Transcription by Ike Hamill Read Free Book Online Page A

you never talk to your editor anymore. What are you doing in there?”
    “You’re too smart for your own good, Jimbo. I can’t talk about this, but you have to trust me. What I’m doing in there is very important, and it’s something only I can do.”
    “Why?”
    “I can’t talk about it. I’m going to write down everything. You can read it when you’re older.”
    “It’s not fair, Dad,” James said. “Everyone else gets a mom and a dad. I don’t have either.”
    Thomas dropped his head. James felt triumphant for a second. He’d meant to hurt his father, and he’d succeeded. When Thomas looked up at him again, James regretted it. The pain in his father’s eyes seemed to be double his own. Whatever his father was contending with, James had just made it worse.
    “I’m sorry, Dad.”
    “No. Don’t be sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry. None of this is your fault, and you don’t deserve it. I stuck my nose where it didn’t belong and you’re paying the price. I’m sorry.”
    “Can you just tell me what’s going on?”
    Thomas didn’t answer. He moved back to the door and looked out the small windows cut into the upper half.  
    James went back to his room.
    The door of his father’s office was jarring to look at. His whole life, he couldn’t remember seeing it closed.

    #   #   #   #   #

    James shook the memory from his head. He had been about to fall asleep again, and it was no time to sleep. He had things to do to get ready. If he could go back now, he would have so much to talk with his father about. Maybe if his father had someone to commiserate with, he wouldn’t have been so depressed. Maybe they could have found a way to share the load of the transcription. They might alternate nights, or swap every-other week so they could both lead a somewhat normal life.
    It wouldn’t work, and James knew it.
    The transcription ate a person up, like a motor draining a battery.
    And Thomas wasn’t driven mad by the process, he was driven mad by the mistakes he had made. Early on, while still discovering the nature of his duties, Thomas had been careless, and his best friend Ron had died.

CHAPTER 6: PRISON
     

     
    Diary of Thomas Hicks, 1977

    W HEN I FIRST EXPLAINED my theory to Jeremy, it took a lot of convincing before he agreed to help me out. Jeremy works as a freelance fact checker, and if you’re looking for a review of numbers, he’s your guy. He works part-time at the University, so he has access to some number crunching machines to run his simulations through. I wrote a story last year on large-scale hog farming, and Jeremy actually found a mistake in the farmer’s calculation of feed-to-meat ratios. He probably saved that farmer ten-thousand dollars, and all in the name of making sure that my article was correct.
    This was a different kind of problem I brought to him though.
    The conversation had to restart three or four times before he understood what I was getting at.
    “I’m looking for a pattern in these dates.”
    “What kind of pattern?” he asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Then it won’t do you any good.”
    “Pardon?”
    “You’ve got four dates there,” he said. “I can find any number of patterns there, and I can also make a strong case that those dates are purely random. You don’t have a large enough sample to do yourself any good. You’ll need a hundred more dates. Then, I can find you a pattern.”
    “But this has only happened four times, as far as I can tell.”
    “Then you’ll have to wait,” he said. “Unless you can correlate some other variables.”
    “Like what?”
    “Do you have an idea of what caused the phenomenon on those dates?”
    “No, that’s what I’m trying to investigate. But it’s really difficult to investigate if I can’t go watch it, and I can’t go watch it if I don’t know when it’s going to happen again.”
    “It’s a little hard to speculate when I don’t even know what we’re talking about,” he said. “These