Noam Schultz is in her office. Her workday ended an hour ago. Cold LED lights hum. It's Friday. She taps her foot, refreshes her Foundation email inbox. No one is sending her messages after hours.
The department's been in a bit of a mess recently. There's not a lot of staff, so any absences cause a lot of work to be shifted around. This time, everyone was kind enough to assign her as little of Ben Schultz's work as possible. It's the closest thing she gets to bereavement leave.
He died 12 days ago. Major stroke. They found him on a park bench, told her he looked "at peace." Quick, painless, he went the way everyone wants to go. Allegedly.
Noam picks at the gunk under her nails. She checks the hallway. No one — even the janitor is out.
Exploring the limits of necromancy remains a long-term goal of the SCP Foundation. Necromadic communication has the potential to become a key source of intelligence for the Foundation as well as other veiled-world actors. As of January 1998, the Foundation's application of necromadic communication remains limited. Budgeting remains a key constraint given the ever-expanding cost of containing anomalies.
She'd brought someone back three days ago. Yussuf Ben-Saeed, an engineer who designed surveying data for anomalous geology. Prostate cancer. She'd never met him, but the Foundation gave her his file. Name, face, life story, correspondence with other staff, a drawing that his son had made and which he kept on his desk. With a little familiarity and the proper equipment, she could find his fragments in the noosphere. Take what other people thought of him, piece those together, and you get an image of a human being sharp enough to compare to the noosphere's background radiation. There's residue of Ben-Saeed's conscious thought in that radiation, slowly decaying. The image lets you pick out the residue, and combining the residue with the image gives the most accurate reconstruction of their consciousness.
She talked to his reconstruction for three hours. It's not really him, but it's good enough. The Foundation got the information they needed — his expertise applied to whatever problem had stumped the rest of the Foundation. And she got to go home after she finished filling out the paperwork.
The Foundation's capacity for necromancy is also limited by our ability to recruit necromadic mediums. While existing Foundation faculty can be trained, only a select few meet the physiological requirements to be a medium.
Most people are disqualified at birth, lacking the necessary type O- blood. Many more become ineligible due to environmental factors. What would otherwise be considered moderate levels of alcohol, lead, THC, mercury, opiates, and certain pesticides have been shown to sharply reduce necromadic potential. It is estimated that roughly 30% of all strains of influenza halt necromadic development outright.
Because it is difficult to discreetly screen civilians for these risk factors, the Foundation instead screens Foundation staff with O- blood (as disclosed by staff in case of medical emergency) and no alcohol or cannabis usage (as self-reported by staff members). Candidates who pass this screening are given partial training as necromadic mediums before being assessed on their performance.
Candidates who perform significantly below the performance threshold are assumed to have an undetectable risk factor (such as pesticide consumption or viral infection) and are deemed ineligible. Candidates who pass the threshold are incentivized to transfer to the Department of Applied Necromancy via pay raise and/or through the Fire Suppression Department. Family members of a candidate who passes are also screened due to their increased likelihood of being viable mediums.
I finish my lunch while Noam chats about football. I always eat slower than her, and the beef stir fry I made has too much salt, so I keep stopping to drink water. I get another glass and ask her if she wants to smoke a little before lunch is over. She says yes, as usual. It's the least I can do.
The cashier slides Noam's items across the scanner. Milk, eggs, oranges, chicken breast— "How's your day been?"
There's a moment of silence where Noam hasn't realized that this question is for her, right now, right here. She snaps awake. "I'm just looking forward to the weekend."
"That kind of week, huh?" She smiles. "I'm off Wednesday and Thursday, so my weekend just ended."
"Hopefully you got to relax."
"No. I had to take my dog to the hospital…" She sees the way Noam is looking at her. "He's fine. He's just— God, what a nightmare."
"I can imagine."
A box of vanilla extract passes over the scanner. It's her last item.
"Do you want a receipt?"
"… No, thank you."
The cashier crumples it in one hand, drops it into a trashcan with 139 other receipts.
"Have a nice day."
"You too!"
Soon, they will both forget this conversation. And yet, the cashier is one of only three people Noam will speak to that day. For the cashier, Noam is one of eighteen.
"Were you close?"
She exhales, turning the cigarette between her fingers. I can't tell if she's deliberating my question or distracting herself.
"He was an asshole. He yelled at me — a lot. More than at my mother. I didn't want to be like him, but-"
"I mean, just because you worked the same job-"
"-I know, I'm more than my fucking job. I only took it because he would be on the opposite side of the world."
She takes a long drag. She's trying to hide how much burns. I think trying not to cough makes her feel like a kid again.
"I don't even know what I want to say to him." She says, a wisp of smoke escaping off her tongue.
"… Maybe you want him to apologize?"
"Hah-" Now she coughs. "Do you want it to rain money? Of course I want him to apologize — I don't (cough) think it'll happen."
She takes her personal laptop out of her bag. Setting it beside her office desktop. She has to push her office keyboard out of the way for everything to fit. The machine — the 1996 Necromadic Communication Device — is already on the desk. It never leaves this room.
The NCD-96 is a black rectangle the size of a first-aid kit. There are a few buttons, a switch, a latch, and an adjustable slot on the shape of a human hand. Inside of the slot are 12 retracted needles, ready to strike. It looks like a tech showcase — too sleek and featureless to be intuitive, a plastic shell with four rubber feet. On the back is a power cable and a USB connector. She plugs it into her personal laptop.
She'd already put all the necessary software on this laptop. She copied it off her work computer four days ago. Now, she makes sure everything is set up correctly. Her mouse pauses over a single checkbox: Record session activity. She could have his words forever. She could create the most damning evidence possible. But she knows that she isn't good at covering her trail, so what harm would more evidence do? She checks the box.
"Bring him— Christ, Noam, you can't be serious."
A lazy cloud of smoke curls out of her mouth. She shrugs.
"They'll fire you! I mean, there'll be a whole tribunal!"
She watches the embers at the end of her cigarette. "They're not going to fire me. Do you know how many mediums they have? Four. That's worldwide, Sione. Used to be five, you know." She glances at me, then off somewhere else. "Even if they find out, they can't afford to get rid of me."
"But you don't know that for sure! I don't want you to throw your life away for-" I can't bring myself to say it in front of her. For your father. For someone who's already dead. There's no combination of words that's salvageable. "Please, just think about what's at stake here."
A bird hops along the pavement below us, picks at the crumbs inside of a box of fries.
Noam looks at me with the corner of her eye before she turns inside. "I'll think about it." And then she's gone.
Lunch ended seven minutes ago. I ash my cigarette.
+---------------------------+
| DEVICE WARMING... |
+---------------------------+
The machine hums. She places her hand inside of the slot. It fits perfectly without any adjustments.
+-------------------------------+
| READY. PRESS 'OK' TO CONTINUE |
| |
| >CANCEL< >OK< |
+-------------------------------+
She presses the button she has pressed a thousand times.
Necromancy as a field is a scientific frontier in the sense that every fact is accompanied by an unexplained mystery. We understand that mediums interface with the deceased through their residual imprints on the noosphere, but it's unclear how drawing blood from the medium aids this process. We understand that O- blood is more useful because it's universally compatible with the blood of the deceased, but its unclear why the blood type of the deceased is relevant when the noosphere is intangible. We understand that hands are relevant to the noosphere by proxy of their physical, social, and symbolic importance throughout all historic and contemporary human societies. However, it's unclear why necromancy is most effective when a medium's blood is drawn from their hand.
Each component of necromancy can be explained by cryptobiology or in noospherics. However, a unifying theory of necromancy (a so-called "theory of everything") would also have to unify cryptobiology and noospherics. This requires treating these fields as two interlocking systems rather than mutually exclusive explanations for anomalous behavior. Prevailing theories in both fields do not support this unification. While fringe theories that relate the two do exist, they present their own problems for necromancy.
A needle stabs her middle finger so quickly that it's out almost before it is in. She can feel her pulse there, her veins swelling slightly around the wound. But she can't think about that — she needs to think about him. His fragments are out there, spinning in the noosphere, rebounding off of ideas far more important and now more whole than him. She can sense everyone holding onto him, the fragments slowly eroding. He is survived by four drinking buddies, a mouse that chewed a hole into his pantry, a lemon tree that lives in spite of his negligence, a neighbor who's noticed that the mail is piling up outside his door, a lady who saw him walk by two hours before the stroke and thought he was sexy, a cat which he pets whenever he decides to take a Saturday morning walk, an ex-wife who hasn't spoken to him in over a decade, a mechanic he yelled at for giving him a deal that wasn't all that bad, the man at the hardware store he would always chat to about baseball, two cousins he would visit during the holidays, three crows, his physician, his optometrist, his cardiologist, and a daughter.
She's done more with less.
Two more needles had gone in and she didn't even notice. A third comes now, makes her lips tight. Her hand never moves.
The laptop's hard drive spins up, encoding his fragments onto shining platters.
"Can I ask a slightly weird question."
Noam looks up at her. "… Sure?"
"Was he a good medium?"
Noam smiles, takes another puff. "He was their best for fourty years. Right up until he died."
There is a low, fried groan, compressed through the laptop speakers. There it is again, learning to form words without a mouth.
"I… Iiiiiyaiiii…"
An impossibly deep inhale. And then-
"Nnnnnn… Nnnooaammmm?"
The spectrogram dies again. The unwavering black line stares at her.
"Nnoam? Iss that y-"
She nearly falls over yanking the cable out of her laptop. The program freezes. (Not Responding). The fans continue to spin.
Before midnight, she will hold down the power button on her computer until it shuts off. She will procrastinate on deleting the new file stored on her computer, procrastinate on opening the folder at all. She will spend the next week obsessively checking her staff email, waiting for a hammer that never comes down on her. She will spend next Thursday waffling to the therapist she's been seeing for six years. She will spend the next two years unintentionally carving out the material and psychological conditions that will result in her getting a cat that wants to fight 25% of all living creatures. This decision is both spontaneous and perhaps the smartest thing she will do in her entire life.
But this is not one of those moments. In this moment, she holds the cable stock-still. A drop of blood runs down her other hand.