Read The Chronoliths for Free Online Page B

that year—and my attempts to reach her were rebuffed.) I was connected, not well, but not quite randomly, either. Running into Sue Chopra was an omen, like seeing the woman in the commuter car; but the meaning of it was inscrutable, a prophecy in an indecipherable language, a signal buried in noise.
    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.
    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