Sam Arlo briefed Matt on the new plan, then drove him home.
It was coming up on 4:30 a.m., Wednesday morning. It was still dark, the night air humid after a light misting of rain.
Matt was feeling shell-shocked. In the past forty-eight hours, almost everything he knew about life had changed, including that life didn’t necessarily end at death.
Once, long ago, he had wholeheartedly accepted that there was an afterlife. His parents had raised him to believe in it as a reward in heaven, or punishment in hell. Like most children, he had absorbed his parents’ views without question.
Later, like most teenagers, there came a time for questioning everything. In the midst of those roiling years of youthful revolt, his grandfather had died.
The elderly man had been frail, but mentally sharp, and had his family’s love and their company at the end. Matt had felt the ache of his granddad’s loss, but then had been puzzled by how emotionally devastated his parents were. What had happened to their faith in his grandfather’s continued existence? Their belief that they would be reunited with him in time?
Matt had been troubled by the possibility that his own parents didn’t truly accept what they had tried so hard to have him believe. His need to question those beliefs grew. Then, two days after his funeral, Matt’s grandfather had come to him.
* * *
The memory of his grandfather’s visit was perfectly clear—no sense of a dream, no half-remembered fog. Matt had awakened in his room just after 3:00 a.m. according to his alarm clock. He had switched on his bedside lamp for no particular reason. His grandfather was standing at the foot of his bed, casting a shadow on the wall behind him.
He was younger, no longer frail. He wore the leather flight jacket that still hung in his closet at the home—the one he had let young Matt try on so many times, the one he had worn in the Army Air Corps, a pilot from the Greatest Generation fighting the Last Good War. Matt remembered thinking how new the jacket looked, its lifetime of wear and scuffs and scrapes erased as if they had never happened.
“It’s okay, Matty,” granddad had told him.
Matt remembered that he wasn’t startled or frightened. He remembered sitting up in bed and thinking that he should get his mother and father because they’d like to see granddad, too.
“Let them sleep,” granddad said. “I just wanted you to know that it’s okay.”
At the time, those words had made sense to Matt, as if they were part of a much longer conversation. After hearing them, he had simply gone back to sleep, untroubled.
In the morning, he woke at dawn as the sun shone through his window, and the only indication of his grandfather’s visit was that the bedside lamp was still switched on.
It was years before he had talked to anyone about that night. When he did, it had been at a dinner party with a few friends and Helena, before they were married. The conversation fueled by wine had swung round to ghost stories. Matt hadn’t called his grandfather’s presence a “visit.” He called it a dream. Vivid and memorable, but nothing more than a troubled brain offering solace to a saddened teenager. Certainly that was the proper explanation for all the other so-called ghost stories recounted that night: mere wishful thinking.
But the odd thing was, since he had had that dream of his grandfather, he was no longer troubled by the thought of his own death. Whenever the inevitability of his end crossed his mind, almost instantly he would hear his granddad’s voice, passing on that same message from so long ago.
“It’s okay.”
* * *
Streetlights strobed by on the rain-slicked road.
Arlo looked to be in his late twenties, but drove as if he were in his teens, with an almost childlike enthusiasm for his red Corvette. Amber lights were merely a signal to jump to light speed. The few other cars on the road were simply stationary obstacles to swerve around and leave behind.
Matt reflexively pushed his brake foot hard against the floorboard after one of Arlo’s sudden lane changes caused them to swing out beyond a slow-moving street sweeper and into the path of an oncoming bus. Just because he wasn’t troubled by the thought of his own death didn’t mean he was in a rush to face it. “Uh, you said we didn’t have to hurry?”
At the CROSSWIND facility, Arlo had explained that Laura’s ghost—her quantum-field manifestation—could only be counted on to appear at night. That’s when potentially disruptive interference from the sun’s radiation would be at its weakest. So the new plan wouldn’t begin until after sunset tonight, when Matt would be stationed in an apartment in Merrifield. A place Laura knew well. Her home.
“We don’t have to hurry, but the streets are never this clear.” Arlo gave Matt a quick grin, then downshifted as a traffic light changed to amber, too far away to challenge.
The lights ran long this early in the morning, and Arlo impatiently revved the ’Vette’s engine at the intersection.
“Does it happen to everyone?” Matt asked. “Ghosts, I mean.”
The light turned green, and Arlo slammed the car forward. “Course not. Otherwise, they’d be everywhere and everyone would know about them.”
“So what about survival?” Matt asked. “For everyone. Even if we don’t all become … manifestations. Does our consciousness continue?”
“Everyone at the project asks the same question. We don’t have the answer. Not yet.” The Corvette slowed almost to the speed limit. “On the one hand, we’ve all got brains and consciousness, so it stands to reason we can all generate the quantum field that’s at the root of the phenomenon. On the other hand, almost none of us can separate our consciousness from our body.”
“Like Laura.”
“Yeah, so maybe only perceivers have the special brain chemistry that produces a self-sustaining consciousness after physical death.” Arlo gave a half-grin to Matt. “Screwed up, isn’t it? Turns out there might an afterlife, but it has nothing to do with religion. It’s only for a chosen few who won some kind of genetic lottery. High Church of the Holy Rollers of the Dice.” The Corvette unexpectedly came to a complete stop before making a right turn on a red light. Arlo looked deep in thought. “Not like we’re missing much, though. Even if a perceiver’s consciousness survives death, it can only last for six days.”
“But all the stories … Aren’t some places supposed to be haunted for years? How does that fit in?”
“Yeah, well, we go back and forth on that. When we measure the quantum field strength in lab experiments, we can calculate the energy requirements to maintain it. The math comes out of a theory called spontaneous symmetry breaking. Applies to all sorts of freaky quantum effects. Works out that the strength of the field produced by the human brain has a self-sustaining persistence of about a hundred and forty hours, plus or minus five. After that, well, the field essentially hits a tipping point and winks out.”
“So castles haunted for years…?”
The Corvette’s engine roared as Arlo took a corner hard and Matt’s seat belt automatically tightened. “Those stories could just be an extension of the folklore. Or maybe there’s something in the construction of supposedly haunted places that helps maintain the field. Maybe ore-bearing rocks or exotic minerals or metal beams or some kind of architectural alignment of walls create a natural resonating chamber that keeps the field from losing energy. We’ve kicked around the idea of creating a magnetic bottle to keep a field energized, maintain it for an indefinite time. But there’s really no need for it.”
“Wouldn’t it help your perceivers to stay separated longer?”
Arlo shook his head. “Rules of the game. They’re never gone for more than a few hours. We even have to time their sessions according to the influence of the sun at their target site, because they usually can only function reliably from about an hour past sunset to an hour before dawn. Then we have to adjust for local magnetic conditions. Including sunspots and solar flares. It’s a complicated business. And then, the most promising targets, say the Chinese premier’s office? Those, believe me, are safeguarded like you’d not believe.”
“How?”
They were on Matt’s street now, and Arlo turned off his navigation. “Same techniques used to screw with radio communication. You know: jamming signals, conductive mesh, the usual stuff.”
Matt held back his desire to laugh—Arlo had a knack for making the profound concept of disembodied consciousness surviving death nothing more than a matter of nuts and bolts.
“Don’t get me wrong,” the young man continued. “Remote viewing is a powerful technique, but it’s got limited application. Still, we’ve stopped a lot of bad things happening because of it, and the longer we keep it secret, the less chance there is that someone of interest will take measures to block us.”
Arlo turned back just as the Corvette hummed to a smooth stop in front of Matt’s building. “And here we are. A driver’s going to pick you up at noon and take you to Laura’s apartment. We’ll have it fully wired for sound and video, so Caparelli can talk you through the whole encounter.”
“If there’s an encounter,” Matt said.
“Like I told you, manifestations have a better chance of happening someplace with significant emotional meaning to the individual who died—kind of like lightning drawn to a lightning rod. If you think of the legends, then the place of death is almost always a place where sightings happen, especially if it’s a result of an extreme or violent event.
“We figure that’s why Laura showed up in that café, just a few yards from where she died. Too many people there, though, to try that again. So, according to her psychological profile, her apartment is a refuge for her, emotionally speaking. With you there, that link you have with her, the odds are way better than good that that’s where she’ll turn up.”
Matt put his hand under the door latch, but wasn’t ready to go. He still had so many questions. “Tell me something. If Laura wants to report to you guys so badly, why doesn’t she just show up at CROSSWIND?”
Arlo gave a little shrug. “Far as we know, the disassociated consciousness exists in a frozen moment of time. Legends also speak to that. You know, people seeing ghosts repeating actions, over and over, never completing them? Right now, our working theory is that Laura died wanting to go to CROSSWIND. So when she manifests, that’s the desire driving her. Going there. Not being there.”
Matt knew his expression was the reason for Arlo’s grin. “Yeah. It is kind of crazy-making at first. But after you’ve studied it for a while, you realize it’s all part of nature. Bottom line is when we measure it in the lab, every aspect of the phenomenon obeys all the laws of physics, just in new ways that no one’s used to yet. But you’ll get there.”
Matt wasn’t so sure, but he said good night and heaved himself out of the low car. He heard the Corvette speed away on the deserted street.
The lobby of his building was small, brightly lit, and empty. An elevator opened as soon as he touched the call button.
By newly formed habit, Matt half-stepped out on his floor, to check both directions in the corridor. The Mauricio organization was patient.
The corridor was clear.
He checked his apartment door. The small sliver of paper was in place, undisturbed. The door hadn’t been opened since he’d left.
He pushed the door open.
No one burst out to pistol-whip him.
Matt relaxed. He stretched and yawned. A shower. A beer. Then bed. He could think again later in the morning.
He turned and locked the door behind him. The security chain slid home with a satisfying clunk.
“You can help me.”
Matt wheeled around.
Laura …
She stood inches from him.
Waiting.