Jose Adams looked into his webcam and exactly fourteen million five hundred thousand sixty-two faithful, loyal, patient, willing, paying subscribers would stare back at him. In ten hours.
He cleared his throat a little as his prerecorded guest-host startup line played, along with what he knew would be the catchiest jingle written in this decade.
“Good evening,” said a celebrity not worth remembering whom everyone knew, “and welcome to today’s mass broadcast: the forecast that even you can afford! If you’re too slow to catch this one, or you’re missing out on last week’s tips, gold subscribers get archive access! And remember, sharing prophecies without the prophet’s consent is theft, and everyone who does this for the next two years WILL be caught.”
This was a lie, but a very helpful one. It had increased the number of subscribers by several million, all of whom were gullible enough to pay for extra services.
“Now….here’s Jose!”
And there he was. He’d already taken in his breath, and as he counted out the seconds it left his body in a hiss of words.
“All parents whose social security numbers both end in ‘8,’ your daughters will feel blue this week due to green envy, causes may vary. If you are a white male between the ages of twenty-two and thirty who was born in July look both ways twice before crossing the street this month or run the risk of being struck with a semi-truck. Owners of cats that are both orange AND striped should keep them indoors to prevent rabies. A free tip for the gambling men out there: this week’s biggest celebrity drug scandal item will start with ‘C.’ On no account should any children under the age of ten step on sidewalk cracks this week; mother’s backs will not break but their ankles might due to faulty construction work. Construction workers, take the day off for a job hunt, your companies stand a 85% averaged chance of being immobilized by lawsuits and sunk within the next year. Do not trust anyone whose middle name rhymes with ‘orange.’ Begin buying low and selling high. If anyone promises you the deal of a lifetime, they’re crooks. Take your time over lunch but skip breakfast and get home fast. If you see a reptile, run away. Goodbye.”
Jose took off his headset and closed his eyes, basking in the invisible applause of exactly fourteen million five hundred thousand sixty-two loyal, willing wallets. It was like a hot tub for the soul.
“Viewership’s up this week, sir,” said one of the happy, underpaid interns he employed to tell him things he already knew. “Should we get Craig Watson on again next week to do the intro? He’s so well-spoken!”
“No,” said Jose. “He’ll be busy.” He bundled his coat into his arms and counted how much change he’d have. “I’m going to get a coffee and something expensive and baked. I’ll be back at twelve nineteen and forty-two seconds seven milliseconds to do our premium personals.”
Life was good, knew Jose, as he retrieved the most expensive baked object in a two-block radius – some sort of insane genius’s dream of a cinnamon roll. Well, maybe not in general, but his was. And what made that life so good was knowing exactly how long it would remain so: in his case, for the next seventy years minimum. Maybe longer if he got off his ass within the next two decades and started funding some serious science in that direction. Every other billionaire he knew did nothing but fuel lobbyist groups and private think-tanks – nobody ever thought big. Luckily, Jose was there to think for them. Just like he did for everyone else.
He closed his eyes, and bit into something soft and warm. As predicted.
The taste, however, was something else.
At the tail-end of a fit of dry heaves, still foaming at the mouth with spittle, Jose looked at his incredibly expensive, incredibly delicious, yet somehow foul, odorous meal. He looked, and he understood that not all of the white matter caked atop it was frosting. And then his ears kicked in and led his eyes to the source of the trouble: a white-winged cackler circling in the breeze overhead, somehow managing to leer at him through a beak.
A common seagull.
“It can’t be impossible.”
The man over the phone shrugged as he heard that. “It is. Always has been, always will be.”
Jose rubbed his temples and tried to forget the taste of guano, despite knowing that such a thing would not happen for the next thirty years of his life. “I can forecast a researcher in Antarctica and every single slum-dweller in Atlanta. I can describe the exact life-cycle of a given rat. I can read the future of the WEATHER. And you’re telling me that it’s impossible to foresee a seagull?”
“Common gull or black-backed gull?”
“Common.”
“Yeah, no chance. Black-backs you can see, it’s just a bit fuzzy and it’s mostly them murdering and eating smaller things. Commons are like trying to read a newspaper with your ears, through earplugs. And you’re in New York and the newspaper’s on Olympus Mons.”
“That’s lunacy.”
The man over the phone shrugged at him again. Jose had never bothered to learn his mentor’s name, but he was the wealthiest individual in human history by a factor too high to pronounce, possessing more money than all humans born before 1902 had ever accumulated. He spent most of his days on some nice islands he’d had removed from the geography and history books. “It’s how it is. Just accept it. Do what I did and pay somebody to hold a little umbrella over you whenever you’re outside. You’ll be fine. And don’t glare at me so much, I don’t want to have you assassinated. Bye.”
Jose refrained from glaring at the phone; he was the fourth of the man’s apprentices. He contented himself with cursing quietly, pacing rapidly, and spinning around to stare out the window at odd moments.
His intern knocked at the door to tell him that the first private premium personal sitting of the day would be dialing in within the next minute.
“Sir, the first-”
“Cancel that,” Jose snapped. “Something important just came up.”
It had taken him six tries to find a veterinary clinic that had a gull present. ‘Rats of the sea’ didn’t get much sympathy, even from animal lovers, and those were less than affluent. Fortunately, neither were many veterinarians, and it didn’t take much cash to persuade the parting of vet and bird.
Jose stared intently at the thing. It seemed to be smirking at him. You couldn’t smirk through a beak, right? But you couldn’t leer either. He was pretty sure of both those things, but less so than he had been that morning. That was a horrible feeling, and he was eager for it to be over – surely the proximity would do it, surely being this close would fix it. Close enough to touch, and everything got so much easier…
“I know you,” he told the bird and also himself. “I know you better than you do; inside, outside, inside-out, past, present, future and miscellaneous. I have personally counted the number of skeletons in our president’s closet – three and six vertebrae – and peeped the what-ifs of the life of Temujin, Genghis Khan. I know what I will have for breakfast for the next fifty years of my life. I can see all this, and I can see all of you.”
He reached out a hand and concentrated. The seagull bit him.
Jose’s second seagull was not as conveniently restrained as the first had been, but it did not have a broken neck. As he watched it peck at the scattered potato chip crumbs on the boardwalk, he felt a certain inclination to alter that. He’d been staring at the damned thing point-blank for two hours and nothing had happened. He would’ve had more luck prophesizing a stone, something he had a proven success record at.
Jose thumbed absently at the bandaid on his right palm as he considered his options. It was the first time he’d used one in over a decade. “What are you hiding?” he whispered to the bird.
It stared at him. It awrked at him. Then it turned its back and trotted away.
More manpower was needed, obviously. He hired the best men. Then when those men questioned his decision to have them tail seagulls he fired those men and silenced them with payoffs, blackmail, or assassination as needed. Then he hired men who were not quite as good but more predisposed to keeping their mouths shut, some out-of-work ecologists, and just about every amateur birdwatcher in the city.
“Seagulls,” he told them. “Let me know about the seagulls.” And in only a few weeks he did know about the seagulls, he knew as much about seagulls as any man alive, as any head of the National Audobon Society ever had, as much as a seagull itself. Entire libraries-worth of information on seagulls had been sent into his computer. Sometimes he found himself walking very nearly like a seagull.
And yet the one bit of information he actually wanted remained elusive. They seemed to mock him for it as he passed them in the streets, gazing down at him from the lightposts and storefronts with their pudgy bodies and beady eyes.
“I’ll have you soon, you’ll see,” he’d hiss at them.
And the seagull would ignore him, or more likely proclaim aiiek, aiiiek, awk awk awk awk awk, and a great anger would well up inside him like blood in a compound fracture.
A week went by. Two weeks. Two weeks with no progress. Something had to be done.
Jose Adams clung to the underside of the dock as the saltwater lapped against his spine and hoped that he had imagined the shark fin in the harbour, because he didn’t need the distraction now. He was so close to the nest of the Big One that he could almost taste it in his mouth, taste it like the befouled cinnamon roll that had led him on this path of destruction. A week of careful hands-on surveillance, days spent in meditation, nights spent painstakingly drawing together information from the charts in his office and his own eyes. All brought to this.
Now. Now he would see what they were planning.
Carefully, achingly, he used one hand to prise the tiny periscope loose from his wire-tight jaws and shimmied it up the largest knothole he could find. Then, trying to persuade himself that he was only imagining the swirl of water beneath him as anything other than normal wave action, he pressed an eye to the eyepiece.
The view was blurry. Then there was a beak in it.
Jose jerked backwards in terror, lost his balance, and plummeted with a blubbering cry onto the head of a mature female great white shark measuring sixteen feet six inches in length who had been examining him out of morbid interest. She reacted in the only way she knew how.
It was only a little bite, the doctors told him. Just a little bite. A few stitches, really. Walk it off in a few weeks, ha-ha, don’t worry.
Unfortunately, Jose Adams had not required his medical insurance for years, and so the bite inflicted upon him was much larger than one any shark could inflict. Combined with funding half a city’s-worth of private investigators, ecologists, and birdwatchers for almost a month and the angry lawsuits for breach of contract from his advertisers, celebrity clients, and staff, and he was somewhat short of pocket, as well as short of any clothing fancy enough to possess pockets.
Well, needs must. He could make it work, of course he could. He was a prophet, wasn’t he? Any man with that could make money hand over fist in five minutes, and once he saved up a little dosh through the backroom blackmail circuit he could have a new face, a new name, and a new career. Maybe he could even foretell his own death, and wouldn’t that be a kick?
All that was down the chain, of course. Right now he had other priorities. Top priorities.
There was one down the road, pecking at a donut, and Jose’s eyes narrowed.
“Got you,” he whispered.
Six seagulls later and he was no closer to finding one that would squeal. It didn’t matter what questions he asked, what threats he used, how many splinters he shoved into the webbing of their feet, they weren’t giving up a damned thing. His stomach gurgled with rage and indigestion from the half-consumed wad of French fries that he’d fished out of a trash can and called lunch.
“HOW’D YOU DO IT?” he screamed at a sentry atop the nearby coffee shop – possibly one he’d owned a controlling share of, once upon a month ago. “WHY?”
Awrk, it commented. It ruffled its feathers.
Jose felt the bile rise up in him again, and this time it didn’t settle down. He spat curses, spat liquid into the gutter, and charged the bird. Nothing else existed, nothing else mattered – not his future, not the city’s future, not the world’s future, just the future of the bird that stared at him with its beady eyes and yellow beak. He focused all his might and intellect upon that hateful, mocking little face, he tunneled down the world that he’d played like a piano to one atom of one blemish on a single key.
He saw it picking up a French fry from his outstretched palm.
And then, for a great and glorious moment, Jose Adams felt hope rise up in him, lifting him from the ground as light as a feather. His perspective spun, the world shone bright and strange in his eyes, and his heart fluttered like a schoolboy’s before the momentum from the semi-truck left his body and sent him skull-first into the asphalt.
Something hard jabbed his palm.
Jose Adams was buried on his birthday: July eighth. On a pleasant day with a bright sun, cool breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. And a lot of seagulls.