Fig. A: Collective kisses. A practice of microbial care at the With Microbes writing workshop in January 2020 at Kilpisjärvi (Finland) biological station brought we three artists together to think and imagine with microbes and social scientists. We (Vishnu Vardhani, Oona Leinovirtanen and Riina Hannula) offered the social scientists an individual reading from the data of their own microbes. Speculative fictioning/realism turned the laboratory into a space of magical predicting instead of scientific predicting, providing a platform for interspecies community building. Our aim was to think of relations with microbes beyond dichotomies of self/nonself or good/bad microbes etc. We asked: how do we let microbes living in and on bodies have more agency without anthropomorphising or totalising them or treating them as objects? We had no medical agenda, but we collected samples, and this ‘i-magickining’ became a four-hour performance for and with the academic participants: an event detecting microbial samples as a ‘tarot’ deck. Producing and constructing facts to predict outcomes is the daily work of science. Can we identify agents as more relational and distributed if we are not bound by factual results, even when we use the same methods as scientists do? (Photograph by the Labracadabra team)