A Ghost for a Clue

by C L R Draeco

  Out in the sunlight, my senses normalized, and I made my way underneath the shade of a tree a short distance from the greenhouse. I laid Torula down on the grass and cradled her head on my lap.

  I stared at her chest, and only when I saw the normal up and down rhythm of her breathing did I relax my arms, but every other muscle in my body remained clenched.

  Starr crouched on her shins and leaned over to slip Torula’s hyperjammer back on. A cool breeze brought along the scent of fragrant bushes nearby and mixed with Starr’s fruity perfume. It seemed enough to nudge Torula’s eyes open.

  “Tor, can you see me?” Starr asked, bowing low to peer into her friend’s face.

  Torula nodded. “Amply,” she said, her eyes on Starr’s cleavage.

  “Oh, thank goodness.” Starr clasped her hands together, and I managed a normal breath.

  “You okay, Jackson?” Roy asked.

  “I feel pins and needles up and down my arms, but other than that, I’m okay.” She raised her head a bit.

  “You’re not okay,” I said through gritted teeth. “So don’t get up yet.”

  “Take my blood sample,” Torula said, relaxing back down on my lap.

  “I’ll go get the kit,” Roy said and jogged back to the greenhouse.

  Eldritch’s black wingtip shoes crushed blades of grass as he approached. “That was foolhardy of you, Dr. Jackson. I’ve already warned you about spirit attachment.”

  “What did you see, Starr?” Torula asked. “Was he trying to show me something?”

  “It wasn’t very clear. Just a woman’s silhouette. A hazy figure in a long, flowing dress.” Starr sat back on the grass, smoothening her skirt over her knees. “But what more did Thomas say to you? I didn’t hear anything besides, ‘Tell her.’”

  “I couldn’t hear a word at all,” Torula said. “Your jewelry was making too much noise.”

  “What jewelry?” Starr brandished both her arms. She had a watch on one wrist and a chunky pink bracelet on the other. “These don’t make a sound, honey.”

  Torula shook her head. “But I could’ve sworn . . .” She pushed aside a lock of hair that the wind had blown across her face.

  “Perhaps it was another message,” Eldritch said, his slicked-down hair impervious to the breeze. “The sounds you heard might hold a deeper meaning for the hyperwill. Remember, they speak in symbols.”

  “What symbol could there be in my jewelry?” Starr asked. “Could it be something Florence had worn?”

  “Florence isn’t real,” I said. “Torula put two random syllables together in her head. That’s all it is.”

  “What if—” Starr paused and suddenly clutched her pink bracelet. “A woman . . .” Her eyes grew wide. “Of course! Thomas wants us to find a woman named Pinkie.”

  “Pinkie?” I nearly choked saying it.

  “I’m sure you recognize the painting Thomas looks like. The Blue Boy? And my jewelry was calling attention to itself with sounds. Maybe he’s trying to tell us that he’s looking for the spirit of—”

  “The Pink Girl?” I asked, in disbelief. “What are you doing? Getting spiritual guidance from a bangle?”

  “Let her speak, Mr. Morrison. She needs to explore all its possible meanings,” Eldritch said.

  “Explore? You mean guess, don’t you? Make things up like it was a game?”

  “Gordon Bennett! I’ve had enough of this.” Eldritch glared at me. “Every day, you come here and watch us take wild swings, and all you do is scoff at our attempts. You’re like a popcorn seller who doesn’t care which team wins or loses. You’re just happy to get in for free to be with Dr. Jackson.”

  I jabbed a finger at him. “Let me tell you who ought to be selling popcorn—”

  “Oh, look!” Starr cried, louder than she needed to. “Roy’s here!”

  Roy ran over and handed her a small medical pouch. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks, honey. I used to be a candy striper. Now, I’m just a candy snacker.” Starr’s sparkling laugh did what it could to lighten the atmosphere.

  Eldritch turned and stepped away to gaze at the greenhouse, clipping his hands behind his back—as if to say “conversation over.” While Starr put a tourniquet on Torula’s arm, Roy called the clinic. To distract—and calm—myself, I listened to his every word as he gave instructions for someone to come pick up the blood sample.

  “All done,” Starr said, tapping on the tube of freshly collected blood.

  “Not bad,” Torula said, flexing her arm. “I hardly felt it.” She pushed herself up. “Believe it or not, I feel perfectly fine.”

  “Well, I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “Okay, I concede,” Torula said. “I’m probably borderline anemic, but then, I’m close to that time of the month, so maybe it’s just PMS.”

  I frowned even as I helped her up. “Just have a seat for a while anyway. You scared the bollocks off of me.” I ushered her towards a stone bench encircling the base of the tree.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as she sat down. “But I had to . . . test a hypothesis.”

  “That you’re more stubborn than an ass?”

  “That when presented with the nourishment he preferred, Thomas would feed. You can’t deny the effect. When I came in, he energized. He responded to me.”

  “Spore, he looked life-like even to me. But I just put skin and clothes on a ball of smoke. It’s a graphic simulation.”

  She tilted her head questioningly. “It got cold in there. Was that part of your simulation too?”

  “It couldn’t have been.” Starr glanced at me. “Was it?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “And I didn’t feel anything.”

  “Yo, I felt it too,” Roy said. “But I checked the data. There was no temperature drop. It’s frickin’ crazy.”

  Torula glanced around at all of us, her expression both teasing and tentative.

  Oh no. I knew that look.

  Roy squinted at her. “Y’know what’s goin’ on, dontcha?”

  She quirked her mouth. “I looked through some of my mother’s research papers on the nervous system and came up with a shaky hypothesis.”

  Roy plopped down beside her on the stone bench. “Shake it away, Jackson.”

  “Cutaneous thermosensation is mediated by unmyelinated fibers that respond to frequencies within the range of a hyperwill.”

  Roy snorted. “Y’know what. It’s your turn to talk to me like I’m Goldilocks. With nothin’ more than two syllables.”

  Starr laughed, and we all waited for Torula’s “translation.” Even Eldritch turned to face us, staying at a distance, this time clipping his hands in front of him.

  Torula tempered a smile. “All right. Here goes. Most of our nerves have a white, fatty coating that helps them conduct signals faster. But . . .” She paused and looked at Roy. “I can’t give you its name because I’ll go beyond my limit.”

  “I’m givin’ you a pass. Just this once.”

  “Myelin. And there are a bunch of nerves called C fibers which don’t have this coat. And they’re found in human skin.”

  “Go on.” Roy nodded.

  “C fibers respond to cold. Meaning when it gets cold, it tells the brain it’s cold, so you feel it.”

  “So you’re sayin’ hyperwills are cold creatures? So our skin reacts—”

  “No, they’re not. You know how capsai—” She paused again, probably subtracting syllables from her thoughts. “A compound in hot peppers. Our brain tells us it’s hot even though it’s not.”

  “You mean like if I shove a thermometer into a habanero at room temperature, it’ll read normal, but one bite and it burns my tongue off?”

  “Right. That’s because the nerve sensor for heat is the same one that picks up the signal from peppers. The brain reads both as hot even though the other is not.”

  “And the C fibers read for cold?” Roy asked.

  “Yes, and unlike other nerve fibers that respond to hundreds or thousands of hert
z, the naked C fibers respond to less than 10 hertz.”

  Sweet Jesus. Did she really just make sense of it?

  “No shit.” Roy swabbed a hand over his stubbled head. “Hyperwills resonate with those naked fibers in our skin?”

  Eldritch unclipped his hands and moved a step closer.

  “Precisely,” Torula said. “Unmyelinated, C low-threshold mechanoreceptors are activated by a five to ten hertz stimulus. Which is why the Verdabulary didn’t pick up a temperature drop. It’s because the stimulus wasn’t cold at all. It was an electromagnetic signal at a frequency that activated the same afferent nerve fibers that transduce, encode, and transmit information at innocuous, cold temperatures.”

  “Goddamn. I can’t believe I understood that!” Roy cried.

  “Bravo.” Starr applauded with a laugh, and a bird overhead twittered.

  “So,” Roy said, “the cold isn’t because of any endothermic reaction goin’ on. No energy’s gettin’ generated that way?”

  Torula shook her head. “Bioelectrogenesis. That’s the power source, Roy. And my blood tests can give you a clue as to what the process does to my body’s resources.”

  “Your blood tests, huh?” He looked like he was jotting it down in that notebook in his head. “Can dogs do the same bioelectromajingle thing?”

  Torula crinkled her brow. “I . . . would assume?”

  From down a stone path, a nurse came jogging towards us. “Hey there,” he called out. “I’m here to collect the blood sample of Dr. Torula Jackson?”

  “Here you go,” Starr said. “Thanks for coming over.”

  “No problem,” the nurse said as he took the vial from her. “Oh, and uh, you’re supposed to change the frequency.”

  “Frequency of what, honey?”

  “I dunno. The guy who called just told me to pick this up and tell you to change it.”

  “Yo, I’m the one who called,” Roy said, raising his hand. “I didn’t say anything about any frequency.”

  Alarms and a red flag suddenly went wild inside my head.

  The nurse shrugged. “Just repeating what I was told. Gotta go.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Can you remember the exact words of the caller?”

  “Exact words?” The guy shrugged. “Uh, like . . .‘We’re right outside Greenhouse 3C. Could you please send someone over to pick up the blood sample of Dr. Torula Jackson.’ And he said thanks.”

  “Right. That’s what I said.”

  I nodded. That’s exactly what I’d heard Roy say.

  But the nurse continued, “Then you asked if I could—”

  “Yo, that’s all I said, then I hung up.”

  “Uh, you said thanks, and then you asked if I could hear you. When I said yes, you said, ‘Bro, you gotta tell them to adjust the frequency.’ Then you hung up.”

  A cold sensation coursed through me, in one intense sweep from head to toe. Could this—all this—still be part of one elaborate VN prank? “Did it sound like him?” I asked, bobbing my head towards Roy. “The one who said to adjust the frequency.”

  The nurse shrugged again. “Why wouldn’t it? It was the same call.” He held up the vial of blood. “Okay if I go now?”

  “Sure,” Starr said. “Thanks, honey.” She waited until the guy had jogged a good distance, then turned and addressed Torula and Eldritch. “Okay, can either of you explain why Thomas is impersonating Roy now?”

  “Clearly,” Eldritch said, “the spirit is desperate to get his message through, and he’s telling us, through an engineer, what needs to be done.”

  “What are you sayin’? He possessed me? Possession my ass. It was obviously just a split pairs fault in the service network that caused some crosstalk. What the hell kinda ghost would use the word ‘bro?’”

  I swabbed my hand over my mouth. I knew exactly who would—but I needed proof before saying a thing, or else I’d be taking potshots just like they were.

  Eldritch squinted at me. “You seem to have another explanation?”

  “Me?” I raised my brows as innocently as I could and shook my head.

  Eldritch glanced around at us. “It appears you have all forgotten that we may be dealing with two distinct spirits here. One is Thomas, and the other, the one whose manifestation was caught on video. For all you know, the Verdabulary could be opening up channels to even more.”

  I rubbed at an itch that I didn’t have on my nose.

  “We need to recalibrate.” Eldritch turned towards Torula. “Meanwhile, you need to go to the cafeteria immediately. Eat to replenish your strength.”

  “I feel fine,” Torula said.

  “You mustn’t allow yourself to stay weak after a psychic episode. You need to stay strong to fight it off in case it chooses to attach again. Dr. Benedict, please make sure she eats.”

  “I’ll be more than glad to show her how it’s done, honey.”

  Eldritch then addressed me and Roy. “I need you to figure out what this ‘change in frequency’ means, but more importantly, how you can ensure that communicating with hyperwills using the Verdabulary will not bring harm to humans, particularly Dr. Jackson. Let me know what you’ll need.”

  Eldritch headed down one path as Starr tugged Torula to walk down another. Roy and I turned towards the greenhouse, but Roy stopped in his tracks, spun on his heel, and trotted after Eldritch. “Yo, wait a sec, Brighton. Gotta ask you somethin’.”

  That left me, alone and reluctant, heading back to deal with this creature they called Thomas—or to uncover if it was nothing but an elaborate practical joke from somebody I once knew.

  34

  Virtual Nexus

  It did look like a grown-up version of the kid in The Blue Boy painting.

  Standing atop the workstation of Greenhouse 3C, I stared at my 3D caricature of Thomas—the manufactured image of a memory that refused to die. I had tossed this together to prove a point.

  Could Franco have orchestrated some audio version of this together? Just for kicks?

  I sat down at the console and navigated to the Virtual Nexus website and searched for Franco’s account. It asked for my password—which I quickly found in that unopened email I’d ignored all this time.

  Franco had left me one message. The same one Sienna had told me about: Him telling me to “make my move” on that childhood friend of mine whom he thought sounded great, then ending it with, “Carpe diem, bro.” But that was it.

  I clicked on VN’s support chat box and asked where I could find the files of phone calls. The person on the other end searched all records related to Franco’s account and found nothing else addressed to me. Franco had never recorded any messages, whether audio or video. Not for me. Not for anyone.

  As I slowly turned to gaze at the image in the chamber we had come to call Thomas, goose bumps made a chilling crawl from the nape of my neck. Was it . . . could it . . . It couldn’t be. There was no way that hyperwill was Franco. There was nothing about it that pointed to him in any way.

  I moved to the control panel and turned off all the hyperwill’s computer-generated layers, leaving behind the blob of a cloud that everyone else considered alive. I walked down the platform and approached the chamber, stopping right in front of where I assumed its “face” would be.

  It rose higher from where it hovered as if to look me in the eye. The mist roiled dreamily, its shapeless coils unfurling and twisting back.

  “Franco,” I whispered. “Is that you?” I leaned in close, my eyes scrutinizing the display for any indication of life. Any overt movement. A pattern or rhythm. Anything besides chaos.

  As I watched, two smoky tendrils coiled close together, uneven whorls about to form eyes. I held my breath as they darkened—poised to coalesce. But the misty ribbons spiraled apart and disappeared into the haze.

  I sighed in disappointment, ready to be convinced but finding nothing. If this wasn’t a hoax, then—“What the bloody hell are you?” I took a few pondering steps backwards, then turned away and headed back to the
console.

  My gut told me this hyperwill wasn’t the man I’d worked, laughed, and marveled about outer space with. But it also told me something else. There was some probability it was Franco’s hyperwill that had made that call to me after he’d died.

  Some.

  I huffed out a breath, caught off guard by my own willingness to accept the unlikely. The memory of Sienna laughing her head off blinked on in my mind. But what the heck. My conclusion stood on flimsy evidence from my past few weeks here. Thin as ice, but it still gave it some ground to stand on.

  Some.

  I shoved away the annoying image of Sienna—and the echo of her laugh along with it—collapsed into my chair, and observed the misty cloud inside the chamber. It was a haze of meaningless data that at one time could have been a record of someone’s life. No matter what these “hyperwills” were, I wasn’t going to let myself fall into the same trap Torula had. I wasn’t going to think of them as “people.”

  Neural data. That’s what they were. Left intact outside a protective body after death. What in nature could possibly store that with any stability at all?

  I reached over and shut down the Verdabulary. Still wrestling with my thoughts, I kept my eyes on the rotating mirror at the center of the transparent cylinder, mesmerized by the spiraling motion—slowly circling, spinning, and winding to a halt.

  And then it hit me. “A vortex.” The image of a whirlpool spun around in my mind, turning into a spiral galaxy, and cosmic hands closed in to encase it in a colossal Petri dish. “Yeah, that could work.”

  “Thanks for the vote o’ confidence,” came Roy’s unexpected reply.

  I jerked around. “My vote of confidence on what?”

  Roy fidgeted, looking as guilty as a stooly who’d just blurted out the wrong thing. “Thought you heard me talkin’ to Brighton.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “So what did you say could work?” he asked.