“Ahh, shit,” Hamza said, finally. “It’s the Site, Miko. Will and I are working on the Site.”
Miko slowly raised her eyebrows.
“What are you talking about? The Site? The future Site?”
“Yes. Will’s the Oracle, and I’m helping him.”
Miko’s eyes narrowed. Hamza waited. He knew what she was doing—waiting for him to decide he’d milked enough humor out of thejoke and laugh, or smile, something. Miko frowned. She stood up from the table and walked to the refrigerator, where she clinkeda few chunks of ice into a glass from the dispenser and filled it with water.
“You want one?” she asked.
“No, that’s all right . . . actually, yeah, that would be good.”
She poured Hamza a second glass and placed it in front of him on the kitchen table. Her mouth twisted.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
“What?” Hamza said. “Don’t you want to hear the rest?”
Miko didn’t answer. She left the room. Hamza watched her go, momentarily left with nothing to say.
He heard the sound of the printer in their tiny home office spitting out a few pages. A moment later Miko reappeared, holdingtwo sheets of paper. She sat down at the kitchen table and laid the papers flat, side by side. Hamza read them upside down,seeing the all-too familiar text of the Site.
She studied the predictions, taking her time. Hamza remained silent, letting her read. Finally, Miko looked up and met hisgaze.
“The Site. My God. I was just grading my kids’ essays in the bedroom before that call. The topic was free choice—I just askedthem to write about something affecting the world today. Almost every single one of them wrote about the Oracle, Hamza.”
Miko tapped the printouts with her index finger.
“Where did Will get these?” she said. “Where did the predictions come from?”
Hamza shrugged.
“I don’t know. Neither does he. According to Will, he woke up at about five a.m. one day, just launched out of a dream. You know what that’s like—no break between sleep and reality. You’re awake, but itdoesn’t really feel like it.
“The dream was just a voice, he said, reciting a series of events, each with a date. A hundred and eight separate things,all set to happen over the next three years or so.”
“One hundred and eight? Why that particular number?”
“No idea. That’s just how many there were.”
Miko processed for a moment. She gave a little involuntary shiver and looked up at Hamza, half angry, half embarrassed.
“Hamza, I just realized—I sent a question to the Site, when you set up that e-mail address so people could write in.”
“You did? What did you ask?”
“None of your business. It was personal. That’s the point. I thought I was asking the Oracle, and it turns out I was justasking Will.”
“Well, I never saw it, and Will never mentioned it, if he did. We’ve gotten millions of e-mails, Miko, and we’ve only madeit through maybe a hundred thousand. Most of them won’t ever be read.”
“Why did you ask for questions from people in the first place?”
Hamza took a sip of water.
“The idea was to give corporations and wealthy people a way to contact us without being obvious that we were offering to sellpredictions about the future.”
“But you must have had so many people writing to you for answers, for hope. Did you ever respond to any of them?”
Hamza suddenly felt extremely small.
“Why did you lie to me?” Miko said, her eyes flaring. “You could have told me. You’ve been lying to me for months. That dayyou came home after quitting, and you wouldn’t give me a real reason why. That bullshit about a biotech startup you were shepherdingalong, and all that VC money . . .”
“I wanted to tell you, Miko, but Will has a huge bug up his ass about staying anonymous, and he was afraid that the more peoplewho knew who he is, what he knows, the greater the chance it’d get out somehow.”
“I’m your wife! Not some . . . random! You didn’t think you could trust me?”
Hamza reached out and touched Miko’s hand.
“Listen, I can trust you with anything, I know that. That’s the point. That’s why you’re my wife. But this secret wasn’t mine to share.”
Miko let her hand stay where it was, Hamza noticed with some relief.
“So why are you telling me now?” Miko asked. “Did Will change his mind?”
“No. I’m telling you because you’re my wife and I can trust you with anything.”
The corner of Miko’s mouth twitched upward.
“You’re goddamn right. What else?”
“There’s not really that much more. We did some work to figure out the rules, you know, whether the stuff he saw had to cometrue, or if it can be changed.”
“Can it?”
“Not as far as we can tell. Everything so far has happened just like he dreamed it, even when we try to get in the way ofa prediction, or push it in another direction. It just . . . doesn’t work.”
“Creepy.”
“It’s actually a great thing from a sales perspective—means we can have confidence in our product . . . but yeah. Not everythingWill knows is good, and he’s getting wrapped up in the causality of the whole thing. He’s wrong—none of these things are hisfault—but I sympathize. It’s not easy for him.”
Hamza paused and looked across the kitchen for a moment.
“He’s probably the most famous person in the world, but not really in a good way. You know how people feel about him. Halfare terrified of what a guy out there who sees the future means, and the other half are terrified and they want to kill him.”
“Not everyone.”
Hamza rolled his eyes.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Crazies who think he’s the second coming, maybe, or UFO freaks.”
Miko shook her head.
“No, that’s not true. My students are fascinated with him. He confirms their suspicions—they’re still young enough to thinkthere’s magic in the world, and the Oracle plays right into that. And I’ve had lots of conversations with people who thinkit’s hopeful that the Oracle’s around. It means there’s a plan. Life isn’t just random.”
She wrapped her hands around her glass of water.
“I hope so, anyway,” she added.
“Why’s that?” Hamza asked.
Miko looked up and met his eyes.
“Because I’m pregnant,” she
