I’m executive secretary of the Center, which was incorporated four months ago, in August, 2000. Carvajal’s money pays our expenses. For now we occupy a five-room house in a rural section of northern New Jersey, and I don’t care to be more specific about the location. Our aim is to find ways of reducing the Bernoulli Interval to zero: that is, to make guesses of ever-increasing accuracy on the basis of an ever-decreasing statistical sample, or, to put it another way, to move from probabilistic to absolute prediction, or, rephrasing it yet again, to replace guesswork with clairvoyance.

So we work toward post-stochastic abilities. What Carvajal taught me is that stochasticity isn’t the end of the line: it’s merely a phase, soon to pass, in our striving toward full revelation of the future, in our struggle to free ourselves from the tyranny of randomness. In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing. So Carvajal said. I believe he was right. You probably don’t. You tend to be skeptical about such things, don’t you? That’s all right. You’ll change your mind. I know you will.

Carvajal is dead now; he died exactly when and as he knew he would. I am still here, and I think I know how I will die, too, but I’m not altogether sure of it, and in any case it doesn’t seem to matter to me the way it did to him. He never had the strength that was necessary to sustain his visions. He was just a burned-out little man with tired eyes and a drained smile, who had a gift that was too big for his soul, and it was the gift that killed him as much as anything. If I truly have inherited that gift, I hope I make a better job of living with it than he did.

Carvajal is dead, but I’m alive and will be for some time to come. All about me flutter the indistinct towers of the New York of twenty years hence, glittering in the pale light of mornings not yet born. I look at the dull porcelain bowl of the winter sky and see images of my own face, grown much older. So I am not about to vanish. I have a considerable future. I know that the future is a place as fixed and intransient and accessible as the past. Because I know this I’ve abandoned the wife I loved, given up the profession that was making me rich, and acquired the enmity of Paul Quinn, potentially the most dangerous man in the world, Quinn who will be elected President of the United States four years from now. I’m not afraid of Quinn personally. He won’t be able to harm me. He may harm democracy and free speech, but he won’t harm me. I feel guilty because I will have helped put Quinn in the White House, but at least I’ll share that guilt with you and you and you, with your blind mindless votes that you’ll live to wish you could call back. Never mind. We can survive Quinn. I’ll show the way. It will be my form of atonement. I can save you all from chaos, even now, even with Quinn astride the horizon and growing more huge every day.

I was into probabilities for seven years, professionally, before I ever heard of Martin Carvajal. My business from the spring of 1992 onward was projections. I can look at the acorn and see the stack of firewood: it’s a gift I have. For a fee, I would tell you whether I think particle chips will continue to be a growth industry, whether it’s a good idea to open a tattooing parlor in Topeka, whether the fad for bare scalps is going to last long enough to make it worthwhile for you to expand your San Jose depilatory factory. And the odds are I’d be right.

My father liked to say, “A man doesn’t choose his life. His life chooses him.”

Maybe. I never expected to go into the prophecy trade. I never really expected to go into anything. My father feared I’d be a wastrel. Certainly it looked that way the day I collected my college diploma. (NYU ‘86.) I sailed through my three years of college not knowing at all what I wanted to do with my life, other than that it ought to be something communicative, creative, lucrative, and reasonably useful to society. I didn’t want to be a novelist, a teacher, an actor, a lawyer, a stockbroker, a general, or a priest. Industry and finance didn’t attract me, medicine was beyond my capabilities, politics seemed vulgar and blatant. I knew my skills, which are primarily verbal and conceptual, and I knew my needs, which are primarily security-oriented and privacy-oriented. I was and am bright, outgoing, alert, energetic, willing to work hard, and candidly opportunistic, though not, I hope, opportunistically candid. But I was missing a focus, a center, a defining point, when college turned me loose.

A man’s life chooses him. I had always had an odd knack for uncanny hunches; by easy stages I turned that into my livelihood. As a summer fill-in job I did some part-time polltaking; one day in the office I happened to make a few astute comments about the pattern the raw data were showing, and my boss invited me to prepare a projective sampling template for the next step of the poll. That’s a program that tells you what sort of questions you ought to ask in order to get the answers you need. The work was stimulating and my excellence at it had ego rewards. When one of my employer’s big clients asked me to quit and do free-lance consulting work, I took the chance. From there to my own full-time consulting firm was only a matter of months.

When I was in the projection business many uninformed folk thought I was a pollster. No. Pollsters worked for me, a whole platoon of hired gallups. They were to me as millers are to a baker: they sorted the wheat from the chaff, I produced the seven-layer cakes. My work was a giant step beyond polltaking. Using data samples collected by the usual quasi-scientific methods, I derived far-ranging predictions, I made intuitive leaps, in short I guessed, and guessed well. There was money in it, but also I felt a kind of ecstasy. When I confronted a mound of raw samples from which I had to pull a major projection, I felt like a diver plunging off a high cliff into a sparkling blue sea, seeking a glittering gold doubloon hidden in the white sand far below the waves: my heart pounded, my mind whirled, my body and my spirit underwent a quantum kick into a higher, more intense energy state. Ecstasy.

What I did was sophisticated and highly technical, but it was a species of witchcraft, too. I wallowed in harmonic means, positive skews, modal values, and parameters of dispersion. My office was a maze of display screens and graphs. I kept a battery of jumbo computers running around the clock, and what looked like a wristwatch on my wrong arm was actually a data terminal that rarely had time to cool. But the heavy math and the high-powered Hollywood technology were simply aspects of the preliminary phases of my work, the intake stage. When actual projections had to be made, IBM couldn’t help me. I had to do my trick with nothing but my unaided mind. I would stand in a dreadful solitude on the edge of that cliff, and though sonar may have told me the configuration of the ocean bottom, though GE’s finest transponders had registered the velocity of current flow and the water’s temperature and turbidity index, I was altogether on my own in the crucial moment of realization. I would scan the water with narrowed eyes, flexing my knees, swinging my arms, filling my lungs with air, waiting until I saw, until I truly saw, and when I felt that beautiful confident dizziness back of my eyebrows I would jump at last, I would launch myself headlong into the surging sea in search of that doubloon, I would shoot naked and unprotected and unerring toward my goal.