Alchemy and Algebra

Chapter 1

Kennedy was in her happy place. Paper and pens were neatly arranged on the desk in front of her and her favorite calculator was in its proper place to the right of her work. In the middle of the desk, in a position of honor, was a thick textbook that was slowly revealing to Kennedy the secrets of a little-known corner of the world of statistical analysis.

She'd loved every minute of her years studying advanced statistics. In a way, she was sad that this year would be her last. By spring, assuming everything went according to plan, she would be graduating from Simonstone University with a PhD in statistics. There was only the small obstacle of writing her thesis first.

Kennedy's phone chimed a flat, repetitive melody and she reached in her bag to turn off the alarm. With a small reluctant sigh, Kennedy wrote a few final numbers on her page and packed up her work. Her dismay at leaving the comfortable world of numbers and calculations was soon replaced by a simmering excitement. Today was her first interview for her thesis research. She was going to see a psychic.

Kennedy made her way down the familiar path out of the library, her home away from home, to the student parking lot. With some effort, she shoved her bulging bookbag behind the driver's seat of her old two-door car. It would only be another couple of months before she'd have to park it again. The poor old thing just wasn't up for Simonstone winters. Kennedy would be back to riding the bus again, apologizing endlessly to her fellow students for bumping into them with her weighty backpack.

Before sitting in the driver's seat, Kennedy reached into her back pocket and pulled out a printout of her email conversation with the psychic she was to see, and re-read the address. She'd remembered it correctly, it turned out, and she had the email in her phone as well. It was unlikely that her memory and her phone would fail at the same time, but with her thesis on the line, Kennedy wasn't leaving anything to chance.

As she drove through the quiet streets of the University neighborhood and made her way to the busy traffic of the middle of the city, Kennedy reviewed her experimental procedure in her mind. She would ask the psychic, in this case a tarot card reader, a series of yes-or-no questions and record the predictions. Then, Kennedy would score the answers for accuracy. After she repeated the experiment with several psychics, Kennedy would then try to statistically determine whether a psychic had a better than random chance of correctly predicting future events.

It hadn't been easy convincing the local psychics to participate in her experiment. After the first two hung up on her, she was tempted to pretend to be just another customer and to book an appointment without warning them of her intentions. But though she was inclined to believe that psychics did not have any special powers beyond acting and sales, she couldn't bring herself to participate in the culture of deception if she could avoid it. Kennedy had had better luck with the next few shops she'd called, though, and eventually collected enough appointments to proceed with her research.

The autumn sun was low in the sky as she pulled up in front of "West Wind Tarot Readings." From the curb, it didn't look like a psychic reader's shop as much as a bookstore, though decorated in bolder blues and purples than any of the many bookstores she'd seen in her life. The front window displayed an array of books with pretty teacups and candles here and there.

When she got closer, Kennedy saw that the books were on topics like improving your intuition and the history of paganism, and there were various crystals scattered among the books. There wasn't a math book to be seen. Definitely not Kennedy's kind of bookstore.

She pushed open the front door of the shop, on which were posters advertising tarot readings, intuitive counseling, and extended hours available for parties. Her entrance was announced by the silver tinkle of good-quality bells. The inside of the shop looked much the same as the front window: a brightly-lit shop with aisles and aisles of books, plus displays of items that might have been impulse purchase items at a cosy bookshop, like jewelry and pottery.