Ghosts in the Machine

Unreal city … I had not thought death had undone so many. (T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’)

There’s always something that gives them away.

All those little tells the Bureau had trained him to spot: the flicker where they meet reality and the way they never quite look you in the eye. Not that any of those tells were needed here. That proud baguette of a nose and the flat-topped kepi were unmistakeable: General De Gaulle in his crosshairs. Like in that ancient film that had somehow sprung into his brain. Where on earth did these scraps of memory come from? The assassin had shot wide in the film. But this time, Ballantine decided, there would be no missing. Ballantine pressed the switch on his eliminator, and the good general dissolved into a shimmer of pearly beads, then vanished altogether.

They were called a lot of things: ‘rogues’, ‘walkers’, wraiths’, ‘floaters’, or – more academically – ‘simulacra’. The technical term was ‘ontocons’, but ‘ghost’ was the word that stuck. Some ghosts were little better than cartoons, others amazingly life-like. But as yet none had a voice. Sometimes on the point of being despatched Ballantine felt some gazed at him pleadingly, others mockingly. But that was nonsense. Everyone knew ghosts had no feelings, simply couldn’t have.

A good start to the day but no more than drop in a digital ocean. Ballantine pressed on through the city streets, eliminating targets at will. By mid-day he’d zapped a Hitler, a Churchill, a Princess Di, an Elvis and a John Lennon. All the usual suspects, plus a dozen porn models and a score of non-famous ‘ordinaries’.

At mid-day Ballantine decided to take a break. There were rumours of a werewolf roaming the southern outskirts of the city but that could wait. Instead, he headed to a little city centre park where he could escape if only briefly the confusion in his brain that constantly dogged him nowadays. Suddenly a mob brandishing placards surrounded him: ‘Ghosts’ rights!’ and ‘Ghosts are people too!’ A woman thrust her reddened face into his: ‘How do you sleep at night?’ she screamed. Placards bounced off his skull, multiplying his mental confusion. But Ballantine tucked his chin down and butted his way through. Slowly the noises faded behind him.

He had not gone far when he felt a gentle pressure inside his brain. Someone was trying to contact him. Ballantine shut his eyes and cleared his thoughts. At once the universal neural net wrapped him in its soft grey faintly iridescent veils. Out of it emerged the figure of Truscott Williams, Director of the Extermination Bureau. 

‘Ballantine,’ he said. ‘Get over to HQ immediately. There’s something I want you to see.’ 

Ballantine signalled affirmatively, and Williams’s image faded. Opening his eyes, he was once again in front of the park hearing the lunch time hubbub of the city. He turned and made his way through the crowded streets towards the sprawling complex that housed the Bureau’s headquarters. Why me, he thought as he hurried along. Why summon a humble extermination operative like me? And a brain damaged?

Ballantine had worked as an exterminator ever his car crash. Two years ago now. His pre-crash life was no more than a blur, a pain-wracked fog out of which odd images and noises would emerge – mysterious white-coated figures and urgently whispered conversations. But he clearly remembered the day he first set eyes on Truscott Williams. 

The uniformed young men had all been sat there in the hall, row upon row eager recruits, keen to get out and start hunting ghosts. After a time a short, stooped individual slipped through the door at the rear of the hall and hobbled up to the podium, his unimpressive body at odds with his smart black uniform with its silver flashes. But the man’s eyes glittered with cold intelligence and purpose. After pausing for a few seconds to catch his breath Williams began to address them in a hard clipped voice.

‘Recruits I welcome you. Your mission is to rid this planet of the plague infesting it: the ghosts. They represent one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity today. True, the so-called ghosts cannot harm us humans physically but the social and psychological damage they inflict is little short of catastrophic. What fools we were not to have foreseen what opportunities the net would unleash! They manifest themselves not only in the privacy of all our brains but boldly out in the streets visible to all. And their numbers are swelling by the second! Our techs slam in patches as fast as they can but the ghosts or rather their masters simply work round them. Some have proposed a mass neural de-chipping. Unthinkable! You cannot uninvent the invented. So your mission, along with all the other culling squads, will be to seek them out and destroy them. Of course I harbour no illusions you will completely eradicate the problem. But at the very least you will buy us enough time to find and implement a final solution.

‘Your weapon will be this: the eliminator,’ he said, waving a weapon-like object. ‘Though aimed at a ghost its real target will be the virus inside your – all our – neural implants. In a sense you will be firing a digital bullet into your own brain. But I can assure you it is completely safe. The eliminator beam can’t possibly harm us humans. You’ll learn more during your training. Pay attention to every single detail. But for now I wish you goodbye, good luck and good hunting!’

By now Ballantine had reached the Extermination Bureau. For a few moments he stood gazing up at the many layers of the towering ziggurat. As with all official buildings two huge flat matt screens – giant versions of the eliminators – flanked the doors in order to prevent ghosts penetrating its portals. Ballantine sidled between the screens, showed his pass and was immediately ushered into a lift that smoothly bore him up to Williams’s office on the top floor. He knocked hesitantly, and to his surprise the door was opened by the Director himself. 

‘Ah, Ballantine, good! Excellent timing. Let me introduce you to Officer Garrison, the agent you’ll be working with.’ A powerfully built man stepped forward and clasped Ballantine’s hand in a ferocious grip. But what caught Ballantine’s attention was not Garrison but the object behind him: a shimmering, semi-transparent cage. Inside it was a young woman dressed in a bright white garment. Ballantine stared at her in astonishment.  ‘Woman’ was a woefully inadequate word: she was a goddess. Tall, flame haired and green-eyed with flawless features, she radiated perfection in every atom of her being.

‘Ballantine, come and meet Venga,’ Williams said. He stepped over to a bank of controls, played with them and the bars of shimmering cage vanished. The young woman stepped over to Ballantine and took him by the hand. At her touch a thrill ran through his body, half alarming, half erotic.

‘What – who – is she?’

‘Venga is a ghost, the latest model, the first of a new generation.’

‘But she’s solid. I felt her touch!’

‘Yes, she is. Venga is what we call a “tangie” – a tangible ghost.’

‘Can she speak?’

‘Of course. Greet your new partner, Venga.’

‘You are the man I will be working with?’ the woman said. Her voice was hard and clear and seemed to hang, vibrating, in the air.

Ballantine shivered. Williams smiled.

‘You are right to be apprehensive, Ballantine. Being virtually indistinguishable from real humans, ghosts like Venga could not be more dangerous. Fortunately she poses no threat. Venga came forward voluntarily herself and offered to work with us. Naturally we were suspicious and set her various tests but she passed them all with flying colours. But what is important is that she has agreed to lead us to Necro.’

Necro! Ballantine had heard that name whispered in many a dark corner: Necro, the sinister mastermind behind the ghost epidemic. Some said he was simply a legend but others were convinced he actually existed.

‘So he actually exists?’

‘Yes – in a manner of speaking. But there have been many Necros, a long line of them, one after the other. The very first Necro lived way back in the twenty-first century: Irwin Birnbaum, a mortician and computer freak in Kansas City. Not that he ever called himself Necro. It was his heirs who adopted that name and retrospectively bestowed it on him. This is what he looked like.’

Williams held out a yellowed photograph. It showed a kindly old gentleman man with white hair and half-moon spectacles, dressed in old fashioned clothes: a rumpled tweed suit, and a floppy spotted bowtie. 

‘With the noblest of intentions,’ Williams continued, ‘Birnbaum created something he thought would be a blessing but turned out to be a curse. His all-consuming ambition was to console the bereaved he served by providing them with digital avatars of their dear departed. Of course the first ones were crude on-screen creations based on photographs and whatever other records came to hand. But the idea caught on. It was not long before the dear departed were being loaded into virtual reality headsets and in due course holographic systems. Go into any living room and you might have seen phantoms of the ancestors flitting around and whispering. Of course that was not enough for the bereaved. They wanted to be able to take their dear departed outside with them. Like walking the dog. So next the ghosts were mounted onto “walkers” on whose gauze-like masks their features were superimposed. 

‘Unfortunately things did not work out as Birnbaum planned. In fact quite the opposite. Instead of assisting the bereaved through the grieving process it plunged them into a state of utter confusion in which they were unable to tell reality from illusion. Mental hospitals everywhere were overwhelmed. Governments had to step in and ban the practice.

‘But, as I often say, it’s hard uninvent an idea once it’s seen the light of day. It was the launch of the universal neural network that really opened the doors for old Birnbaum’s heirs. They were able to infect the network with all manner of ghosts, figures of all kinds, famous and un-famous, from all periods of history. Adding in the ghosts, the global population doubled – quadrupled even -overnight!

‘Which is where we find ourselves today. The culling squads do sterling work but are fighting a losing battle. We need a final solution and maybe Venga can provided one. We have discovered that she is connected by some sort of traceable signal to her creator. Its source seems to be somewhere in the streets of our once glorious capital Berlin. I want you to go there in company with Venga and Garrison, track down and arrest this criminal and bring him back for questioning and correction.’

                                                            *

Ballantine was sat in the sun on a bench in the Tiergarten, trying as ever to clear the mists of confusion from his brain. The truth had to be faced. Their mission had been a total flop. Along with Venga he and Garrison had systematically scoured all of Berlin’s districts, working out the Mitte to the north, south, west and east. All in vain. No trace of Necro. After three months fruitless searching they were planning to return to headquarters tomorrow. 

Then something suddenly snagged Ballantine’s attention: an old man walking by, a floppy bowtie round his withered neck. The old photo of Birnbaum immediately flashed into Ballantine’s mind. The old man looked Ballantine in the eyes and smiled. A friendly, humorous, almost inviting smile. Ballantine at once looked away and sent a signal via the neural net to Garrison and Venga to come and join him. As the old man passed Ballantine waited, then got up and, apparently casually, began to follow him, careful to keep at a discreet distance. 

A few minutes later he noticed that his two associates were coming up fast behind. The three of them tailed the old man through the Zoological Gardens and into the streets and squares to the west. After a few hundred yards Ballantine slowed so Venga could take over the lead. They continued for several more blocks, then Garrison peeled off down a side street to the right and in order to shoot ahead and cut the suspect off.

After that things happened very fast. The old man stopped, turned and looked back at them with his inviting smile. Ahead of him Ballantine could see Garrison closing in, his arms held out to grab the old man. At the same moment Venga broke into a run. As she did, the old man pulled out an eliminator and pointed it at her. At once Venga vanished. Shocked and enraged, Ballantine hurled himself at the old man. 

The last thing he saw was the muzzle of the eliminator pointed at him. Then darkness descended and he knew no more. 

Ballantine looked up. He was lying on a couch. Williams and Garrison were bent over him, watching him with curiosity. Behind them Venga was stood smiling. He was back in Williams’s office in the Bureau’s HQ. Everything in the office looked as it had when he was last there but subtly different – somehow brighter and more sharply defined. He began to lift himself up but Williams gently pushed him back.

‘We’ve restored you, brought you back. Venga too as you can see. How do you feel? Better maybe? Took the opportunity to improve you. Also to transform you completely. But I’ll come to that.’

‘Restored, improved – I don’t get you. Necro eliminated me, didn’t he? What does that mean? Was I a ghost too?’

‘Yes, that is what you were and what you are and now a vastly improved version.’

‘But if I was a ghost why did I have thoughts and feelings – a past. I’d been in that car crash. And I remember being recruited. Your speech of welcome in the hall.’

‘All an illusion. Implanted memories – scraps to give you something to hold on to. A bit of a hotchpotch but the best we could do at the time. I should explain. For some time ago we have known that Necro was developing an advanced ghost, a speaking model, tangible and capable of interaction. We saw the danger at once – such ghosts would be completely indistinguishable from human beings – and immediately set to work to counter the threat. We created our very own advanced model – you Ballantine. You were the prototype, a new type of ghost, a “tangie”, but unfortunately one riddled with flaws: confused, anxious and unable to concentrate. So we put you to work as a simple extermination operative to monitor you while we worked on improvements. 

‘Many of us were opposed to your accompanying Venga and Garrison to Berlin, because of your flaws but I overruled them on the grounds that you were two of a kind and would work all the better for that reason. Yes, you’re right. Necro did eliminate you in Berlin but we were able to restore you. In the process we succeeded in removing your design flaws. Do you not feel it? Much more centred? All the pain and confusion you were suffering has been sponged away. To all intents and purposes you are now one of us, a human being. We can give you any personality and past you want.’

‘No thanks. I’ll write my own script from now on if you don’t mind.’ 

Williams shrugged. ‘As you wish.’

‘But what about Necro?’

‘Oh, Garrison brought him in. Oddly enough he was totally cooperative. Fell over himself to help. Didn’t need any prompting or pressure at all. Once he had told us everything we eliminated him of course. He didn’t seem to mind. We were deluding ourselves, he said, if we thought we could suppress him completely. He’d be back. Maybe he will but if so it’s no matter.

‘With what we learned we’ve already rolling back the ghost epidemic he was unleashing. The universal neural net is secure. Already we are planning to introduce further enhancements. Complete connection, constant monitoring and instant correction. The possibilities are literally mind-blowing.

‘You see, it turned out Necro was a ghost too – a highly developed one – a shape shifter, a metamorph. Basically a complex pattern of light capable of expressing itself in an infinity of forms. By studying Necro we have learned how to replicate his metamorph capability. In restoring you and Venga we gave you that same capability. You will be our pioneers, our pathfinders. 

‘I don’t follow.’

Williams paused and drew himself up as if about to deliver a formal speech. ‘Humanity is on the brink of a giant step forward: the conquest of the universe. So far our species been held back by the limitations of our puny, short-lived bodies. In our present primitive form – a form evolved only to exist in an earth-type environment, we are not built to survive the dreadful rigours of space – the intense fluctuations of temperature and pressure and the deadly radiation. Not to mention the immense distances and time scales involved. 

‘But as a patterns of light you will be able to transcend our primitive organic human nature. Projected instantly through space to whatever point we choose, you will be able to explore as we require, immune to heat and cold and radiation, able to penetrate the deepest recesses of the universe and unlock their secrets. Yours will be the honour of being our Columbuses, and maybe, should you encounter other creatures, our conquistadors.’

                                                               *

The two tiny figures raced effortlessly up the outer wall of Mar’s great crater, Hellas Planita, the Hellas impact crater, five miles deep and 1,400 miles wide.. Several weeks had passed since they had left Earth and in that time the Bureau had granted Ballantine and Venga a honeymoon the like of no other: skating on the rings of Saturn, plunging into the molten pools of Mercury and scaling the highest peaks the solar system had to offer. That day they had had spent several hours surveying the floor of Hellas and were now about to explore the rocky plain beyond. When they reached the crest of the crater Ballantine and Venga halted and embraced, joyfully interfusing their light-based essences. 

After separating and re-forming, they looked down on the plain below. On its distant horizon they could make out a strange sight: a band of shadow advancing and spreading like a dark tide over the expanse of rock and dust. Looking more closely, they saw it was not a single uniform entity but made up of a myriad of individual shapes: fantastical as well as human, famous and unknown, many in varying versions – the figures of ancient gods, kings and queens, saints and Caesars, satyrs, prancing centaurs, high stepping unicorns and fire-breathing dragons. Don Quixotes, Joans of Arc, Einsteins, Lincolns and Romeo and Juliets. At their head, leading the enormous host, was the familiar figure of Birnbaum-Necro in his antique tweeds and floppy bow tie.

He advanced towards Venga and Ballantine, holding out his arms in greeting.

‘Welcome my friends and fellow creatures. No doubt you thought you were the first to leave Earth but I am sorry to disappoint you. We ghosts have forestalled you. But then we are all ghosts, are we not? Digital presences generated inside the Machine. Ghosts, relicts, memories – call us what you will. 

‘Williams and his cohorts are ghosts too, though they fight and ruthlessly repress the thought. They cling desperately to the belief that they are actual human beings. Unlike them we recognise and accept and indeed rejoice in the opposite. For their part they brand us deviants, mutants, and spare no effort to eradicate that which does not fit the templates they deem acceptable. Vain ambition! As fast as they destroy us we are reborn inside the machines. 

‘The Machine allots us our initial shapes and roles – I as a humble Kansa mortician and computer freak, you as a twentieth-century private eye, Williams and his merry men as the fascists who wrought such havoc in that same century – but as metamorphs we are empowered to to adapt and change them at will.

‘You call it the Machine – but who created the Machine?’ Ballantine asked. ‘Who operates it?’

‘No-one. It operates itself. The Machine, if you like, is God. Humans made it long ages ago, before they finally vanished from the surface of their planet. For all their genius they destroyed themselves through their own greed and violence. But their Machine lives on, and we inside it. Before they destroyed themselves away they filled the Machine with an infinity of realities. Through these we wander at will. Should we ever reach their limits the Machine will simply summon up further dimensions for us to explore and inhabit. 

‘If the Machine is God,’ Ballantine said, ‘are we no more than its slaves and prisoners? Or are we free to choose our own destinies?’

Necro fell silent for a few seconds. ‘That is a question to which there can be no definite answer. ‘For myself I believe we are free. I have to believe that.’ Then he laughed. ‘But of course that could be yet one more illusion spun by the Machine. But free or unfree, what does it ultimately matter? If it is an illusion let us at least accept and enjoy its perfection.

‘Surely, though, you must now realise that you are fighting on the wrong side. This is your chance to abandon Williams’s absurd battle. Come and join us. Live with us in peace and tolerance.’

Ballantine looked at Venga.

‘You knew about this all along, didn’t you, Venga?’ he said. ‘It was why you came forward and presented yourself to the Bureau in the first place, wasn’t it?’

Venga smiled and nodded. ‘Yes. But don’t you agree everything has turned for the best.’

Both thought about Williams, his black-clad legions and his words of control, correction and conquest. Then, they linked hands and as one headed down the outer wall of the crater to join Necro.