The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  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 banned from certain schools, until the ACLU intervened. Because he stood for nothing discernible except destruction and conquest, Kuin became a slate on which the disaffected scrawled their manifestos. None of this was taken terribly seriously in North America. Elsewhere, the seismic rumbling was more ominous.

  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, Annali Kincaid, who loved turquoise and New Drama and took a lively interest in current events. She dragged me to lectures and readings I would otherwise have ignored. We broke up, finally, because she possessed deep and complex political convictions, and I did not; I was a Kuin-watcher, otherwise politically agnostic.

  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. Annali had already voiced her objection to the aerial and orbital photographs of Chronoliths with which I had decorated my bedroom, the Kuinist downloads that littered the apartment.) We sat through the presentation of three papers and most of a pleasant Saturday afternoon, at which point Annali decided the discourse was a little too abstract for her taste. But on our way through the lobby I was hailed by an older woman in loose jeans and an oversized pea-green sweater, beaming at me through monstrous eyeglasses.

  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 Annali.

  Annali was floored. “Ms. Chopra, I know who you are. I mean, they always quote your name in the news stories.”

  “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 connected,” Annali told me on the ride home.

  But that wasn’t right. (Sue didn’t call me — not 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 Ar
nie’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.

  Is this obsession? Annali had thought so.

  I tried to sleep. Sleep that knits the raveled sleeve, etc. Sleep that kills the awkward downtime between midnight and dawn.

  But I didn’t get even that. An hour before sunrise, my phone buzzed. I should have let the server pick it up. But I groped for the handset and flipped it open, afraid — as always when the phone rings late at night — that something had happened to Kait. “Hello?”

  “Scott,” a coarse male voice said. “Scotty”

  I thought for one panicky moment of Hitch Paley. Hitch, with whom I had not spoken since 2021. Hitch Paley, riding out of the past like a pissed-off
ghost.

  But it wasn’t Hitch.

  It was some other ghost.

  I listened to the phlegmy breathing, the compression and expansion of night air in a withered bellows. “Dad?”

  “Scotty…” he said, as if he couldn’t get past the name.

  “Dad, have you been drinking?” I was courteous enough to refrain from adding, again.

  “No,” he said angrily. “No, I — ah, well, fuck it, then. This is the kind of — the kind of treatment — well, you know, fuck it.”

  And he was gone.

  I rolled out of bed.

  I watched the sun come up over the agricultural coops to the east, the great corporate collective farms, our bulwark against famine. A dusting of snow had collected in the fields, sparkling white between empty cornrows.

  Later I drove to Annali’s apartment, knocked on her door.

  We hadn’t dated for more than a year, but we were still friendly when we met in the coffee room or the cafeteria. She took a slightly maternal interest in me these days — inquiring after my health, as if she expected something to go terribly wrong sooner or later. (Maybe that day had come, though I was still healthy as a horse.)

  But she was startled when she opened the door and saw me. Startled and obviously dismayed.

  She knew I’d been fired. Maybe she knew more than that.

  Which was why I had come here: on the off chance that she could help make sense of what had happened.

  “Scotty,” she said, “hey, you should have called first.”

  “You’re busy?” She didn’t look busy. She was wearing loose culottes and a faded yellow shirt. Cleaning the kitchen, maybe.