. Twenty and three: hardly a lifetime, but arguably long enough for Kuin (if he existed, if he was more than a contrived symbol or an abstraction) to mass forces for his putative Asian conquests. Long enough for a young man to become a middle-aged man. Long enough for a young girl to become a young woman.

But no Chronolith had arrived anywhere in the world for more than a year now, and some of us had chosen to believe that the crisis was, if not exactly finished, at least purely Asian — confined by geography, bound by oceans.

Our public discourse was aloof, detached. Much of southern China was in a condition of political and military chaos, a no-man’s-land in which Kuin was perhaps already gathering his nucleus of followers. But an editorial in yesterday’s paper had wondered whether Kuin might not, in the long term, turn out to be a positive force: a Kuinist empire was hardly likely to be a benevolent dictatorship, but it might restore stability to a dangerously destabilized region. What was left of the tattered Beijing bureaucracy had already detonated a tactical nuclear device in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy last year’s so-called Kuin of Yichang. The result had been a breached dam and a flood that carried radioactive mud all the way to the East China Sea. And if crippled Beijing was capable of that, could a Kuin regime be worse?

I had no opinion of my own. We were all whistling through the graveyard in those years, even those of us who paid attention, analyzing the Chronoliths (by date, time, size, implied conquest, and such) so that we could pretend to understand them. But I preferred not to play that game. The Chronoliths had shadowed my life since things went bad with Janice. They were emblematic of every malign and unpredictable force in the world. There were times when I was profoundly afraid of them, and as often as not I admitted that fact to myself.