The warehouse smelled of blood and motor oil and the particular despair that only a South Side abattoir can produce. Jack "Cleaner" Harlan worked methodically, wiping blood from the concrete floor with a rag that had seen better decades.

Rule number one: don't ask questions. Rule number two: don't ask where the blood came from. Rule number three: if the blood has equations written in it around the body, call The Firm and wait for instructions.

Jack had called. The instructions had been simple: clean it up. Burn the rag. Come back to the office tomorrow for your check.

He was on his fourth glass of whiskey when the door to his apartment opened without knocking. The Professor walked in like he owned the place, which, in a way, he did. The Professor was blind, eighty years old, and the smartest man Jack had ever met, which was saying something because Jack had known a lot of very smart people—people who could calculate ballistic trajectories in their heads, people who could memorize a phone book and recite it backward, people whose brains worked like machines.

The Professor was a machine himself.

"Mr. Harlan." The Professor sat in the only chair that wasn't broken. "I've run the numbers."

"You always run the numbers."

"This time is different. Your death is calculated to occur in forty-seven hours, nineteen minutes. Plus or minus six minutes."

Jack stared at him. The Professor's blind eyes were white as milk, but they saw everything. "Forty-seven hours. That's about two days."

"Yes."

"For what?"

"For everything, Mr. Harlan. For the cleaning you just completed. For the transport you'll be offered tomorrow. For the conversation you'll have on the train to New York. For the decision you'll face in a Brooklyn basement. For the choice you make at the very end, which is the only choice that matters and which you think you're making freely but are not."

Jack poured another whiskey. "What choice?"

"The zero-sum choice. The choice where every option leads to your destruction, and the only variable is the speed andelegance of the destruction." The Professor tilted his head. "The Firm has been using the Oracle Machine for thirty years. Since 1923. It was built from captured German calculation equipment and American mathematical genius. Originally designed to predict artillery trajectories. Then repurposed. Now it predicts human behavior."

"Human behavior?"

"Every human behavior. Market movements, political decisions, criminal acts, romantic entanglements. The Oracle doesn't guess. It calculates. And it has never been wrong."

Jack drained the glass. "You're telling me there's a machine that can predict what I'm going to do before I do it."

"Not just predict, Mr. Harlan. The Oracle doesn't predict. It knows. It knows because it has modeled every variable that influences your decisions—your childhood, your education, your traumas, your preferences, your biochemical state at any given moment. It has more data on you than you have on yourself."

"That's impossible."

"The Oracle has never been wrong. Would you like me to list your last seven decisions, made without telling anyone, completely private, that the Oracle predicted within hours of their occurrence?"

Jack thought about the cleaning. The blood equations. The warehouse on the South Side. "What were the equations?"

"Probability distributions," The Professor said. "Written in blood because the person who wrote them wanted the message to be unmistakable. The equations describe a system where free will is an illusion generated by insufficient data. If you had all the data—the position of every atom in your brain, the chemical signals firing, the environmental stimuli—you would see that your choices were determined before you were born."

Jack stood up. He walked to the window. Chicago sprawled before him, a city of steel and glass and millions of people living their millions of lives, completely unaware that an Oracle machine in some underground facility knew what each of them would do tomorrow.

"Can I fight it?" Jack asked. "The Oracle. Can I do something it can't predict?"

The Professor smiled. It was a sad smile. "Mr. Harlan, the Oracle predicted that you would ask me that question. It predicted the exact words you would use. It predicted the three-second pause before you spoke. It predicted the slight tremor in your left hand because you've had three whiskeys tonight and your liver is processing the alcohol at a rate of—well, it predicted all of that."

Jack turned back. "Then I'm already dead. Aren't I? Forty-seven hours. That's not a prediction. That's an execution order."

"It's a calculation, Mr. Harlan. There's a difference. An execution order implies malice. The Oracle feels nothing. It simply knows."

Jack sat back down. He picked up his glass. He looked at the whiskey the way a drowning man looks at a life raft that he knows is full of holes.

"What do you suggest?"

The Professor leaned forward. "I suggest that you understand the mathematics of your situation. I suggest that you make peace with the fact that your life is a equation with one known solution. And I suggest that when the forty-seven hours are up, you walk calmly into Lake Michigan and stop swimming. The math will be waiting for you, Mr. Harlan. The math always waits."

Jack drained his glass. The rain had started outside, tapping against the window like a Morse code message he couldn't decode.

"Forty-seven hours," he said.

"Forty-seven hours."

Jack Harlan was a man who had spent his life cleaning up other people's messes. Now he was the mess. And the Oracle knew it. The Oracle had always known it. The Oracle knew it before Jack was born.

The math waited.