A Ghost for a Clue

by C L R Draeco

  “A vortex. What did you think I was talking about?”

  Roy glanced at the darkened chamber and said nothing.

  I eyed the chamber too. “I hope you’re not planning anything stupid with that con artist.”

  “Yo, Brighton’s legit, man. Don’t turn him into a bad guy just ’cause he’s got no control over ’is gift. He’s like a faulty CB radio—where the band keeps changin’ and all the citizens are dead.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “So you are planning something with him.”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?” I shook my head. “Just don’t come running to me when it blows up in your face.”

  “That’s sworn to and guaranteed,” Roy said, raising his right hand as he gave his solemn oath. “Not lookin’ at you for any help. At least, not until Sunday.”

  “What’s with Sunday?”

  Roy quirked a brow. “What’s with a vortex?”

  I almost dodged the question, but it was about time I stopped dealing them popcorn. “I think . . .” I cleared my throat. “I might have an equation that explains what happened to Thomas.”

  35

  Orbs Aren’t Made Of Dust

  “I love it!” Roy cried and gave a whoop. “This is why the world needs guys like us.”

  I winced as his voice walloped against me. My head had all the oversensitive symptoms of a hangover as I greeted the new morning with barely any sleep. “What are you talking about? I did all the work.”

  “Yeah, but I had to keep you awake to finish it. You think that was easy?”

  I yawned and slouched in my seat, propping my legs on an adjacent chair.

  “Man, I can’t believe you figured this out. Sure can’t wait till Sunday so you can help me figure somethin’ else out.”

  “What’s up on Sunday again?” I squinted up at him; the opaque setting of the Transhade overhead still left the workstation far too bright for me.

  Roy eagerly nudged a tablet towards me. “JFGI. ‘Orbs in barn’ by Mac Maniac. It’s a video of ghost animals.”

  “Orbs are nothing but the retroreflection of light off dust particles,” I mumbled.

  Roy planted my mug of hot coffee on the console table with a rousing thud. “Drink up n’ wake up. You gotta see this. It proves that orbs aren’t made o’ dust.”

  I took a sip and settled back down in my seat.

  “It’s this video from someone here in California. He’s got ghost animals in ’is barn. It happened where a horse gave birth. So I figure that place’d be reekin’ o’ hormone-propelled energy, right?”

  I did my best to hold my droopy eyes open and watched the video.

  “See that?” Roy pointed at the long rays of sunshine on the black and white footage of an empty barn. “The sun’s low in the sky, so I guess sunrise or sunset—that makes the time just right. Then the orbs . . . there, see?” He pointed at a bright ball of light bobbing on the screen. “That one’s actin’ like a horse that’s just stickin’ its head outta its corral. Now, here, wait for it. Wait for it . . . There! I think that orb’s a dog.”

  The movements didn’t look like dirt floating in the air at all. “You’re right. It’s not dust.”

  “Bet your ass it’s not.”

  “It’s a spider. Crawling so close to the lens, it’s turned into a moving dot.”

  “What the fuck, man! That’s just one bug that crawled across the top. Glue your goddamn eyes on the bright orb floatin’ all over the place. See how it’s sniffin’ exactly around that wet part on the ground, where the horse had the foals. Like it’s tracin’ the edges. That one really reminds me o’ my Boner when he finds a wet spot he’s interested in.”

  I grimaced. “Why can’t you just call him your dog?”

  “So whaddaya think? Worth checkin’ out? Brighton says animals can definitely become hyperwills too. He said animals can have a memory o’ their lives but without self-awareness. Meanin’ they can appear as weird monster-like things, disembodied eyes, colored lights or orbs just like that. They remember how to behave but have no idea what they looked like.”

  Roy continued to watch the badly scratched video, devoid of any sound and obviously captured in analog. “The orbs look like they got shadows, but I’m sure it’s just gen loss and noise . . .”

  He kept on babbling as my eyelids acquired a will of their own and refused to obey me. The last thing I remember hearing was, “C’mon. It’s not that far . . .”

  The next thing I knew, I woke up to the sound of Roy cussing at something. “What the hell kind o’ question is that? Why else would a guy like him bother with shit like this?”

  “But he doesn’t believe in ghosts or souls. And nothing I say seems to change his mind.”

  My breath caught the second I recognized Torula’s voice.

  “Do I have to spell it out?” Roy said. “Y-O-U. That’s why he’s doin’ it. And the reason you were tryin’ to kick ’im out? H-I-M. You were takin’ care of ’im, so he won’t lose ’is job.”

  “That’s exactly my point.” She sighed. “I don’t understand why he’s risking it for something he doesn’t believe in. And as he would say—it doesn’t compute.”

  “Doesn’t compute? Hell. He’s a man. You’re a woman. One plus the other equals only one thing. That’s the simplest equation I know.”

  In the silence that followed, I forced myself not to move and kept my breathing steady. Come on, Roy. Keep her talking.

  “Hello, there, honey bunches!” came a cheerful but oh-so-incredibly ill-timed greeting from its unmistakable source. “My, it’s a gusty morning out there today.”

  I opened my eyes to the sight of Starr pushing stray blonde tendrils back into her bun. I glanced at Torula who had a tentative smile on her lips as she looked at me, as though she wasn’t quite sure of her opinion of what she was seeing.

  I smiled back awkwardly and brushed a hand through my hair for some attempt at grooming.

  “Yo, Benedict! You’ll never guess the surprise Morrison’s got for us today.”

  “Ooh, I hope it’s something sugar-free.”

  “Somethin’ way sweeter. He’s figured out that all hyperwills hitch a ride on sinusoidal waves at the start.”

  “At the start of what?” Starr asked.

  “The afterlife.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Starr slowed down as she climbed the platform steps.

  I stared at Torula as she approached and lowered herself into the seat next to mine. She was that close, but I still couldn’t read what she was thinking. So much for ESP or EEC or whatever else Hans Berger might have missed. I reached for my coffee mug and took a quick sip, then grimaced at the room temperature brew.

  “Have a look at this.” Roy invaded the space between Torula and me and reached for the keyboard. “Morrison worked on it all night so we can show you what happens to your memories—after you die.”

  Starr clutched her pendant and moved closer and peered at what looked like a pillar of gray smoke on the monitor. “Isn’t that the radio wave photo of the hyperwill?”

  “Hell no. It’s the simulation of a soul! Morrison thinks Thomas is livin’ inside a soliton.”

  “I never said ‘living,’” I said.

  Both women turned to look at me; one seemed amazed, the other appalled.

  “C’mon man. Show ’em. It’s wicked cool.”

  I shook off what remained of my grogginess and took over the keyboard. “Our senses deal with data in analog, right? So I made a simulation of the body shooting out its neural information in analog.” On the monitor, the cloud of gray began to undulate. “That’s a simulation of how a real hyperwill probably behaves if it were visible at the point of death, with a sine wave initial condition.” It was mathematically sound, and it was upsetting—what the equation said. That this could be the fate of all our stored memories after death.

  The image eddied and swelled until a red-orange streak appeared, arcing through the cloud. “That reddish band demonstra
tes how solitons eventually come out of the single-mode initial condition. Tiny imperfections appear and grow exponentially.”

  At its core, feathery plumes of swirling coils appeared. “See those random shifts that decay into individual vortex rings? Those ‘breakaways’ are bound to increase over time. It’s predicted by numerical studies of time evolution. But fluctuating temperatures can also trigger scattering.”

  With everyone’s eyes locked on the screen, the simulation of the original wave slowly degenerated.

  Roy clucked his tongue. “That’s the problem with analog signalin’. With the invasion o’ noise, the original wave breaks up into separate standin’ waves. Eventually, the noise becomes dominant. And that leads to signal loss and distortion—makin’ the original data impossible to recover.”

  “Impossible?” Starr asked.

  “Impersonate?” Torula asked almost at the same time.

  “You mean impossible, dear,” Starr said.

  I puzzled over the misused word. Another slip of the tongue? Torula kept blinking as though deep in thought, her eyes fixed on the monitor. Was she trying to work out how this wave could be a person?

  “What does this all mean?” Starr asked.

  “Simply put, it means, over time, a soul just falls apart.”

  Starr looked at me with troubled eyes. “It can’t be . . . that simple.”

  I turned back to the screen and let the simulation show it. “The analog electromagnetic waves the human body generates are unstable and eventually break up into a stream of solitons—new objects that spontaneously appear in a system when conditions are right for it.” I pointed at whorls in the simulation. “These smoke rings are closed loops of vortex filaments, which prove to be better, if not excellent, candidates for transmitting information. The dark cylindrical core is stationary with extraordinarily stable properties.” Stable enough, I thought, to have held fragments of Franco’s neural data intact long enough for us to keep receiving snippets of them after he’d gone. But how that transmitted data ended up in phone calls? That was just beyond me.

  “That, m’dear ladies, is the physics o’ the soul as calculated by m’friend, Bram Morrison.” Roy slapped me on the shoulder. “It explains why ghostly apparitions, soon after a person’s death, seem like they still got all their faculties together. But over time, they break up into smaller but more stable pieces. That’s why all we got left o’ Thomas . . .” he gestured towards the dark and gloomy chamber, “. . . is only what we got left o’ Thomas.”

  Torula remained silent, still staring—mesmerized by the image on the monitor.

  Starr fiddled with her crucifix pendant. “This also demonstrates that the soul emerges as a complete ‘packet’ of all our memories, right?”

  “Sure does. It’s just a matter o’ catchin’ it in time. But as far as poor ol’ Thomas is concerned? Nearly everythin’ that he was—if he was an artist, a playboy, a genius—that’s all gone. All we got left o’ him is the part that’s still holdin’ on to those damn blue flowers. Sure stinks like shit if that’s what’s gonna happen to my soul.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Starr said, frowning at the screen. “This is just the simulation of a guess.”

  “It’s a mathematical fact.” I nudged my sketchpad over. “Every radially symmetric standing wave solution is unstable if perturbations are equal to or greater than one plus four over n.”

  Starr let out an irate breath, refusing to even glance at my scribbled equations.

  “But all hope isn’t lost,” I said. “If p is greater than one and less than one plus four over n, then they could remain stable. Which is probably why some hyperwill segments last longer than others.”

  “Which also means souls have the capacity to be virtually immortal.” Roy sent Starr a reassuring wink. “Given idyllic conditions, that is, missy. I mean, missus.”

  “Idyllic, like paradise?” Starr asked.

  Roy nodded, then glanced up at the glass roof. “Sad fact is—as long as they’re lost out there, they’re as mortal as the rest of us.”

  Torula stood up and gripped the edge of the console table as though to steady herself. “It’s not impossible.”

  “What?” Starr asked.

  “The original data. It’s not gone for good, so it’s not impossible to recover.”

  “Honey, did you just drift off and miss everything we’ve talked about?”

  “Maybe that’s how they reproduce,” Torula said. “When a hyperwill breaks up into independent sections, it’s like cacti. Stems with weak joints fall off and reproduce asexually.”

  I gaped at her, unable to believe she’d just taken my digital simulation and turned it into a sign of life.

  “Hell, I don’t see how this leads to producin’ baby ghosts. But it does show an entity breakin’ up into pieces. Pretty much everythin’ that holds itself together for a long time relies on things bein’ constant. And judgin’ from your visions o’ Thomas fallin’ apart, I don’t think he has that kinda stability.”

  “How much time do you think he has?” Torula was looking straight at me. “Regardless of whether it’s alive or dead, how long can that data stay intact unprotected like that?”

  “The answer could be anybody’s guess,” I said.

  She shrugged and flashed a charming smile. “I’d like to hear yours.”

  It was enough to coax the answer out of me, and I tapped on the keyboard to show her. “Vortex solitons can hold tons of energy in the circular motion at the core. And under ideal conditions, that energy could last quite a long time.” The display changed to footage of the planet Jupiter’s turbulent surface. “The Great Red Spot. It’s been raging for about 350 years.”

  “That’s a storm,” Starr said.

  “That’s a vortex,” Roy said. “A very stable standin’ wave.”

  “But that thing’s huge, honey. Solar-system huge. And Thomas is just a tiny little smoky thing.”

  “We get invisible standin’ waves in small recordin’ booths all the time. They’re the worst thing in studio acoustics. The smaller the studio, the worse it gets.”

  “So you think Thomas is living in a standing EM wave nearby?” Torula raised a halting hand at me before I could object. “I know. You didn’t say ‘living.’”

  I shrugged to acknowledge the truce.

  “He can’t be that close,” Roy said. “He used to have to wait ’til sunset to be able to broadcast this far.”

  “But in case you can locate its source,” Starr said, “we can bring Eldritch there, right? So he can send him into the light.”

  “No,” said Torula. “That will kill him.”

  “It will save him,” Starr said. “Thomas needs a protected environment, and he won’t have that here on Earth. That’s the help he’s asking for.”

  “And you’re pinning your hopes on paradise?”

  “Of course, I am.” Starr’s conviction shone like an angel’s golden lamp for the benefit of lost souls. Torula, on the other hand, was like the PAWS police, fighting to save a stranded animal.

  “My mother’s been there and back. She entered that so-called light in her near-death experience. She didn’t like what she saw.”

  “She saw hell?” Roy asked.

  “She saw nothing.”

  Well, that makes sense. I reached for the keyboard again.

  “It’s what God allowed her to see,” Starr said.

  “It’s probably what data looks like after it’s been erased.” I changed the computer display to a pristine white screen.

  “Shit.” Roy grunted. “Death by erasure. That sucks.”

  Torula pointed at the blank screen and looked at Starr. “Don’t try to send Thomas into that light. Not until after we get some answers.”

  “I already have my answers. It’s in the scriptures. In the church. In the hearts of everyone who believes. What about you? Where does your faith lie?” She gestured towards me. “In mathematics?”

  Torula moved to block me from Starr’s
aim. “If you want to attack my point of view, then address me. Don’t drag someone else in just to—”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.” I got up and offered myself as an open target. “Life is a matter of calculation. Every living thing, from bacteria to terrorists, to the savior around your neck. They live or die by the same equation.”

  “What equation?” Starr asked.

  “The one that answers which gives the greater advantage, my death or my life?”

  Starr’s eyes locked on me. “And where did you find this life-determining formula? In an atheist’s bible?”

  “Nature abounds with formulas. Equations rule the world.”

  “And pray tell.” Starr thrust a fist into her hip. “Who do you think wrote those equations?”

  “Touché,” Roy said.

  I wasn’t about to fold on that. I huffed and lowered my gaze, feeling like a bull pawing at the ground before it charged. “It’s interesting, this recurring story of a barrier to the afterlife. The pearly gates to heaven. The River Styx.” I looked at Starr. “Do you know the slash we put across an equal sign to denote when values aren’t equal?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s the symbol of a barrier. When the right factors are in place, things happen. When they’re not, the barrier stays.” In my mind, I held the picture of a phalanx of female football players in lingerie, and a bit of a smile escaped me as I glanced at Torula. “I think hyperwills form only when the right factors are in place. How long they last also depends on a lot of variables. But what the equation proves is . . .” I directed my gaze at Starr. “Not everyone who dies generates what you call a soul.”

  Something that sounded like a stifled scream escaped from Starr, and she glanced at Torula, then back at me. “The two of you are Adam and Eve all over again. Plucking forbidden fruit that will get us pushed farther out of Eden.”

  “What makes you think we’re defying God?” Torula asked. “If intelligent design got us this far, then that design has brought us to the threshold of finding out if hyperwills do manage to stay conscious and alive.”

  “If they do, then it is by God’s will that they do so. It’s not our business to interfere—”