INSIDE A DUSTY, CRAMPED ROOM in the center of a poorly ventilated building high above the planet, a group of the world's most influential citizens converged.
Had anyone ever met these citizens in passing, they would not have been recognized as having enough power to shape world affairs.
While each looked different in their own way, each person bore the same mark of responsibility indicating considerable authority over a long period of time: graying hair.
Even the youngest among them, at the age of forty-four, bore streaks of gray. The rest of them-men and women alike-had all grayed before their time.
They could not forget that fact as the twelve of them sat down at a table meant for six.
They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, with hardly any space for themselves. The room had been built for people of the past, people who had been much shorter.
The building had been the first of its kind, a floating, cubic slab of metal given the weight of a hydrogen molecule due to processes the twelve people no longer understood.
They could not tell the public that, one day, the most important building in the world would burn up in the atmosphere in the process of falling to earth because they had forgotten the methods that had kept the building afloat to begin with.
Nor could they access the computer to learn how such a miracle had been achieved in days past, for the computer continued to show the same face that it had shown for the past few days, the face a minor functionary had recognized as belonging to a citizen of the Temporal Constabulary.
The twelve people scrunched together in the small room had wanted to speak to the man, yet for all their attempts, he had evaded capture. As a result, they had come together once again to discuss what might be done about the situation.
None of them had wanted to come, not since the last time when shouting had erupted over the decision to use the Black Brigade to affect the citizen's capture, rather than summoning him. A vocal minority of one, Plone Hesser, had expressed doubts about whether the Black Brigade would succeed in capturing the man who frustrated all attempts to learn anything from the computer.
Plone had come to the meeting looking more tired than he had previously. His balding, white hair stuck up in odd places on his head. The other eleven people had seen him bring forth a comb from a pocket once and actually use it on his hair. He had done this without thinking. His hair moved along with the comb, then went back to its customary place standing up in tufts.
Unconscious of his hair as ever, Plone affixed a pair of thick glasses to his face. He stifled a yawn with the back of one hand.
Vio Quann, the man who had argued in favor of using the Black Brigade, appeared no less tired than Plone as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, trying to gain enough room to put an elbow on the table.
He had thrown on his robes haphazardly, as though he'd had other matters on his mind when dressing himself in the morning.
In fact, Vio suffered from the world's last-and most insidious-disorder: insomnia.
Try what he might, he simply could not fall asleep when he wanted. As often as not, sleep claimed him just at the moment when he felt ready to give up on the idea of lying in bed. Even after he'd lie prone, eyes closed, directing his thoughts in this manner, his body refused to cooperate.
Time, it turned out, mattered more than the state of his mind.
It gave him no small comfort that many of the people who had sat in this room over the years suffered from the same problem.
They had gone about their daily lives with bloodshot eyes, a spinning brain apt to explode into a world-crushing headache at any moment. They had seen the crude cartoons drawn between news reports depicting Vio as a zombie, or as a lurching, misbegotten creature with metal plugs on each side of his neck and a wide, comical star across his forehead. This creature, whatever it had once been, had been used so often and for so long in political comics that it had come to be known simply as "the leader."
Sitting there across from people who both needed and despised him, Vio felt more like the leader now than he ever had before.
The feeling might have been enough to bring a smile to his face, had he been in a more positive mood.
All twelve people kept circling back to the room due to the wide metal cylinder built into the structure. The cylinder bisected the building, jutting out from the bottom where it received enormous amounts of information from the world below.
Powerful as the twelve might be, they had never been able to function without the central computer, nor without its most powerful receptor. Even the Temporal Constabulary, which had contributed a massive amount of information to the computer, did not have the capability to recall data at the speed or frequency as the twelve in the cramped room.
Even after the computer had frozen, they continued to meet in the same room in the hope that the computer might resolve the error on its own.
Additionally, their own brand of singular stubbornness resisted all forms of change, no matter how beneficial.
So there they sat, the twelve of them, four groups of three each, gathered together for an unprecedented third time that week, each sitting in an atmosphere of sweat, stale air and awkward silence.
They did not speak at first.
Instead, they stared at the image displayed towards each side of the table, an image they had since come to despise.
The flashing images that rushed past in quick success had been a comfort for the group.
Plone had not argued as much when he had the brief images to view every morning as he caught up on events that had happened during the hours when he tried to sleep.
Vio hadn't found himself growling at either of his two wives as they comforted him as best they could. Their joint efforts had always calmed him down; their soft words spoken in his ear while he watched the computer display the same images allowing him to focus.
Staring at the image of the man who stared back in a mocking way, Vio sighed deeply. It would be a great effort to maintain his calm today while the Council of Thirds discussed how best to handle the situation.
In their previous meeting, they had discussed the possibilities that awaited them if indeed the Final Prediction proved to be true.
The Final Prediction, as the Constabulary called it, described a day when the human race would disappear from the face of the planet because one man-the man the computer continued to show them-defied all logic.