Bull's Eye: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective #3

Chapter 2

Zandra's focus on the lighter over the past week wasn't just for want of tobacco, although that played an outsized role in narrowing her attention into a bull's eye. No, there was another purpose.

On the second day of her incarceration, the guard thought it'd be funny to drop a pop science magazine into her cell. Zandra didn't allow him the pleasure of laughing at her expense, and instead made a point to read its contents whenever he was around.

The cover story focused on the work of Julia Mossbridge, M.A., Ph. D., at Northwestern University, specifically in the areas of consciousness and precognition. The headline read, "Can Psychic Phenomenon Be Proved Through Statistical Analysis?" As it turned out, the answer was "yes."

Of most interest to Zandra were two experiments Mossbridge conducted at the university that went on to survive aggressive peer reviews. It seems scientists at other universities had a hard time accepting the results.

In the first, individuals were asked to choose between four colors displayed on a computer screen. If these participants chose the color randomly selected ahead of time by the computer program, they'd receive a cash prize. Participants repeated this process several hundred times each.

On sheer chance alone, the odds of guessing correctly were one in four. Even with those relatively favorable odds, participants fared far worse than chance. They chose the wrong color almost every time. But that's not what interested Mossbridge, or Zandra.

In the brief seconds before the participants selected the right color, Mossbridge consistently recorded an increase in their heart rates. It was as if their bodies knew about the correct choice ahead of time and reacted accordingly, since winning money tends to quicken the pulse.

This could be repeated in lab settings over and over, Zandra read, although no one was sure why it happened. Mossbridge made it out to be a feature of the interplay between time and consciousness, so she designed another experiment.

This time, two pools of individuals took a challenging test about geography. The first pool did not study for the test, and on average they answered 71 percent of the questions correctly. The second pool, on the other hand, studied, and as a result answered 95 percent of the questions correctly.

This wouldn't surprise anyone on first glance, but Mossbridge threw in a twist. The second pool of participants studied after taking the test. Again, this could be repeated in lab settings without fail.

The magazine article concluded with a statement from Mossbridge that stuck with Zandra.

"Our perception of time appears to be malleable. It may also be manipulable under the right conditions," Mossbridge was quoted. "The second phase of my research will focus on identifying those conditions."

One step ahead of you.

From the quiet of her cell, Zandra spent every moment up until the present second focusing on two things: her heartbeat and the lighter in the guard's pocket. She knew he took a smoke break once an hour during his shifts. What she didn't know is when. He staggered the breaks. She gave herself the job of choosing which minute of the day he'd leave to smoke, comparing it to the analog clock on the wall beyond the bars.

Predictably, she got it wrong for the first few days, as anyone would with a one in 60 chance. Then, as she learned how to burrow down into a meditative state, she could feel her heart beat like a flat tire on pavement. It became clearer and clearer, until it played like music in her ears. That's when the misses started turning into hits. 10:32 a.m. 2:01 p.m. 3:19 p.m. 4:52 p.m. She's not 100 percent accurate, but that never stood in the way of her psychic claims before.

They didn't cover this in the books at Sneak Peek, not that there are any left.

Even now, as Zandra faces the guard at the bars of her cell on the promise of a future told, she's listening to her internal rhythm. It'd be just as well for her to draw some conclusions from a read of the guard's behavior, but her mind needs something meatier to chew on to pass the time.

"Tell me about how great my future is going to be," the guard says.

"How far out do you want to know?" Zandra says from behind the unlit cigarette. It dangles out of the corner of her mouth, the filter glued to her dry lips.

"I get to pick?"

"Today you do."

"OK, tell me what I'll be doing five years from now," the guard says.

Zandra runs through two generalities in her mind: living and dead. Her pulse quickens on dead. Then she narrows it down.

Does he die from natural causes or something else? Her heart tells her it's something else. Another pair of options shows that that something else is at the hands of another person. Was it accidental or intentional?

With the answer in mind, Zandra croaks, "You're not going to be doing a damn thing in five years."

"What does that mean?" the guard says.

Zandra's hoarse chuckle nearly propels the cigarette into the guard's face. She drops her voice and says, "You know what that means."

It's not like he's going to get back to me in five years if I'm right. And if I'm wrong, hell, one of us is probably going to be in prison anyway.

The guard grins and says, "Nice try. You think you can just make things up to get a rise out of people, huh? Well, it's not going to work on me. I'll be taking that cigarette back now, thanks."

Zandra backs away from the bars, keeping out of reach. "I don't lie."

"Every liar in history says that," the guard says. "How about you prove it?"

"I don't have to prove anything," Zandra says and sits down on her bed. "I just have to wait."

"You want to wait five years, be my guest," the guard says, pointing a finger through the bars at Zandra.

Zandra runs the cigarette's filter across her mouth like she's applying lipstick. After a moment of staring through the guard, she says, "It could be sooner than five years. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen today."

"You know it's a crime to threaten someone like me, right?" the guard says.

"Oh, I'm well aware of the crimes being committed right now," Zandra says.

"Yeah, well, maybe you should look into your own future, see how you like that," the guard says as if it's the ultimate putdown.

I've heard worse.

"I was hoping it involved going outside for a smoke," Zandra says.

"You can forget about that, because it's not happening anymore," the guard says and backs away from the bars. "Gee, look at that. I'm a psychic, too."

Zandra spends the rest of the day staring at the ceiling, staying focused on predicting when the guard's next smoke break will happen. She breaks from that focus only once, having succumbed to the temptation of running the same series of questions on herself. Now, instead of the marveling at calling the smoke breaks correctly, she tries to convince herself this is all a product of coincidence and mundane intuition.

I don't want to be a psychic.

She shelves that thought for another time. She has a visitor.