Psychic City

by Page Turner

  A more down-to-earth person may have replied, “Oh please, Bronson is fine.” But Bronson Eck was not a down-to-earth person. He was, in fact, quite enamored with himself and his elevated station in life. It’s sometimes said that kids with trust funds are prone to being born on third base and because of this subsequently laboring under the false impression that they’ve hit a triple. Bronson Eck was thrilled about having been essentially born between third base and home, able to steal a run whenever the mood struck him. He thought it made him a Major Leaguer.

  “Madam,” Eck said, tipping his head to Penny and winking at her.

  Penny blushed and felt sick to her stomach.

  Viv turned her head and pretended to cough as she involuntarily rolled her eyes.

  This guy is cheesy as hell, Karen thought to herself. It’s like he thinks he’s in a movie.

  Karen was right. Bronson Eck did in fact think he was in a movie. What remained to be seen was what kind of movie he thought he was in. That would soon become evident, however, as Eck spoke again.

  “So ladies,” Eck said, sending another chill up Viv’s spine, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? Did my father arrange something… conjugal for me? I must say. I would have been thrilled with one lady friend. Three really is a rare spat of generosity. Even if only one of you – “ his gaze lingered uncomfortably on Penny – “would normally be something I’d pick up for myself. I’m sure I can find a supporting role for all of you. Buy one get the other two free, right?”

  He waggled his eyes in true chicka bow wow fashion. All he was missing was the porno stache.

  Viv glared at him.

  “Just a little reference for you bargain hunters. I mean, I’m sure you’ve clipped a coupon or two, haven’t you, darling? A psychic salary isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.”

  He pretty much only directed his gaze at Penny. Looking her up and down with overt elevator eyes. Pausing self-indulgently at certain “floors.”

  “I have a few ways for you to make a bit of extra money, if you know what I mean. What do you say?” Eck said.

  “I say,” Viv said, “that I don’t give a shit who your father is. I’m not going to take this kind of disrespect.”

  “Viv,” Penny said.

  “What?” Viv snapped.

  “We have a case to solve,” Penny said.

  “I’m not going to stand here and let him treat me – treat you – like a piece of meat. Like we’re presents sent here to be his own personal playthings,” Viv said.

  “It doesn’t matter what he thinks though,” Penny said.

  “I’m sitting right here. I can hear you,” Eck said.

  “I know,” Penny said.

  Viv laughed.

  “He’s locked up here. You know how prisoners are. He’s escaping into a world of make-believe just like anyone else. His fantasies are just a little… more entitled than the average person. And he’s more likely to voice them,” Penny said.

  Viv nodded. “Because he hasn’t really been taught about ‘no.’”

  “Not properly anyway,” Penny said.

  “So you’re saying it’s a ‘no?’” Eck chimed in. “You ladies are missing out.” Viv twitched again.

  “Honestly?” Penny said. “Unless you have a portal to Hell hidden in those pants, then I’ve probably seen everything you have to offer.”

  “Ah,” Eck said, sounding wounded. “I left the portal to Hell in my other pants. The ones I use to plane shift.” He cracked a smile. He studied their faces curiously. “You don’t know whether I’m kidding or not, do you?”

  In truth, it was hard to tell. Not only were the Families incredibly wealthy, but they were rumored to also be privy to technology that didn’t officially exist, artifacts that weren’t supposed to be real, cutting-edge scientific (and experimental) tools. A pair of plane-shifting pants wasn’t out of the question.

  “No,” Viv said. “But we’re going to pass on checking.”

  “Pity,” Eck said. “You would have at the very least found a retractable ladder to heaven.”

  Penny groaned, losing her composure for the first time during the encounter.

  “You mentioned a case,” Eck said. “Are you talking about that game of cards I was in? That sore loser Macomber?”

  Karen’s jaw dropped. Was this how he was going to refer to his murder charge? “That game of cards I was in?”

  Viv wasn’t having it. “If you mean your murder of Jack Macomber, yes.”

  Eck rolled his eyes. “Maybe you live under a rock, but I’m innocent. Well… sort of. I’m innocent of the murder anyway. I’ve had a lot of fun in my life.”

  Penny sighed. “Yes, yes, I’m sure you’re a virile playboy. Gallivanting around the globe. That’s not what we’re concerned with today.”

  “Unfortunately,” Eck said.

  “Poor you,” Viv said.

  Eck glared at her. “I’d be careful if I were you,” he said, his voice growing colder. “You should try not to offend me. I’m a very important person. And I’m rather connected. Sure, I’m locked up here. But my friends are not. And a psychic’s life… well, you have your powers, but what else do you really have? Certainly not resources. Or important friends.”

  “Is that how you killed your guards?” Penny said.

  “Excuse me?” Eck said.

  “Your guards here at the prison. Did you have your important friends kill them?” Penny said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eck said. “Are there not guards out there? Could I just walk out of here? If so, that’s news to me.”

  Viv shook her head. “There are guards out there, just different ones.”

  Eck shrugged. “I hadn’t noticed. I’m stuck in here in any event.”

  Penny looked at Karen. “Feel him out,” Penny said to Karen. “I’m gonna go for a walk.”

  “Oooo, feel me out? That sounds fun. Except maybe you could do it?” Eck said.

  Penny signaled to the guards that she wanted to be let out of the interrogation room. As she left and put distance between herself and Karen, Karen began to feel painfully aroused, like half the blood in her body had rushed precipitously to her groin.

  Of course, how obvious, Karen thought. And how disgusting given the current circumstances.

  Karen did her best to push down her own personal disgust, however, so it wouldn’t interfere with her feeling Bronson Eck’s emotions.

  “So about your guards,” Viv said.

  “I told you. I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Eck said.

  Karen noted he felt defensiveness – that was hardly surprising. Another murder charge wouldn’t exactly be a welcome development.

  But there was something else underneath that defensiveness. Eck was confused. Surprised.

  If this murder had anything to do with the Eck Family, Bronson wasn’t involved.

  “I’ve got it, Viv. I’ve felt it,” Karen said.

  “Felt it?” Eck said. “Felt what?”

  “She felt the earth move,” Viv said sarcastically.

  Eck looked at her. Karen felt another spike of confusion emanating from him.

  “Have a nice day, Mr. Eck,” Viv said, in a flat tone.

  “So he doesn’t know anything?” Penny asked.

  Karen shook her head no. “He’s clueless.”

  Penny sighed. “Ugh. A dead end.”

  “Well maybe not,” Viv said.

  “What do you mean?” said Penny.

  “Well, it’s possible that he’s protecting someone,” Viv said.

  Karen shook her head. “Not to his knowledge. He felt defensive, sure, but that was probably for his own sake.”

  “Do you know that for sure?” Viv said.

  “Well, I guess not,” Karen said.

 
“He could have no idea what happened and also be protecting someone else. Someone he could feasibly suspect of doing the crime. Even if the crime itself were news to him,” Viv said.

  “I guess,” Karen said. She wasn’t sold, however.

  “Look, if you don’t like my theories, maybe you could come up with one of your own,” Viv snapped, sensing that Karen wasn’t exactly on board. In this case, you didn’t have to be an empath to get that impression.

  “I’m sorry, Viv. I don’t have an alternate theory. I just know that he wasn’t directly involved. That the fact that his guards were attacked was news to him. And he genuinely didn’t view the attack as beneficial to him,” Karen said.

  “Anything else?” Penny asked.

  “He was really turned on,” Karen offered.

  “Ugh,” Penny and Viv said in unison.

  “That was the strongest emotion he was feeling, truth be told,” Karen said. “Even more than defensiveness or confusion. Arousal.”

  Viv frowned. “I’m really kicking myself right now.”

  “Why?” Karen asked.

  “I’m thinking we should have brought a telepath in with us,” Viv said.

  Ouch. Karen felt that statement right in the chest. Well, maybe if you wanted to be 100% sure about the wrong thing, she fought back in her own head.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to say that – or something similar – aloud. Because she often wondered herself if Penny and Viv wouldn’t be better served teaming up with a telepath or even a precog. A more common – and potentially more useful? – team member.

  Karen stood there frozen in place as tears filled her eyes. She quickly yanked the hood on her sweatshirt forward to make it less obvious.

  Differentiation of Common Types

  While hundreds of varieties of intuitive have been unearthed, it is worth noting that some types are far more common than others. Two of the earliest discovered types of psychic practitioners have continued to be among the most numerous: Precogs and telepaths.

  Precogs, short for precognitionists, are masters of the future. They can see future events with profound clarity. Some precogs do so involuntarily, assaulted by uncontrollable glimpses of things that have not yet come to pass. Other precogs have more control of their visions and with considerable effort can look into a question and see what the future holds.

  Predictably, many precogs work for government agencies and most commonly in law enforcement.

  However, their findings aren’t admissible in court – and for good reason. Precogs only see possible futures. Things that may happen. There are many false positives (but many accurate readings as well) in even the most disciplined precog’s life.

  Precog findings, however, are used to guide investigations.

  In law enforcement precogs also often work alongside telepaths, another very common type of psychic practitioner.

  Most commonly, telepaths hear the thoughts of others. This can be a very handy skill in detective work. Notably, however, while telepaths are privy to the content of a person’s thoughts, they do not have access to the context of those messages. Telepaths do not sense the emotional state of the thinker and are unable to look back in a thinker’s mind to see what thoughts preceded the current message.

  Empaths, conversely, have the ability to feel another person’s feelings but do not have access to the verbal component of thoughts. This can lead to less precision about the actual message but better sense of the context of their thoughts – and importantly some insight into what possibly preceded the current feeling, as emotions – or “hot cognition” – tend to dissipate more gradually than a cold thought (or a “cold cognition”).

  Empaths are believed to be generalists. Further reports of empathic specialists are widespread but at the present time, unverified. Rumors persist, however, that empaths exist whose skills are limited to a certain single emotion.

  However, these specialists aren’t simply able to detect that particular emotion. Instead, they have a full range of control over the emotion in question, that they can cause it in others or remove it from someone currently experiencing it.

  Empaths in general, however, are exceedingly rare. This is believed to be due to the incredibly high rate of suicide for empaths. The leading explanation is that this suicide rate is linked with empathic burnout and intense compassion fatigue. It is incredibly stressful feeling other people’s emotions all the time. Many empaths do not survive into adulthood, the age of majority when they can be successfully employed by government agencies, in either a Green Star or Blue River capacity.

  Telepaths, however, have a lower rate of suicide than the general non-psychic population.

  Telepathy is also found prominently in individuals who are very concrete thinkers. Telepaths tend to be people with a high belief in a just world and who view things as primarily black or white, zero or one, and/or binary.

  Telepaths are often very certain of the accuracy of their findings, while they are often very much off the mark.

  Two main categories of telepath exist: Receptive and expressive.

  Receptive telepaths can hear the thought messages of others.

  Expressive telepaths can send thought messages into the minds of others.

  Of the two, receptive telepaths are far more common than expressive. Even rarer is a telepath who has both powers, receptive and expressive.

  from Insecta Psychica: Towards an Intuitive Taxonomy by Cloche Macomber

  “Short meeting,” Martin said as the final two detectives walked out of the interrogation room to join him where he was waiting with Penny.

  “Is Roscoe around?” Viv asked.

  Karen’s heart sank. Telepathic boy wunderkind. He had joined PsyOps a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday. It had only been a couple of months since then, and he was already making waves around the department.

  At this rate, he’d be running the department in three years, some said. Karen wasn’t sure exactly why, but the idea made her feel miserable.

  It probably didn’t help that he bore a striking resemblance to someone in her past. Someone she’d rather forget. A cruel co-resident at the ranch for troubled teens Karen’s parents had sent her to, thinking it would correct her “behavioral problems.”

  It had taken quite some time for anyone to realize that Karen was an empath, far longer than it probably would have in other households. Unfortunately, empathic powers weren’t routinely screened for the way that other more common psychic talents were. And Karen’s parents hadn’t been exactly keen to get her generally tested for psychic intuition in the first place, fearing a positive result. Their neighbors had a child who had tested positive for psychic abilities, and they’d seen how that had gone. All their dreams as parents had been destroyed. The neighbor kid would never have a normal life. Kids. A normal career.

  So they’d done the best they could to get Karen exempted from testing. Cited religious beliefs. Karen’s father, Augustus Cross, even went so far as to invent an entire religion and register it with the government. The Grounded Temple. The church’s main belief structure was based in the avoidance of negativity and the power of positive thinking.

  Psychic powers could be overcome and switched off if everyone would just believe a little harder, the church said. All you had to do was kick in a few more thoughts and prayers.

  The church believed that psychic powers were a collective delusion, a test sent from God. And it was important for believers to do everything they could to pass that test.

  Grounded Temple members were accordingly forbidden from testing their own children for psychic abilities. To do so was to simply invite temptation. It was exactly what the Devil wanted them to do.

  “The Devil? Surely, that’s a typo,” the clerk handling Mr. Cross’s application had inquired.

  “No, that’s correct,” Mr. Cross had said.


  “Capitalized?”

  “Are you a Christian, sir?” Mr. Cross had asked, his voice growing quiet and his gaze becoming more intense.

  The clerk had nodded.

  “And as a Christian you capitalize God, don’t you?” Mr. Cross had asked.

  The clerk had nodded again.

  “In the Grounded Temple, we acknowledge the Devil as a real threat, sir. We take the Devil seriously. And we demonstrate that we take the Devil seriously that way. It is not a typo. There are no mistakes on this form,” Mr. Cross had said.

  When Karen had been a little girl, her father Augustus had tried very hard to impress upon her the ideals of avoidance.

  Whenever Karen was overwhelmed by the constant cacophony of other people’s emotions, Augustus Cross would simply look at his daughter and say, “Calm down.”

  When she would ask him how, he would helpfully instruct her, “Just don’t think about it.”

  And when she would scowl reflexively at this utterly useless advice, he’d snap at her. “You look like a monk with that giant hood over your face. Only your religion is self-pity. Honestly, Karen, you disappoint me. I had hoped any daughter of mine would be above petty teen angst.”

  For someone who was so adamant that she needed to calm down, Karen mused, her father’s actions said something entirely different. He seemed hellbent on agitating her by sticking guilt daggers into her and twisting them.

  Perhaps if it had been only him she would have survived her adolescence unscathed. However, he had a whole Temple behind him who seemed just as happy to oblige. There was an entire community ready and willing to reinforce his parenting choices.

  It was through the Temple that Mr. Cross had met Karen’s stepmother Celia Banks, the first woman he’d dated since the morning Karen’s mother had left on a long drive and never came back.

  Mr. Cross called his new bride “Sissy,” and despite Karen’s psychic abilities, even she wasn’t exactly sure whether it was out of affection or disdain.

  But Karen knew one thing for sure: There wasn’t any of what she’d personally call love in this marriage. Commitment? Sure. Trust? Fine. But no affection – and certainly no passion.