Echocondriacs by Douglas Wilson, read by the author.

This book is dedicated to Mark Stein, to whom I'm indebted for various things, including my

introduction to the word e-contriacs.

Sunday night, countdown.

Dr Helen Green led herself into her brown Annapolis townhouse apartment, kicked off her shoes by the front door, set the small bag of groceries down on the kitchen counter, and then went back to lock and bolt the front door.

She lived in a nice neighborhood, but it was only three blocks away from one that wasn't so nice, and she'd

always been a careful sort.

She circled back into her living room, enjoying how the carpet felt on her sore feet.

It had been the day of days, and was actually about to get a good deal dayer than that.

This in fact was going to be the dayiest of all her born days.

If you threw in the next morning, it was going to be epic.

As she walked by her home office laptop

which was lined up perfectly straight with the lip of the desk and perfectly

perpendicular with the two mechanical pencils on the right side of the computer, there was

nothing else on her most immaculate desk. Her eye caught a

notification from Stephen Lee, her one-time advisor, and mentor from grad school. Dr. Lee was

now the current head of her research group, and up to this year she had thought that his gruff manners were the mark of great genius.

But over the last several months she had started to wonder if they were really an indicator of a soaring ego as opposed to a soaring intellect. That thought had occurred to her at

timer three. Helen had been appointed to the research group last year and it really

was quite the honor for someone her age. The group was an international task force on climate change and

was the most prestigious of the lot. The lot consisting of all the other task forces, each

one scrambling for money and throwing the occasional elbow.

...