Ethan was ignoring the stack of term papers on his desk when the buzzer on his phone sounded off. He heard it vaguely, somewhere off in the distance, but it seemed to lack any meaning. His eyes were instead glued to the monitor in the corner of the room, where the swirling green and yellow showed a storm moving in over the city. Rain, for some reason, excited him. Perhaps it was the variance, the fact that no two storms were really alike. Sometimes it was a heavy downpour, other times nothing more than a light drizzle. The truth was that it operated randomly—a rarity in a world where control was the norm.

“Professor Kemp?”

It was Mrs. Hart’s voice, tinny and distorted through the second-hand phones, the most advanced equipment the university could afford to buy. Ethan wondered why she was bothering him, what sum of knowledge one receptionist could hold to rival that of an incoming storm. It was just rain and clouds and thunder and yet he was entranced by their movement on the radar. In this indeterminate time between fall and winter, no one had any clue what would drop from the sky when it finally arrived. It could be anything, wonderfully anything.

No, Ethan told himself. The possibilities were not endless. They were guaranteed to be some combination of previously seen behavior and now more predictable than ever. Watching the meteorologists on the television simply took all the fun out of it.

“Ethan,” said Mrs. Hart, her voice more urgent.