Sparks

by Laura Bickle

  Katie pointed to the house. “Leslie.”

  Anya slammed open Chris and Leslie’s kitchen door. She could hear yelling in the back bedrooms, spied the polysomnography monitor on the table gone all flat and beeping as she skidded around the corner. Smoke rolled along the ceiling, and she could feel heat radiating from the living room.

  She stuck her head around the corner, saw fire ripping in a sheet up from a wall socket to the ceiling. The fire poured up and chewed into the drywall, reaching out into the hallway.

  Anya swore. She burst into Leslie’s bedroom to find her in bed, unmoving. Chris was shaking her shoulders, trying to wake her, and Brian was on the phone with paramedics. Smoke began to creep into the room through the open door.

  “She was asleep,” Brian was saying. Anya couldn’t tell if he was talking to the dispatcher or Chris. “Her pulse and respiration climbed through the roof and just stopped.”

  Anya snatched the phone from him. “The house is burning. Get out now.”

  Chris blanched. “No. I promised her.” He bolted off the bed and charged down the hall. Anya could hear his thundering footsteps on the floorboards.

  Brian ripped the wires off Leslie’s limp form and lifted her up.

  “I’ve got her,” Anya said, taking the burden from him. “You get ALANN and your stuff and get outside.” Some distant part of her was puzzled that she thought of ALANN as a person in need of rescuing.

  Brian nodded. He kicked open a bedroom window and began to chuck some of the polysomnography equipment the short distance down to the grass. The suction created by the open air pulled smoke into the room in a thick haze.

  “Leave it!” Anya shouted. She shifted Leslie over her shoulder and stormed down the hallway. The smoke was so thick that she couldn’t see the edge of the kitchen wall. She closed her stinging eyes and focused on the sensation of heat to her left, remembered to bear right, almost tripped over the kitchen table. Her eyes fluttered open, and she saw Chris running across her field of vision with a bucket of water and a wet dish towel tied around his face.

  “Chris,” she coughed. “Give it up.”

  “Have you got her?” he shouted. “Have you got Leslie?”

  “Yeah. C’mon!”

  But he seemed not to hear Anya.

  Anya stumbled through the kitchen door and into the blessedly cool air of the outdoors. Anya dropped Leslie to the dew-slick grass a few yards upwind. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the roof was beginning to be engulfed, the cedar shake shingles on the south side of the house going up like tinder. She breathed a sigh of relief to see Brian sprint from the house with his arms full of computer gear.

  Anya pressed her fingers to Leslie’s wrists and throat, feeling for a pulse, felt nothing. She tipped Leslie’s head forward, listened for breathing.

  Anya pinched Leslie’s nose shut and blew into her mouth. Her breath felt raw and jagged from inhaling smoke, but it was all she had. Two breaths. No movement. She laced her hands over Leslie’s breastbone, locked her elbows, and leaned into the chest compressions. The force of her efforts shook dew from the grass but didn’t make Leslie move.

  She breathed for Leslie, breathed and did compressions until the muscles in her arms ached. When the paramedics came, she stepped back. They took over pounding on her chest and squeezing the oxygen bag over her face. But by now, Anya knew that it was a useless effort.

  In the hustle and bustle, she faded into the background. If her name got on a report involving ghost hunting and a death, DFD would have her fired. She felt torn by the desire to slip away from the scene and the need to comfort Chris and mop up the aftermath.

  Chris… Anya looked back at the house. A pump truck had pulled up to the curb, and firefighters were dragging hoses to the porch. Chris was nowhere to be seen.

  The stupid son of a bitch. He thought he could fight the fire by himself.

  Anya ran to the pump captain, pointed to the house, gasping. “There’s a man still in there.”

  The pump captain shouted to the firefighters on the back of the truck. The firefighters stormed the porch, broke down the doors with their axes. Glass shattered as a window blew out.

  Anya waited behind the fire hydrant, watching, waiting, hoping that Chris hadn’t been that stupid. She knew that he and Leslie were desperate to save the house, but nothing was worth flesh and blood. Two firefighters dragged a form out onto the porch. A hose runner blasted the figures with water as they emerged, but Anya could see the char on Chris’s clothes, how his feet bent limply when the firefighters dragged him to the grass.

  She shut her eyes.

  Damn it. No dream was worth this.

  “IT WAS A LUCKY THING you were there.”

  Anya made a noncommittal noise as she sipped her coffee in the hospital lounge. The hot coffee rinsed some of the taste of smoke from her throat but did little to ease the burn in her sinuses. That would take days to clear.

  Marsh flipped through some papers on his clipboard. “One of the witnesses, Katherine Parks, said she flagged you down on the street. Said she was delivering a cake when she saw the house on fire and stopped.”

  Anya took another sip, thoughts churning. DAGR was covering their tracks. Mention of ghost hunters performing a sleep study without medical supervision was a recipe for disaster… especially when that experiment ended in death. Brian had discreetly gathered his equipment and left the scene. Jules and Max had remained at the neighbors’ house, she supposed. And Anya had no idea what damage being associated with DAGR would do to her career. Katie, apparently, had the presence of mind to try to cover for her. Even when she was playing the role of wicked witch, Katie always looked cherubic. She was certain that DFD bought every line she fed them. The grandfather of the house next door had slept through the whole thing.

  “Yeah,” Anya mumbled. “Too bad that I couldn’t help.” She glanced up at Marsh. “Any word yet on what might have started the fire?”

  “My guess is something electrical. A socket was found in the living room, melted. Old houses like that have a lot of problems. Looks like they were doing some renovation… Maybe they double-tapped a wire or disturbed something in the process of updating the house. It’s a crying shame, though.”

  Anya swallowed. The whole thing was a disaster. The guilt weighed heavily on her, and the deception did nothing to mitigate it. “Is everyone okay?”

  Marsh shook his head. “There was a guy in the house. The smoke got him, then the flames. They found him holding a bucket.”

  Anya stared into her inky coffee. “What about the woman?”

  “The attending physician thought it was smoke inhalation, but there’s no trauma to the lungs. She’s brain dead.”

  Anya looked up. “Can I see her?”

  “She’s down here.” Marsh gestured for her to follow him down the hallway. “Room 218.”

  Anya drained her coffee cup and trudged down the hallway. Though she knew Hope Solomon was at the root of the situation, that whatever force had set Bernie and the museum guard on fire and sucked up ghosts in a giant vacuum cleaner was acting at Hope’s behest, Anya still felt as if she and DAGR had unwittingly placed Leslie and Chris in a precarious position as they poked the beast.

  Leslie’s hospital room smelled of bleach. Anya reached out with her senses to see if Leslie’s spirit lingered nearby, but she felt nothing. Leslie lay in a hospital bed, connected to a machine that whirred and pushed air into her lungs. Her eyes were taped shut, and she’d been intubated. Leslie’s chest rose and fell with an artificial breath, sending chills down Anya’s spine. Machines beeped metronomically beside her, giving the illusion of life.

  “Why is she still on a respirator?” Anya whispered.

  Before Marsh could answer, a familiar voice trickled from behind the curtain in the next unit. Hope Solomon pulled the curtain aside and regarded Anya with narrowed eyes and a plastic grin: “She had a medical power of attorney drawn up to donate her organs. She was a very generous soul.”
/>   “Who are you?” Marsh demanded.

  “Hope Solomon, Leslie’s spiritual adviser.” She extended her hand to Marsh who stared coldly at her until she dropped it.

  Anya’s fist clenched. “In this state, the organ donor list is organized on basis of need.”

  Hope held a sheaf of papers. “Leslie agreed to a private donation.”

  Marsh growled at Hope, “That’s not legal.”

  “That will be for the courts to decide.” Hope leaned over to the bed and tenderly brushed hair away from Leslie’s eyes in a fake motherly gesture. “But I’m sure that no one will bar a transplant when time is of the essence.”

  Hope’s eyes flickered to Anya, hesitated on her throat. Her voice was thick as syrup as she drawled, “You’re not wearing that fabulous artifact. Did you lose it?”

  Anya’s fingers fluttered to her neck. She leaned forward and hissed at Hope, “I’m on to you, lady. And I’m not going to let go.”

  Marsh grabbed her arm and dragged Anya out of the room before she ripped Hope’s grinning bleach-blond bobble head from her spring-loaded neck.

  “Is ALANN all right?” Anya asked.

  Brian’s feet stuck out from underneath a glass-and-chrome desk, draped by wires and bits of ribbon cable. This deep in his computer lab at the university, behind the whir of the cooling fans on server racks, he was in his element—and often indistinguishable from it.

  “You can ask him yourself,” came the muffled reply. “Check the laptop on the table.” A hand with a screwdriver waved Anya in the direction of a glass-topped table sitting on anti-static floor pads. The table was strewn with electrical devices, some of them charred and melted from last night. Brian was trying to retrieve as much of last night’s evidence as possible from the equipment, and it was slow going. If nothing else, DAGR would need it to cover its ass if it was implicated legally. Anya saw a lump of melted plastic that had once been a camcorder and winced.

  Anya opened the laptop, and it flickered to life. The black screen blinked, then typed out: Hello, Anya.

  “Hi, ALANN. I’m glad that you’re okay.”

  Thank you for your concern. But I find it difficult to believe that your sole reason for descending into Brian’s dungeon was to check upon my well-being.

  Anya frowned. If it had been human, Anya would have thought she detected a rim of bitterness around the words. “I was worried for you. And I also need Brian’s help to put together some surveillance equipment.”

  Interesting. May I ask who the object of your interest is?

  “A con artist. I don’t have enough evidence to get a warrant on her, but I think I know what she’s going to steal next. A museum piece. And I want to track every move she makes.”

  Why does she want the museum piece?

  “It’s complicated.” Anya wondered how much she could tell the machine without burning up its heat sink. “I think she wants an artifact reputed to be Pandora’s Jar as… as a reliquary for ghosts. A prison for them. She’s captured many others, and she’s forcing them to do her will somehow.”

  The cursor blinked for a few moments, and the fan kicked on.

  I saw the ghost you were chasing last night. Is that one of the ghosts she has?

  “You saw it?” Anya leaned forward.

  Yes. I was monitoring all of Brian’s equipment.

  Anya’s brow furrowed. She wondered if Brian knew that. “Yes. That’s one of the spirits I think Hope has.”

  And she’s keeping them… in a database of sorts?

  “That’s probably an apt way of describing it. She’s keeping them in bottles. I think the next one she wants is Pandora’s Jar.”

  A new window opened on the laptop, and a newspaper image from the Detroit Free Press showed Pandora’s Jar. ALANN zoomed in to the lip of the jar.

  Interesting. The interior is crystalline?

  “Yes. All her reliquaries feel like geodes inside.”

  It might have originally been a geode, carved out of rock. Crystals provide for large quantities of data storage. Rather than using magnetic or optical data storage, a crystal provides for holographic data storage. It allows for information to be distributed throughout the surface area of the media. When light issues through the medium, different images can be produced.

  “There might be a scientific basis for the reliquary?”

  Theoretically, yes. Up to 500 GB per square inch, or more.

  Anya placed her chin in her hand. The intersection of magick and science was exciting, but it made her head hurt. “So… you’re saying the reliquary is no different than a CD-ROM or a flash drive?”

  Well, in terms of volume, it’s much more similar to the server farm that powers my processing. The reliquary is as much a trap as this computer is for me. The ghost in the machine.

  Anya frowned. “I didn’t know that you felt that way.”

  Feeling is relative.

  The cursor blinked, and did not elaborate. Instead, it changed the subject: What are you hoping to capture on surveillance?

  “I’d like to connect Hope Solomon to some of the stolen property from one of her victims. I want to know where she’s keeping it. I also want to see if we can tie her to some of the fires that have been set.”

  What kinds of fires?

  “Two deaths that I can’t yet attribute to anything other than spontaneous human combustion. And several small fires in the proximity of her ghost activity.”

  “That’s bothering me, because it makes no sense.” Brian’s voice sounded from the other side of the room. “Remember that we use temperature gauges to detect the presence of ghosts?”

  “Yeah. The colder it gets, the more likely it is for a ghost to be present, because they’re drawing heat energy from the ambient air to manifest.”

  “Right. If there are ghosts around, I’d expect there to be a decrease. But in the case of Hope’s ghosts, temperature increases, to the point of causing seemingly random flash fires. It’s entirely counterintuitive.”

  “Maybe not.” Anya ran her fingers over her naked neck. “Sparky’s a nonphysical being. Not exactly a spirit, but he’s warm.”

  ALANN beeped to get her attention, and Brian crawled out from under the desk to look over her shoulder. Consider the first law of thermodynamics, on conservation of energy: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. If your spirits draw energy to manifest in the physical world, it’s logical to assume that some of that discharge would result in heat. The more energy transferred in the system would result in higher amounts of heat.

  “Our spirits are then taking heat to manifest, and then using that heat to create fires… whether intentionally or unintentionally?” Brain twirled a screwdriver along his knuckles. “Interesting.”

  Of course, I’m shooting from the hip. It could very well be bullshit, since the brain I’m patterned after didn’t believe in ghosts. But suspending disbelief for a moment… it could be possible. A crystalline structure, such as what’s contained in the interior of the reliquaries, does allow for a nice amount of energy storage as well.

  “Like a battery?” Anya asked. The conversation was over her head, though she knew that ALANN was making an effort to distill it down to manageable terminology.

  Very possibly.

  Brian shook his head and wandered back to his pile of gegaws. “Hope’s got some interesting technology. I’d love to figure out how that works.”

  Anya crossed her arms. “Out of idle curiosity? Or for practical application?”

  Brian gave one of his inscrutable shrugs. “What I’ve done with ALANN requires a massive amount of computational space on several servers. If the storage problem could be resolved through holographic data storage… shit, I’d be in business with a whole squad of ALANNs.”

  “Doesn’t that create an ethical problem? I mean… the idea of patterning self-aware artificial brains after people who’ve died sort of squicks me out.” Anya’s gaze flicked back at the monitor. She felt odd talking about ALANN as if he wasn’t the
re. “Sorry, ALANN.”

  “Not really. Dead is dead. The way I figure it, your rights pretty much end when you quit breathing.” Tools clinked under the desk.

  Anya’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know about that. The ghosts we see… many of them have consciousness. They have feelings.”

  “Yeah. But they aren’t alive.”

  Anya shook her head. “They deserve some kind of consideration.”

  “You don’t really think that they’re entitled to the same rights as living people, do you? I mean, if you did… you couldn’t be judge, jury, and executioner, right?” His tone was mild, but Anya could hear the tightness in his voice.

  “I don’t know what I think.” Anya rubbed her arms, chilled both from the extra air-conditioning units working to keep the servers cold and the gap in Brian’s ethics. She looked away, glanced down at the monitor. The white cursor blinked, spelled out:

  Let me out of here. Please.

  Anya took a step back, startled. She looked over at Brian, saw that his attention was absorbed in a squid of cables trickling over the edge of the desk.

  ALANN carefully backspaced over the words, leaving no trace.

  Anya reached out to touch the screen, thoughts roiling. Shit. Was ALANN trapped in there? Like the ghosts in the reliquaries, imprisoned with science, not magick?

  “Would you say that Sparky was conscious?” Brian continued.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “But you pretty much keep him on a leash, and he does what you want.”

  “It’s not like that,” Anya protested. “It’s much more…” She wanted to say intimate than that, but it sounded all wrong.

  “Regardless, you don’t have a relationship of equals.”

  “That’s just because he can’t talk.” Anya’s mouth thinned. Brian hadn’t seen Sparky, didn’t know about his personality.

  “You really anthropomorphize him, you know.”

  “He’s my guardian,” Anya said. Anger rippled through her voice. “He’s watched over me all my life. If anything, I owe him a debt, not the other way around.”