Underland Arcana 4 by Forrest Aguirre

Author:Forrest Aguirre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Underland Press
Published: 2021-10-06T16:32:34+00:00

Wayfinding

~ A. P. Howell

Becca didn’t realize she always avoided part of the plaza until a sunny Wednesday when she noticed a weed growing in a cracked paving stone. She was very familiar with the paving stone and made a habit of looking down at it, stepping carefully on the familiar unevenness, taking special care during winter when pooled water iced over.

She stopped walking, feeling the afternoon traffic move around her. The plaza was big enough, uncrowded enough, that one non-moving body didn’t cause any inconvenience. People simply stepped around her.

But not just anywhere. Becca wracked her brain to think of the different paths she’d used to get to class or the library or a food truck. Human memory wasn’t perfect—the brain played all kinds of tricks, dumped useless data, and freely interpolated—but even allowing for that, Becca knew she had favored paths and there were certain areas she couldn’t remember traversing at all.

She watched the other pedestrians for a while, uncomfortably aware that they also seemed to be avoiding some of those same spots. In the spirit of more scientific inquiry, she sat in a metal chair at an unoccupied table and watched for another hour.

A physicist friend had enjoyed making fun of the “unnatural sciences,” and certainly anything involving human behavior was messier than optical equations. But her observations were still data, and in all the time she watched, Becca never saw anyone set foot in a five-foot-square area she herself unconsciously avoided.

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