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As in a Glass, Darkly

Clairvoyance, the ability to sense if not actually foresee future events, is not entirely uncommon.

In fact, many major “discoveries” – electromagnetism, evolution, relativity and so on – were

always there waiting in the future to be uncovered by people who saw just a bit further than others.

So as a geneticist, it naturally occurred to me that since certain ethnic groups are generally credited with the gift, there might be a heritable basis. It turns out that Celts, Romanies and Tibetans share the common characteristic of a thymus gland that is both larger than normal and remains active much longer than in other peoples, in whom it degenerates in the mid-20s.

This provided a valuable clue, but working on humans is difficult and expensive, so I chose pigs, which are known for their telepathic powers and, being bred to be slaughtered young, provide ideal subjects. Nevertheless, it took five years of my own life and the lives of innumerable porkers before I located a tiny organelle in the pig thymus that secretes an enzyme I dubbed HSP, for Haruspicase.

By itself it has no effect, but injected intravenously in micromole amounts together with the trigger hormone adrenaline, as HSP/A, the night before a planned slaughter, and only then, it induces a cacophony of squeals, sobs and screams. The sequence thus became clear: the pig is jostled or steps on a stone, secreting a minute amount of HSP/A, becomes apprehensive and, only if death lies in the immediate future, generates a much larger amount of HSP/A, resulting in positive feedback and uncontrollable hysteria.

The next step was to try it on humans, but for security reasons I necessarily had to be my own guinea pig. It took several weeks to get the safe dosage right, but finally I was ready for the crucial experiment. The night before, I studied the historical behavior of a volatile penny stock, and tried to predict its opening price the next day by conventional methods before injecting myself with a moderate dose of HSP/A and then concentrating on my predicted figure.

The immediate effect was as if my perception of time had accelerated enormously, and the figure I was trying to keep in mind kept changing until it stopped suddenly. I managed to write it down just before falling into an exhausted sleep. The next day, amazingly, the opening price was identical to the figure I had written down the night before.

But that’s not the half of it. By imagining an opening price two or three times the predicted figure, and immediately investing a sufficiently large sum to justify the jump, I could make the next day’s opening correspond to my imagined figure – an interesting example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

My years of research had paid off, but nothing comes easy in this world; after my third million of profit, both the SEC and the FBI came calling and blackballed me on every exchange. So now I am reduced to investing by proxy and in much smaller amounts. Also, I am becoming progressively more tired.Would you care to help out?

 

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