Filling in stuff!
We finally were able to properly hear the report that [spoiler] had died in a shuttle crash about twenty minutes after the Anticipant had — I don’t know how she managed to figure out what happened. Maybe it’s really easy for her to decipher static. I mean, if she’s at right angles to the rest of us anyway, every regular form of communication would be garbled half-nonsense to her. Why should static be a special case? At least she didn’t go crazy in the cabin, which is just as much fun for a pilot as it sounds. Instead, the Anticipant just retreated into herself, took a sedative from Oft, and was soon sleeping the sleep of the medicated.
Oft was apologetic about the whole thing. “It’s a side effect of her training,” he explained. “The Anticipant has been taught to come to accurate conclusions, from woefully incomplete data. The techniques work, but they come at a cost of heightened sensitivity. In her case, painfully so.”
I looked over. Asleep, she looked a lot older, but a bit less pained, and I wondered just what those ‘techniques’ involved. “So sudden unexpected news knocks her for a loop?”
“Not exactly,” Oft replied. “It has to be unexpected and malicious. The universe simply randomly being the universe would be another part of the pattern, or so I think I understand. A reaction like this comes from a deliberate attempt to wreck the pattern, for whatever foul purpose.”
“So you don’t think [spoiler] died in an accident.” I didn’t state it as a question, and Oft didn’t take it as one.
“Certainly not, and neither do you.”