I had been working on an idea about the metaphysical possibilities of the tango connection and decided to see what AI could do with it. I liked the outcome and went ahead with the rest of the book as told through AI. Carmen Cray, is one of my pen names. It's available on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Harvesters-Carmen-Cray-ebook/dp/B0GHSVCGKV/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2VH91ZHL5SV7L&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.N4_6ZQ_yGStw2FMIb_hUAQ.S-CmFNRdTSOctmksfESs92vzxD7QfuzauzgZ2OxZMCE&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+soul+harvesters+carmen+cray&qid=1773360303&s=books&sprefix=%2Cstripbooks%2C1744&sr=1-1
The Soul Harvesters
Carmen Cray
Welcome to the Other Side and Anya Two weeks ago I believed in physics.
Not the soft kind. Not the metaphorical kind. I believed in the hard stuff. Particles. Forces. Predictable collapse of wave functions. I believed right and wrong were social inventions and that meaning was something human beings stapled onto a fundamentally indifferent universe.
Now I am not so sure.
Two weeks ago, tango was my hobby. Now it is my laboratory. And possibly my undoing.
There are over two hundred dancers in the ballroom tonight, which means the odds are good and the lighting is bad. The chandeliers drip amber light across polished wood.
Perfume and aftershave hang in the air like weather. The DJ has good taste and questionable mercy; he favors orchestras that make grown men sentimental.
I lace my shoes. I close my eyes. And I wait for the slip.
It doesn’t happen immediately. It never does. First comes connection—ribcage to ribcage, breath to breath. The smallest
adjustments in weight. The surrender of ego to shared axis. When tango works, it doesn’t feel like leading or following. It feels like collapsing two nervous systems into a single, negotiated geometry.
Then something loosens. The beat drops. And time hesitates. That’s when the Other Side appears.
Not a place. A layer.
The dancers dissolve into spheres of light—some faint and flickering like dying bulbs, others dense and coherent. Threads of attention stretch between them like filaments. The music continues but it is no longer sound. It is architecture.
Two weeks ago I thought this was a neurological anomaly. Now I know better. I’ve sensed her before—the purse snatcher. She moves like a glitch in a program.
Flicker. Blur. Gone. A small sphere tethered to something larger, like a parasite that hasn’t decided whether it wants to detach.
Tonight I’m hunting her.
But something else enters the room first. She is not subtle.
The temperature drops half a degree when she arrives—not enough for anyone to consciously notice, but enough for my skin to register. Her presence is large. Larger than mine.
Larger than most.
She appears young in my mind—twenty, maybe—but ageless at the edges, like time refuses to adhere to her. Her aura is iridescent, faint but undeniable. Not fragile. Contained.
At times I see her as a flash: thick black curls, eyes that shift in color—slate, frost, polished metal. When she turns her attention toward the dance floor, the lights flicker violet for half a second.
No one notices. Except her. And me. “That was cool,” I think.
I feel her amusement before I hear it. I’m refrigerated, she replies. Then she moves away, swift and precise.
Across the room, the purse snatcher’s aura flares—just briefly—before being pinned by the larger presence. For a fraction of a second I see the thief clearly: a small sphere attached by tangent to a greater one.
Then both vanish.
The music resumes its ordinary tyranny and I realize I am not alone in knowing. “You should ask me to dance,” a voice says. I turn.
She is wearing a torn white T-shirt, honey-blond hair cut short, blue eyes that do not apologize for themselves. Early thirties. Too young for me. Which is to say: exactly dangerous enough.
“I’m the one in the T-shirt,” she adds.
I nod—cabeceo—and she smiles in acceptance.
The moment I step toward her, I snap back into ordinary time as if someone flipped a breaker. The experiment is no longer observational. I am inside it.
Her embrace is warm and immediate. Not coy. Not tentative.
I lead a long, slow side step. Our spines align. Our hips negotiate. She exhales deliberately, compressing her frame, drawing closer. It is sensual without being crude.
I take her to the cross. She moves with intelligence. Responsive but not submissive. Present.
Midway through a pause she leans near my ear.
“The large presence is Ma’at,” she whispers. “Goddess of justice. She’s here to apprehend a dimensional purse snatcher.”
She pulls back slightly.
“Also? You got good coms. Your lead is fire, boomer.” I almost miss the beat. “Coms?”
“Communication bandwidth,” she says, rolling her eyes playfully. “You’re clear on the Other Side. Most people are static.”
We slip together. And this time, we stay.
On the Other Side, communication isn’t language. It’s image. Emotion. Full data packets dropped directly into awareness.
Her name is Anya. Twenty-nine. Professor of physics. She discovered the Other Side in Berlin, a year ago.
Alone, until now.
“You’re easy to read,” she tells me. “That’s rare.” The compliment hits harder than it should.
We drift between realms seamlessly, dancing in the present, conversing in the Field. It is intoxicating. And not just because her breast brushes my chest when she pivots, or because her hips rotate with graduated precision.
It is intimacy without concealment. You cannot lie there. Desire radiates like heat. She knows exactly what my body is thinking. She chooses to ignore it or maybe she enjoys it, I can’t tell sometimes.
That may be the most seductive part. “Is it safe?” I ask her.
She tilts her head like I’ve asked whether the ocean is wet. “It’s structured,” she says carefully. “Egyptian-coded
architecture. Ma’at. Isis. Ra. Time behaves weird here. You can move forward.
Never back.”
“And the purse snatcher?”
“Petty crime,” she says lightly. “Local. But crossing boundaries upgrades the charge.”
“Upgrades the charge.”
“Balance must be restored,” she says solemnly—then grins. “That is The Way.” I find myself repeating it. “That is The Way.”
We dance three tandas.
By the end of the third, I am infatuated.
Not naïvely. Not foolishly. Just honestly. Tango does not permit you to lie about what you feel. If you fake it, the dance collapses.
She withdraws at the end, gives me a hug that is almost—but not quite—platonic. “Stay frosty, fossil,” she says.
And walks away with my equilibrium.
I stand alone in the ballroom and try to recalibrate.
Two weeks ago, this would have meant nothing more than a good dance with a beautiful young woman.
Now it means:
Time is negotiable. Consciousness is architecture. Justice appears in person. And I am not crazy.
Or, if I am, I am not alone in my insanity.
I used to believe the universe was indifferent. Now I suspect it is watching and I think it just made contact.
Chapter Two
The Symbiont
I did not become a tango dancer because I was romantic. I became a tango dancer because I was in danger of becoming a monk.
Divorced at forty-eight. Two daughters in college.
Mortgage. Laid off from a telecommunications job I thought would carry me into respectable mediocrity. I needed something that required breath. And posture. And eye contact.
Tango provided all three.
Before children, I had been a whitewater river guide. Rapids, hydraulics, reading currents by instinct. The river teaches you to feel what you cannot see. It teaches you that the surface is rarely the story. Tango is not so different. Beneath the music there is the undertow.
And beneath the undertow—now I know—there is Field. I travel for work when there is work. Cellular networks.
Repeaters. Towers. I spent years optimizing signal strength for corporations that believe five bars is salvation.
Irony is not subtle.
I spent decades strengthening signals in the visible world.
And now I find myself studying bandwidth in the invisible one. The week after meeting Anya, I was useless.
I replayed every phrase she said. Every brush of her hip. Every micro-pause in the embrace. Attraction at my age is inconvenient. It refuses to be dignified. I told myself it was intellectual curiosity. Professional collaboration. Joint research.
My body disagreed.
The second milonga of the week was smaller. Midweek crowd. Fewer than a hundred dancers. Basketball court converted into sacred geometry. Benches instead of cocktail tables. Twenty-dollar voluntary donations dropped into a ceramic bowl no one guarded.
Trust as policy.
Interesting choice in a universe where interdimensional purse snatchers exist. I arrived early.
She did not.
I danced with three women my age and one who could have been my accountant. Good dancers. Solid connection. I slipped once, briefly, but only into
static—background noise of unfocused auras. No coherence. No structure.
Without Anya, the Field felt dimmer. That bothered me more than her absence.
Then I felt it.
Not her. Something else.
A presence thick and controlled. Not flickering like the thief. Not radiant like Ma’at. Contained. Calculated.
I opened my eyes. She was blonde. But not honey-blonde. Manufactured blonde.
Surgical blonde. The kind of blonde that costs money and requires maintenance.
Her face was a meticulous negotiation with gravity. Skin pulled taut. Eyebrows replaced by something that had once been eyebrows but were now an aesthetic suggestion. Lips fuller than nature intended. Her dress expensive. Her gaze direct.
She did not smile. She simply waited. I nodded. She rose.
Dancing with her was… alarming. Not because she was bad. Because she was extraordinary.
Her technique was impeccable. Not flashy. Not theatrical. Efficient. She anticipated weight changes before I led them. She did not follow. She inhabited.
I felt like I wasn’t embracing her. I was wearing her. Like a coat that adjusted itself to my spine.
I attempted to slip. Nothing. A wall. Not accidental. Not environmental.
Intentional.
She was blocking me.
The knowledge came not as suspicion but as certainty. I tried again during a suspension.
Still nothing.
Her hand tightened almost imperceptibly on my shoulder blade. Control.
Then—ten seconds before the final note—she allowed it. The wall dissolved. I dropped through.
On the Other Side she was different.
Her aura was violet—deep, velvety, coiled. Not bright like Anya’s. Not balanced like Ma’at’s. There was hunger in it.
And calculation.
“You peer with such earnest confusion,” she said—not in words, but in tone. “How quaint.”
“Who are you?” I asked. “Terpsichore.”
The name landed with classical weight. “Not the muse,” she clarified. “A function.”
Behind her aura, I sensed something else. Another pattern layered beneath her glow. Like two frequencies occupying the same channel.
“Symbiosis,” she offered. “You’re the thief.” “Borrower.” “My wallet.”
She extended it toward me.
On the Other Side it shimmered like a small red anchor. “You vibrate strongly,” she said. “Identity anchors matter.”
“You stole my ID.”
“I calibrated your field.”
“By emptying my bank account?” A flicker of amusement. “Money is narrative compression.” “That is not comforting.” She leaned closer.
“You want access,” she said. “I can provide it.” “And the price?” “We will discuss that.”
The music ended. I snapped back into the ballroom. My wallet was in her hand. She placed it into mine without spectacle. I checked it.
Cash intact. Cards intact.
That unsettled me more than theft would have. After the tanda she lingered.
“You may ask me to dance….anytime,” she said softly. There was no flirtation in her tone. Only inevitability.
Anya found me in a café an hour later.
Apparently she had decided hacking my phone’s carrier registry was a reasonable icebreaker.
“You are wildly unsecured,” she informed me cheerfully. “You invaded federal infrastructure,” I replied.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I toggled your GPS. You were easy to find.” “You will turn that off.” She grinned. “Boundaries are sexy.”
We talked about Egyptian architecture over espresso.
“Ma’at is enforcement,” she said. “Isis is balance.” “Ra is executive authority.” “And the octopi?”
She stirred her foam thoughtfully.
“They’re everywhere there’s water. Pitchers. Vases. Plumbing. I think they’re contractors.” “For whom?” She met my eyes.
“That’s what we’re about to find out.”
Back at the milonga, something was different.
The octopi were more visible now that I knew how to look. One eye open in each water vessel. Not glowing. Observing.
Anya and I danced. We crossed easily. Together our auras amplified. Then the old man appeared. He was complete. Dense.
Whole.
His sphere of light was not flickering. It was planetary. The octopus in the water pitcher brightened.
A doorway opened. White. Clean. The old man stepped toward it. “Wait,” I tried to project.
He did not hear me. Or he did and chose otherwise. He entered. The portal snapped shut with thunder.
We were expelled. Back in the ballroom. The music ended. The same man collapsed on the dance floor.
Paramedics. Defibrillator. Shouting.
I stood there knowing something irreversible had just occurred. Not death.
Harvest. The room emptied in stunned silence. The dance was over.
Anya’s hand found mine.
“Did you see that?” she whispered. “Yes.”
Her face had gone pale. “They’re taking them,” she said. “Who?” “The octopi. Under Ra’s authorization.” “For what?”
She looked at me in a way that made my lungs feel smaller. “Reinforcement.”
The word meant nothing. And everything.
When I went home that night, my parents were arguing about salt. I watched them differently. My father’s coherence. My mother’s orbit around him. Two stable fields. Strong.
Structured. Attractive.
I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. If tango gatherings were watering holes—If coherent souls were resources—If contractors harvested under executive authority—Then what exactly was I dancing inside?
And why had Terpsichore returned my wallet?
I began to suspect something worse than being observed. I began to suspect I was being cultivated.
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