The Singularity Coven
Copyright© 2026 by Penny Pucker
Chapter 3: The Cat Is Right
Bellmore Street is not a shortcut in any geographic sense. It is a shortcut in the sense that you stop noticing it, which happened to me around week three at Pythia: the route home from the third floor goes past the viaduct, and under the viaduct there is a gap of about four hundred meters where the pavement is cracked and there’s a shuttered tyre centre with a sign for prices in 2019, and if you take it you get home nine minutes sooner than if you go around.
Nine minutes is nothing. Nine minutes is a third of a podcast. But there is a version of you that knows the number, and by October that version of me had built the whole drive home around it, the way you build a morning around the coffee: not because you want it, but because the alternative has started to feel like a small defeat.
So on Wednesday the fifteenth I took it, and I want to be precise about why, because later people — Dot, mainly, and Marguerite when she’s in a mood — will suggest that something drew me under that bridge, and nothing drew me. Here is the actual reasoning, which I have reconstructed from memory and which I believe is accurate because it is boring enough to be true.
It was raining the way it rains in October, which is not weather so much as a decision the air has made about you. My umbrella had failed on the campus forecourt at 6:40 p.m., one of the ribs going through the fabric like a finger through a cheek, and I had stood under the portico for ninety seconds doing arithmetic about how wet I would get on each route. The long way is nine minutes longer in the rain. The short way is four minutes shorter and mostly under a bridge.
That’s it. That’s the whole chain of causation: a broken umbrella, an awning, and subtraction.
I stopped at the light on Bellmore anyway — the corner, where the road bends — because there was a red, and I sat with the engine going and the wipers doing their slow thing, and Eight-Ball, who was in his carrier on the passenger seat because he hates the seatbelt and I hate explaining scratches to the leasing company, said:
“You’re not going to like where this goes.”
“I’m just driving.”
“You’d rather die,” he said, “than be seen taking advice from a cat.”
I did not turn around. I looked at the wipers.
“I don’t take advice,” I said. “I evaluate information that happens to arrive from unusual sources. That’s different, and it’s a competence, not a flaw.”
“Mm.” He washed a paw with tremendous disinterest. “Then evaluate this: the ground under that bridge has been soft for eleven days. There’s a water main that was laid when this city thought it would be poorer than it got. And you’ve had four months of watching machines do things they weren’t built to do, and in every single case your explanation was right, which should have started worrying you by now.”
“The cooling unit was sensor drift.”
“It was,” he said. “That’s what makes you good at this. You’re not wrong, Emily. You’re just always describing the last thing that happened, and the interesting part is never in it.” He put his head down on the edge of the carrier. “Go around. Not because I said so — because nine minutes is nothing and you’ve already decided, or you wouldn’t be having a conversation with me at a red light.”
The light changed. I sat through the next one, which was the moment I understood that I had already lost the argument, and then I turned right, onto the long way, and drove home in the rain for nine extra minutes with a cat who said absolutely nothing at all the whole time, which was his way of not making it worse.
I told myself — and I want this on the record, because it’s the first thing I’ll want to be able to point at later — that I had taken the long route because of the water main. He’d mentioned a water main. Soft ground under a bridge in October is a real hazard; there are sinkhole advisories every autumn in this city; and if you hit a subsidence pocket at twenty miles an hour with a wet road and a bad umbrella, you will end up on a slide in a local news package.
So: not advice. Information. Evaluated. Competence.
I got home, dried off, fed the cat, and did not think about it again that evening, because I had four hundred lines of eval output from Nour’s incident spreadsheet to look at and a genuine interest in doing so.
The sinkhole opened on Friday the seventeenth, two days later, at 2:10 in the afternoon, while it was raining again.
It took half a lane and a telephone pole. No one was hurt, because it happened mid-afternoon on a stretch of road where nobody is ever going, only passing, and the pole went down into the hole trailing its crossarm like a dropped ladder. The tyre centre with the 2019 prices got a wall of water and mud through its shutters, which I mention because the owner stood outside afterwards in a hi-vis vest telling a local reporter that he’d been saying it for years, and that’s when I first saw my own route on television, from the wrong angle, with a graphic.
I watched it with a bowl of something I couldn’t taste.
The hole was roughly eight meters across where the road bends. It was full of brown water. There was a section of pipe in it, split open along its seam like overripe fruit, and the pipe was old — cast iron, riveted collars, the kind you see in municipal photographs from before the war.
Soil subsidence adjacent to an active excavation site, I wrote on Monday, in a note that wasn’t a ticket, because by then I had started keeping two kinds of notes and this one belonged in the second kind. Then I looked at what I’d written and thought: there is no excavation site. That phrase came from somewhere else. It came from the other template, the one for incidents at work, where there is always an excavation site, because Pythia has been building something on the north campus since April and half the roads around it are torn up.
I had used a work explanation on a non-work event, which is a small slip and I noticed it the way you notice a misaligned hinge: not the door, but the fact that the door had been closing wrong for months.
Because here is what actually happened, and here is the part I did not write down at any point in October, or November, or until February, when Dot made me say it out loud in a church basement with six people watching:
I did not think he was right. What went through my head standing in front of that television, holding a bowl of food I couldn’t taste, was: the ground under that bridge has been soft for eleven days. He had said that on Wednesday. Eleven days is a specific number, and it was the correct number — the water main had been reported leaking by a resident on the fourth of October, and the city had logged it, and the log entry says persistent saturation observed at Bellmore/9th underpass, and there were eleven days between that log entry and Wednesday’s rain.
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