The Oracle Paradox by Stephen L. Antczak & Digital Fiction

Author:Stephen L. Antczak & Digital Fiction [Antczak, Stephen L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Digital Science Fiction, an imprint of Digital Fiction Publishing Corp.
Published: 2017-09-30T06:00:00+00:00

Alison Haley heard Senator Watts bellow for her at the top of his lungs for the second time.

"Miss Haley! Don’t you hear me callin’ you?"

"I hear you, Senator!" she yelled back. "I’ll be right there!"

The Senator had a bad habit of hollering out her name whenever she went into the bathroom. She was sure he got some sort of perverse thrill out of it. She finished up, washed her hands, then went to Senator Watts’ office. The entire office smelled of old wood and dust, and sometimes she imagined Senator Watts had been there so long that he had absorbed the essence of the smell himself.

"Take this," he said in his long, South Carolinian drawl, handing her a small stack of papers. "You know what to do with it, Miss Haley."

That she did. Once a month, every month that she’d been working as an aide for the Senator, she’d been sent to a different location for lunch and there had been met by a courier and handed a flat envelope. She always delivered the envelope directly to Senator Watts, and then, usually a day or two later, she was given a small stack of papers to dispose of in the shredder. It amazed her that Watts didn’t shred the documents himself, that he trusted an aide to do it. She supposed it was one of the hallmarks of power, to delegate such tasks and to assume they would carried out in good faith.

Alison Haley was a shining example of why that was just bad policy.

When she discovered that he secretly supported a murderous element of the Right to Life movement, she was stunned. She overheard him putting pressure on a contributor to "put some in the kitty" for attorney fees for a man who’d murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic. Of course, Watts publicly decried the murders and claimed to want to see those responsible imprisoned for life.

She shredded almost every piece of paper without really looking at it. Almost. There was always one sheet, though, for which she constantly scanned. When she found it, there was a short pause in the shredding process while she looked at what was on the paper, and memorized it. It wasn’t hard, as it generally only consisted of a column of ten words. They looked like randomly chosen words. Above the column was a row of triple-digit numbers. She’d been told to ignore the numbers and concentrate on the words only. Later on, at home, she would boot up her computer, connect to the Internet and go to a web site that allowed anyone who wanted to set up an anonymous e-mail address. She’d create a new message consisting of the memorized words, and send them on their way to her benefactor, who also had an anonymous e-mail account with the same web site. A few days later, a cashiers check would arrive in the regular mail, sans returns address. It wasn’t much, but it covered her monthly student loan payment.

It surprised her that her boss didn’t know.

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