Full Spectrum

My 5000-word story for THE MIDNIGHT VAULT.

I’m going weird again.

This is my 5000-word story for THE MIDNIGHT VAULT.

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Full Spectrum

By Phillip Carter

Full Spectrum
By: Phillip Carter

Consider Janet Sheahan, age twenty-seven. It is Janet’s first day in a supposedly new job, where government secrets are ferried like pirated treasure in trolleys like minecarts through the various caves and caverns of an ever-expanding office building affixed to an increasingly secretive base on the outskirts of an unremarkable, and by all accounts forgettable town. Janet wears bright shirts and loud blazers, but exhibits an almost allergic reaction to bright lamps and noisy coworkers. She is forever insulated from this realm of repetitive overstimulation by her red tinted glasses and her noise cancelling headphones, which allow her to trim some of the sensory fat from reality – that irksome stuff which most people’s brains long ago learned to tune out. Janet’s brain is different; it doesn’t filter much at all, and from the resulting galaxy of sensory input Janet’s brain ekes meaning. From those messy constellations of sensory coordinates, her brain discovers patterns. But are patterns alone enough to bestow upon one person extraordinary senses, extraordinary luck, or is something else at play? For Janet’s sensory reality, her private microcosm, is so different to our own that it could be said to have entirely different physics.

-

Cheap desk dividers rattled as another day’s secrets were shunted from department to department, the intellectual treasure of a government that had long since forgotten the value of intellectualism. Janet wished to be back in the stairwell, where the sound was good and the light was good and the smells were even tolerable, if the guy from IT who smoked only expensive cigars and wore nice aftershave had brushed past. The décor was good too, 1970s stuff, warm wooden tones and grey concrete window frames that absorbed light like pumice. Back in the office, things were nightmarishly neon, noisy, and smelly.

From where Janet was sitting, she could not see much of the large, slightly tinted windows which bracketed this floor. She was a nucleus in a three-sided cell of cheap felt and thin metal. Or maybe the mitochondria… she thought to herself. But, at least this place let you dress how you wanted, as long as it was smart-casual, whatever that meant. For this first day, Janet wore a red-orange blazer with a dark green floral shirt. Hints of hot pink flickered out in flower petals and exotic birds, perhaps fictional. She flinched as someone across the office made a crash in the canteen, and turned up the music she was secretly playing in her headphones.

“How are you settling in,” asked the manager whose name she forgot, leaning over the felt barrier. The woman looked oddly threatening in her Rudolf sweater. Janet pursed her lips, realized she was doing it, and stopped.
“Real good,” she said.
“Having fun?”
Was this a trick question? Are jobs fun now? It’s been so long I can’t remember.
“Yeah.”
She remembered the poster in the 1970s stairwell, dated to three years prior, about a Christmas party everyone had to sign two spreadsheets to attend.
“And the systems?”
“Oh yeah, they’re pretty smooth,” Janet lied. She only knew the cigar-scented man in the stairwell was the IT guy because he had been called twice to her desk this morning; once to give her a new password because the one she’d had for half a minute wasn’t valid, and a second time to explain in simple yet incomprehensible terms to Janet’s nameless manager that it was not Janet’s fault that the fire safety video had no audio on it.

“You get through that fire video in the end?”
“Yeah,” Janet lied again. Having headphones, whilst not usually socially acceptable, meant she could pretend to be listening to any number of things, when in reality she was quietly, intensely, figuring out just where she went wrong in life to be working here. Lying about hearing the video was easier than being stared at for bringing Clint the IT guy back a third time before dinner. Janet knew what people were like. People presumed things. Her manager said a few more scripted niceties before dissolving into the background chatter, leaving Janet to her muted safety videos. She forced herself through a video about data protection, and another, and another, before the overhead lights in the office gave her a migraine. Quietly she excused herself, telling her studious manager she was going to chat to another newbie during a short break, and get something from the shop round the corner.
“We’re all adults,” the manager said, as if this held meaning.

Janet left the double doors and turned right into the stairwell, avoiding the elevator. The street was four floors down, and Janet enjoyed checking the city out at different angles as she descended. The strata of different eras of expansion were made obvious here, modern-day apartments growing like crystals atop the bedrock of old mills and factories. Coffee shops and Japanese food places emerged from the bottom floors, giving these ancient structures a new life force. Here she felt on top of the world, part of the world, yet still a biological anachronism. She imagined herself in the Precambrian, long before humans evolved to invent noise cancelling headphones and the various technologies that made their invention necessary in the first place.

She put her red-tinted glasses on again before going outside. They shifted the wavelength of street signs, making green traffic signals hard to notice, but Janet could tolerate lifting them a moment to ascertain if other pedestrians were crossing properly or taunting traffic. The little man was green, she crossed the street. She kept going. Only a twenty-minute break, but she needed something hot to fight against the painful intrusions of light and smell that formed her new workplace. Something bigger, in the sensory sense, might overshadow, overpower all else.

She got to the coffee shop with music playing in her earphones, ordered a Chai Latte over David Bowie’s Heat, and waited.
“Hey newbie,” someone said. Janet turned and saw Clint, the IT guy, sat on an outside table. The person calling her name was a stranger to both of them, recruited solely to call her newbie, and to invite her outside. Janet got her coffee and went outside. 

“Welcome to the ‘I wish this was beer’ garden,” Clint said, gesturing broadly over his technology and drinks. His table held an empty takeout dessert box, two small coffees, a laptop that was almost smaller than them, and his phone, encased in what looked like bulletproof armour.
“Hey,” Janet said. She fumbled with the buttons on her orange blazer.
“Sorry, you’ve come here to escape it, haven’t you?”
“Escape what?” Janet asked unconvincingly. She worried Clint might be the type to talk about private conversations, and in doing so would reveal to the people who hired Janet that she did not belong there at all.
“The dreadful noise, and the stink of it all. You know someone was microwaving fish on my floor?”
“Oh right,” Janet said, still nervous, still looking around for spies from work.
“Don’t worry about the break,” Clint said. “Tell them I distracted you with talk of UAPs.”
“UAPs? Is that a form?” Janet asked. Clint shook his head.
“You work here, and you don’t know that?”
“I’m not big on abbreviations.” Janet admitted.
“I’ll tell you in a minute.” He pushed the chair opposite outward, reminding Janet that there was somewhere to sit. She sat down, putting the hot paper coffee cup down on the table and leaving it alone for a while.

“Another abbreviation. STFU, that’s what I wish everyone would do,” Clint said. He noticed Janet turning her headphones down slightly, and pointed to his own ears, within which were teal-colored noise-cancelling earplugs. Janet smiled just enough that Clint knew she had understood him. Somehow, Clint the IT guy swearing in a coffee shop in the shadow of the office, whilst drinking two very different coffees and maintaining a conversation whilst typing on two different devices, had finally alleviated Janet’s understandable paranoia.
“It’s given me a headache already. How long do you think I can get away with?” Janet asked.
“As long as you need. You came to me with an IT issue, and I distracted you. UAP’s remember. Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. UFOs, basically. And aliens flying without UFOs, and that one thing they saw above Tajikistan.” He took a sip of one of his coffees. “You know there were binoculars, heat vision things, they used in Iraq that could see the souls leaving dead people?”
“Which way did they float?” Janet asked. Clint smirked.
“I like you, you’re odd.”
“Thanks.”
“And to answer your question, reportedly they were affected by direct light, otherwise they would dissipate rather slowly, like spores.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t have to like me back by the way, we don’t know each other yet. I just make quick decisions. I recognise patterns,” Clint said whilst writing something on his phone, adding, “We don’t have to be friends.” He took two sips of the other, darker coffee, and typed something aggressively onto the tiny laptop.
“I like the honesty,” Janet said, disarmed. It was true. There were no theatrics here, no false niceties, no script. The mere existence of Clint in the same workplace was a sign that more Janets and more Clints might survive, or even thrive there. Perhaps Clint had already met a few Janets, and they might have their own parallel society tucked deep within that strange government building.
“How long have you worked here?” Janet asked. A cold breeze swept over their table, and she pulled her orange blazer tight, nursing the hot paper coffee cup once again.
“Trying to figure how long you might last?” Clint asked.
“Can I answer that?”
“You just did.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Of course. I’m right, aren’t I?”
“You are,” Janet smiled.

The two of them bonded over the clinical atmosphere of their shared workplace for a few more minutes, before conversation returned to UAPs and the paranormal.
“They took the binoculars from the soldiers, said a chemical in them caused eye cancer, hallucinations.”
“Convenient,” Janet replied. She looked at the tall brutalist structure across the way. She had always admired the design from outside, and now she worked there, she knew its original insides had been torn out, replaced with something not quite welcoming to humans.
“What department are you in?” Clint asked.
“You can’t tell by the floor?”
“No, they subdivide, move people around. Going for a generalist thing in the long term which I think… no, I know, is institutional suicide, but nobody listens to the guy who can speak computer.”
“I’m in contracts, accounts, expenses.”
Clint nodded. Another singular sip from coffee one, and a double sip from coffee two. Janet’s chai latte was just cool enough to drink now, so she joined in. It was like a social convention, except it wasn’t. She really was thirsty, but unsure she was drinking correctly, now that she’d made the whole process into a ritual.
“Do they have you on the Africa thing?”
“It’s my first day. And what Africa thing?”
“They found wreckage off the coast of Lamu Island. I booked a holiday there to check it out, then I heard about the trade deal.”
“Trade deal? Should we be talking about this?”
“They want us working together, let’s work.”

Clint opened a document and turned his laptop around, shielding the screen from prying eyes with rugged hands. It showed a tall, wide-shouldered silhouette, as drawn by a soldier whose name had been redacted. The figure appeared to be wearing feather epaulettes, or spikes, or was fading away at the edges. It had two sets of arms, one shorter than the other, and digitigrade legs. The head was strange, set lower down than one might expect, and was wide and oval shaped. Janet felt a coldness in her throat, a terror, as if reliving a traumatic memory. She missed the coffee cup, spilled some latte on her scarf. “Shit,” she hissed. Clint passed her a napkin.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah it’s just. Call me silly, but that thing is creepy.”
“I’m sorry, silly.”
“It’s alright.”

The pair finished their coffees, wound down with idle conversation about the dullness of training videos, and headed back to work. They waited for the green pedestrian light, and started to cross the road. Janet felt something grab at her shoulders, a coldness, a cramp, some muscular magnetism. She stopped, stumbled backwards, and knocked into Clint as she went. Inches ahead of them, almost on the pavement, a cyclist raced past.

“Twat. You alright?” he asked.
“Yeah. No. I feel sick,” Janet said.
“Want to sit down?”
“No. It was like, you’re going to think this is weird. Well, maybe you won’t.”
“Not likely,” Clint admitted stoically.
“But I felt something pulling me back,” Janet explained.
“Like a hand?”
“No. Not quite. Not instinct, not precognition, but a warning. It was beneath consciousness, more like a memory of what could happen.”
“That is precognition,” Clint said. “I knew you were odd.”
“It isn’t,” Janet said. They made another attempt to cross the road. This time it was safe.

“What was that thing?” Janet asked.
“Something new,” Clint said. “First report was 2003, Iraq. Not in any religious stories or anything. But at the same time, in Sweden, Denmark, Canada, a handful more sightings.”
“You do know I’ve not got security clearance for this.”
“Who said it was a work thing?”
“I know what we do upstairs, Clint.”
“What you don’t know doesn’t exist.”
“Is that official policy?”
“No. If we had anything official, it would exist, and it could be broken, or worse, cited in a future court case.”
“So, no rules for that which cannot be captured nor governed,” Janet suggested.
“Precisely. It’s all improv on the lower levels. Everything else exists as theatre, set dressing, an artifice. Like the filter those glasses or those headphones give you. It’s not quite reality, but it’s pretty close.”
“Other people’s brains do this stuff naturally,” Janet replied. “Which I suppose means their world is in some way less real than mine.”
“That it does.”

Even as they approached their workplace Clint was fiddling with his mobile phone. He put it away in a right pocket, then produced another from the left.
“Work phone and home phone,” he explained, responding to Janet’s soundless intrigue. He checked his texts, nothing, sighed.
“You alright?”
“I’m in a job I’m overqualified for in a building that’s had its soul ripped out, in a city which isn’t safe even in the morning. I travel to be here to tell people over the phone to turn their computers on and off again, and nobody thanks me for it.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Janet said. She liked Clint, but he was intense. The pair of them passed through the gap where the revolving doors once were, under a block of interior scaffolding, and through the security gates.
“Renovations downstairs,” Clint explained. As he walked ahead, Janet noticed a visual disturbance. There was a pinched cone of shadow leaving the top of Clint’s head, like steam from a hot wet surface.
“You okay?” he turned, as if sensing her intense staring.
“Yeah, it’s nothing.”

The rest of the day passed normally, which for Janet meant unpleasantly. On the fourth hour of her strange new employment she was tasked with signing a leaving card for someone whose name she had to ask to spell. She could have used any of the six spellings already in the card, but she felt she owed it to this stranger who would remain a stranger that she got their name right, and placed herself squarely in the eleven or so percent of people who cared enough to ask. By the end of the day, Janet was drained from the sensory barrage that was other people, and she donned even darker tinted glasses for the last hour, and put on some Gary Numan. She left by the stairwells again, spiralling down through the jagged DNA of the place toward the core of the Earth. She could not observe the city’s crumbling and regenerating strata now, merely triangulate familiar places from the pockmarks of lit up shop windows in the snowy darkness. Beyond the black horizon, thick grey clouds rolled in and twisted into strange shapes, reminding her of cartoons of industrial era Britain, and of the dark figure Clint had shown her earlier.

A week or so later, Clint and Janet had met again at the end of their shift. The outside world was dark, and most of the movement-activated lights in the office had shut down.
“So the paranormal investigation business wasn’t going anywhere, financially, spiritually, or otherwise, so I got into IT. I broke up with my old boss, as well,” Clint said, spinning idly on an office chair. “So why did you land here?”
“I lied about my experience and had a friend pretend to be my old boss,” Janet said. Today she was wearing a green coat and black shirt with blueberries on it.
“No, not how, why,” Clint said. He had started shaving his beard neat.
“Why?” Janet asked herself, the universe. “I guess I sort of fell here. I got emailed the job and I thought I might as well try it.”
“Emailed? Really?” Clint packed up his back. It was a square satchel, upon which the words ‘H-BOMB CAPABLE OF TOTAL DESTRUCTION’ were printed, an old newspaper headline.
“Yep. One of those mass ‘dear candidate’ emails.”
“But you’re from outside the organization?”
“I registered interest online, apparently.”
“Never heard of that happening.”
“It happened to me.”
“Fair enough. But does it align with what you want to do on this planet?” Clint asked. Janet paused. She finished logging off and looked for a little too long at her new friend.

“Nobody has ever asked me that before.”
“You mean the planet bit. I always suspected you were an alien?”
“No, just the question. I’ve never thought about it. I thought, I’m just here to make money. Does it matter if I don’t like it?”
“I think it matters a lot. Think about water dripping into a cave. No big deal right? But over time, stalactites form, rock gets eroded and built up elsewhere. The world changes you.”
“Has it changed you?” Janet found herself rocking in her office chair too.
“I suppose so.”
“Your aftershave is noisy,” Janet said quickly.
“Sorry. You’re tuned into everything aren’t you?”
“I am. There’s no getting out of it. The world is bright and smelly and noisy and coarse and it tastes bad.”
“Remind me never to take you to my favourite food joints.”
“They might be haunted anyway,” Janet joked.
“Yeah.”
“I wish we had those spook binoculars here,” Janet probed. “I’d like to try them.”
“Well, we don’t,” Clint said, suddenly stern. Janet was taken aback, but refused to give up.
“And if we did have them, they’d be a secret, and someone would go looking for them.”
Clint’s bushy right eyebrow raised almost imperceptibly at this notion.
“That makes sense,” he said gruffly. Janet watched his expressions, his tone, the way he avoided eye contact. She knew it would not be long before he caved.
“Do you want to see something cool?”
“Is it as cool as this?” Janet checked the time on her glow-in-the-dark watch.
“Cooler.”
“Then it’s a yes,” Janet said. She reached out and shook Clint’s hand.

Clint walked straight to the stairwell, avoiding the elevators. They descended in zig-zagged stints toward the ground floor, where the construction work on the main entrance was still underway. The new front doors, huge panes of glass on sliding chrome rails, waited there ahead of the metal detectors and security desks.
“I need a cigar first, if that’s alright.”
“That’s fine.”
They crossed under the scaffolding as instructed by security, out the sliding front doors, and stood looking at the city that rolled away downhill like a fading memory.
“I like the smell,” Janet said.
“Do you?”
“Yeah. Much better than microwaved fish.”
Clint nodded. “So this thing. It’s not your gig, but it is cool. I’ve been asked to help fix it. Not like it’s a state secret or anything, they’re having it as a sort of ‘open secret’ so nobody tries breaking in to look at it.”
“Makes sense,” Janet lied. “So what is it?”
“You really can’t wait?”
“I really can’t.”
“Fine. You know those binoculars I mentioned last week?”
“The soul-seeing military equipment? No, don’t remember them.”
Clint laughed. “It’s something like that, but like an airport scanner.”

After finishing his cigar, Clint walked back with Janet into the building, and again Janet had one of those tearing, cold feelings in her body. This time it rippled outward from her feet, taking root in her spine, and sending cutting, shivering impulses of primordial fear into the back of her head. She stepped back.
Stop, she heard and “Stop,” she said, hearing the same word echoing in another voice in her imagination. She wasn’t sure which happened first, or if it mattered. Something held her back, pressing into her ribs. A strong gust of wind shook one of the glass doors from its guardrail, which had not been properly screwed into the concrete foundation beneath the marble flooring. The light from the building spilled out like guts as the glass door shunted, shifted, bent, and fell forward. Miraculously it did not shatter, but its tip landed mere inches from Clint’s feet.
“Are you both alright?” a security guard yelled from the office building, as warm air bled out into the world. Clint looked at Janet and mimed ‘thank you’.
 
They re-entered the building, and Clint scanned his lanyard at the security desk.
“What did you think of the coolant system?” he said to Janet. She turned to him and he winked.
“I think it’s a step in the right direction, but at the same time it sacrifices some of the wider benefits of the first system.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s too big. And the awkward shape of it means there’s now air pockets where we could be putting components. And I know what you’ll say, air pockets are good for insulation, but I really feel we can make this device smaller,” Janet said. Her lie had seamlessly interlaced with Clint’s, and by now the pair of them had walked to the back of the entrance hall, where another corridor would take them to the server rooms, and beyond that, the treasury. Once through this final grey layer of administration, they wound their way down a metal staircase which gave way to a dull concrete ramp, which opened up into a series of rooms, each locked with ID scanners.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” Janet said. She adjusted her hair, pretending to flirt, or pretending to flirt as a ruse for pretending not to flirt. She could no longer tell.

The red door swung open, and behind it was a large room, its edges black, its centre dimly lit and enigmatic. Clint turned the lights on, and Janet practically hissed at them.
“Sorry, no dimmer switches here,” Clint said. In front of them was a large contraption that looked like someone had crossbred an airport scanner with a smart refrigerator, and then crossbred the resulting beast with a rocket engine. To one side of the machine was a curved screen, around nine feet wide and seven tall. It was a transparent neon green, the colour of uranium glass. It was held in place by clamps drilled into the floor of the room.
“Hope those are more secure than what the builders can do,” she said.
“Much.”
“Looks like an MRI machine,” Janet said, ignoring the screen for now.
“I thought you didn’t do abbreviations?”
“Oh that one is obvious. Magnetic Resonance Imaging. It’s not like TLDR or STFU or UAP or TTYL or MILF.”
“All those hard technical terms,” Clint said.
“Exactly.”
“You didn’t need to spell out that last one, nobody does that.”
“I know. So what does it do?”

Clint walked behind the machine and sat down in front of the screen.
“It sees you.”
“Doesn’t everything now?”
“No I mean, it really sees you. No red lenses, no filters. It shows you energy, fields.”
“And why are you showing me?” Janet asked, though she already knew the answer.
“It’s cool. You’re cool. I know you saw something on my head last week, my aura or whatever. I had an aunt who could do that.”
“I had a grandma.”
“Yeah,” Clint said. “So I knew you’d be cool with it. This is taken from the same tech they made the binoculars with.
“Seen anything weird through them?”
“Not yet. How do you feel about standing inside it?”
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“Cancer?”
“Not yet.”
“Any danger at all?”
“We’re currently committing treason, I think.”
“That’s fine,” Janet said.
“Typical accountant.”

And with that, Janet took one more look at that vast cylindrical machine, at the wires snaking away from it, and the hastily-arranged monitors that bracketed it in this room. She absorbed the whole image, as she often did with the world outside, and her brain made no attempt to shave off detail or to compress or to obfuscate or obscure. The whole thing went into her brain, and out of it came a pattern, a number, the value of which she did not know, not even subconsciously. It was a perfect mathematical representation, not of what the room was, but of what it meant.

“Does it see through clothes?” she asked, snapping out of her reverie.
“I hope not,” Clint said. He activated the machine and ran quickly into it as it was powering up, “Quick now, behind the screen, just like in hospitals.”
Janet hurried herself behind the giant curved screen and waited. She noticed now that it was not uniformly neon green, but was a crystalline thing, with patches of texture not unlike marble, which held a depth of colour when looked at from a certain angle. There were even flashes of purple streaking through the thin surface, like inclusions in rutilated quartz, which showed only when her focus was moving through the screen.
“I know it’s pretty, but look here,” Clint said. Janet looked up at Clint in the machine. His clothes were intact, and the black vent of aural energy was larger now, stretching into visual realms even Janet could not see unaided. A green light began to envelop Clint.
“Don’t worry, just part of the scan,” he said. “Tickles a bit.”
There was a smell like metal in the air, then sulphur, but this passed quickly. The light behind the screen grew brighter, and Janet was tempted to don her red glasses again.
“Doesn’t get much worse, you’ll miss the show,” Clint said. The machine shuddered now, clunked, shunted.
“Could you turn the green dial up for me?” he asked politely.
“Sure.” Janet crossed the room and obliged him, then returned to behind the emerald screen. A semi-circular thing descended now, sweeping around Clint, whirring and jittering. Through the crystalline screen Janet could see wisps of thin white energy appearing now. She tenderly moved to the edge of the screen, looking around it, rather than through it.
“Incredible,” she said.
“They’ve not measured any of the apparitions,” Clint explained, ducking under the metal semi-circle and getting out of the machine as it slowed. “We don’t really know if they are there or not, but people report seeing the same things.”
“They don’t show on camera?”
“We’ve not managed to catch it, no. Probably an electromagnetism thing. Your turn.”

Janet stepped back. She felt that familiar cold pain again.
“What’s up, is it dangerous now?” Clint asked sincerely. He reached a cautious hand out. Janet shook her head. “No, no. I’ll do it. I need to know something.”
“Okay…”
“You won’t freak out.”
“What is there to freak out about? A little wisp of electromagnetism here or there.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. Clint nodded. He got behind the control console again and activated the machine. Janet walked into it, pushing against a strange type of resistance.
“I feel like a kitten being given a bath,” she said.
“How so?”
“My entire body feels magnetically repelled, as if it doesn’t want to be here, right now.”
“It’s the terror of being known,” Clint joked. “This is way more exposure than an icebreaker.”
Janet stepped fully into the machine, dragging reluctant feet up the little round ramp that held the scanning platform. Clint moved behind the emerald screen and watched.
“Nothing so far,” he said. “Other than the vent above your head, but everyone has those.”
“And the green dial?”
Clint obliged. The machine dropped its semi-circular scan ring again, and shuddered its way into the next stage.
“Few wisps, an orb here or there?
“Orb?”
“Tiny, like motes of dust.”
“I wish I could see them.”

Clint stepped away from the computer.
“Cool, isn’t it?”
“Try the full spectrum,” Janet asked nervously.
“How do you know there’s more?”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Okay. What do you expect to find?”
“I don’t know.”

Clint put himself behind the computer again. He typed something in, moved to another page in the program, and waited. The scanning machine went silent now, then the air fizzed, then crackled.
“I feel the cold again.”
“Have you ever considered your good fortune?” Clint asked. He walked now behind the screen, but did not look through it yet.
“That I keep narrowly avoiding electrocution or being squished by doors or bikes?”
“Exactly.”
“I am considering it now. Look at me,” Janet asked. Clint turned, glanced, stared through the strange crystal screen.
“W…T…F…” he said to himself, then, “Fuck.”
“What?” Janet asked. Clint raised a hand to his mouth in shock, fell backwards.
“Step forward, carefully,” he said.
“What is it?” Janet began to feel panic. The hairs on her arms stood on end.
“It’s behind you, around you. Fuck, can’t you feel it?”
“What is?”
“That fucking thing. It’s on your shoulders.”

Janet Sheahan, whose luck proved luckier than others, did not quite have a guardian angel on her shoulders, nor too did she have a demon. There was something there alright, or perhaps there wasn’t. But whatever it might have been was lodged firmly between this world and another; a sort of interloper, a trickster interested only in the continuation of Janet Sheahan’s peculiar bloodline, with all the peculiar sensory abilities it bestowed upon its recipients. Not least the ability to feel on some level the presence of the interloper, even if that presence was never reflected upon nor seriously considered. Because, interlopers thought, if they did think, that if they could move a human here or there, nudge their worldlines, their genetics in the right direction, they might one day produce offspring capable of that goal which almost all intelligent species searches for in the cosmos: first contact.