A Ghost for a Clue

by C L R Draeco

  Part of me wondered if it was her mother’s ploy to block my attempts to get closer to Torula. I’d always feared Triana wanted her only daughter to follow in her footsteps to veer as far away as possible from a wedding march.

  A wedding. Wow. I heaved a breath, surprised by my own thought—then surprised myself yet again when I broke into a smile.

  Dr. Grant’s face suddenly loomed inside my head. Baby steps, young man. Baby steps. I wiped the grin off my face and warned myself not to scare Torula away.

  Today could be my lucky day. Despite Torula’s objections, I’d shown up at the Green Manor for the start of my forty-five-day stint as a “psychic’s apprentice.” But she didn’t know I was aiming to make it my last day too. The plan was to prove that talking bacteria had nothing to do with talking to the dead.

  I’d spent much of the morning combing through all the garden plots inside Greenhouse 3C, checking for dubious devices or cables or anything that could lead to an explanation for a hyperwill. Whether pointing to a hoax or an accidental trigger, I found nothing suspicious and headed back to the central platform.

  The sun shone hot, high, and bright, and all the plants seemed greener than green, spreading their leafy arms out, enjoying the morning and its humidity. Satisfying for the plants, stifling for the humans. I couldn’t wait to get to the central platform with its cooling fans and darkened Transhade.

  Starr and Torula stood leaning against the console table, listening to Roy’s excited chatter. As I climbed the wooden stairs, Roy froze midway through a sentence. “Yo, listen. Can you hear that?”

  I nearly stumbled on a step and paused in the silence.

  “Hear what?” Starr asked.

  Roy broke into a wide grin. “The bacteria’re talkin’.” Starr let loose her brilliant laugh as Roy swooped to his chair to call something up on his monitor. “Take a look at this, Morrison. The proof we wanted. We got us electromagnetic waves in the 1-kilohertz frequency from inside the RF shielding.” He jabbed both pointer fingers towards the Faraday cage with its Petri dish setup.

  “And we verified it, too, with one of the manor’s microbiologists,” Starr said. “She confirmed that bacteria can do radio waves.”

  “I suspected as much,” I said, feeling smug like a detective who’d exposed a crime millennia after it had been committed. “Though I can’t imagine how bacteria can do radio.”

  “Apparently,” Torula said, “the DNA of highly developed bacteria forms in loops unlike our double helix. When free electrons traveling through those loops go through differing energy levels, they produce photons.”

  “Great. So our job here’s done.” I felt like dusting off my hands even though I never had to lift a finger. I smiled at Torula. Maybe tonight, we can have that dinner date.

  “Yeah, we got to prove what Brighton said.” Roy gestured at the Faraday cage. “We’ve discovered some ‘primordial form o’ ESP.’ It’s also what that shrink, Berger, was lookin’ for, right?”

  “No,” I said, frowning at Roy. “That wasn’t the point.”

  “They’re not using ESP.” Torula picked up her glass for a drink only to find it empty. “It’s EEC.” She put the glass back down. “Endogenous Electromagnetic Communication.”

  Roy cocked a brow at her. “You just made that up, right?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Torula gathered up her thick mass of hair and clamped it up against the heat. “It’s long been postulated that endogenous electromagnetic fields of organisms may act as both sender and receiver of electromagnetic bioinformation. In short, we may have merely identified—not discovered—what Hans Berger was looking for.”

  Roy nodded. “Yeah, and that’s what Brighton thinks. That’s how the dead can talk with us.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “This isn’t supposed to go there.”

  “I agree,” Torula said. “I don’t think that’s what Eldritch intended either.”

  “Great.” I sighed with relief.

  Torula walked to the Faraday cage. “He said this setup was to show us the mechanism ‘by which a soul leaves the body.’ So I think he wanted us to recognize that bacteria can indeed transmit bioinformation out of their bodies as they die. He sees it as the precursor of something more complex. That’s why Mr. D said this setup supports my theory.” She beamed and looked at me. “Thanks, Bram.”

  I gaped at her. “For what?”

  “For borrowing the Petri dish setup. You showed us the means by which a person’s neural data can be transmitted—out of a dying human body—and stay intact even after death.”

  I tried to sift through the jumble of words inside my head, none of which formed, “You’re welcome.”

  “Hold on a minute, honey.” Starr pursed her glossy red lips. “Jumping from bacterial transmission to soul migration is quite a fantastic leap. The material we’re talking about here are very short fragments.”

  I nodded. My thoughts—more or less, and sort of—exactly.

  “That’s only because we’re looking at transformation events in bacteria,” Torula said. “Imagine how millions of years of complex evolution could have built on that process.”

  “Spore,” I rubbed a hand uneasily over my chin. “All we have here are dying germs, not stand-ins for human consciousness.”

  She turned to me with eyes that wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Are you saying it’s impossible because it’s minuscule compared to the magnitude of the eventual outcome? That’s like saying discovering the existence of rhodopsin in no way helps explain the evolution of the human eye.”

  I dug my fingers into my scalp as I struggled to piece together what she was talking about. “Look, if what you’re saying is that radio waves can make hyperwills ‘happen’—then all it explains is why they appear most at twilight. It has nothing to do with—”

  “Twilight?” Starr asked, her thickly mascaraed eyes widening. “You mean, you’ve made sense of the time factor?”

  “I think so. It boils down to ideal broadcast conditions.”

  “How do you mean?” Starr asked, moving closer.

  I glanced up, past the Transhade overhead, at the intense sunshine penetrating the greenhouse roof. “Low frequency transmissions travel better at dusk or dawn. It gives a window of a few minutes.”

  Torula squinted at me, and I could almost see the steam rising off the top of her head.

  Roy’s mouth fell open. “Holy shit. I get where you’re takin’ this.”

  “It’s about time, mate.” I wiped a bead of sweat off my forehead, then grabbed a stool and sat down.

  “Why?” Starr asked. “What makes twilight special?”

  “It’s kinda complicated,” Roy said. “You want the long version or the short version?”

  “We don’t need a doctorate on it, honey,” Starr said, taking a seat too. “Just the basics.”

  “But not too basic either,” Torula said, settling down next to her in front of Roy.

  “Jee-zus. You’re like a pair o’ Goldilocks. Not too hard. Not too easy. Okay, here’s the fairy tale version. Once upon a time, a lotta people listened to AM radio stations which, by day, relied mainly on transmitter power and antennas on the ground. But every night, magical changes happen in the atmosphere, allowing signals to travel farther.”

  “What changes?” Starr asked.

  “In the light o’ day, the ionosphere’s D layer absorbs radio waves about 10 megahertz and below. But after sunset—it disappears! With nothin’ to absorb those signals at night, everythin’ in the lower frequencies gets to bounce back and travel farther distances across the Earth. And if the whole path were in darkness, then that radio signal can go even farther. Is that clear enough for you, Goldie? What about you, Snow White?”

  “Clear as daylight, Brother Grim.” Torula glanced up through the transparent roof at the blazing sky. “So broadcasting conditions improve all night? But,” she looked at me, “you said it’s a window of only a few minutes.”

  “You get peaks associ
ated with the sunrise-sunset terminators. It’s those peaks that last ten minutes at best.”

  Starr got up and gazed out towards the cluster of papayas where the hyperwill had appeared twice at dusk. “I don’t understand,” she said. “How does this explain three a.m.?”

  “What’s with three a.m.?” I asked.

  Her eyes grew wide, and she turned towards Torula. “Honey, you haven’t told them?”

  “Told us what?” I asked.

  Torula swallowed and flicked the hair off her brow. “This isn’t right. We shouldn’t be considering anecdotal—”

  “Told us what?” This time, I addressed Starr.

  Torula swiveled her seat and turned away, like someone avoiding having to look at her own bandage getting torn off.

  “There were two incidents at her apartment,” Starr said, “both at around three a.m. The first was when her brother saw it watching her sleep before it walked into the wall, and the second was when she woke up with it sleeping with her in bed, naked. Then it disappeared.”

  What the bloody hell? I glared at Torula. “When will you trust me again not to laugh—”

  “It’s not about trust.” She got up and paced, gesturing with her hands. “That happened there; this happened here. Notice the difference?”

  “Don’t mean to scare you but . . .” Roy said. “. . . it could be an incubus.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “A male demon that has sex with women in their sleep and drains the life out of ’em.”

  Starr snorted. “You can’t be serious, Roy Radio.”

  He raised a brow. “What if I was?”

  Torula shook her head. “The incubus is nothing but a convenient excuse concocted by women in Medieval times to conceal their extra-marital affairs. Just like the succubus—a female demon that purportedly had sex with innocent men in their sleep and gave them diseases.”

  “Succubussss,” Roy said. “Doesn’t that word just capture what it does? You can almost hear it slurpin’ the life outta you. And listen to the plural! Succubi. Sounds like two bisexual ghosts that come suck you in your sleep.”

  Starr and I laughed while Torula inhaled deeply like a fire-breathing dragon about to incinerate an unwanted guest.

  Roy cocked his head at her. “Tell me somethin’, Jackson. You ashamed to be studyin’ this?”

  Torula scowled at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “There’ve been two other manifestations—both with you there—that you didn’t bother to report. You shouldn’t be holdin’ out stuff like that. It could be important.”

  “Well,” Torula said, “what’s important to me could still be easily dismissed as male bovine excrement.”

  “Say what?”

  “She means bullshit,” I said.

  Roy clucked his tongue. “My ex and her Pekingese used to wake up at three a.m. and make a frickin’ racket about things only the two of ’em could see. The vet told me that dogs really can see, smell, and hear things people can’t. Matter o’ fact, he said a good guard dog doesn’t just protect you from human trespassers but from invisible ones too.” He shook his head. “He’s a damn good vet but god-frickin’ strange.”

  “So what’s with three a.m.?” Starr prodded.

  “That’s the witchin’ hour. My ex said it’s the opposite o’ Christ’s hour o’ death. Or that it’s the devil’s way o’ showin’ irreverence to the Holy Trinity.”

  “Oh my.” Starr fingered the crucifix on her neck. “I say one thing’s for sure. This hyper ‘Thomas’ is sticking to some kind of schedule we still don’t understand.”

  “Right,” Torula said. “Which means your radio waves at dusk or dawn won’t explain those incidents that happened to me and my brother at three a.m.”

  I scratched my forehead and frowned at Torula. “What happened to that being there and this being here?”

  The bold overture of the Star Base theme played on my iHub. I glanced at the caller ID, and my lungs deflated at the sight of it. “Bugger. It’s my boss.”

  Torula’s eyes instantly reflected my anxiety.

  I spoke into my wristband and put on my most casual tone as I walked down the platform away from everyone’s earshot. “Hi, Dave! What’s up?”

  “What are you wasting your time on over there?” came the harsh question.

  “I’m . . . making progress.”

  “You damn well better be.”

  To my relief, there was no mention or question about ghost videos or psychics or anything in the Twilight Zone. It was a simple demand that I send in my design proposal for Project Husserl tomorrow.

  It was a problem much easier to solve, but a problem nonetheless; I’d hardly started. I tried to haggle for an extension, but it was nonnegotiable. I was left with no choice but to give in to the deadline.

  I turned around and jumped at the sight of Torula standing right behind me. “Jesus.”

  “Did he ask why you’re here?”

  “No.” I sighed. “False alarm. It’s about work and this new deadline I got.”

  “But you’re staying on and risking everything until it’s more than a false alarm?”

  “Of course. I mean, no. Nothing’s at risk. Like I said, we’re all done here.”

  “Bram . . .” She rolled her eyes, seemingly about to argue with me—but . . . I was wrong. Her head tilted backwards, and she swayed.

  I lunged forward and steadied her. “Are you all right?”

  She turned towards the cluster of papayas as I held her. I looked too, but there was nothing to see but a plot full of shrubs standing in bright sunlight.

  Then I heard Franco’s voice from right behind me. “Did you get my message?”

  I jerked around, but of course, there was nobody there. It was all in my head.

  “What message?” Torula asked, her eyes closed as she leaned against me.

  Bloody hell. It’s not all in my head.

  “What . . . did you hear?” I asked.

  “I can’t tell you if you don’t say what message you’re talking about.” She planted a hand flat on her forehead and opened her eyes. “I must be dehydrated from the heat.”

  “Let’s get you back under the Transhade.”

  I ushered her towards the workstation as my mind scrambled to explain that voice. Radio waves? Why? And more importantly—what the hell were we hearing?

  19

  A Voice In Your Head

  Alarmed by Torula’s dizzy spell, the team agreed to head out to some place much cooler than the cafeteria for lunch. I sat, arms folded, behind the wheel of my partially autonomous rental as it headed down the winding tree-lined road that was the Green Manor’s endless driveway. Torula, in the seat next to me, spouted a sentence with too many three- and four-syllable words in them, aimed at Starr and Roy. I was too immersed in my own thoughts to join in their discussion.

  What could possibly explain that disembodied voice Torula and I had heard? Should I bring it up? She still didn’t know it wasn’t me, and that to my ears, it had sounded exactly like Franco.

  The Verdabulary could probably pick up stray radio waves anytime, but Starr and Torula didn’t see it as a possible explanation because of those incidents that happened outside of the manor. And Roy might just do a dance of joy over my “superpower” of calling upon the dead. I think it’s best they didn’t know for now.

  “I completely disagree,” Torula said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because many of the abilities we possess now have their origins in single-celled organisms.”

  Bugger. I’d only been talking to myself, and I had no idea what they’d been debating.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Oh, don’t pretend you’ve never experienced it,” Starr said. “People say it all the time like there’s a voice in their head that tells them something or other. I sometimes end up doing things I can’t explain, and I just tell myself an angel whispered it to me.”

  Well, I’ll
be stuffed. They were talking exactly about the puzzle in my head.

  “So it’s viable, isn’t it?” Torula asked. “That extrasensory perception could simply be through a biological mechanism for detecting radio waves?”

  I looked into the rearview mirror at Roy, eager to hear his opinion.

  “Heck, maybe bacteria sorta invented it, yeah,” Roy said. “But evolution must’ve figured it wasn’t a good gamble, so it put its chips on vocal cords and ears and all that shit, and thank God for that, ’cause now we got rock n’ roll!”

  “Hallelujah,” Starr said with a laugh and slapped a high five with him in the back seat.

  Torula remained stoic. “But it also means a biological radio can still exist, doesn’t it? Maybe somewhere in our brains?”

  “Not if nature was bankin’ on gettin’ the fittest to survive. Sound waves are the way to go. I mean, didn’t the earliest life forms evolve in the oceans?”

  “Yes, they did,” Starr said. “Why?”

  “Well, even underwater, both light and sound do a lot better ’n radio at travelin’. And as hot as you babes are, an object at your body temperature won’t be emittin’ much o’ radio. It’d be too weak to be worth anythin’. Even the infrared you give off easily outshouts it.”

  “But what you’re saying is—” Torula pursed her lips. “It’s not impossible.”

  “What isn’t, honey?”

  Torula twisted in her seat to address them at the back. “For evolution to have fumbled with a receptor for radio signals, and then . . . set it aside. The most physicists can say is that it’s impractical—but not impossible, and therefore, vestiges could still be there.”

  “Yeah,” I piped in. “Which probably explains why we sometimes see or hear things that we think have no possible source.” Like a voice in your head that sounds like a dead friend. It was my turn to thank Torula. “Great explanation, Spore.”

  She looked at me, brows raised. “You agree with me?”