kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"Echoes.1"

words

The first ghost I remember seeing, back when I was five or so, hardly registered. He was an elderly man with that timeless presence you get with such an age. I felt him watching me, watching over me, almost watching vicariously through me. In my head, he was smiling, melancholic. I had other thoughts on my mind at the time with the importance only a five-year-old can truly attribute them: defending a fort made of couch cushions from bombardment by pillows.

There were other ghosts as well, a trail of seemingly unrelated beings that I couldn't quite see; I could sense them but only with the mind's eye the way you can see something when your eyes are closed, a cognitive construction you can manipulate, nothing if sensed through the retina. These seeming abberations of the mind led me to take up an education in neurophysics; only my true intimates knew what I was really hoping to find in my studies.

The next apparition solidly impacting my life appeared the day I drove off of a cliff. I was driving up highway one, lazily tired from the warm sun shining through the windshield and the fact that I'd been sunbathing on the rocks just a handful tens of minutes ago. I noticed him, a man trying to get my attention, just before the tires left the road. It was a two hundred foot drop that I somehow survived. If he hadn't startled me, I told myself then, I would have noticed the turn and saved myself years of pain. As of a few moments ago I fully doubt it.

Intro to Quantum was the first course I took that really made me consider time; it introduced me to the theoretical nature of scientific existence with virtual particles and tachyons, quanta that could only be speculated at as just two centuries ago we speculated at the atom. Tachyons are particles of complex matter: real and imaginary. With the imaginary mass greater than the real mass, these particles move faster than light; some speculate they would travel backwards in time. Scientific experiment has not yet shown them to exist, but... one more incident and it all came together.

An hour ago, a ghost actively tried to get my attention. He was oddly familiar but I couldn't place why nor decipher what he was frantically trying to convey. I got the impression of a specific diner, one I'd just been about to go to for lunch; I went. He was outside the diner, listless but like he'd just experienced or understood something very important. He paid me no attention so I went inside, sat down, and waited. I signalled for the waiter just as a rock, or something, was tossed through the window. I stood up and out of the corner of my eye I saw the ghost stumble backwards through the door, collapse painstakingly to the floor, and bounce into me just as the bomb exploded...