A Digital Clairvoyant.

Elena’s grandfather left her the drive in his will. But no password. She had tried every one she could think of, including:

1. The model ship-in-a-bottle. (Named after grandma, so that was a two-fer, but she’d tried grandma’s maiden name and anything she could mine from her mother’s scrapbook or by asking relatives.)
2. His dogs, going back to childhood. His two sisters, parents, any names she could find, including her aunts and uncles and parents and even her own.
3. His nickname in the army (“the Brit” because he drank tea religiously). Also every type and brand of tea he’d had in the cupboard.
4. His favorite beer (Red Stripe).
5. Every author and title from the paper library in his study, from the video her older cousins had taken before they carted them off (their inheritance).

She had run a brute-force guesser on it for a month, trying over a million guesses. (It took a few seconds to try each one, limited by the ancient encryption built-in to the drive.)

It was a small portable drive. Silver-gray finish, about the size of a dried meat ration. It used the old USB-C series connectors: she had to beg an adapter from the junk man who lived in the basement of the building next door. The worn sticker on the back said it was only 20 terras, so it couldn’t hold much unless it was text or something that had used compression. She could tell the drive still worked, and that its data was still there, a bunch of mishmash without the password.

She had tried everything, so she had tucked the drive away in the drawer and occasionally pulled it out, plugged it in, and tried anything that came to mind. All the characters from Shakespeare’s plays. All the old Greek and Roman gods’ names. The rosters from random baseball teams. The ingredients from a box of breakfast cereal. The brute-force program she’d written would automatically cycle through a set of transpositions and character replacements on each attempt, as well as logging them all to skip duplicates. But the search-space was huge.

Six months after her grandfather had died, she happened to be on the underground, riding back from a visit to the City Circus, which wasn’t an actual circus, but a bazaar that ran on the weekends when they shut down a couple of streets to traffic. She had bought some old towels she wanted to shred and weave into curtains for her bathroom, and she was petting them on her lap, imagining the finished work, when a beggar stepped onto the train.

“Feed your ears and feed my kids! Help me out, and I’ll sing you all a song,” the woman said to the train. She was short, full-bodied, and wearing black clogs that peeked out from under a long brown pleated skirt with little golden bells printed on it. She wore a fuzzy pink sweater over her blouse, with her dark hair falling over her shoulders.

A few people stood up and tapped their mobiles, sending her a credit or two. The woman protested: “A few more, come on. My youngest needs meat to loosen her baby teeth.”

Two men in suits across from Elena seemed to confer before one nodded his head. He stood up and punched at his mobile.

“Bless you! That’s more like it,” the woman said, and as the train rolled on she took a deep breath, her upper body swelling like a balloon. Her mouth opened wide and she sang out an operatic vibration so high and smooth the whole train seemed to lift off the ground, like one of those fancy foreign maglev rigs that can go half the speed of light.

Her sweet song had stopped time, but she finished up as they pulled into the next station, all hands clapping but for a few holdouts who stood up with their mobiles and dropped a few more coins for her, including Elena.

It was Elena’s stop, so she stayed standing and waited for the doors. The busker must have decided an encore wouldn’t pay, for she came over and stood beside Elena.

As they stepped out, Elena saw a pale green card slide across the tiles, dropped by the singer. She one-armed her towels and stooped down to pick it up. “Miss, you dropped this,” she said, holding it out.

“Keep it,” the woman replied without looking back.

Elena held it between her index finger and thumb. Plain on one side, she flipped it over and read the name:

The next day, after she’d finished shredding the towels and arranging the scraps into a nice pattern for her to weave together, Elena tucked the drive next to the card in her pack and caught the bus that ran out toward what had once been the spaceport.

An hour later, she stepped down from the bus to the lonely corner curb in front of what had been the visitor’s center. These days it was an appliance repair coöp. “Pay or play” ran the motto on the hand-painted plywood sign that hung over the doors on two loops of yellow braided nylon rope. You could fix your own items here for free, or pay the members to fix it for you.

Elena stood at the open front door and asked the best way to the launchpad. A woman in a gray jumpsuit with short blue hair said, “Best way is straight through here, and down the road.”

Walking through, she saw about half the space indoors was dedicated to electric motors and pumps, while the other half focused on electronic boards, 3D-printing of functional parts, and machining. She weaved her way past metal tables littered with cages and windings and multimeters until she saw the daylight out the back door. She turned that way and kept walking.

Back outside, Elena followed the cracked road that headed to the small office park that formerly held launch offices, including mission control. From there, it would be another long walk out to the isolated concrete structure that had once shot rockets into orbit. It would take forever.

She turned back and found the blue-haired woman, to beg a ride.

“Why are you going all the way out there?” she asked Elena, who held up the pale green card with her cheeks blushing.

“Oh! She sends a vehicle. Hold on.” She pulled a mobile out and tapped away in a text client. “It’ll be over in five. You better have the credits. She has a bad side.”

Elena nodded, saying, “I can pay. I wouldn’t have come all this way if I couldn’t.” The woman told her to wait by the back door.

Five was twenty, and when it trundled over the broken way it was a low, cheap ride, apparently custom. The body had been converted from an animal crate. It still had a stencil on the side claiming it the property of Exotic Animals of America, but a piece of plexiglass had been installed as a windscreen, and another as a window on the single door. She pulled it open. Inside were two folding chairs with their legs cut short bolted through the bare-metal floor. It wasn’t rust-eaten, and it seemed to run okay, so Elena took the front seat and closed the door.

Half an hour later, Elena stepped up out of the cramped electric two-seater that Madme Fsck had sent for her, which had parked at the edge of the concrete hill that used to send rockets to the heavens. Was there an under to this? Was this the right place? She walked around until she saw the flame deflector trench, covered in tarps piled over sheet metal. She walked that way, following the rainbow cast by the string of Christmas lights.

As the tunnel mouth’s light faded, only that dim string of lights guided her until she saw the Olympic-sized tent that sat where geysers of flames once purged from engines powerful enough to lift giants. Strung above the open tent flaps a canvas sign read Madame Fsck’s.

Elena stepped up to the entrance, poking her head just far enough past the edge to see the space divided into sections including mounds of scrap and junk, what looked like a kitchen area, and a large second tent toward the middle. She figured that was where the magic happened, so she walked toward it, glancing around for Fsck, or for anyone.

Once she got close, she saw there was no entrance to the smaller tent on that side, so she began to circle around. She soon saw large crates of squash, potatoes, and onions. There must be a farm, she figured. Finally she came half-way around and there the tent opened into a small parlor lit by hanging lamps.

At the table in the center sat Madame Fsck, a thin woman with short, curly silver hair. She wore a long purple gown and had her hands folded on the red velvet tablecloth. She stared ahead and didn’t turn or move her eyes as Elena walked up.

“Hello,” Elena said standing next to the table.

“I assume you know I’m Madame Fsck. I’m not psychic with people. Only with tech. If you thought I would guess your name, you thought wrong,” Fsck said.

“I’m Elena. I came because of this,” she said, pulling the drive out and holding it up.

Fsck reached out a bony finger and touched the drive, and with her other hand she reached into her robe and brought out one end of a USB-C cable, which she plugged into the drive while Elena still held it out.

“You can sit down,” Fsck said. “If you want, we can have tea after.”

Elena placed the drive on the table and settled into the seat opposite Madame Fsck.

“First I am going to bypass the drive controls and make a copy. If you want a backup, you’ll either need to provide me a second drive, your mobile if you have space—twenty terra, you should—or I can sell you a drive. If you’d rather wait and download the backup over the network, that’s free.”

Elena thought about it and asked, “Is it okay if I wait to decide until I know what’s on it?”

Fsck nodded. “It’s 29 percent done copying. While we wait, do you want to tell me about the drive? About yourself?”

Elena quickly recounted a sketch of her grandfather, and she explained what she’d done trying to crack the drive. Fsck asked, “What about your grandmother? Is she alive? Did you ask her?”

“She died when my mother was 17, so I never knew her.”

Fsck said, “Reason I ask, I think it probably does have to do with her. I’m starting to get a feel for the data. 43 percent done.”

Elena said what she knew from second-hand tales, from her mother or grandfather or other family. Her grandma had been a homemaker and a good neighbor with a kindness about her. While they had never been able to buy a real sailboat, she had bought the model kit for grandfather and he had named it for her. It wasn’t much. There were childhood stories of her mother growing up, but those were mostly about what the kids did, and of what grandfather had told them. She realized her grandmother had been kind of a background character, which she figured was because she hadn’t been around after a point, memories tended to fade.

“It’s at 70 percent,” Madame Fsck said. “I can see it’s mostly videos. A little text, some images. Mostly videos.”

Elena tried to imagine what kind of videos. Of her grandmother cooking? Cleaning? The family around the house? On vacations? Maybe Fsck was wrong. Grandfather had sometimes given lectures on his work as a historian. She doubted videos of his lectures would fill a drive, but felt sure that was some of it. It was his drive, left to her. What could it really have to do with a woman she’d never known?

“It’s done. Now we really go to work. First, the credits. You better have them.”

Elena took out her mobile and opened the wallet. She saw the icon for Madame Fsck’s and tapped it, transferring 100 credits.

“What are you doing?” Fsck asked. “You only gave me 100.” Fsck pulled a hammer out from under her robe, and placed it next to the drive.

“Wait! How much is it supposed to be? I only have a little more to spend.”

“It’s supposed to be a thousand. Business is slow, not many people with old tech and fewer who care to have it recovered.”

Elena’s heart sank. She did not have that much, and it would take her over a year to save it up. And if Fsck smashed the drive, who knows how much she be might charged for the copy. “It’s what the card said. It says 100. It says cheap!”

Fsck jumped a little. “I think you’d better show me the card.”

Elena reached into her pack and drew out the pale green card, passing it across the table to Madame Fsck.

Fsck turned it over, and over again. “It’s been some time since I had these printed. You’re lucky I never moved.” She was thinking. Deciding if she wanted to continue. She looked at Elena’s face, the worry in the girl’s eyes. But something else.

“Did the card come with the drive?” she asked.

Elena shook her head. “It came to me by chance, yesterday on the train. Dropped by a stranger.”

“But your grandmother was Maggie-Jean, the Siren Between Stations?”

Elena said, “Grandfather would call her Maggie in stories sometimes, but I never heard Maggie-Jean.”

“World-class busker. Used to be, when I was a kid, we’d all try to figure when and where, so we could catch the train and hear her live. I saw her all of twice, but the network still has a couple dozen of her performances from way back.”

“I think you’re mistaken. I never heard anything about her singing. She was a housewife. My mom would have told me if grandma had been a famous singer. But.” Elena paused, a bit confused. “But the card did come from a woman who dropped it, who sang on the train.”

Madame Fsck pulled a tablet from under her robes and held it up for Elena to see: “Was this her?”

It was a picture of the woman from the train, wearing a pink sweater and a long brown skirt with bells printed on it. “Yes, Ma’am. That was the woman on the train.”

“I took the picture from your drive. Here’s one of her with your mother, from the same set:” She swiped to the next image, and there was Elena’s mom as a young girl, sat on the woman’s shoulder and giving her bunny-ears. “The password was Siren Between Stations. I don’t know how she managed to be on your train if she’s been dead longer than your candle’s been lit, but somehow your grandma looked out for you. And your granddad too. It’s all videos of her singing at their home. His letter says that after she quit busking, she only ever sang just the two of them together. Recorded it all.” She tapped the drive with that bony finger.

Madame Fsck reached into her robes once more, and she laid a new gumstick drive next to the original. “A copy. I refunded your credits. You keep those memories real safe, maybe even shop them around to some music houses. She had the finest voice I ever heard. The world deserves to remember her. Now how about that tea?”