Necessary Madness by Lisabet Sarai

Author:Lisabet Sarai [Sarai, Lisabet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

“Somebody’s messing with the space-time continuum.” Jezebel removed her headphones and looked back over her shoulder, trying to get Stefan’s attention. He glanced up from the technical journal he was skimming.

“What?”

“Look. Here. And here.” The woman pointed to a complex line graph on one of the three enormous LCD monitors that surrounded her, a flickering column of numbers on another. A dizzying array of tables, figures, images and text flashed across the screens, changing from second to second. A map rose to the foreground, to be replaced a moment later by a newspaper clipping and then a scrolling table in which certain values oscillated between red and black. “These discontinuities—you see?—they’re not what I’d expect. The normal time currents are suddenly diverted, swinging wildly away from the forecast paths. Here—at the start of this week—and then again, a couple of days ago. Somehow, someone or something is wrenching the flow away from its trend, sending it in new directions. It shows up all over the place—here, in the stock prices, and here, in the daily accident statistics. Even here in the temperature flux, for Christ’s sake!”

Stefan nodded, though he didn’t see the discrepancies Jez pointed out. He had written the software she used for her analyses, gathering real-time feeds from every source she asked for, splashing the results across her screens in a kaleidoscope of information, but he couldn’t make sense of it the way she could. That was her gift, the one he’d felt when he first found her shooting up in that dark alley two years ago. In some other age, she would have read the patterns in tea leaves or animal entrails. Now, she scanned for truths in the hurricane of bits generated by the modern world.

“What does it mean? Should we be interested?”

“Maybe.” Jez leant back in her chair and rubbed her tired eyes. “It could be a sign that there’s a pre-cog out there somewhere, seeing the future and then trying to alter it.” Jez hadn’t known much about psi powers when he had rescued her, but she learnt fast.

“A pre-cog!” Stefan’s heart raced at the thought. Imagine what he could do, if he knew what the future would bring. Make almost unlimited amounts of money, for one thing, though at this point he hardly needed more wealth. But there were far more subtle possibilities. Elections, for instance. Knowing the results ahead of time would allow him to easily manipulate them. Or disasters. He could hold whole cities hostage. Better still, he could be hailed as a hero, the only man who could save lives and salvage hopes when everything seemed to be lost.

“Stop judging me,” he snapped as he caught the thread of Jez’ thoughts. “Think of all the good I could do with that kind of power. Especially combined with the abilities I’ve already gathered.”

“Think of the risks, Stefan.” She swivelled her chair around to face him. “The last transfer nearly drove you insane. I had to sedate you for more than a week.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.