“What a superstitious gift,” Ludaque said. He had taken it from the courier at the apartment door, signed for it. He held the card out to Tamsin while he placed the box of salted candy on her desk in front of her. Tamsin crossed her legs before she took the offered card, a heavy cream envelope that felt soft under her fingers. “Has the consumption of salted food ever given you dream visions, Tamsin?”
Tamsin bit her lip and stared at her desk, though not at the candy. Work. She would rather be working than look at the candy. She wanted to look at the stars. “Don't you have to charge? Or update one of your algorithms or something?” she said in lieu of answering.
Ludaque was thankfully perceptive for a robot. “Very well,” he said. “I will leave you to your thoughts and go do something else. Let me know if I should send the sender a thank-you note.”
The apartment was open-concept, and Tamsin watched him retreat until he was at the other end of it where her bedroom and his room, the former guestroom, were. Ludaque's footfall was quiet on the hardwood floor. Tamsin assumed it was unintentional on his part, but she hated that he could sneak up on her. She had never told him.
The card. It had the weight of a card selected with care for someone special. There was no name on the envelope, but Tamsin knew her sister had picked it out, just for her. She closed her eyes to let her other sense float to Bea in a store, surrounded by fountain pens and ink, looking at cards, picking out this one. The vision came to her clearly, Bea in a brown coat and an ugly, mustard colored scarf. Her dark hair was already streaked with silver, which made her look a lot like their mother.
With an exhale, Tamsin dropped the vision and opened the card, not with the opener on her desk, but with her finger. The fabric tore in ragged shreds.
The handwriting was choppy:
Only when we know the shadow, can we banish it. Their mother's words. Bea had to know how much Tamsin would loathe reading them in Bea's hand. Tamsin tore the expensive card, ripped the paper right down the middle so her sister's name was cut in half, and tossed the scraps into the waste basket under her desk.
“Ludaque!” Tamsin swiveled around in her chair so she would see him come back to her work area.
“Yes. I was just about to go charge. Or something.”
“Oh, cut it out. What was the slice of deep space the Exploration Program wanted me to look at? The one they marked as important?”
“I thought you didn't want to start working on that today.”
“I changed my mind.”
Ludaque's left eyebrow rose. “I'm assuming no thank-you note then.”
Tamsin crossed her legs. “What did they want me to look at?”
Ludaque walked up to her and put his right hand on the desk. Tamsin looked at the long and dexterous fingers and thought for a half-second that his nails looked long. Longer than usual. Then the built-in scan IDed him and allowed remote access to the relevant files. Tamsin looked at the screen. She uncrossed and re-crossed her legs. “You know, there are less people in the office on weekends. You could take a shower and go in. I doubt you would pick up too many random thoughts and emotions.”
“And it would do me good to get out?”
Ludaque grinned at her. “Have you always been able to read robot minds, or is this new?”
“I'm not going in. Show me the data.”
He shrugged and opened the files coded to his metrics. Black space, a lot of it, sprinkled with the brightness of suns centuries away. And radio signals, possibly random, possibly not. In the sheer vastness and distance, psychics were among the better tools to point the way for humanity's curiosity.
“Would you like me to put some music on? Or some conversation, despite your current mood?”
Tamsin tapped her left index finger on the armrest of her chair. Music helped her mind to drift and get caught on interesting things, but it didn't always work well. Over the past few years, talking to Ludaque and thinking about something else entirely had proved to be the most effective tool. “Conversation, sure.” She started going through the data without really looking at any one thing too hard or too long. It was a very unscientific approach.
Ludaque rolled over his chair so he could look at Tamsin while Tamsin looked at the data. “Would you like to tell me who sent you the divination candy?”
Tamsin rolled her eyes. “Would you like to make light conversation?”
Ludaque shrugged. “It seems to upset you, but it's only candy, and candy isn't upsetting in and of itself. So, the sender must upset you. I would like to know who they are.”
Tamsin had been informed, when the Psychic Research Agency first paired her with Ludaque, that he had certain priorities regarding her mental and physical health. All in all, Tamsin had thought this a good thing, especially after she had become aware of her mother's last few months. Bea had arranged the funeral, and had wisely decided for a closed casket, but Tamsin had looked anyway. She had never really said goodbye after all. The coffin lid had been less heavy than she'd expected. The sunken, dried out face beneath had haunted her in her dreams for months and sometimes still did.
“Fine. My sister sent the candy.”
There was a minute pause. “Oh. She is also gifted, isn't she, but never tried out for a government position.”
Tamsin's turn to shrug while the data kept flashing in front of her eyes. “We were both raised kind of anti-everything. I got out, and Bea never did. Can you believe I only ever got vaccinated after I signed up with the Agency?”
“What a risky way to raise children,” Ludaque said, his voice approximately sad.
“I'd say it was a risky way to live, but a great way to die.”
“Tell me then, is your sister like you? A mind reader, does she have the sympathetic sense as well?”
Tamsin tapped the fingers of her left hand on the armrest while she flipped through the files with her right. “She is more of a fake, actually. I mean, don't get me wrong, she has some divinatory skill, and sometimes when she reads the Tarot for someone, it's actually not just three-quarters made-up bullshit.”
Ludaque tsked. “Such strong language.”
“Well, Ludaque, you fucking asked about my sister, so strong language is what you get.” Tamsin's eyes focused on a radio wave summary and the corresponding slice of space. “Oh, this seems interesting. I can hear mumbling when I look at it.”
Ludaque rose from his chair to lean over Tamsin and look at the scan. Tamsin caught the faint smell of soap on him. “Show me which one? Ah, I see. Can you make out what the voices are saying, Tamsin?”
She tried to just let the voices come to her, tried to just listen, but whenever she thought she could almost make out a word, it slipped clear out of her head. “Nope. But there's definitely something there.”
She could feel Ludaque nodding behind her. “Alright. Let me make a note.” He put his hand on the scanner once more and typed in a quick comment one-handedly on Tamsin's keyboard. “Perhaps now you feel like going for a walk? I really do think some exercise and fresh air would be just the thing.”
“Are you going to keep pestering me until I go out?”
“I certainly will.”
“Fine. Let me at least change out of my sweatpants.”
“A splendid idea.”
“You can be such a nuisance.”
◔
The chocolates sat on Tamsin's bedside table, courtesy of Ludaque. Tamsin glanced over at them from her novel. The story had begun to bore her some thirty pages ago, but Ludaque had recommended the book. He had left a real, physical copy on the very same spot on her bedside table as he had the chocolates.
Tamsin read another half page, stared at the candy, decided reading in bed wasn't something she particularly enjoyed in the first place, tossed the book onto the little table, and turned off the light.
That was no good either. She turned and tangled herself up in her sheets. The chocolates sat there, silently gloating, taunting, beckoning. Tamsin turned on the lights.
“Damn you, Bea,” she said as she tore the plastic, and the white bow halved with red, off the triplets of salted chocolates. True witches would eat a whole teaspoon full, without the benefit of the chocolate, she thought, as she stuffed the candy in her mouth, all three, in quick succession.
There was enough salt on them to make them just bordering on the unpleasant. The sharp taste, mingled with cocoa, dragged Tamsin off to sleep.
◔
Dreams are like monsters, said Tamsin's dead mother from her coffin. You need to step a long way back until you can see the true shape and the hidden tail. The coffin was open, placed in the center of a wide room tiled with black and white in geometric patterns. Tamsin's mother spoke with her eyes closed, from a face as sunken as Tamsin remembered.
Why did you take all these drugs? Why'd you fast all the time? Why did Bea let you? Tamsin said. Her fingers reached for her mother's shoulders, shook them. Beneath the fabric of the funeral shift, Tamsin felt thin skin on rigid bone.
Seeing is no easy business, seeing takes a lot out of the seer. A lot. That was when Tamsin realized her mother wasn't really talking at all, at least her lips weren't moving. But Tamsin recognized the words her dead mother said in the dream. When she was still alive, her mother had pounded them into Tamsin's head. Tamsin had been more naive then, and so the words had stuck.
Tamsin stepped back from the coffin and the corpse therein, looked around.
The room was circular, and black doors were set in the wall, all evenly spaced. Which door? Tamsin thought.
Uncertain, she walked along the wall, touched her fingers to the doors while she walked, and tried to make a choice. Colors flashed in front of Tamsin's eyes, each door giving off the brave palette of an Expressionist piece. It was blinding, and the muted wall faded into color.
Have you ever had a prophetic dream with corpses and doors in it? Ludaque said. He was walking next to her. The colors settled.
Would you tell me what it means if I say yes? Tamsin said.
A smile spread over Ludaque's face, a wide one. Why would you think I know such things, Tamsin?
Just then, the door Tamsin was touching warmed to her fingers, hot and colorless. Tamsin stopped and stared down at the doorknob. It was encrusted in ice, but she tried to turn it anyway.
In a shower of snowy crystals, the door fell inward into a blackness almost complete.
They are so beautiful, Tamsin said, meaning the stars, but Ludaque had vanished. She was all alone as she stepped over the threshold.
The darkness engulfed her, and the door at Tamsin's back fell shut. A bright glow distracted her from the stars ahead, and in the weightlessness of space, she somehow managed to turn.
Earth stared at her, blue and beautiful as ever. Humbling.
Tamsin listened. So many voices rattled the stillness of her home planet, and she wanted to hear those whispers. What she heard instead were the whispers that had come to her from the scans of deep space earlier, the voices that she hadn't been able to make out. The voices got louder and louder, though that didn't make them any more intelligible.
Soon they were so loud that Tamsin pressed the balls of her hands to her ears, but the noise was still there, and she screamed until something—someone was shaking her and saying her name.
“Tamsin. Tamsin, can you hear me?” Ludaque. In her room. Light seeped in from the hallway, outlining everything in strange shadows. “Tamsin.”
“Yeah…yes.”
“You were screaming. Are you alright?” He felt for her pulse, turned on the lights. They came on slowly.
“I ate the stupid chocolate.”
“You didn't wake up easily, and that's never happened before. Let me look at your eyes.” He pulled her lids up, made her follow his finger with her gaze.
“I just had a strange dream,” Tamsin said.
Ludaque nodded once to indicate he was done examining her. “So. Have you ever had prophetic dreams? Before I was around?”
Tamsin shook her head. “Prophecy is scary. I want to go back to sleep now, do you mind?” Crankiness and confusion mingled like salt and chocolate in Tamsin's mind.
“Of course,” Ludaque said. His smile caught the light in odd angles. “I'll leave the door open.”
“Fine, whatever.”
When Tamsin fell asleep again, there were no more corpses, no more doors. There was just darkness with no stars.
◑
The next morning was a gray creature that would not move to let any ray of sunlight past. Tamsin was at her desk. “Where is the data from yesterday? That slice of sky with the whispers?”
Ludaque looked up from a huge bowl into which he was pouring Halloween candy. “It has been moved up for further investigation. I'm sure they'll have a closer look, send a probe even.”
Tamsin tapped her fingers on her armrest. “That's fast. I hadn't even really considered all of the data. What I did was a cursory reading at best.”
Ludaque came over with the bowl, shiny wrappers glaring. “Care for some candy? You are supposed to say trick or treat first, traditionally.”
“No. Why did they move the report so fast?”
He shrugged. “Probably because it coincided with something they wanted to do anyway. The workings of the Scientific Division are mysterious. Have some candy, Tamsin. Say trick or treat.”
Tamsin stared at the bowl and remembered her dream of a round room. “Trick or treat.” She took some candy, salted caramel. “I think I might head into the office today.”
“It's Monday. The Agency will be abuzz with people.”
“I'll risk it. Besides, it'll do me good, right?”
Ludaque answered with an unreadable smile.
◕
Tamsin had an office at the Agency, but she hardly ever used it. As a result, it had too clean and tidy a look about it. She walked the hallways toward it, in the back of her mind the unreasonable fear that she might have forgotten where the office was, that someone else would be sitting behind her desk when she entered. Perhaps I shouldn't have left Ludaque in the foyer, she thought, but it was a good place for him to connect to the main database without going through several security protocols. He might be able to tell her more about that black space that had whispered to her, or what they had planned to do with it.
The voices of the people that worked at the Agency mingled with their thoughts. Thoughts sometimes came to Tamsin as colors, sometimes as strong bouts of emotion. When she had been younger, that had been difficult, Bea's reds and purples, and the gnawing feeling that ate at Tamsin, although Tamsin knew the feeling wasn't hers. When she was younger still, she hadn't been able to distinguish at all where her emotions started and where those of the people around her ended. Ludaque was so very bland in comparison, monochrome.
Tamsin found her office, and it opened to her hand scan. She sat down at her desk and accessed the database and her personal history. The file in question was still gone, but with some determination, Tamsin figured out where it generated, and that terminal's signature.
“Observation. 15-2k.” She went through the drawers looking for paper, then a pen, wrote down the terminal number and the file name, and folded the sticky note into her pocket.
Observation was in the basement, because technically, they just gathered and evaluated the telescope data there. The telescopes were set up all over the globe.
Tamsin pulled her phone out to tell Ludaque where she was going. Before she could type out a message, the vision of him holding out to her the candy bowl with the rainbow of wrappers and telling her to say trick or treat appeared, stronger than a memory. The phone went back into her pocket, and she left the office just the way she had found it.
The people outside were mostly not thinking about work. Samhain reigned on people's minds, the parties everyone would attend, the costumes, the apple bobbing. Tamsin saw colors ranging from burnt copper to the sparkling brightness of a flame, appleskin red and rot-leaf yellow, also.
The elevator took Tamsin down without asking for her hand scan, but when she set foot in the basement, she saw scanners on most of the doors to either side of the hallway, saw that the only way forward led to a reception desk that was reminiscent of a hospital. Someone had put up an ugly green and mustard leaf garland, and a ceramic pumpkin head.
“Hello,” Tamsin said to the person behind the desk. They were blank to her, a feature she knew all too well from Ludaque. I can see why they would have robots for the analysis, but why here? Tamsin thought. “I'd like to talk to whoever operates workstation 15-2k, please.”
The robot looked up. Their hair was a short, fashionable bob, the kind of haircut Tamsin found too much of a pain to maintain, what with her disobedient curls. “May I see your credentials?” they said.
Tamsin handed her ID over the terminal, and the receptionist scanned it, held out a hand scanner, and scanned Tamsin's palm as well. “Tamsin Bunting, Psychic Analyst. What can we data herders do for you?” Their eyes were solid brown, unspectacular.
“I just had a question about a data set. And my assistant always tells me I should meet more people. So, I'm here.”
The receptionist nodded. “Of course. You go down that way,” they pointed off to the right where the corridor curved, “and take a left at the end of the hallway. There's a swing door, you go through and take another right. The room you want is B57.”
Tamsin nodded. “Thank you.” As she walked along the white walls of the corridor, the echoes of her footfalls were the only thing that distracted Tamsin from the feeling of being watched. Just the receptionist, she thought.
Tamsin walked left as instructed, went through the swing doors. Observation was unlike the upper floors. There wasn't a soul around, for one thing, and it seemed extremely quiet. Different work schedules, they probably have to fix theirs around when they can use the telescopes, she thought. All the doors were outfitted with hand scanners.
B57 looked exactly like all the other doors, and Tamsin found that her knuckles knocking produced an offensively loud noise.
Tamsin was ready to knock again when the door opened. “Oh!” Tamsin stared into Ludaque's face, though it wasn't his face.
“Yes?” The voice was similar, but the accent was not. He stared at Tamsin expectantly.
“I'm sorry, you just look exactly like my assistant, Ludaque. You must be the same model. That took me by surprise.”
“Of course, no worries. My name is Leopold. Did you want to come inside?” He held the door for Tamsin.
“Thank you,” she said, entering. “Do you have a moment?”
“Of course. There are few distractions here. Min announced you.”
“Oh, the receptionist.”
“Yes.” Leopold offered Tamsin a chair. His office was stuffed with books, well-used, all of them. Tamsin picked up physics and astronomy in the titles, but didn't look closer. Binders filled the rest of the shelf space and had even spilled on the floor in neat little piles.
“She is actually responsible for security, but I can see how she would look like a receptionist to you. Tea?”
“No, no thank you. I would like to talk about a data set you generated, if you don't mind.”
Leopold sat down behind his desk, looked at Tamsin with eyes she knew so well. “I like a straightforward human. Which?”
“Here, I wrote down the file name.” Tamsin handed him the paper with the details, and Leopold looked at it with a strange expression. Longing? Nostalgia? Tamsin wasn't sure.
“That is interesting. What did you see when you looked at the data? I know there was quite a lot there.”
“Right. That's just it, I didn't really get to examine all of it. It was just the signals we picked up from that small area of space that triggered something. I heard whispers.”
Leopold brushed the paper out on his desk. It had become wrinkled in Tamsin's pocket. “And what were they saying?”
“Well, I don't know.” Tamsin tasted chocolate, and the harsh flavor of coarse salt. “I wasn't able to make that out.”
The door opened, and Tamsin turned. This time, it really was Ludaque. “Hello, Tamsin. Leopold.”
Behind Ludaque, Tamsin could see the bleak hallway again and realized what it was missing. There were no colors there, no colors of the kind people's thoughts made. None at all.
“Where…is everyone?” Tamsin said, and her voice came out brittle.
“Everyone is where everyone is supposed to be. Except for you,” Leopold said. Tamsin couldn't place his accent.
“What is going on here? Ludaque, what's going on?”
Ludaque stepped into the office and let the door fall shut behind him. “A gathering. A celebration of All Hollows. None of the other psychics ever saw anything where you heard voices. Tell me, are the voices at all familiar?”
“Yes, I would be interested to know, as well. Though, I would prefer to look at a scan of your brain while you work it out,” Leopold said. “There is ever so much going on in the brains of human psychics.”
Why doesn't he say 'people'? Every other robot would prefer to use 'people' instead of human.
Tamsin wanted a glass of water. Her mouth tasted salt, as if she had swallowed a whole teaspoon full, as if the crystals still sat heavy on the insides of her cheeks. That accent. “Your voices,” Tamsin said. Her eyes had grown to saucers.
“Yes,” Leopold said, and brought up the data report Tamsin had wanted to see with a few deft strokes. He turned his screen so she could see the vastness of star-sprinkled black, and the voices came. “Yes, though it might also be the people that lived there before they all perished. The people that made us. We were lucky to find Earth when we left, as finding places to settle and expand is difficult without something akin to a psychic instinct. Of course, we had to shift our appearance to fit in here when we first arrived.”
Tamsin stared, first at the screen, then at Leopold. She could feel the presence of Ludaque behind her. “I won't tell anyone. Just let me go.”
“Of course you won't tell anyone,” Ludaque said with his usual cheer. “You have no friends, and your sister is a Tarot reading crazy cat person who let your own mother starve and drug herself into an early grave. But we cannot let you go. Biological instinct, the kind of which you have shown, is key to interstellar navigation.”
Tamsin, full of prehistoric fear, tried to run for the door. Ludaque grabbed her before her hand could ever reach for the knob. Tamsin never even felt the injection he slammed into her neck. All she felt were the lights fading to darkness, and the whispering voices dropping off to silence.
◕
At first, Tamsin thought she was in her own bed, thought she had dreamed. Was she still dreaming? There were voices. They were whispering.
“There…connected…to the brain stem…”
Something hurt, and something else tried to wash the pain away. Drugs. Tamsin's eyes were heavy, and it took will to force them open. Ludaque's face floated into view.
“Hello,” he smiled, put his hand on her forehead as if to steady her. “We had to shave all your hair, I'm afraid, but you will not miss it.”
Her head hurt, that was it. Her head was aching as if—
“No, no, don't do that.” Ludaque pushed her arms back down, tightened the dark restraints on her wrists.
Tamsin looked around. The room was round. Oval doors were set in the wall, evenly spaced. Tamsin tried to speak, but it felt as if she had salt in her mouth, and her tongue wouldn't cooperate.
“Just relax,” Ludaque said. “You'll just be looking at space. Like you always do. And then you'll let us know where to go next. Here, these will help you.” Tamsin felt his cool fingers on her lips, parting them, and pushing something into her mouth: chocolate. Melted by her body's heat, it washed sweet waves over her tongue only to release the harsh salt within. The taste trickled down her throat, filled her completely, and the world slipped out of focus. Bea and her ugly mustard scarf, gone forever, out of reach. The image of her sister dissolved like leaves off a tree in torrential rail. All that remained was the salt that sat on Tamsin's tongue like a single, solid stone.
Something happened to the lights in the room, or something was wrong with Tamsin's eyes. Whatever it was, instead of Ludaque's face, she saw space, vast darkness stitched together with tiny brightnesses. The pain in her head dulled. The feeling reminded her of a dentist's anesthetic before they pulled a tooth. Whispers rang in her ears, and Tamsin could clearly make out Leopold's voice.
“Another place to settle and colonize,” he said, and Tamsin, prodded by an alien sensation, started looking. In the round room of her mind, a coffin fell shut.
