The Singularity Coven
Copyright© 2026 by Penny Pucker
Chapter 6: Willing Threshold
The four weeks after St Aidan’s are the last boring weeks of my working life, so I am going to spend words on them, and I would like it recorded that I spent them doing the correct thing.
I kept notes. I kept them in a plain text file called gain.txt, which is a bad name for a file on a work machine in a building where the word exfiltration has its own dashboard, but it was the honest name, because the word Yusuf used was the one I couldn’t stop turning over.
She’s not leaking. That’s gain.
And here is the thing about gain, the thing I did not see for four weeks and which is going to have to wait until later to be pointed at, because I want to be accurate about the order in which I was an idiot: gain is not a mystical word. Gain is a number on a datasheet. Gain is what an amplifier does. It is the ratio between what goes in and what comes out, and it is measured in decibels, and there is an entire branch of my profession whose whole job is putting gain in the right place and keeping it out of the wrong one.
I knew that. I have known that since I was twenty-two and building a microphone preamp in a kitchen. I wrote the word down four hundred times in that month and I never once looked at the second half of the sentence.
Instead I did science. I built a control: the following Tuesday I drove to a community hall on the other side of the river and sat in an NHS physiotherapy group for ninety minutes, and nothing happened there except that a man called Keith explained his hip to a stranger. I went back to St Aidan’s the Tuesday after that and sat in the corridor outside for ten minutes before going in, to see whether the building did something, and the building did not do something. I wrote a table. I put “undercroft” and “physio” side by side and I wrote the two candle runs in the middle column and I looked at it, and the only column that didn’t match was me.
I wrote observer effect next to it, because that is the least frightening explanation available, and then I closed the laptop, and I did not write what the alternative was, and nobody in my life has ever asked me what I did not write, which is how I got away with it.
At work the pod had become real, which is what happens when a CEO says a word in front of nine hundred people.
We had a room now — not a store cupboard, an actual room with a window and a whiteboard, and on the whiteboard Nour had put the twenty-two confabulation phrasings from chapter four in colour, and under them a heading she had written and then underlined twice: REFUSAL INDEX. Nour does not talk much and what she does say is load-bearing. She had taken my eleven thousand corrections and sorted them by what the model had failed to complete, which is a much harder join than mine and produced a graph with a shape in it, and the shape was a rising line with a step in it in March.
“Why is there a step in March?” I said.
“Because I only found the March logs,” Nour said. “The old ones are on a system we don’t have a name for. When I asked, Legal asked who had asked.”
Devraj had gone back to the forty seconds of “Sanskrit-ish” and got nothing, which he took well, because he had known it would be nothing: the audio had one word in it, cut off in the middle, and the machine that played it had stopped being able to play it, and he had now checked that four times on four different machines. He had started keeping the recording in a drawer instead of a folder, which is Devraj being careful, and I did not ask him why a file needs a drawer.
And Bex said nothing at all, which is Bex, except once, on a Thursday, from three desks away, without turning round: “You went out.”
“I go out.”
“You went out, and you came back different, and you’ve been quiet for four weeks, which is worse.” They turned their chair around this time, which they had done exactly once before. “When I was young I had a colleague who started going to a class. Evenings. He was lovely about it. He was better at his job within a quarter and he was gone inside two years.”
“That’s not a warning, that’s a coincidence.”
“It’s a pattern,” Bex said, “and you of all people should be able to tell the difference.”
I thought about that for about eleven seconds, which is how long I thought about copying my notes onto a personal drive in chapter four, and this time I did it before I had finished thinking.
There was also the matter of Marcus, which is a matter I have still not decided what to do with. He had started sending me things late. Not tasks — context: a thread from a research group he was advisory to, a paper from a lab in Zurich, a change proposal on inference scheduling at a company we compete with, always after eleven at night, always with one line, always the same line: “you’ll see something in this I can’t.”
I want to note that I have now read thirty-eight documents I did not need to read, that none of them had anything to do with my job, that all of them were interesting, and that I have never once asked him what he actually wants me to do with them, because I like being asked. I did not notice that in four weeks. I noticed it in year two, in a chapter much later than this one, and by then the fact that he had been routing hard problems past my desk since my first week was not news, it was just arithmetic.
The second meeting was four weeks to the day after the first, and I went, and I want to be honest about the reason, which was that I had not finished understanding it. Not Pauline, who saved me a biscuit and called me “the engineer” as though it were a diagnosis. Not the tea. Understanding.
Marguerite was doing the chairs again, same spacing, same cardigan. There was a name sticker and a pen on the little table by the door before I got to them, and on the sticker, in handwriting I had not seen before — round, upright, unhurried — was written EMILY ROGERS.
Not Emily. Full name.
I stood in the doorway of a church undercroft with a sticker in my hand for longer than is normal. Then I found Dot, and I said, mildly, in the voice of a person who is not alarmed, “How did you know my surname?” and Dot said, “From the register, dear, we keep a register,” and did not look up from the laminated index cards, and I said, “Oh,” which is the sound a mind makes when it is choosing not to follow a thread.
And then I signed the sheet — again, a second time, four weeks later, without reading it, without hesitation, in a room where I had watched the candles behave — and that is the part of this I go back to. The first time I wrote my name in that room because there was a box and it said name. The second time I wrote it because it was a habit now, and I have spent two years of my life telling people that the way you find a security problem is to look at what people do without thinking.
Marguerite was taking the sheet up at the tea break, folded into thirds, the way she had done last month, and I said it. I said, in front of a biscuit tin, “I’d like to know where the sheet from last month went.”
And she stopped, and she looked at me, and she said: “It’s a register. It’s a list of who came. I keep it because if anyone’s husband comes looking, I want to be able to say she was here, and I want to be able to prove it, and if that frightens you then you should read your own terms and conditions sometime, Emily, because you people sign anything.”
That is a completely adequate answer. It is adequate in the way that a lock is adequate: it works on the door it is on.
Yusuf asked me one thing that evening, and only one, and he asked it in the corridor by the coats where nobody could hear, with his tablet against his chest like a shield, as though he had written it down and then decided to try it on me first.
“Have you ever been in a room,” he said, “where the same job got done better, several times, for no reason you could name, and nobody in the room ever commented on it, because from inside it looks like a good week?”
And I said the thing I said, and I have thought about it perhaps two hundred times since, and what I said was: “In software that’s called a warm cache, and it means something nearby is already doing the work.”
He wrote that down. He wrote it down in front of me, on a tablet, in a corridor, and then he said “thank you,” which is the first time anyone has ever thanked me for being an explanation, and he went back into the room and did not ask me anything else all night.
The programme has six steps, and by the second meeting I knew them, and step four is where this chapter’s business is.
Step four is called, with the total lack of poetry that this group brings to everything, HOUSE RULES, and it is ninety seconds long, and Dot reads it off a card, and this is roughly what it says: nothing starts in somebody’s home unless the home has said yes; nobody brings anything into somebody’s home that they can’t say out loud in front of the person whose home it is; and if you are the person whose home it is, you are allowed to change your mind at any point, in any words, and you do not have to give a reason.
Then Dot put the card down and said, “That’s not a rule I made up, that’s the oldest thing in the book, and I want to say it again in plain English so nobody goes away with a metaphor in their head. A house is a working. It is the biggest one most of you will ever be part of, and it is the only one you live inside, and its whole function is the sentence you are not allowed in here. When you say come in, you are not being nice. You are doing magic, and you are doing it badly, in the doorway of a place you have spent years making strong, usually to somebody you were trying to be polite to.”
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