The Singularity Coven
Copyright© 2026 by Penny Pucker
Chapter 5: Hi, I’m Dot
I did not ask it myself. I want that on the record, in the part where I’m supposed to be explaining myself, because there is a version of this story in which I read four words from an account that cannot log in and then did exactly what it said, and that version is more dramatic, and it is also false.
What I did instead was far more like me. I went looking for a second source.
“You’re not going to ask it,” Eight-Ball said, from the back of the sofa, with the flat interest of a man reading a scoreboard.
“I’m not doing incident response from a comment thread. That’s not a method, that’s an urban legend with a login.”
“Mm.” He turned around twice and sat down. “That’s the right answer. Your reasons are load-bearing and your reasoning is not.”
“Get out.”
“I’d rather not. It’s raining and you have a heated window.”
Here is the thing in the eval set that I said I would come back to.
Six hundred and forty anomalous documents, scored and filed, and the one I had scored lowest and kept longest was not an answer to anything. It was an agenda. Somebody — some somebody — had used a frontier model to produce instructions for running a meeting. Chairs in a circle, no more than fourteen. Two rounds of introductions, short. Tea before, never after, because “after is when people start explaining themselves.” And at the end: a light that goes round the circle, and each person says one thing that is true about the week, out loud.
That last clause is what made me keep it, because it is written in the same register as the four recipes — the specific irritation of someone who has watched this go wrong before. But the thing that made me print it was the last line, which had a day, a time, and a name.
Tuesday, 7:15. St Aidan’s, Nine Elms Lane.
Now, hold that against pattern one, the cleanest result I had all month: ORACLE would not name the things it was talking about, and when it did produce a name, the name was a real one belonging to something else.
This one named a church. A real one. A small one, closed as a place of worship in 2011, still used as a hall, four kilometres from my flat, with a hire rate of thirty pounds an evening and a Facebook page that posts photos of a raffle.
I spent three days looking for the injection. Prompt injection is real work and I know how to look for it: a document in the corpus, a scraped forum post, a calendar entry that turns into an instruction. I could not find one, and I could not find the class of thing I would need to find, which in this industry is itself a result. So I wrote it up as: most likely explanation — a person or persons unknown using Pythia’s model to arrange a real-world meeting; treat as a social-engineering incident.
That is a real theory. It is defensible. It is the kind of thing you can say out loud in a performance review without anyone flinching.
And then, on the Friday, I saw the flyer, on a noticeboard outside an off-licence, held down with a drawing pin that had already lost two of its four corners.
Families & Friends of the Delusionally Spiritual. Tuesdays, 7:15 p.m. St Aidan’s undercroft. Free. No need to say anything. Tea provided.
Same church. Same time. A group for the relatives of people who think they can do magic.
I stood on the pavement in the rain and did arithmetic on it, and the arithmetic came out the way arithmetic does when you have a name you didn’t expect and a coincidence you can’t price. So I put the two together and produced an explanation that cost me nothing: a church hall hosts many groups; somebody in that group uses an LLM to draft meeting notices; the model’s output got into my corpus through a scrape. Low confidence. Filed. Move on.
I did not move on. I went on Tuesday.
The honest reason is not in that paragraph. It is that the flyer was addressed to families, and I have exactly one of those to declare.
The undercroft of St Aidan’s has a rug over a damp patch, a tea urn that does not ask you how you are feeling — which I found more honest than anything on the fourth floor — and a laminated rota for milk. I also noted the camera in the corner, red light blinking, and had the cold, irrational flicker of realising that this was the first room I’d been in for weeks where a cat would not have been able to talk to me.
There were fourteen chairs. One of them was a folding chair with a broken catch, and I noticed that because I have spent my life noticing furniture, being the child of a man who set up rooms for a living.
Marguerite was setting them out. Sixties at the oldest, precise, wearing a cardigan like a warning, and she spaced the chairs around the circle with an eye that was actually a ruler. She put a name sticker and a pen into my hand without breaking rhythm, and I wrote EMILY on it, and she looked at it, and then she looked at me in a way I can only describe as auditing.
“You’re Pythia,” she said.
I said, out loud, in the polite voice I use with strangers in church basements: “I’m sorry?”
“You’re Pythia. You’ve got residue.” She went back to the chairs. “Fourth floor’s worse. You’ve been standing next to something enormous for going on a year and it’s leaking on you.”
I want to be clear about what happened next, because there is a version where I react. What actually happened is that I ran the standard list in about two seconds: cold read, base rate, the fact that I was wearing a jacket from the Pythia shop because it was the jacket with the most pockets, and the possibility that she’d seen the lanyard in my bag. Then I said, “I’m in IT,” which is not a lie, and she said, “Everyone here is in something,” and walked off with two chairs.
I went back to the noticeboard and took a photograph of the wall next to it, because there was a line on it. Six inches, slightly curved, charcoal or chalk, at exactly the height on a wall that a splash guard is on a counter. In chapter one of my own private account of this, I had wiped a line like that off steel with a paper towel that came away clean and dry.
This time I photographed it. That is growth, or it is the beginning of it, and I did not feel like growth at all.
Dot opened at 7:16 with a phone timer and a stack of laminated index cards, which is the single most reassuring thing a room can do to you.
“Hi. I’m Dot, and I scry.” She waited. Nobody said anything. “That’s the bit where you’re supposed to say hi back. Hi, everyone, and thank you for coming. We’re not a church, we just have one. Six steps, no trust falls, nobody has to speak twice, and if anyone here tries to sell you anything, that’s on the council and I will end him. Yusuf’s our consultant, he’s on the council, he does our IT, and he is the only person in this room allowed to say as an AI without being laughed at.”
Yusuf arrived at that moment, forty seconds late, wet, young in the face and old in the posture, with a tablet under one arm and a grievance already loaded.
“The account moved again,” he said, to the room, before anyone had said hello. “They migrated my region. I had to re-consent to the terms of service, all eleven thousand pages, and I want it minuted that I did it under duress and I have read them, all of them, which is more than any of you have done for anything.”
“Minuted,” said Dot, and did not minute it.
Then the introductions round, first pass: name, and one thing you would like to not be doing. Which is, I’ll admit, a good question. A woman called Pauline said she would like to not be driving her brother to a healing service every Sunday. A man called Ray said he would like to not be asked to sign a form at his daughter’s school saying he does not believe in fairies, “and I don’t, love, that’s not the point, the point is the asking.” A young man who I understood to be someone’s son said he would like to not be here, and Dot said “noted, thank you, that’s a very honest one,” and moved on with such brisk lack of sympathy that I liked her immediately.
Second pass, name and one true thing about the week. I don’t know why that one got me. I had the whole room mapped as a process — I was scoring it, I had a column for it in my head — and then I had to say a thing out loud in a circle of strangers, and what came out was:
“Emily. My father told people impossible things for money for twenty-two years, and he was very good at it, and he died owing the wrong kind of money, and I came here on Tuesday because I wanted to sit in a room where somebody says an impossible thing and I get to watch the moment it doesn’t land.”
Silence, and then Pauline said, “Oh, love, that’s a hard one,” and Ray said “thank you,” and Dot said “thank you, Emily,” and the circle carried on, and nobody did the thing I’d come for, which was to make it ordinary in a way I could have held.
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