Ghostmaker

ERIC MICHAEL CRAIG

THE WALLS WERE DULL GRAY, like everything else, even the food. The company he kept, sitting in the gray world, was lifeless, cold, unresponsive. But the medication helped. In those roaring times when the voices called to him, the meds dialed down the impossible chattering cacophony of a million souls screaming for help.

If only he could get them to shut up. Or find someone else that would listen to them, so that they’d quit coming to him. But he knew it was more than just trying to find a voice, with him they were seeking vengeance.

For now, he tried to pretend that he was alone. But he knew better. They clung like a gossamer net, tangling his thoughts and tripping him up. He tried to explain that if they didn’t leave him alone, he’d never be able to help. They didn’t seem to care.

Sleep came to him, as it always did after his shot. But as usual, he dreamt through the eyes of a thousand lost souls, seeing the world torn away in shattering colors. The drugs were stronger than the terror, so he lay motionless, chained to the bed, hiding from the screams yet unable to even cover his ears.

“Are you awake, Dr. Steele?” a voice from the real world whispered, bare inches from his face.

Open your eyes, you damn fool, he thought through the fog. It’s her again. His lashes flickered but the lids refused to raise even the barest distance.

“Adam, can you hear me?” she asked, touching his shoulder and shaking him. “We can’t get them to listen, unless you speak to me. Adam, please. We’re losing.”

I need to be heard, he thought again, trying to force his body to respond to his will.

“It’s no use,” she said, raising herself out of his awareness by sitting up on the edge of his bed. “The meds are too strong.”

There’s someone else in the room! he screamed sotto voce, shuddering against his body until he was sure she could see his movement. His voice locked in the chemical prison of his nightly coma.

“I know that if he could tell us what he’s hearing—” Her voice shut out by the sound of a closing door. And then keys turning in the lock.

∞

SURE, MONEY’S TIGHT, but someday that’ll be different, Adam Steele thought, pulling his beat-up Geo Lectro between two impressive EUVs that each took up a space and a half. He’d had a brilliant future ahead of him, but instead of accepting a position at one of the big institutes back east, he’d followed his dream. Though lately it had felt more like a nightmare.

Taking what little inheritance his parents had left him, he started his own independent lab. A small space in the back corner of a rundown industrial complex, filled with cast off equipment salvaged from late night dumpster diving expeditions behind the local Honeywell and Hughes Aircraft plants. It wasn’t much of a lab, dusty and dirty most of the time, though he could call it his own. More importantly he didn’t have to answer to anyone.

Until of course, he’d run out of money and had to start panhandling the rich and ignorant for contributions. He’d discovered that getting money for science, was tougher than getting it for a three headed leper who wanted to have sex in public and call it art. Those few who had money were the most sinister, cutthroat pirates since Captain Blood sailed the high seas. Once he’d started spending Other People’s Money, he found out what it was to be on a leash. A very short leash.

His first so-called “investor” tried to micromanage everything, from the science itself, to the brand of toilet paper he bought for the bathroom. Needless to say, that relationship died a shuddering and near violent death.

His second investor was no better, not micromanaging, just strangling him by the purse strings. He expected progress, he said every Monday when he called on the phone. No matter how much he’d accomplished, there wasn’t enough progress. Ever. It was always too slow. Instead of giving him a break, he just kept choking him tighter. If you can’t get the work done, there’ll be no more money. Finally, he’d told the old bastard that he could have it quick, or he could have it cheap, but there was no way in hell he was going to have it quick and cheap.

When they’d parted company there was no threat of violence, just a lawsuit. Quiet and brutal, and resolved only after pushing Adam to the precipice of bankruptcy.

And so it was that the young, brilliant, and desperate Dr. Adam Steele came to be sitting in Einstein’s Bagel Shop across from the university, staring into his laptop screen and trying not to contemplate the death of his dream, when chance dropped an angel into his lap.

“May I join you?” she said walking up. He wasn’t in the mood for company and he glanced around before realizing that he sat at the only table with an empty space.

“Sure,” he said, looking up at her for the first time, his breath catching in his throat. She was about his age, tall, and beyond beautiful. A shocking white smile and dark eyes that sparked with mischief framed by silky black hair that hung well past the top of her otherwise totally distracting cleavage.

He closed his computer screen and moved the remains of his half-eaten bagel out of her way.

“Thank you,” she said, as she eased into the chair. “I’m Luci.” She held out her hand and he sat for several seconds before he could even move to shake it.

“Adam,” he said, finding speech to be almost impossible in her presence.

“What’re you working on?” she asked, nodding toward his laptop.

“Trying to work out some science,” he said.

“Ah, so you’re a student?” she asked. Dipping the corner of her croissant into the honey butter she had in a little cup, he watched as she stuck the crumb of bread between her lips, his mind miles from his dilemma at that moment.

“Oh no,” he said, blinking to clear the erotic images from his mind. “I used to be, but now I work for myself. I’ve got a small lab of my own.”

“Really, that’s cool,” she said. “So, what do you do at your lab?”

“Actually, I mostly starve to death,” he said, regretting his words even as they slipped out.

“I thought it was supposed to be artists who starved,” she giggled.

“Yeah well, me too,” he admitted. “But it’s hard to get people to understand what you’re up against, especially when you’re trying to build something as far out as a commercial matter transmitter.”

“So, you’re chasing Heisenberg uncertainly through the corridors of quantum indeterminacy?” she said, never missing a beat.

“Excuse me?” He blinked, several times. “Did you just say what I thought you said?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Just ‘cause I look like this doesn’t mean that I can’t have a degree, too.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but words wouldn’t form in his consciousness. He flapped his lips open and closed like a fish getting a suntan while she smiled at his discomfort.

“So, how about you show me your lab?” she asked, taking him another step outside his frame of reality.

∞

IT TOOK TWO WEEKS, and a half dozen dates for her to admit that it hadn’t been entirely chance that had brought them together. She’d been at Einstein’s Bagels that particular morning on a mission, specifically to find him. Dr. Rothschild, a former professor of his, had heard about what he was working on, and thought the two of them should meet. It was only after she’d spent the time getting to know both him and his work, that she confided the truth.

Lying in bed, she propped her head on her arm and stared at him, waiting for him to come fully awake. He opened one eye and looked at her, squinting like a pirate without his patch.

“Yes?” he whispered his voice still hoarse after the heavy growling of their passion.

“I want to invest in your project,” she said, blindsiding him.

His other eye popped open and he rolled to face her. “Really?”

“Yeah really,” she said, nodding.

He didn’t know if she was teasing, but since she’d shown no signs of interest in his financial problems before, he was prone to be doubtful. “Have I told you I don’t particularly like investors? They tend to fuck things up.”

“You like me, don’t you?” she asked, looking serious.

“Silly question,” he said, reaching for her under the covers.

“Stop that.” She pushed his hands away and sat up. “I want to give you money for your work. I think what you’re doing is important.”

“You’re playing with me,” he said, uncomfortable with the turn their relationship might be taking. He rolled over and sat up on the edge of the bed facing away from her.

“No, I mean it,” she said, crawling up and putting her arms around him from the back. “How much would it take to finish your work?”

“I don’t know,” he said, very much aware of her naked breasts pushing into his skin.

“Five million… ten million?” she asked. “More?”

“About that,” he said, shrugging and pulling free to stand up and face her. She was clouding his mind, and he knew it was dangerous to try to think when he was having a blood diversion issue.

Hey buddy, don’t worry about it, his penis seemed to be shouting at him. “Where are you going to get that kind of money? Rob a bank?” he asked, ignoring his stupid partner.

She leaned back, locking eyes with him. “I have it,” she said. “And enough more to make sure that when we need to go into production, we can do that, too.”

“Didn’t I tell you I have problems with investors?” he said.

“So, I’m not an investor, I’m an angel,” she said, rolling over and grabbing her bag off the nightstand. Fishing out a small card, she handed it to him.

Lucille Fernandez

Angel

“It’s a business term for a philanthropic investor,” she explained. “It was also my father’s nickname for me when I was growing up. When he passed on, I inherited the family trust. For what it’s worth you’re not the only inventor I’ve helped.”

Suddenly a flash of jealousy exploded in him before he could stop it. “And did you sleep with them too?” He regretted his words the instant they erupted from his mouth.

She smiled and shook her head. “Of course not. I’ve always been good. But now I guess you could say I’m a fallen angel.” She winked, throwing herself across the bed and pinning him against the wall.

This time, his little friend won the argument.

∞

IT HAD BEEN another restless night, the dreams tormented him relentlessly. Faces, flashing like a roulette wheel under strobe lights in an unending parade of superimposed expressions. Voices, droning in a murmured whisper not quite audible behind his thoughts. He sat up slowly, slipping out of bed and settling the covers over his wife’s sleeping form. She rolled toward him, almost awake, fumbling across his pillow with her arm.

“What’s wrong?” Luci mumbled her voice thick and husky.

“I’m just awake,” he said, leaning down to kiss her cheek. She was still as beautiful as she’d been the first day they met. “It’s only a couple hours early, you go to back to sleep; I’m going to jump in the shower.”

“Ok dear,” she said, yawning. “Your pills are on the top shelf if you need one.”

He drew in a deep breath and let it hiss between his lips as he headed to the bathroom. He hated the idea that he needed to take those damn things, but they did help, and she was right, they kept him from being angry all the time. Maybe they were even helping him to get back in touch with his creative side, something he’d lost somewhere along the road from starving and broke, to rich and famous.

The lights came on as he entered the bathroom and he called for the shower, “Hot, one twenty-five.” The A/I responded with a hissing spray and a billowing cloud of steam. He opened the cabinet where she’d put his meds and fumbling through the bottles fished out the Lorazamax, He popped one into his mouth and choked it down dry.

He eased into the shower, flinching under the near scalding jets of water. He stood there adjusting to the heat after several minutes. Hanging his head, he ordered the medium massage. The nozzles adjusted to a rhythmic pounding beat against his arched neck, working the knots loose beneath reddening skin. He lost track of how long he stood there before he got out, but the mirror, in spite of its built in heater, was a continuous sheet of condensation when he stepped up to the sink to shave.

He wiped a hole in the fog and leaned close to look at his face. A cold shiver ran up his back and he shuddered. Above where he’d cleared the glass were two words written in the moisture, Help us. The tail of the S slowly dripping down where the water had been pulled by an unseen finger.

“What the hell?” he gasped, spinning to look around the room. “Luci, are you in here?” He stepped around the corner to make sure she wasn’t hiding in the toilet. He was alone. Another shiver, stronger this time, and he spun back to look at the mirror.

Hurry, the long stroke of the Y drawing as he watched. He staggered back, bumping into the towel bar. Through the open door he looked over at his bed, expecting to see himself lying there. He had to be dreaming. This was way too strange for reality. But the bed was empty, and he was very much awake.

∞

THE GLOW DIED, slowly fading from blue to red. The whining of the induction coils whistling as they absorbed the residual charge from the matter stream. It was a second before they realized that they’d done it. Even if it was only a hamster, they’d managed to transport it. It sat there happy as could be twitching its nose, unaware of its place in history.

Luci squealed, throwing her arms around him, and jumping up and down, the engineer hired with her money looking enviously at him. When she pulled herself off of him he smiled sheepishly. “Let’s get Gumdrop into the medical scanner and see if she’s 100%,” he said, trying to maintain his professionalism in spite of being somewhat flustered by her physical assault.

Two hours later he was staring at the readouts from the wireless EEG and scratching his head. The hardware had gone through the transfer with the rodent as expected, but immediately after it had reassembled, there was a marked decrease in brain activity. Not really a change in pattern so much as a small voltage drop. Not necessarily enough to be worrisome, but it was there, nonetheless.

“Maybe it’s the sensors?” Eddie Thompson said. He was the electrical engineer and always looked to the hardware first for the source of a problem.

“But you’ve sent electronics through the matter stream before,” Joel said. “None of them showed any signs of a problem.” Dr. Maxwell was their physician. He wasn’t really a full-time employee of their company, but he pitched in occasionally and acted like their hair shirt. He asked the questions that made them itch in uncomfortable ways.

“Maybe it was the Heisenberg Constraint Threshold,” Adam said, looking at Luci. She was the only other physicist on the team.

“The what?” Joel asked.

“Heisenberg theorized that you can only approximate the actual location of any given particle within a set of mathematical limits. Basically, you can’t be sure, at a quantum level, exactly where anything is. Even the process of looking interferes with the reality of where a given unit of matter is by the time you can record its location.”

“So?” he asked.

“What Adam’s done is to develop a mathematical process that allows us to assume the given energy state of all the matter within a set threshold value, and then transfer that to the data matrix for transmission. The lower the threshold, the looser the approximation of the energy and the wider an area of matter we have to move. With a solid object we can be a lot tighter than we can with one that has moving parts and lower density components.”

“You lost me somewhere,” Joel said. “Are we talking about reality or mathematics?”

“Both,” Adam said. “The mathematics are used to define a frame of reference in a relativistic sense, in which we can hold the quantum structure reliably together while we build an identical matrix on the receiver platform.”

“So, if we constrain the threshold tighter, we get a slightly smaller proportion of energy through to the other side. Loosening the threshold gives us a little more energy, but also a higher level of quantum junk,” she finished, looking at Joel like it should all be obvious.

“How about I just make sure you don’t kill something accidentally,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I thought medical jargon was bad.”

“Well let’s send her back through and see if it happens again,” Luci suggested. And so, they did, twenty-seven times that afternoon and ten more the next morning. Not once was there any more loss of brain power. Probably a good thing too, Eddie noted, because a hamster doesn’t have much to start with.

“I want to try it,” Luci said, volunteering and then pouting at him until he was on the verge of giving in.

Dr. Maxwell stepped in and made a suggestion. “Let’s do one more thing first. Send through another test subject. One that hasn’t gone through before. If it happens again then we might have a problem. If not, then I think we can rule out the drop being a physiological phenomenon.”

They wired Gumdrop’s sister JuJou-B into the EEG and put her between the gates of the transmitter. JuJou-A had not quite made the transport as planned, and from the way B reacted when they loaded her into the machine, she looked like she knew it. “I’m going to lower the threshold a little bit,” Adam said, punching in the new values while they turned on the power supplies.

Nodding to Eddie, they threw the switch.

And JuJou-B appeared in the other room, blinking in mild surprise, but otherwise quite unhurt. There was an imperceptible voltage drop on the EEG readout.

Adam shook his head again, but Luci pushed for her trip through the quantum wonderland. “Sooner or later one of us is going to have to go through and you know it,” she said. “I’m the only one here who’s redundant.”

“She’s right,” Eddie said. “You do the numbers, and I push the button that makes it go ping.” He shrugged.

“Unless the Doctor wants to go through the magic doorway, that leaves me.” She stood up, ripping her shirt open and holding her arms out. “Wire me up, doc.”

The engineer stared at her for several seconds before he realized that his boss was watching him drool. “Sorry” he said, forcing his eyes back to his monitors, “I’ll reset the system while you guys get her ready.”

It took twenty minutes to recalibrate everything and get her into the chamber. Adam spent the time checking and rechecking his calculations. In the end, Eddie stepped aside and let Adam punch the button himself. It was his wife, after all, who was being disintegrated. Fortunately, Luci Fernandez-Steele became the first person in human history to successfully leave her body and rematerialize in another location without having to die first.

And she showed none of the voltage loss in her brain, the first time, or any time after that.

∞

BREAKFAST HAD BEEN NOTHING, if not strange. Adam had spent the rest of the pre-dawn morning staring at the mirror, watching the writing fade as the humidity reabsorbed into the air. By sunrise he’d almost managed to convince himself he’d been dreaming. Not quite, but close.

“How are you this morning sweetheart?” Luci asked, appearing in the kitchen doorway.

“Ok,” he said, not sounding convincing even to himself. He’d been staring at the news feed on his Epad, but nothing was sinking into his brain.

“What’s wrong?” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “More bad dreams?”

He bobbled his head back and forth, not really nodding or shaking it. “Maybe,” he said after several seconds of considering if he wanted to tell her. “The problem is, this one was so vivid I’m not sure it was a dream.”

“What was it?” She sat down beside him and put her hand on his leg, giving it a squeeze.

“I got up and took a Lorazamax and then jumped in the shower, do you remember?” he said.

She looked at him, confusion on her face. “I remember you getting up, but you weren’t out of bed for that long.”

“Yeah I was,” he said. “I took a shower. I checked the towels to make sure. They’re still damp.”

“If you say so.” She leaned back studying him. “So anyway, what about the dream?”

“It was real quick,” he said. “I felt something strange in the room with me, and then words appeared on the mirror.”

“Strange? Strange, how?”

“Like… like maybe a ghost,” he said, feeling foolish as he said it. “There was this bone-numbing cold… thing… in the room with me, and then it wrote three words on the glass. Help us. Hurry. Nothing more.”

“Really?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. She wasn’t trying to be cruel, but even he had to admit it sounded too weird to be true.

“The thing is, I could swear to you that it happened,” he said.” And when I think about it, it’s what the voices in my dreams have been saying all along. Help us.”

“Ok, so this dream was more of the same,” she suggested. “I’d think it not all that uncommon to have dreams that revolve around a common theme.”

He looked up at her, staring into her eyes, and shook his head. “It wasn’t a dream. It happened.”

She let out a slow breath and said nothing as she got up and went over to the fridge to pull out their instant breakfasts. She popped them in the nuke, pulling out two glasses of orange juice and a thermo cup of coffee for him. Popping the tab on the coffee she looked over at him, concern visible on her face. Bringing the drinks to the table she started to say something but stopped herself and went back to the oven to grab their food.

He stared at the steam rising off the coffee as the thermo-chip brought it up to temperature. She slipped the tray in front of him and sat close beside him at the table. Leaning forward she squeezed his arm, not turning loose until he looked into her face. “Adam,” she said, her voice soft and soothing, “I know we’re both under a lot of stress with the IPO for TransMatrix, and believe me I know you haven’t been sleeping well for a long time. But this really scares me.”

“I know it sounds nuts” he said, trying to smile but knowing that his face was wrinkling oddly instead.

“It does,” she said, “but I know you’re not crazy, okay.” She squeezed his arm tighter.

“Let me call Joel,” she said after several long hanging moments. “Maybe we should have him adjust your meds. He knows that we need to be discreet.”

He nodded. “I guess so. I know I can’t keep on like this anymore.”

∞

IT HAD TAKEN SIX WEEKS for the word of their successful test to leak out. It had been like a tornado from that moment, a never-ending whirl of calls from scientific journals and the international news agencies. The story of how a small group of scientists, working in a tiny lab, with salvaged equipment and a shoestring budget, had managed to build a machine that would change the world. The story had gone viral, told in a hundred variations. It was well on its way to becoming an urban legend.

Dr. Adam Steele’s boyishly genuine face appeared on newsstands everywhere, smiling like the cat that ate the canary, and somehow lived to tell the story. He was on the radio, he was on the news, and he even spent an hour with Oprah (or at least the woman who was the heir to the Oprah franchise this year). He was the boy wonder of the next industrial revolution.

What was most amazing to him was that with all the money they were spending, so far they hadn’t sold a unit. But that was coming. They’d just bought a manufacturing building out in the Valley and they were going to be moving their operations as soon as it could be outfitted.

Of course, there were those things to deal with that weren’t so pleasant, like the calls from his previous investors, especially the two who had been the most difficult. They seemed to think that now he’d reached the Promised Land, he owed it all to them. Fortunately, with Luci’s huge fortune had come a legion of attorneys who were best measured by the acre foot.

She handled those calls from that point on. She was surprisingly good at it and after she’d finished explaining the reality of how things worked, not a single one called again. In fact, she planned out the entirety of their business strategy. She liked that kind of work and he was totally okay leaving it to her. It left him free to deal with the creative things he wanted to do.

For his twenty-eighth birthday, about four months after they’d gotten their new company, TransMatrix, off the ground, she surprised him with something he’d wanted since before they’d met. They were visiting Arizona State University where he was doing a lecture on Shoestring Science; after he’d finished up, she’d taken him out driving their rental car through Scottsdale, one of the richest cities in the United States. Back home he still drove his old Lectro; it wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t really matter to him. He knew that if he’d been driving it at this moment, he would have felt his car’s embarrassment as a tangible presence. To drive down Scottsdale Road, passing by the rows of cars that started with price tags of a quarter million, was a painful sensation.

Fortunately, she was behind the wheel, or he’d have killed them rubbernecking. A bright red Ferrari EX3000i sat inside a polished chrome showroom and he blinked in surprise when she turned into the lot. “See something you like?” she asked, knowing that she’d pulled him up in front of his dream car.

“Duh” he said, looking at the car almost as lustfully as he had looked at her that first day.

“Dr. Steele,” a man in a ten-thousand-dollar suit walked up, rapping on the window and stepping back politely.

He glanced at his wife and shrugged, “Maybe he’s seen my picture somewhere?”

She giggled. “Maybe so” she said, staring out the front window with her hands on the steering wheel.

“Dr. Steele are you here to pick up your car?” the man asked, stepping forward and raising his voice.

Luci burst out laughing. She held out a set of keys and pointed through the window at the Ferrari.

Needless to say, he drove home. He drove everywhere he could after that. Even continuing to drive after most of the world started using TMatrix Doors. It was ok if people thought he was eccentric. He was rich enough that the world could wait. He planned to enjoy the ride.

∞

LUCI SAT BESIDE HIM, holding his hand while he talked to Joel. Since the days in the lab they’d been close friends, and he’d been Adam’s personal physician as well, but it was hard to tell him about the dream. It was harder still to confess that he didn’t think it was a dream. But Dr. Maxwell never once questioned his friend’s sanity as he listened to him struggle to explain what he thought he’d seen.

“So, you think I’m ready for the rubber Hilton?” Adam asked, once he’d finished.

“I’ve known you now for quite a while,” Joel said, smiling. “You might be a little off-balance once in a while, but you’re not crazy. Hell, you’ve achieved the impossible, so who am I to pass judgment?”

“What can we do?” Luci asked.

“I’d like to order some tests before we go jumping into some kind of treatment plan,” he said. “Let’s rule out some kind of physiological problem. Without knowing what’s going on electrochemically we might make things worse by trying to prescribe meds.”

“Tests?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, brain scan, blood and enzyme screening. Nothing too invasive,” he said. “We just want to eliminate the easy things before we go calling in an exorcist.”

“This is serious Joel,” Luci said, jumping to his defense.

“I know,” he said, shooting her a significant look, “but let’s not complicate the situation by making it more than it is. I’ll go ahead and up your anxiety meds and give you something else that will make your sleep more productive, deeper. We’ll get the blood drawn today.” He stood up and led them to the door. “It’ll take a few days to get you into the Mayo clinic in Scottsdale, so we’ll just take it easy and do what we can to get you taken care of, okay?”

“Sure,” Adam said. “And if there’s nothing wrong with me, do you know where to find an exorcist?”

Three days later, they’d gotten the blood tests back. His only problem was with his serotonin levels, and they were barely outside the norm. The pills were letting him sleep a little better; at least he wasn’t getting up in the middle of the night to stare at the mirror.

“Let’s take the Door to Phoenix,” Luci said. “It’s a lot quicker and we can spend the extra time sightseeing. You know, maybe we could even enjoy the time off.” She held up her skimpy new bikini and looked at him seductively.

“I’d like to drive,” he said, his eyes pleading. “We can take the top off and feel the wind in our faces. It’s only six hours and I haven’t had a chance to open it up for a while.”

“You and that car” she sighed, teasing.

“Come on, remember when people used to see the world they were traveling through?” he said. “It’ll be fun. Nostalgic.”

“Can’t we put windows in the data stream?” she asked, winking. “I mean since you changed the world, the highways are mostly filled with trucks. I don’t like the idea of being surrounded for six hours by lumbering behemoths that can’t do more than seventy on a good day.”

“Fine, you jump, and I’ll meet you there,” he said, giving her those sad, puppy-dog eyes that always got him his way.

“I surrender,” she said, smiling and pushing him away playfully. “If you’re going to be driving with the top down, maybe I can spend the time getting rid of these tan-lines. Six hours in the middle of the desert with nobody around.”

“You’re so wicked,” he said, grinning and tossing her the cocoa butter off the dressing table.

For a while he felt almost normal, and the scans the following week confirmed it. He was normal. So, their next step was to put him on a low dose of the Sarastatin as a diagnostic tool. They’d keep an eye on him to see how he reacted.

Of course, he resisted the idea. He was afraid the drugs he was on were already having an adverse effect on his creativity, and he didn’t want to lose what little he had left. But when Luci made up her mind that something needed to be done, there was little point in arguing.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Joel assured him. “Right now you’re fighting exhaustion more than anything. These meds will just help you keep a grip on the demons that are chewing you up. Once you get them off your back, you’ll see, everything will be good again.”

∞

“DR. STEELE?” the woman was back again. Sitting on the side of his bed. Her voice sounding muffled. “Can you hear me?” He nodded, not opening his eyes.

“Good, he’s responding this time,” she said, talking to someone beyond the edges of his awareness. “Do you remember me?”

He lay still, dredging through the clutter of memories and trying to pull up her name. He knew that he should know her, but her identity sat in the middle of an empty hole in his mind. After a week that was probably only several seconds, he opened his eyes. The light in his room was almost painfully bright, like he hadn’t used his eyes in months. The room spun sideways while the bed tumbled end-over-end. He clamped his eyes closed, preferring darkness to the sickening twist of the world. Finally, he shook his head slowly. No, he didn’t remember her.

“I’m Nancy Carson, your attorney,” she said.

He wrinkled his forehead in confusion. Attorney?

“I’m trying to help you, Dr. Steele,” she said touching his hand. He flinched away from her. “Your wife is trying to hold your company together and she needs you to step aside while you’re getting better. Do you understand?”

He shook his head slowly.

“You’ve had a breakdown,” she said. “Do you remember anything about the last few months?”

Again, he shook his head.

“She’s not trying to take your business away from you, she’s only trying to keep this from hurting both of you,” she said. “We’ve drafted papers that allow her to take over temporarily and we need you to agree to them. If you do, then her attorneys can drop the motion to have you declared incompetent. Do you understand?”

Ghosts dancing in the mists of his mind. He shook his head, and then slowly nodded, struggling to make sense of what she was saying. His brain was so thoroughly clouded by the drugs, he’d only followed a fraction of her words.

Somewhere along the way, things had gone wrong. He’d gotten lost. He’d missed the most important thing. He focused not on the woman beside him reading the papers, but on the blackness that had been his memories. A word floated up through the stormy sea of confusion, the voices in his head masking it as he struggled to pick it out. A voice he knew hung just below the surface of his awareness.

As she’d finished reading the agreement, the silence in the real world inspired the voices in his head to fall quiet; all but the one, and it was his own. He licked his lips, swallowing against the dryness of his mouth. His throat rasped, feeling like sandpaper on glass. “Weight,” he croaked.

“Wait?” she asked. “Wait for what?”

He shook his head, forcing his eyes open, trying to ignore the maelstrom of spinning sensations. “Weight,” he repeated.

The woman sitting beside him sighed. “Fine, we’ll wait,” she said, “but it’s only going to make things worse.” She got up and left him lying on the bed. The man behind her stepped forward and slipped a needle into his arm.

Quiet washed over his confusion. Sleep fell around his mind like a blanket, suffocating him again.

∞

THE MEDS DIDN’T change his perception of reality, nor did they make the murmuring voices disappear. They just made it so he didn’t care, made it so that he could almost ignore them, except when he slept. Then, chained to the bed in a medically induced stupor, he still heard them crying out for help. One word wove itself through the cacophony of voices, relentlessly pulling at the fabric of his mind: Help.

“Are you okay?” Luci asked, her eyes probing. She knew he was still hearing things even though he hadn’t mentioned it since they’d changed his medication.

“I’m fine,” he said, his lips twitching in a weak smile. “I’m just a little nervous about my speech.” He was standing on the edge of the stage they’d rented for their annual State of the Company Conference. He was wearing a suit, something he rarely did anymore, but because of the occasion he’d agreed that it was important that he look the part of the polished businessman and not the eccentric visionary. He was much more comfortable in the latter role, especially of late.

Eddie Thompson, the Vice-President of Engineering, was just finishing up his part of the presentation and had warmed the audience up nicely. The introduction over, Eddie held out his arm and Adam strode into the spotlight as he’d done a hundred times before. The two men shook hands, hugging. “Good job,” Adam said over the thunderous applause. “You’re getting to be a tough act to follow.”

“Thanks, Boss,” he said. Help us.

“What did you say?” Adam asked as Eddie pulled free and headed for the side of the stage. “What?” He stood there looking at his friend who disappeared into the darkness.

Help us? How could he know what the voices said? The applause started to die down and he turned and looked out at the audience. They were hidden out in the moat beyond the bright lights. He could feel them watching him as he plastered a smile over his confusion and walked to the podium.

Clearing his throat, he tapped the button on the top of the terminal and the wall screen behind him lit up. He glanced over his shoulder and froze. Instead of his first image, which should have been the corporate logo and a picture of their newest TransMatrix Door, the screen was gold with blue lettering. Help us. Hurry.

He tapped the button again. Again, the gold with blue lettering. Help us. Hurry.

“Well, that’s not working,” he said turning the terminal off nervously and looking over at where he knew his wife was watching. “I guess I’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.” He could feel sweat running down his back under his expensive suit coat. It was dissolving his already fragile confidence in rivulets that danced uncomfortably down his spine.

He glanced back at the now dark screen expecting to still see those words, but thankfully it was off. He raised his eyebrows and shaking his head slightly tried to focus on what he’d planned to say. “Fortunately, the powers that be have given me the portion of tonight’s program that I actually enjoy the most.” He waved off stage, smiling. “It’s ok Honey, I’ll read it like you wrote it.” He winked theatrically, getting the expected laugh from the audience.

“Actually, I wrote this one myself.” He pulled out a stack of papers and unfolded them onto the podium. “Is she coming for me yet?” Another laugh. Everyone knew that while she was the real power behind the throne of TransMatrix, he was the vision in front of it. The press had called them a perfect balance, and even though they both liked to tease each other publicly, it was never more than teasing. She poked her head out from the wings and rolled her eyes, playing to the back row.

“Actually though, I do want to talk to you about where we’re going,” he said, “not just today, but for the next decade. Even for the next century.”

He jerked a thumb toward the screen, forcing himself not to turn and check that the writing had not reappeared. “What you’re supposed to be seeing up there are our two latest innovations to the standard TM Door designs. The TM300, Large Scale Cargo Transporter and our newest breakthrough, the receiverless Independence Portal.” He paused, wishing the screen was working.

He slid his hand across the controls on the top of the terminal and felt a numbing cold grip his fingers, a hand of ice crushing his bones painfully. He jerked his arm away to step back and stare at the podium. A thin fog hung in front of him, tendrils wisping around like hands trying to reach for him. He backed up further. He glanced over and saw Luci staring at him, concern obvious on her face. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes and counted to ten in his mind. The voices in his head stopped, and he walked to the front of the stage, giving the lectern a wide berth. The bright lights were giving him a headache and he squinted out at the audience. He could see his own reflection in the windows behind them, but the area between was a moat of total darkness filled with the bodies of his listeners. Focusing into the emptiness he tried to pick out faces, but they were lost to him. Instead he looked back up at the windows.

On the stage he saw a crowd behind him; at least a hundred people were standing between him and the screen. Where did they come from? He spun around and saw the wispy apparition drifting in his direction, the temperature plummeting as it approached. “Can you see that?” he said, pointing at the fog that now seemed to cover the center of the stage.

Luci stepped partially out into the light, her concern being replaced by fear. She looked where he pointed and shook her head. She couldn’t see it. One of the fingers of the ghost reached out and touched him; he wanted to scream but instead simply shivered and collapsed. She reached him almost as he hit the floor, his head landing in her hands.

“I know what they want,” he whispered, forgetting that his mic was still on. “We’ve got to stop using the Doorways. It’s ripping the souls out of people.” She grabbed the mic off his collar and flung it across the stage.

“Help us,” she screamed. “He’s delirious.”

He shook his head, locking eyes with her as a dozen people swarmed up onto the stage. “No, I’m not” he said. This time his voice was only heard by his wife. “The missing energy. It’s a real part of them. It’s their soul.”

“He’s babbling,” she said, putting her finger to his lips.

“He’s exhausted,” Joel Maxwell said, appearing beside them. “He needs to rest. I’ll get him home. You take over here.”

“I need to be with him” she said, getting up as the Doctor lifted him easily, putting his shoulder under Adam’s arm and standing up.

“You’ve got to stay here,” Joel said. “Explain that he’s been pushing hard and once he’s had a chance to rest he’ll be back in the saddle. I’ll get him home and give him something to help him sleep.”

Looking torn between her responsibilities she nodded. “Take care of him; I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

∞

“SHUT UP!” he screamed at the voices in his head. “I can’t hear what she’s trying to say to me!”

He was propped up in his bed, his eyes darting around the room in terror, seeking out the unseen assailants of his sanity.

“Dr. Steele?” she repeated, trying to ignore his outburst.

He’d gotten much worse and he knew it. The voices were winning day by day and he couldn’t seem to get them to cooperate anymore. For a while the drugs had seemed to make the ghosts behave, but as they were trying to wean him off the meds, the ceaseless wailing of the souls in his mind were overwhelming him again.

“The hearing’s over,” she said. “The Judge granted your wife full control over your affairs.”

“I understand,” he said, watching her lips to help him separate her voice from the others.

“He’s also considering having you placed in a facility where you can be monitored more closely than here at Windhaven,” she said. “It’s in New York.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because you’ve been telling the staff here things that aren’t really something you should be talking about,” she explained. “She’s worried that if someone here repeats anything, it could be bad for your company. She’s afraid you might accidentally give away trade secrets.”

“I don’t know any secrets” he said, shaking his head and immediately regretting it. The whirling of the room was proportionate to the amount of motion in his head. “If I did, the voices would know them already.”

“I see,” she said, easing back like she thought he was contagious. “I don’t think we should fight the custody order if the Judge decides in favor of it.”

“What does Luci think?” he asked, struggling to keep her in focus as she moved away.

“It was her idea,” she said. “She picked the facility.”

“Ok, whatever she thinks is best,” he said, smiling. “I love my wife, and she’s a good woman.”

“She loves you too, Dr. Steele,” she said, knocking on the door to be let out. “You try to get some sleep and I’ll see you later.”

∞

“I’M DOING WHAT I CAN” Adam muttered, walking across the parking lot. As usual, it was empty; almost nobody drove to work anymore, especially not here, where all the employees could have their own Door. TransMatrix was one of those corporations that made sure everyone got to reap the benefit of their labors. The only reason they even had an exit on the building was so that their employees could go outside and enjoy the fresh air and the wildlife refuge that surrounded the campus. That, and because he’d insisted. He wasn’t about to give up the Ferrari just because it made him look eccentric.

“Good evening Dr. Steele” the ground floor guard said, recognizing him even before the security computer called up his ID. “Frying some Midnight Hydrogen?”

“Shhhhh,” Adam said to the voices in his head, and then to the guard added, “Yeah, I’m going to be in my lab for a bit. I’ve got some things I need to work on.”

“No problem, Dr. Steele” he said, looking surprised that the company’s founder would even talk to him.

“I shouldn’t be too long,” Adam said, shaking his head vigorously.

“Right. You’re the boss,” the guard said. “You take as much time as you need.”

Adam turned and opened the security door, its automated voice acknowledging his presence. “Inbound, Adam Steele. Access granted.”

He walked through the labs to his office, well not actually his office, that was twenty floors above, but the room he used most of the time. It was covered with the digital design consoles and work-surfaces that had replaced the drawing boards and laptops of his first shop. He missed those days and the relative quiet that had come with them.

Now everything was polished and fancy and there was so much more emptiness inside him for the souls to inhabit.

He knew where the problem was, why he was being haunted. He’d finally managed to sort out the voices, and he was going to do something about it.

If only he’d never given up on the testing in their headlong rush to get to market. There was so much more that he should have insisted they do. But no, he’d listened to the people around him.

Pulling a microdisk out of his pocket, he dropped it into the slot. Drilling down through the files, he searched back to the data from the very first tests. Looking over the old records he saw in an instant what he’d missed. It wasn’t just charge, there was a trace of missing mass too. Barely a few grams, but it was there in the first transport of every organic test subject.

He uploaded the file to his disk and slipped it into his pocket. “Now I can prove that you aren’t just in my imagination,” he said, hoping to mollify the spirits that shared his consciousness with him. “Just leave me alone long enough to show Luci.”

Shutting out the lights he strolled back through the empty labs feeling the weight physically lifting off his shoulders with each step. “I’ll put this all to rest,” he said grabbing the doorknob and pushing it open.

The guard was standing outside the lab when he came through. “Data security breach, access suspended,” the automated voice said. The door behind him clicking as it relocked. He spun around in shock.

“Dr. Steele, I need to ask you to stand over here,” the guard said, trying to sound official in spite of being scared out of his wits. “President Steele, has asked that I hold you here until she arrives.”

“Luci’s coming here?” he asked shocked. “Why?”

“It might have something to do with the files you’ve got in your pocket,” he said. “She told me not to let you leave the building with them.”

“But they’re just old records. They’ve got nothing to do with anything we do here,” he said, trying to ease toward the door.

“I’m sure that’s true Dr. Steele,” he said, starting to sweat. “But I’ve got my instructions. Please sir, just stand away from the door.”

“Don’t worry, they can’t stop me,” Adam said.

“Excuse me sir?” the guard asked. “Who are you talking to?”

“I’ll tell Luci and she’ll help us,” he said, ignoring the man.

“What do you mean she won’t do anything about it?” Adam said, this time turning toward the window and staring at a face reflected there. “Of course, she’ll believe me. She has to.”

∞

JOEL STOOD OUTSIDE the door, waiting as they tied him into the wheelchair. It bothered him to see his friend like this, even though he felt like he might be partially to blame. If only he’d seen the signs earlier. If he’d been able to head this off, then they wouldn’t be taking him away now. But he was, after all, just a physician and this was obviously more than a case of simple exhaustion. There’d been something deeper in his psyche that couldn’t stand the strain and had shattered. The obvious diagnosis was schizophrenia, though he’d done everything in his power to avoid labeling and had taken the heat for that avoidance as well. Now it seemed inevitable.

Luci stood waiting beside the doctor, watching anxiously as they wheeled him out. “It’s ok, Joel,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can for him. He’ll get better once they get him into treatment.”

“I know,” he said, stepping back as the orderly pushed Adam out into the hall. His eyes were open, and he swung his head back and forth in a drug-induced fugue.

The one behind the chair recognized the expression on her face and explained, “He was agitated about being transported, so we had to up his usual dosage.”

“He looks like he’s still fighting it,” Luci said, kneeling and trying to look into his eyes. “Adam, honey can you hear me?”

His eyes locked with hers for a second and he licked his lips like he was trying to speak, but then drifted away again into nothingness. A single tear rolled down her cheek as she stood up, taking a deep breath. “Let’s get him to his new home. Maybe they can reach in there and find him again.”

They walked down the hallway to the TransMatrix Door and he focused on it with sudden and frightening clarity. “No!” he shouted, struggling to get free from his chair.

“It’s ok,” Joel said, trying to get his attention. “It’s just one of your transporters Adam. It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“No. Weight!” he said, almost screaming. He thrashed so hard that the two orderlies had to hold the chair in place to keep it from falling backward.

“I don’t know if he’s ever actually gone through one of these,” Luci said. “He’s always taken his Ferrari everywhere.”

“That’s ironic,” one of the orderlies said, pulling another syringe out of his coat pocket and jabbing it into his arm. “Didn’t he invent these things?”

“Yeah,” Joel said. “And now the only place he can go to get the help he needs is through there.”

“Well, he’s going to be asleep when he gets his first trip,” the second orderly said, pushing the chair between the transporter arches.

The induction coils whined, and he disappeared.

∞

WHERE AM I? What is this place? Everything looks so strange. This has to be the hospital. Maybe it’s some kind of therapy?

There was a soft golden light all around him, and the walls looked like projections of things from outside. He could see people, his wife and others, talking. Their voices were almost audible through the walls, like the way the other ones sounded when he first started hearing them.

Then someone drifted up beside him, inside with him, but equally foggy. “Where am I?” he asked.

The man beside him shrugged his shoulders. He was out of focus, but he could see the man’s blank face, an expression he recognized as his own.

The man evaporated into the distance, becoming yet another ghost from his past. “It’s got to be the drugs,” he whispered to himself. “I’m hallucinating.”

“No, you’re not, dear,” a voice said, so close it was inside his head. Luci?

The glowing light itself materialized into her form. Her reality solid, dragging substance to his awareness.

“Where am I?” he asked, staring into her eyes, trying to divine an answer from their wells of darkness.

“You’re with me,” she whispered. “I’ve always had this special place waiting for you darling,” she said, running the tips of her manicured nails across his skin. Where she touched him, burned like fire. “You’ve sent me more souls in the last five years than I’ve collected with temptation, in the last hundred-thousand.”

He struggled trying to understand, and she smiled at him.

“I told you I was a Fallen Angel, didn’t I?”

Other works by Eric Michael Craig

Atlas and the Winds

Book One: Stormhaven Rising

Book Two: Prometheus and the Dragon

Box Set: Atlas and the Winds

Shan Takhu Legacy

Book One: Legacy of Pandora

Book Two: Fulcrum of Odysseus

Book Three: Redemption of Sisyphus

Box Set: Shan Takhu Legacy

Wings of Earth

Book One: Echoes of Starlight

Book Two: Dust of the Deep

Book Three: Chains of Dawn

Book Four: Beyond the Edge

Book Five: Stranger Bedfellows

Book Six: Ghost in the Dark

Book Seven: Hope Dies Hard

Box Set: Wings of Earth: Season One

Short Story

Ghostmaker

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Michael Craig is a Hard Science Fiction writer living in the Manzano Mountains of New Mexico. He is the former Director of Research for a private consulting laboratory in Phoenix, where he experimented with inertial propulsion and power generation technologies.

Fascinated with the “cacophony of humanity,” he dedicated much of his life to observing society and how people relate to each other and the world around them. Ultimately this drove him to write full time.

When not writing, Eric is active in Intentional Community Design, plays guitar and bass, occasionally dabbles in art of various forms, and designs websites. He also owns way too many dogs.

Eric is a founding member of the SciFi Roundtable. The SFRT is an active online group dedicated to supporting indie and traditional authors by networking them with other writers and professional resources.

Connect with Eric at:

ericmichaelcraig.net

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From the Desk of Eric Michael Craig

Copyright © 2016 Eric Michael Craig

All rights reserved. This short story contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author and publisher.

PUBLISHED BY

Rivenstone Press