A Ghost for a Clue

by C L R Draeco

  “That we could have some old, abandoned radio sensor inside us? Yeah, I think it’s possible.”

  “So you agree that there’s sentience involved? That hyperwills can communicate in real time because—”

  “Whoa, hey now.” I nearly stepped on the brakes. “Where the devil did that come from?”

  “That’s where this whole discussion started, honey,” Starr said. “That something triggers Thomas to appear beyond just the ionosphere disappearing.”

  Obviously, I hadn’t been paying attention to their discussion longer than I thought. “It gets triggered, that’s the point. It starts a transmission, not a conversation.” The road curved and the manor gates came into view. “If you accidentally pick up an I Love Lucy rerun on your TV, you don’t ask a question and expect Lucy to answer back.”

  “The hyperwill is trying to communicate but failing,” Torula said. “It has a mind crippled by circumstances—”

  “A mind?” I gestured at the open sky through the windshield. “There are formulas out there that exist with no intelligence at work. There are equations like . . . E=mc2. The cosmos blindly obeys that formula even without any sentience to decipher it. You don’t need a brain to store information or a mind to do calculations.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” Starr exclaimed. “You’re more compatible than I thought. Tor believes we don’t need bodies to be alive. And you believe we don’t need brains to figure things out.”

  The car slowed down as we approached the manor’s entranceway, concealed sensors automatically opening the gates. As we went past the archway, I had a sudden compulsion to adjust the rearview mirror so I could watch the gates as they swung closed. Then, as the ornate panels clicked shut, an idea jolted its way through my body, and I yanked the wheel towards the shoulder and hit the brakes.

  Starr and Torula gasped as they were thrust forward and jerked back by their seatbelts.

  “Sweet bejeezus!” Roy cried. “What the hell happened?”

  “Sorry about that. But I just had a . . . sentient moment.” I made a U-turn and headed back to the Green Manor archway, not at all sure I could find the words to explain what all these back-and-forth arguments had helped click into place.

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” I asked as the gates swung open, hoping Roy could help me out.

  Roy leaned forward and stared at the road leading back into the manor. “I just see my lunch break slippin’ away.”

  I pulled over, and everyone got out of the car, our sunglasses on against the noontime sun. I pointed at the gates. “Think of how the data from the car sticker gets to the scanner.”

  Roy shrugged. “Passive RFID.”

  “Data transmission, involving radio waves, that doesn’t need physical contact or even line of sight.” I pulled down my sunglasses and peered at Roy. “It’s how to trigger a hyperwill with no sentience involved.” I took in all their befuddled faces and waited for at least one of them to register comprehension before slipping my shades back on.

  “Holy hell and shit fire. It’s just gettin’ the right vibe!”

  “What do you mean?” Starr asked. “In Goldilocks terms.”

  The faint rustle of leaves prompted me to usher everyone—particularly a possibly dehydrated Torula—underneath a nearby tree. With everyone in the cooler shade, Roy proceeded to explain.

  He pointed at my windshield. “That Green Manor sticker holds data on a circuit, just sittin’ there doin’ nothin’, until—” he arced his hand towards the reader by the gates, “a scanner hits it. Now, hyperwills are like the data in those stickers. And you . . .” he pointed at Torula, “. . . are like a scanner, emittin’ EM signals that keep shiftin’ in frequency dependin’ on a lotta things. Your health, your hormonal makeup, your horoscope—”

  Torula tilted her head.

  “Just checkin’ if you’re payin’ attention. Anyways, once in a rare while, your frequency hits the sweet spot.” He thrust his fist into his palm. “The electromagnetic frequency that jives with a hyperwill. When that happens, you ‘connect’ and it uplinks data to you by modulatin’ your signal right back atcha. And under the best broadcast conditions— like sunset—you get to read the data it’s sendin’ loud and clear.”

  “So, in a nutshell . . .” I looked at Torula and scoured my vocabulary for terms I hoped she’d find more credible. “What we call a hyperwill is data in an electromagnetic signaling system that leverages modulated backscatter in the far field when triggered by specific frequencies from a complex vibration.”

  She grimaced. “What?”

  Oh-kay. So that didn’t work. “It’s just recorded info that automatically gets transmitted when hit by the right carrier wave frequency.”

  “You mean my signal, right?” Torula asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “The big diff, o’ course,” Roy said, “is that the hyperwill isn’t stuck on somebody’s windshield. It’s prob’ly hangin’ around on some waveform, and Jackson’s signal can’t ever be as steady as an electronic scanner. So I guess that explains why a ghost can’t linger for more’n a few seconds.”

  Starr adjusted the designer sunglasses on her nose. “So you’re saying that’s how a person could end up ‘psychic’ once in a while?”

  I nodded, conceding that was probably what had happened when I picked up some random voice in the airwaves that my brain associated with Franco. “And when it comes to the Verdabulary, it probably detected some stray signal and converted it into a coherent radio transmission that we managed to make sense of. In other words, it turned into a transducer.”

  “And that isn’t short for ‘trance inducer,’ all right?” Roy said with a snicker. “I guess you can say the Verdabulary’s like some cool digital psychic.”

  I smirked. “With no sentience or consciousness or life involved.”

  “Why not?” Torula asked, crossing her arms. “Do you have solid grounds for excluding them?”

  I rubbed the stubble on my chin and pondered: How to beam up someone’s consciousness. Was that ever explained in Star Trek? “We could gather some data,” I said with a sly glance at Roy. “We can build a man-sized Faraday cage and toss Eldritch into it. Let’s see what conscious transmissions we can detect out of that.”

  It was meant to be funny, but nobody laughed. Only then did I notice that everyone’s arms were tightly folded.

  I unfolded mine. “Look, okay, maybe a hyperwill could be someone’s neural data accidentally ‘recorded’ on an EM wave. But I wouldn’t call it a soul.”

  Starr stared at the manor gates and shook her head. “But I agree with Tor. Thomas has to be more than . . . stuff in a sticker.”

  Roy scrunched up his face. “So now we’re givin’ the hyperdude a name?”

  “I think we should. To remind us of what we’re dealing with.” Starr turned towards me. “With what you’re saying—it’s reducing someone’s consciousness to nothing but data streaming across the air like Wi-Fi.”

  “Listen.” I grimaced, hating having to say this to Starr. “I was like you once. Desperate to believe in an afterlife.” I took a deep breath. “Death hurts, I know. But forcing meanings onto signs that aren’t there doesn’t change the fact that—”

  “Yo, man,” Roy said. “What’s the harm in a widow believin’ her husband’s still watchin’ over her? Nobody knows for a fact he isn’t.”

  I gritted my teeth. That was like asking when it was time to tell a kid that Santa wasn’t real. I glanced at Starr, dressed in the brightest colors under the sun with her heart still shrouded in black. I lowered my gaze. It was worth giving a widow all the Christmases she can get.

  “So here’s what I think.” Roy thrust a thumb towards the gates. “If you’re right, then it means ‘Thomas’ could be lyin’ dormant in a standin’ wave somewhere with a message for some woman named Florence—just waitin’ for Jackson’s frequency so it gets triggered to life.”

  I groaned in reflex at the sound of that last word.

  “I
n a manner o’ speakin’, that is,” said Roy. “It’s not exactly . . . ‘life.’”

  Torula peered over her aviators at Roy.

  “Or, well, yeah, maybe it is,” Roy said, correcting himself yet again. “You know, like he’s hibernatin’ and we wake ’im up.”

  “This doesn’t disqualify life,” Torula said, gesturing towards the gate. “It sounds a lot like basic signal transduction—a simple biochemical process.”

  Biochemical? Again? My apologies to Santa. “Look, I know you’re a biologist, but this fixation on life is getting too far. Even if it were neural information from someone who was once alive, right now, it’s just inanimate data, Spore. It. Is. Not. Alive.”

  Torula moved towards me. “I’ve seen him, Bram. I’ve felt him. He’s been in my room. He’s been in my bed! I can tell that he’s not . . . a program.” She drew closer, and even though I couldn’t see her eyes through her sunglasses, I felt the intensity of her gaze. “I understand your explanation. But can you at least try to see things from my perspective? That a person’s consciousness could persist and reach out to the living, devoid of a coat of flesh, the same way memory can exist outside of a brain?”

  “Jesus, Spore. If anyone could talk to us after death, then even they would have done it.”

  “They?” Torula asked.

  I held my breath as my mind constricted at the unbidden thought.

  Torula stepped back, then planted a hand on her brow. “Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. I should’ve realized sooner. And to think I’ve been comparing them to fruit bats.”

  “What’s goin’ on? Who’s they? Who’s them?”

  “His parents,” Torula said.

  Everyone fell silent for a moment.

  Starr leaned towards Roy. “He lost them in a plane crash, honey.”

  “Oh man.”

  I let my breath out slowly and turned to look towards the distance, only now getting in touch with what I’d been feeling without knowing. “I wasn’t just thinking about them. I was thinking of . . . everybody. Everyone who’s passed away and all of us who will pass away. I’d like to respect their memories as that of people. Not zombies or ghosts or any other creature that crawls about in the dark to survive.” My mind played back visions of my parents—laughing, waving, cheering, talking. Memories of my childhood that were dear to me. “I’ve accepted that they’re gone, and I’d like to remember them as real, accomplished, wonderful people—who made me appreciate happiness, ambition, and love that can last a lifetime. Why turn them into suffering, decomposing creatures that can still think and feel? I don’t see how believing in an existence like that could make death less painful to accept.”

  “Which is why . . .” Torula lifted her sunglasses. “. . . I would like to make sure there really is nothing for us to worry about—either because death truly is permanent, and hyperwills are nothing more than electromagnetic illusions. Or because whatever it is that lives on truly is doing well and is happy—not at all struggling to survive in the dark. Because what if it isn’t so? What if, in essence, they still are conscious but helpless people? People who might be in need of our help?”

  I stared at her, in no mood to argue over the definition of the word people found in every dictionary out there.

  “Why don’t we test it?” Torula asked.

  “What?”

  “Your hypothesis,” she said. “That the hyperwill’s perceptibility is triggered by a specific carrier wave frequency, because it’s an electromagnetic signaling system that automatically responds to a complex vibration which I generate. Correct?”

  My mouth fell open.

  “How do we test that?” Starr asked.

  “Obviously, we get a really big Faraday cage and toss a medium into it,” Torula said with a smart-aleck smirk.

  I winced, hating that I knew the fellow who’d given her that stupid idea.

  “You’re going to ask Eldritch to get tested?” Starr asked.

  “Not him. Me,” Torula said.

  “Hey, now we’re talkin’!”

  “Wait, what?” I asked, stunned. “Now you think you’re a bloody psychic?”

  “To go by this RFID analogy, you need to stabilize my signal, right? So we can have a reliable transmitter that can communicate with Thomas?”

  “Say nothin’ more.” Roy lit up like a furnace suddenly on fire. “It’s not a Faraday shield we need. It’s a frequency and resonance reader.” He snapped his fingers and aimed both pointers at me. “You remember that soundproof booth I got? I’m gonna modify it to sample Jackson’s signature that triggers Thomas. Let’s go get it.”

  “I’m sorry.” I tapped on my iHub, my perfect calendar now in a mess. “I was planning to leave after lunch. My boss gave me a new deadline.”

  “Of course, it’s a deadline,” Torula said. “If it were alive, you wouldn’t be bothered.”

  I raised my hands in a suspended shrug, aching to say that I had to do this if I wanted to keep my good name at my job. A job that helped me qualify for a slot on a starship. Possibly two slots if she would consider leaving Earth so we could be together. For the rest of our lives. In the magnificence of outer space.

  But all that came out was a grunt.

  “You just go and do what you gotta do, Morrison,” Roy said.

  “Sorry I can’t be here to help set up,” I said.

  “No problemo,” he said. “I can have m’boys at the garage bring it over. By the time you get back tomorrow, I’ll have a dog whistle you can blow so hyperwills will come rushin’ to our door.”

  20

  At A Perfect Spot

  I returned to the Green Manor late the next day, hoping that by the end of it, I’d finally get to ask Torula what I had come to ask. The sun had cooled itself down to a comfortable companion as I ambled down the stone pathways towards Greenhouse 3C. I took in the vast, refreshing scenery Torula enjoyed every day, and I was about to ask her to trade it all in for the cramped interior of a space craft. Did I have any chance in the world to convince her?

  This was just one swatch of the Earth that she loved. A landscape that shimmered with dew in the morning, sparkled with pin lights at night, and now, in the late afternoon, it—

  I blinked in surprise at a gazebo. Was that Torula and Starr over there? I detoured quickly to get a closer look. Yes, it was. They were both seated on a bench, their backs turned to me.

  My pace quickened at the chance to speak with Torula at a perfect spot, away from all the surveillance. As I drew close enough to hear them, but before either of them caught sight of me, Starr said, “Did you ever tell Bram?”

  “No,” Torula said.

  Tell me what? How she felt about me? What she thought about us?

  I ducked behind a cluster of shrubs and strained my ears.

  “I can’t believe you never opened up to me about this,” Starr said. “Best friends don’t keep secrets from each other.”

  “I don’t know.” Torula sighed. “I guess I didn’t want to reveal any kind of . . . weakness.”

  “Weakness? Honey, this isn’t something you can help.”

  “I suppose. So . . . what should I do now?”

  “We have to tell you-know-who,” Starr said.

  I puffed my chest up like a gorilla out to show who was alpha and took a step out from behind the bush. Then Torula said, “Tell Roy? It’s embarrassing.”

  Roy? I stepped back under cover. Why the bloody hell were they going to tell Roy?

  “Honey, he needs to know every possible variable that could affect your frequency. Including that other important thing.”

  “What other thing?”

  “The significance of Bram’s presence. I mean, everyone—from your mother to our own chairman—could put their finger on when all this began. Except for Bram himself.”

  I craned my neck to get a glimpse of Torula’s face, but all I could see was hair.

  She let out a long, very audible sigh. “You know I just want him to leave.”

  �
�Yes, you’ve made that clear enough. But I don’t think you’re being honest about why.”

  Her mother, I’ll bet. I curled my hands into fists.

  “Come on, honey. You have to open up to me. It’s like I’m trying to diagnose a disease with the patient holding back the most crucial information.”

  “All right. You want a diagnosis? Okay.” Torula gathered her hair up and backwards, allowing me to see her face. “I think Bram’s like a brain tumor.”

  Bloody what? Did she know I was listening? I leaned forward to get a better look and nearly scraped my eye on a twig.

  “On holocalls, he’d been benign and dormant. In person, he turns into something malignant that infests my mind. I swear, he casts a smell over me each time he’s near.”

  “I think you mean spell, honey.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Starr gasped. “Oh, my golly gee, that must be it! The smell of him.”

  “What?”

  “Molecules of Bram’s essence travel up your nasal passages, jolt your nerve endings, and change the way you oscillate. It’s so basic, how one’s scent can affect another person’s biochemical makeup. You gave the example yourself. Women smell each other’s sweat and regulate each other’s menses.”

  I crooked a finger to gingerly move aside a mottled curtain of leaves.

  “Bram wasn’t here the first time, remember?” Torula said.

  Starr thrust a fist into her hip. “But his jacket was. I threw it in your face.”

  Torula looked at her awry. “I think that’s stretching it.”

  “It’s primal attraction at work.” Starr fished her sparkling cell phone out of her pocket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Telling Bram about it.”

  I clutched my iHub in a desperate attempt to muffle it. Torula snatched Starr’s phone away in time. “You most certainly are not.”

  Whew.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed about, honey. It’s long been established that natural body odor is more important to sexual attraction than physical appearance.”

  Torula groaned. “Oh, I can’t believe I’m so . . . so—”