A Ghost for a Clue

by C L R Draeco

  “Look!” Triana thrust out her hands as though staring at putrid boils and lesions. But besides age spots and varicose veins, all I saw were fair and slender hands. “Past the peak of our reproductive years, our body believes its job is done and stops bothering with nonessentials. It begins to build up aches and pains, dulling our senses, making life progressively miserable. We age until each birthday just becomes another tick of the bomb. And our brain—including society’s collective mind—helps keep us sane by convincing us there’s a Great Beyond where Heaven waits just beyond the barrier. But I know it isn’t there.”

  “Then put your faith in science,” Tromino said. “Tell her to have the surgery. Don’t pin her hopes on this foolish wizardry.”

  Triana grabbed her purse and started digging through it. Is she bringing up Stuart Malarney again? I rubbed my jaw uneasily.

  She laid out bottles of pills, lotion, and sunscreen on the table. “This. This and this. These are what I call wizardry. Mesmerizing all of us into believing that delaying the inevitable is the best we can do. But now, with the willdisc, we have another choice. At the point of death, we can capture the powerful electromagnetic pulse our body uses as its data recorder. And just like that—we are saved.”

  “My God.” Tromino’s eyes locked on me like heat-seeking missiles that just wouldn’t quit. “You’ve got even my mother wrapped around your finger.”

  “It’s technology, Trom,” I said. “The human body’s like a machine. To fix it, you sometimes have to take it apart. The willdisc simply allows us to back up all her data in an external drive, but it’s still conventional medicine that will have to step in to fix the hardware.” I swallowed, having no choice but to admit the truth. “I can’t do this . . . without your help.”

  “Good. That’s why you’re not getting it. Torula will not be turned into software. She’s flesh and blood. My flesh and blood. And I’d like to keep things that way. So no matter your good intentions, I want you out of what’s left of my sister’s life.”

  I held his angry gaze. “You can’t make me leave.”

  “Tromino,” Triana said. “This is the worst step you can take.”

  He laid his fists on the table and leaned towards me, his next words like a knife carving a thin line across my neck. “If you don’t leave, the illustrious Dr. Rubin Grant will get a message from me. Telling him about your state of mind, your recklessness, your pseudoscience in pursuit of the occult. Let me see you salvage your career—and your future in NASA—after that.”

  Triana touched her son on his arm. “Your sister needs Bram to go on. Without him, she could die of a broken heart.”

  “Open your eyes, Mom. It’s the love of her life who’s stepped up to the plate to kill her.” A vein on Tromino’s brow bulged as he thrust a threatening finger at me. “Make sure you get Torula to drop this delusion and accept the best that medical science can give her. If not, I will personally get in touch with Dr. Grant and have you fired on grounds of insanity.” He snarled and strode out the door.

  I collapsed into my seat and dragged both hands through my hair as I scrambled for some next course of action. Without Tromino’s help, there was no moving forward on this.

  “You can’t leave,” Triana said. “If you do, she would have no choice but to settle for surgery.”

  “Is that so bad, really? At this point, a 3 percent chance is far better than . . . than the zero options we’ve got. We have no medical team. No equipment. No plan.”

  “I thought you were working on it?”

  “What?”

  “The plan.” She raised a finger and drew a circle in the air. “To find your friend on the other side.”

  I squinted as I stared blindly at nothing, finding no reason to look for Franco if we didn’t even have a medical team that would take the first step with us. Even if we had a ghost, we didn’t have a chance.

  Triana sighed. “Could you at least stay until all this is over?” She picked up her purse. “Your presence may somehow boost that 3 percent to a much higher number.” She then collected the bottles on the table—the potions and pills that were her secrets to slowing down time—calling my attention to her aging hands as she tossed them back into her bag. Then a faint tremble of a thought nudged my gaze up to the tiny wrinkles on her face and the flecks of grey her hair dye had missed.

  A jolt ran up my spine. “I need to go to NASA.” I blurted it out even before the thought had completely congealed. “I think . . . maybe . . . I can still chase an appointment there.”

  Triana looked at me with sad bewilderment in her eyes. “You can’t do this. You can’t put your career ahead of her life. I’ll talk with Tromino—”

  “Believe me, this has nothing to do with Tromino, and everything to do with her life.”

  58

  A Sudden Change Of Plans

  Death or NASA. Those were my only ways to escape life on Earth. The second had always seemed the better option because I’d assumed it always meant I’d be able to come back.

  But now, I was going to try to turn things the other way around so that—even with death—coming back becomes an option.

  Amidst the cutting-edge technology and the future-here-today ambience of the Johnson Space Center, Dr. Rubin Grant’s office—with its antique displays and Persian rug—stood out like the anachronism that it was. Free of his knee pain and his cane, the man had his aura of strength and dominance restored as he strode from behind the massive wooden desk.

  “Your original appointment was scheduled a week ago, am I correct?” Grant asked.

  I stood by the door, laptop bag in hand, desperate on the inside, calm on the outside. “I apologize, sir. And I’m grateful you were able to squeeze me in with such short notice.”

  “What’s this about? A sudden change of heart?” Grant took a seat on a tufted leather armchair and gestured at the matching sofa next to it.

  “No, sir. There was just . . . a sudden change of plans.” I cleared my throat as I took a seat, clutching the strap of my laptop bag as if it were a lifeline. I let go of it and went into freefall. “If you don’t mind my asking, sir—of those you’ve invited to join Pangaea, how many have accepted?”

  “Are you here to tell me I can count you in?”

  I smiled and shook my head. “I’m guessing you’re dodging the answer because it’s not a number worth boasting about. Am I right, sir?”

  Grant raised his brow. “Are you showering me with ‘sirs’ to keep from offending me? Just get to the point . . . sir.”

  I nodded, swallowed, and plunged right in. “You’ve been trying to recruit men and women in their prime, asking them . . . us, to leave Earth for good. I can’t imagine the tough sell that is. You’re aiming for a crew with excellent physique, who’re emotionally stable, highly educated, responsible, ambitious. People at the peak of health with the brightest futures. Exactly like who you used to be . . . several decades ago.”

  Grant twitched in his seat. “I take it back. You don’t give a damn about offending me.”

  I held up a hand in apology. “I didn’t mean that as an insult. It was the deepest compliment.”

  “Enlighten me. I don’t see how calling me a ‘has-been’ translates to flattery.”

  I reached for my laptop, hoping the facts would set things straight. “May I?”

  Grant nodded and, for the next half hour, listened intently as I took him through my experiences of the past two months. He learned about everything Tromino had threatened to expose to ruin me. From my witnessing the apparition in a greenhouse to the software I had modified to decode it. I had managed, with Eldritch’s help, to acquire videos of the apparition captured by the manor’s cameras, including that of me walking right through a specter. Grant watched playbacks of the hologram I’d manufactured, footage of Boner when he transitioned, and how he “lived on” in a willdisc in Roy’s garage.

  Grant interrupted me frequently, asked questions, clarified details, double-checked the facts. I felt heartened
by his enthusiasm. The director may have seemed like a man who relished the past, but deep inside, he was a child enthralled by every new thing that gave him a glimpse of the future. No wonder he had dedicated his life to pursuing the untried.

  Unfortunately, the most compelling evidence I could have had—the consecutive apparitions of Thomas and Franco, a man whom Grant could have traced back to NASA—no longer existed. I didn’t even bother to mention them because they would have sounded no different from a psychic’s sideshow. So instead, I pulled out a willdisc and held it up for Grant to see. Light glinted off its titanium core and limned its curved edge. Tiny, vein-like sparks forked within the plasma wherever I touched it. “This is a willdisc. A storage device for a soul.”

  Grant gazed at the device and shifted in his seat. “You’ve given me a dramatic . . . or perhaps I should say disturbing, presentation. And it bothers me that this sales pitch started with you calling me old.” He gestured at the disc. “I hope you’re not suggesting I bury myself in that thing when my time comes.”

  My mouth twitched, unsure of how to respond. “Someone dear to me has fallen gravely ill, and her chances of surviving an operation are grim, to say the least.”

  Grant nodded, sympathetically. “Yes, I understand it was the reason you’d canceled your appointment. How is she doing?”

  “Dr. Torula Jackson was scheduled to have surgery, but she’s asked that it be postponed—until after we’ve moved her neural data into this.” I laid the willdisc down on the table directly in front of him. “We’re about to embark on a procedure that’s never been done before. And if we succeed, it can change the entire future of space travel.”

  He jerked in surprise. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  I leaned forward. “Dr. Grant, I’m offering you a new breed of astronauts for Pangaea.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Dr. Jackson is prepared to make a test flight. Her body has grown frail, but her spirit remains strong. She can make the trip.”

  His brow quivered in seeming confusion. “Have you gone mad, Mr. Morrison?”

  “Yes,” I said, with a roguish smile. “As mad as all of you were when you thought of asking me to leave everything I have on Earth for a wild adventure to some pinprick in the sky. What’s crazier? Sending ninety-nine astronauts to some hazy constellation? Or guiding one determined spirit into a remarkable new future, right here?”

  Grant stared at me, dead silent.

  I kept talking, just hoping the man didn’t already consider me a lunatic by now. “Even the tiniest bacteria can prove that data from a dying organism can be transmitted on electromagnetic waves from one soundproof, airtight Petri dish into another. And today, technology all around us constantly harnesses radio waves to carry information, practically error-free, from sender to receiver and back again. The data in our minds behave similarly, and we’ve proven that it can be captured and stored.”

  Grant eased forward in his seat and touched the edge of the willdisc. “That’s quartz crystal, am I right?”

  I cocked my head, surprised he knew. “Yes, it is.”

  “We’ve had similar experiments involving living cells, proving they code their messages on EM waves. Quartz possesses the UV and IR transparency needed to transmit data from one sealed Petri dish into another. Glass, on the other hand, blocks them.”

  I had to make sure I got that right. “NASA has conducted studies on this?”

  “Yes, but no credit due here. We merely reproduced findings the Russians had back in the ’70s in Novosibirsk.”

  It was unbelievable. “What . . . what were the studies about?”

  “I don’t know why the Russians did it. We, on the other hand, were probing the possibilities of thought control.” Grant leaned back and pursed his lips as he pondered.

  He believes it. He believes memories can be captured on a wave. I reined in my excitement.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Grant said, “but what you did to that poor Labrador. That is what your friend wants for herself?”

  “As step one, yes. Then, we heal her body. At step three, we bring her back to life.”

  Grant paused then shot out of his seat with more agility than expected. For a moment, I feared he was about to call security. The doctor paced, his brow knotted, then he called someone up on his iHub. “Yes, one quick question,” he said. “That project Sioux and Fein were transferred to, what’s it called again?” Grant put on reading glasses and jotted something down. “Yes, of course. How could I forget? Might as well throw away those memory pills.”

  I stood and waited for Grant to settle back into the armchair before taking my own seat again. It was good to have been on my feet for a while. Though my heart was pounding, it felt like I’d lost all circulation in my limbs. My fingertips were ice cold.

  “Level with me,” Grant said. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  My gut tightened. “Yes, I can definitely say—”

  “Please don’t oversell yourself. I need you to be forthright with me. Do you know how to bring her back?”

  I swallowed and bobbled my head.

  “I take that to mean you have no damn idea?”

  I bobbled my head the same indeterminate way.

  Grant clucked his tongue and leaned back in his seat, rubbing one knee with his hand.

  “If . . .” I gritted my teeth. “When we succeed, it could be the breakthrough Pangaea needs to get its crew. After Torula transitions, she’ll prove that, given a stable environment, consciousness can stay alive indefinitely. It will be one small step that’s another giant leap for all mankind.”

  Grant winced. “Ach! You’ve just made Neil Armstrong turn in his grave.”

  “If he’d had a willdisc, he could be joining Pangaea.” I buffed the promise I was holding until it gleamed. “Why cast a wide net when you can just reach out and pluck the low-hanging fruit around you? The smartest and brightest achievers who are far more than ripe for the picking.”

  “About to rot in our graves, you mean?” Grant’s response showed no offense; a smile flickered in his eyes.

  “You can aim for candidates who are experienced and used to riding high, whose biggest problems now are the degradation of their senses and . . .” I gestured at Grant’s knee. “. . . the pain in their joints. Accomplished doctors, scientists, mathematicians, engineers—intellectuals whom everyone would consider too old and too weak to make the interstellar journey.” I picked up the willdisc and held it like a gold nugget in front of a prospector’s eyes. “What if you could offer them a chance to begin a new world where they can be young again—with all their memories of their Earthly lives intact, riding to the stars in curious little rings called willdiscs?”

  Grant’s gaze drifted to the side, as though frolicking in a theme park in his mind. But rather than easing it, my nervousness grew. There was one enormous question the doctor was now bound to ask. How do we bring them back and give them new bodies? Torula, though ill, was young and still capable of healing. What to do with aged astronauts? I was prepared to give a flurry of options, from clones to cyborgs and androids. None of these had solid-enough foundations on which to stand—but they were all I had for now.

  The doctor took the willdisc and examined it. “I think crystal is far too fragile a keeper of one’s memories. Do you have alternatives?”

  I raised my brow. It wasn’t at all the question I’d been expecting. “None, at the moment. We’re aiming for something organic. I think.” I cleared my throat. I wasn’t about to mention pigs.

  Grant nodded and handed back the willdisc. “Hmm . . .” He rose to his feet, this time more slowly, and walked towards his desk to access his computer. He glanced at what he had jotted down earlier, tapped on his keyboard, then focused his attention on his monitor.

  After a long, tense moment, the doctor stroked his salt-and-pepper beard. “Why, exactly, did you come here today? Obviously, it’s still not to give me an answer.”

  I walked ove
r and stood across from him at his desk. “To ask for your help, sir. In exchange, Pangaea gets everything I learn in the process.”

  Grant pursed his lips and took a deep breath before posing his next question. “What kind of help?”

  59

  This Wasn’t The Afterlife

  (Torula)

  Am I dead? My hospital room had been decorated in autumn shades, but now I opened my eyes to a brightly lit place of white and powder blue. Would I recognize St. Peter if he walked by?

  A chuckle nearly made it out of me as I glanced around, but I barely had enough strength to even smile at the trick the room had tried to play on me. This wasn’t the afterlife—it was the prelude to it. I’d been moved to the ICU, a somber place that borrowed what cheer it could from the color of a clear and sunny sky.

  Mom was sitting in a chair next to my bed, her hands on her lap, back erect, eyes closed, earphones feeding her a private soundtrack. Perhaps the lapping of waves on a shore. As I stared at her, something unusual at the center of her brow came into focus. It was a crease. Though a tiny one, it was enough to betray Mom’s effort to maintain her calm.

  In a span of one week, my mother had aged. My disease had knocked a dent in the decades she’d managed to defy.

  Thanks to her and Bram, I had yet to wake up and find myself alone in the room. Even all my brothers fussed—Tromino through his worried scowl, Truth with his phone calls demanding to sleep over; even Treble, who was way across the ocean, sent a constant flow of video greetings. Everyone told me in their own way—I am loved.

  A surge of tears came, and I closed my eyes to quell them. I knew how much each of them wanted to be there with me. To be near. So I would never feel alone. Was that how it would be afterwards? Forever afterwards?

  I pictured Mom, stooped with age, wrinkled beyond redemption, meditating beside my soul encased in a digital time warp. I watched an older Truth, loading The Cellar with energy stores I needed before he rushed off to school. Then came an image of my eldest brother with his wife and children moving out of their home, Tromino having lost his license to practice. Then metal bars clanged shut, and I saw Bram in prison, broken and bent—a man chained to the Earth—paying the price for having killed a woman so she could remain blissfully undead.