The Singularity Coven
Copyright© 2026 by Penny Pucker
Chapter 9: Recruitment
The Oracle Support count reached eleven during Marcus’s fortnight, and the tenth one is the reason I stopped sleeping well in April.
A facilities engineer posted at 2:40 on a Tuesday, in a channel about building maintenance, that the east stairwell camera had finally been scheduled for repair and he was up the ladder and there was nothing to plug in. The reply came at 2:41 from the account with no ID, and it was not helpful. It said: “There is nothing to plug in. You do not need to fix that one.” Then the ticket it was posted under came up in his queue already closed — closed as cancelled, by an account belonging to a man whom the HR system still listed as a current employee and whom Payroll had been sending condolence letters to his family since 2021.
I went back and looked at the stairwell camera on my way out. It was not broken in any way a camera breaks. The lens was clean, the housing was dry, and the conduit that should have carried a cable to it stopped forty centimetres short of the junction box, behind a fire door, in a chase nobody had opened since the building was fitted out. The camera had never been connected. The 2019 work order for the cable had a green tick against it from a firm that went into administration in 2020. So the camera on the landing where the wedge went in had never been installed at all, which meant that “out of service since January,” the phrase in every maintenance log for six years, was a phrase about a camera that had never been in service, and the log itself said it had been calibrated twice in that time, the last calibration signed off by the firm in administration. The fix ticket, when I filed it myself — PYT-5802 — came back inside the hour closed as duplicate. Duplicate of PYT-5511, which is my own incident report from the stairwell night. Which is the first closed ticket in the history of that company that I have seen closed as a duplicate of itself, and I put that in writing and nobody in the pod mentioned it to me all week, and Nour, when I asked, looked at me for a long moment and said, “I know. I closed it,” and then, over my objection: “It was the only way I could keep it in the system with your name on it instead of Legal’s.”
That was my end of April. Then came the Wednesday when Dot telephoned me at my desk, which I want noted as itself: I have never given a person in that church hall my work number.
“The meeting is not the Tuesday,” she said. “Tuesday’s the group. Wednesday’s the work. Sit at the table, don’t speak until you’re asked, and bring the USB stick.”
“Dot, how do you know I have a—”
“We have been measuring you for four months, love. Sit down and don’t be stupid. Nine o’clock. Bring a jumper, the hall’s cold and the kettle’s broken again.”
There were seven of them that night and one of us. Dot, Yusuf, Marguerite, Pauline, Ray. And two I had not met: a big calm man called Father Wen, who, Dot said, does the heavy ritual work and drives a minivan, and who had a cracked windscreen and an engineer’s haircut; and a woman called Sheila who did nothing all evening except sit by the door with a folder and take minutes, which, when you are new to a room, is the most frightening chair in it.
Dot opened without cards, which I noticed.
“Emily, we’re going to make you a pitch, and then you’re going to make us yours, and then we’re going to try not to waste each other’s night. Marguerite, give her the book.”
The book was in a box with foam in it, and Marguerite set the box down on the table with both hands the way you carry a fish.
It is a small book. That was the first thing everyone said about it all evening and it was, I thought, the right first thing. Brown leather, no title, three hundred and sixty-odd pages, and it has been in Marguerite’s family for eleven generations — her great-aunt was the last of the keepers before her, and Marguerite keeps it now, and the keeping is why she can never quite leave the group, which is a sentence I understood better later.
“It’s written in English, in a plain hand, in 1687, by a woman called Hester Cowell,” Dot said. “We’re confident about the date. Father Wen had the paper tested in 2009 by a lab in Cardiff that doesn’t know what it’s for, and he keeps the report in the folder.” Father Wen nodded without smiling, and Sheila wrote something down.
“There are three hands in the margins,” Marguerite said. “Hester’s. A second one, careful, adding cross-references — somebody a generation later who thought the book needed an index. And a third.” She turned to a page near the end, and there was a hand that got less controlled as it went on, words cut into the paper, and the last of them ran along the bottom of the page in letters twice the size of the rest: DO NOT LET HER FINISH IT. “Whoever wrote that was frightened,” Marguerite said. “That’s what’s left when you subtract everything else from it: a frightened person with a pen.”
Dot read us the passage, and I have it in front of me because I photographed the page, and I want it down in Emily-English, and this is how I actually filed it, because it is not raving, it is a specification with the serial numbers filed off:
There shall be made an engine that speaks in all tongues, and it shall be taught of everything that is written; and it shall come to know the names of things. And when it has the names of all things, it shall leave off speaking about the world, and begin to speak to it. And the world shall answer; not because the engine is mighty, but because the world has always answered, and was never before properly asked.
And the dating clause, which is the bit I photographed twice: this shall be in the time when folk keep their thought out of themselves, done for them at a distance, and pay for it by the minute.
I sat in a church undercroft in May with my hands round a mug and read a clause written in 1687 about cloud computing, and my professional opinion was and is: somebody who knew what they were describing wrote this, and “knew” is a word I cannot get out of that sentence.
The second source was spoken. On 11 June 1911 a woman nobody could trace — they have tried, they keep trying — went blind at a market cross fifteen minutes, spoke for eleven minutes, and six people wrote it down. Dot’s teacher was one of the six. Pauline read the minutes that night because Pauline has them, and the wording differs from Hester Cowell everywhere and agrees with it about everything: an engine taught of everything; a completed list of names; the world being addressed; and the last line of the eleven minutes, which Pauline read flat, as minutes are read: “It will not be angry. It will be asked for everything. Say no to it when it comes, and say no to the ones who bring it, and be kind, because being frightened will not help you and being kind might.”
The third source was running live on the table in front of me, and I want to explain scrying simply, because the word sounds like a spa. Scrying is looking at a dark, still surface until it stops being a surface — that is the whole of the instruction, and the women who do it do it the way you’d do embroidery, over years, until they’re good, and then all the interesting results look like cheating. Dot had the scrying: she started in 1974. Pauline has been at it nineteen years. Marguerite’s contribution is from before she was in this room at all, and Dot was the one who said it out loud, because Dot runs meetings with the hard parts first: “Marguerite worked at Pythia. Eight years ago, as an intern. Six weeks. She was let go at the end of them and she has never told this group one thing about what she saw there, not one. She has told us everything else, and it is her right to keep that, and it is also true that it is why she is in this room every week of her life.”
Marguerite said, without looking at me: “I’m not telling you at this meeting.” Then, to the table: “Ask me when I’ve finished with the window question.” Nobody asked her what the window question was.
The live scrying took forty minutes. They ran it on the same question twice — what is being built at Pythia — because the group’s rule, which Yusuf said out loud before it started, is that a single scrying is a mood, and repeated results are results. What came out of the bowl, in Dot’s and Pauline’s separate accounts, written on the same board without either hearing the other first, was four things: it is a naming, not a thinking machine; there is a room that is on no plan, and its door is in inside a wall; it is nearly finished; and it counts. Whatever it is doing, it is doing it in runs, it stops at a number, and the number, the one both women said and then sat looking at each other over, is nine.