At the field archive, they called it reading the field: the full presence record, touch and proximity combined, everything the body had registered about every person who had ever occupied the same space.
Most clients came for their own fields. Some came to read the fields of the recently dead, who could be scanned for several years after death while the traces remained legible. Seve had worked there for six years and had read thousands of fields. She was good at it the way people get good at things they spend six years doing: fluently, without especially caring, with a professional patience she trusted more than enthusiasm.
The case that broke the professional habit was a child. Eight years old, dead three months. A father who wanted to know what the child's field had kept.
Seve had her clinical reason to be careful here: the field of a child who had died was often harder to read than an adult's, the traces less fully formed, the patterns still developing. She explained this to the father at intake. He said he understood. He said he just wanted to know what had been there.
She read the field. It was, as she had said, not fully formed: the child had been eight, had had eight years of accumulation, some dense and some thin. But what was dense was very dense. The father's presence occupied roughly forty percent of the field by area, which was significant, and the quality was the quality she had learned to call sustained: not urgent, not concentrated into specific moments, but there in the way that something is there when it is always there.
She read for an hour and then stopped and told him what she had found.
He thanked her. He stood to go. At the door he turned and asked: "Can you tell if it knew?"
Seve thought about this. In her six years of practice, she had understood the traces as records: what had been registered. Not what had been understood. Not what had been felt. Just the fact of presence, in its various intensities.
"The field records contact, " she said. "I can tell you what was there. I can't tell you what the field knew about what was there."
He nodded. He put on his coat.
"But the density is its own answer, " Seve said. And then stopped, because this was outside her clinical scope, and she wasn't sure it was true, and she wasn't sure it wasn't.
He stood at the door for a moment. Then he left.
She sat with the child's field for a long time. The father's presence in it was unmistakable, distributed through eight years, the same sustained quality at age two as at seven, as if the contact had never changed its mind about what it was.
She wrote her report. She filed it. She went home through the usual streets.