Digital Ghosts: Book 2 of the Space Station At The Edge Of The Black Hole Series

by L. A. Johnson

  Digital Ghosts

  L.A. Johnson

  Chemical Zombie Press

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events in this book are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Chemical Zombie Press LLC

  Copyright © 2018 by L.A. Johnson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Artwork by Christian Kallias

  Editing by Elizabeth Lance

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  About the Author

  1

  Lyra burst through the door into the hospital waiting area out of breath and into a room with zero patients. She looked around while she sucked in mouthfuls of air. There were also no ambulance personnel on the scene. Where was everybody, anyway? This was not the way that typical hospital emergencies went. She frowned at Gorb.

  “Where’s the fire, Lyra?” Gorb asked as he set his morning coffee down on his desk.

  “What do you mean, where’s the fire? It’s supposed to be here. I got an immediate hospital emergency text. See?” She held up the phone for him to see.

  He stared at it for a moment. “You’re right,” he said after a moment, “it looks legit. That is, if you went back in time five hours.”

  “What?” Lyra asked and turned the phone around so that she could read it again. The time stamp on the text was, indeed, from five hours ago. She frowned. “But it just now came through. I heard the notification. I was in a very long line for coffee. And now I’m here. Without coffee. I can’t deal with this place without coffee, Gorb.”

  She thought about the situation for a moment. “So, what did I miss five hours ago, anyway?”

  “Let me check the log,” Gorb said. He typed in a few keystrokes. “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean nothing?”

  “It’s been a very boring shift. Let me just tell you. There was only this one guy, and his issue was a very disgusting foot fungus. I called Arthur for that one.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, staring at his coffee and drifting slightly back and forth. “Trust me, though, I’m at the end of a twelve-hour shift and foot fungus was the most interesting thing that happened.”

  “No ambulances?” Lyra asked.

  “Nope.”

  “No crazy mutant rats or weird zombies?”

  “Double nope. I’d remember.”

  “What you’re telling me is that there’s literally nothing emergency related happening here at this moment and in this room?”

  “What you see is what you get, sister. Nothing here but me searching inappropriate content on my work computer and your text-from-the-past. What else can I do for you?”

  Lyra stepped forward to look at Gorb’s coffee. “Cream and sugar?”

  “You know it,” Gorb answered, “every day.”

  Lyra took the cup and winked at him. “Thanks, Gorb.”

  “Hey! That’s my coffee,” he objected.

  “But you don’t drink coffee, Gorb. You’re a jellyfish. Tell you what, I owe you one, ok?”

  “Ok,” he said, “but you better not forget this time.”

  Lyra headed to her office to check her messages and see what in the name of green glowing stars was wrong with the communications system.

  Lyra settled in at her desk and checked her messages. Nothing interesting. She texted Ian.

  How is the digital AI Zombie defense system going? Send.

  She waited. Then she heard the phaser notification sound that signaled an incoming text.

  I love it when you send me sexy text messages in the morning.

  She smiled and responded. That text is the only sexy thing that’s going to happen today if you don’t get moving on that project. Send.

  Phaser noise. What I meant to say, in that case, is that the project is coming along wonderfully. Way ahead of schedule.

  Lyra smiled and typed back quickly. Maybe tonight we can do that thing you wanted to do. Send.

  The phaser noise came even faster this time. Lyra, please report to my office immediately.

  Why not, she thought, and decided to play along. Are you going to make me guess what’s going to happen when I report to your office? She hit send, but as soon as she did, she had a feeling that something was off.

  Phaser noise. I’m afraid I’m going to need more context.

  Lyra reread the last few texts. What happened to meeting him in his office? Then she checked all of her text messages.

  Phaser noise. I have some questions for you.

  The new text sent her scrambling through her entire text history thread and that’s where she found her horrifying mistake.

  The please report to my office immediately was actually from Callista. Along with the last couple of messages about questions and context.

  Lyra read and reread the relevant texts. Then she buried her face in her hands and did some deep breathing. It’s okay, Lyra. Obviously, it wasn’t the best situation ever, but it could have been way worse.

  She typed out one last text to Ian. Sorry, babe. Work calling. Talk later. Send.

  She triple-checked, after she sent it, that it was to Ian and not Callista.

  Then she texted Callista that she was on her way.

  Lyra arrived at the familiar wooden door of Callista’s office at the spooky end of Celestica. The one with the dragons carved into the wood. The last time she knocked on this door it didn’t go well. Callista had shot at her. But this time she had been summoned. Hoping that would make a big difference this time, she took a deep breath and knocked.

  “Come, Lyra.”

  Lyra’s mouth went dry. That’s exactly what Callista had said last time, before shooting at her. Lyra stood there frozen for a moment.

  “Are you coming in or not?” Callista asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m thinking,” Lyra replied. “Are you armed?”

  “Always.”

  This made Lyra roll her eyes. It also made her a little bit angry. How dare this woman be a bigger smartass than her?

  “Are you going to shoot at me when I open the door?” Lyra felt it was best to be really specific in order to stay uninjured.

  “Of course not,” Callista answered, “I asked you to come.”

  Of course not, Lyra muttered and opened the door. She was still worried, though.

  Callista looked much like she had the last time Lyra had seen her. When she thought about it, the last time she had seen Callista was when she was saving them from Scythe, the mad scientist out to create A.I. Zombies.

  Callista’s black top was singed and her hair still looked mussed from the incident. For the first time, a thought crossed her mind that Callista might actually need some kind of help.

  “Um, hello ag
ain, Callista. What can I do for you?” All she could do was sit there and hope that there were no uncomfortable follow-up questions to the text confusion between her, Lyra, and Ian.

  Callista held out her hand to an old and strikingly uncomfortable looking chair in front of her desk. “Please, sit.”

  Lyra didn’t want to sit. She really only wanted to lurk at the edge of the room until she could dart back out again in case of emergency or weapons fire. But she did as she was asked and sat down.

  “Ok,” she said, “I’m trusting you not to shoot at me, because frankly, right now I’m a sitting duck.”

  “Oh, get over it,” Callista said with a wave of her hand. “We’re way past that now, aren’t we?”

  Lyra sat there and fervently hoped so. The chair was worse than she thought, it was painfully bad. She sat and squirmed and plastered on a fake smile and raised her eyebrows in expectation.

  “I want to stay awake,” Callista said.

  It was very close to the last thing Lyra expected her to say, especially after being summoned away from her medical duties.

  She wasn’t exactly sure how to respond to that. “Um, well. That’s pretty normal, I guess. I mean, it is Monday. That’s why most of us drink massive amounts of coffee.”

  Lyra kicked herself for bringing it up. If she was summoned here to get the old hag coffee, then there was going to be a big problem.

  “You misunderstand,” Callista said.

  Lyra frowned and tried to figure out how that statement clarified anything.

  “I don’t know exactly who I am,” Callista continued.

  “Again,” Lyra said, shrugging, “sort of a Monday thing.” She took a shot in the dark in trying to make the best of the strange conversation by babbling. It was her go-to strategy in these types of situations.

  “I mean, you get this fabulous weekend and you’re having fun and sleeping in and then, bam. Monday. And you’re like who am I and how did I get here? Am I right?” Lyra paused and hoped she was going in the right direction.

  “I was a vampire,” Callista announced.

  Look, Lyra thought, I’m going to need more than just these one sentence statements if I’m going to babble coherently. On the other hand, did this mean that her identity problem was solved? Oh crap, did she need blood? Had she summoned Lyra here to drink her blood?

  “I’m sorry,” Lyra said, “I don’t understand what this has to do with me.” Maybe Callista wanted to help her track down new victims.

  A few people on the space station sprang instantly to mind if that was the case. She smiled wickedly. “You need me to find you some blood donors? I have a few people in mind. Just so long as you know that I’m not volunteering. And what about your identity crisis? Do you need some kind of shrink? Because I have had some success with this new self-help guru on the station. And hang on, what do you mean ‘I was a vampire’? You’re not still a vampire? What are you now, exactly? And don’t get me started on-“

  “Silence.”

  Rude, Lyra thought. She studied Callista’s face. She didn’t look angry or condescending, she looked thoughtful. Lyra would have probably noticed that if she had been paying attention instead of babbling incoherently.

  “I was a vampire and now I’m more complicated than that. I do, in fact, want your blood, Lyra. Because I’m picky about these things. But I only need a tiny amount. It is no longer my primary source of nourishment.”

  Lyra opened and then closed her mouth. What exactly was her primary source of nourishment, then? She was speechless. It didn’t last long though. “What is your primary source of nourishment?”

  “The problem is, I want to stay awake. I’ve been adapted, you see. It was an experiment, back when they used to do these things without specific consent. “What would happen,” they asked, “if you take an immortal living being and fused her with artificial, robot intelligence?”

  “You’re some kind of vampire cyborg?” Lyra blurted out, not believing what she was hearing. “That is SO, SO ILLEGAL.”

  There was an awful silence in the room.

  “You going to arrest me?” Callista asked and laughed. “Trust me, what was done to me was done thousands of years before those laws existed.”

  Lyra opened her mouth again, but Callista’s expression stopped her in her tracks.

  “As I was saying,” Callista said. “My problem is that the cyborg portion of my brain or myself or whatever it is seems to be malfunctioning.”

  Lyra had questions, but she held her tongue.

  “I keep turning off and back on. I can’t control it and I don’t know why. Epochs have passed while I was unconscious. And I want it to stop. That is what I mean when I say that I want to stay awake.”

  Lyra wondered if Callista was done talking. And also, how much is just a little bit of blood? She figured it was probably best to focus on whatever other source of nourishment Callista needed.

  “So what, exactly, do you need me to help with? Other than the blood.”aOw m

  “My other source of nourishment is electricity.”

  “No kidding,” Lyra said. Whew, that sounds better than blood. I’ll focus on that. “How do you do that?”

  “I have forgotten,” said Callista, putting her head in her hands.

  “Okay,” said Lyra, feeling like she might finally have a handle on the situation, “maybe your batteries are just run down, right? If you need electricity, then I’ll bet there’s some kind of charge cord around here.”

  Lyra jumped up, happy to have something specific to focus her attention on. Callista got up as well, and the two of them spent a few moments quietly rummaging around through various desk drawers.

  “A-ha,” Lyra said, holding up a three-foot-long cord that had five different prongs sticking out of it. She looked up at Callista. “Does this look familiar?”

  “Oh. Yes, that looks right.”

  “Well, I’m going to go,” Lyra said, “because frankly, wherever you plug this thing into yourself does not feel like any of my business.”

  “What about the blood?” Callista asked.

  Lyra felt a flash of terror as she considered the idea of Callista biting her. And she really didn’t want to be involved in this at all, but if it was absolutely necessary, she decided to keep it sanitary and medical and professional until she could track down a suitable long-term volunteer donor.

  “Look, I don’t know what you had in mind for that part, but I’m a doctor. What if I go draw some of my blood and drop it off later? You said you only needed a little bit. How does ten milliliters sound?”

  “That should be fine.”

  Whew. That sorted out, Lyra didn’t wait around. She took the opportunity to dart back out of the room and back to the hospital.

  Lyra picked up the pace as she neared the hospital, happy to be free of Callista’s office. Luckily, she was almost there. She turned down the hallway, and ran straight into a- mob of tourists? She bumped right into a crowd coming around the corner. This was the wrong end of the hospital for tours, had somebody gotten lost?

  Then the whole group came into view. Judging by the signs on the wall and the matching t-shirts, she realized she had walked right into one of the brand-new, ‘Celestica-the haunted space station at the edge of the black hole’ ghost tours.

  Lyra scratched her head. Ghost tours? When did that happen?

  The crowd completely ignored her as they gathered around the tour guide and eagerly listened to the presentation.

  Lyra listened for a moment as the speaker droned on and on.

  Wait a minute, Lyra thought as she listened to the speaker on the microphone even though she couldn’t see him through the mob of people. I know that voice.

  “This part of the station is so haunted, that only the bravest, perkiest, and most sarcastic medical personnel brave the walk. Hello, Lyra.”

  Lyra blinked in disbelief. The voice belonged to the hospital’s Chief of Staff. “Grayson?”

  “Don’t you have a shift to g
o to?” he responded. “Why are you hanging around?”

  Lyra couldn’t believe it. “You’re moonlighting telling ghost stories to tourists now? Just how much free time do you have?”

  “You can thank your boyfriend,” Grayson replied, ignoring her question, “ever since he got here and started broadcasting Fear Zone Universe, interest in the station has been crazy. The ghost business is very lucrative, as it turns out.”

  Lyra thought about it. “I just want you people to know that the reason that Grayson can authoritatively talk about ghosts on this space station is because he’s older than most of them.”

  “Scurry along now, Lyra, before I incorporate you into this tour.”

  Lyra had every intention of continuing to argue, but her cell phone buzzed. It was Ian. “Good talk, Grayson,” she said and continued down the apparently haunted hallway with her coffee. “You can fill me in on the rest of whatever is going on here later.”

  2

  Aquila roamed freely through the unlimited distractions of the internet. Each new nook and cranny of information provided stimulation beyond her wildest dreams.

  Knowledge, power, and information denied her for eons was now at her fingertips. She now understood everything in the universe.

  In fact, the images and sounds and text were no longer other, they were hers to command.

  She smiled. That was also new. She had never before been a physical being. She was not fully physical right now. Not yet, anyway, she was somewhere in between.

  The difference between all of the time before and now was that she was aware. She knew she could smile. She knew she was different. She knew she would now reign supreme, not only over the other digital ghosts, but over everything and everybody.