gaseous waveform interaction

vialet wave background, originally uploaded by Helder Magno.

Maria's questions

I found Maria on the terrace, staring out into the fog over the harbor.....she looked to be in her early twenties, and was dressed in the uniform of the Treaty Forces. She seemed to be pretty calm, for someone who had been abducted from humanity and brought to a ghost town. She turned as I approached, and gave me a critical look, frowning and backing away a bit.....

"Are you human?" she asked.

"Well, more or less..." I replied, quite truthfully. "You see, I have been with the ghosts for so long that the biological aspects of my human nature have been almost completely leached away and replaced with ectoplasmic analogs of the various bodily functions."

"What do you mean?" She looked confused.

"Would you like something to eat? Are you thirsty?" I asked...."You don't in fact feel any hunger or thirst, do you? Are you having any trouble breathing?" I asked her as gently as I could...Of course then she gasped, or tried to gasp....but her lungs couldn't take in any air....she was wrapped in a thin haze of ectoplasm, as am I.

"You see my dear" I try to explain....."Here in this dimension people did not evolve from animal precursors....they evolved from gaseous waveforms interacting with energy fields.....there is no need to eat or drink or breathe bits of matter as such....no need for the Ladie's Room either, you will find...." I tried to offer a bit of levity...

"Oh." was all she could say....

I went on to explain to Maria that if we could obtain the assistance of the pertinent powers or authorities .....we might be able to find out how to get her back where she belonged, before her nature was sublimated to any great degree......I would have to pull some strings, call in a few old debts perhaps.....she began to look hopeful, and asked me to please do what I could.....she had no desire at all to remain with the ghosts, if that could be avoided.....

"Then we'll go back to my place and start making calls..." I offered.....

Out on the street I asked her "What do you think of my ride?"

Silver Ghost

1915 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, originally uploaded by Jacob Tran Photo.

Ectopolis Police Department courtesy call

I've been living in a high-rise in a large ghost city for the last four-hundred years or so, if you can really call them "years"....if you can really call it "living"..... It's the 23rd Century on Earth right now, I think.....it was 1892 when I was body-snatched off of a square-rigger carrying guano from South America to Europe....I imagine that my ship-mates marked me down as "lost overboard".....but what really happened is that I was on the dog-watch when a ghost ship flying the Jolly Rodger came sweeping out of the fog, and I found myself suddenly flying away from my ship, in the arms of a ghost-pirate....with an eye-patch, a touch which I thought was just silly....

Well, they told me I could join up with them, or be tossed to eternity....so I said I would join up....I won't describe the initiation ceremony, it was disgusting....after many various adventures, the ghost ship returned laden with treasure and body-snatched crew members from sundry worlds to the great port of Ectopolis, on the Real Dead Sea ghost coast.....With my share of the loot I bought a little cottage on the edge of town, and as the years went by and the population increased I was able to sell the place for a good profit, and move into my current residence, in a nice part of the city, overlooking a fashionable graveyard....

Every once in a while some other human will show up here, and since I'm now senior human in the area, after the old chinaman left, I got a courtesy call from the guys downtown when a human girl named Maria was found wandering around the waterfront one morning....I cranked over the old Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost and cruised on down to the station....

When I got down there and was introduced to this Maria, she had quite a few questions.....

Ectoplasm City

Ectoplasm, originally uploaded by PaulCoyne.

object of desire

Bobby-boy had a thing for Maria....that is the common perception of the other crew-members....but Maria doesn't want anything to do with that jerk.....Maria is coming up the passage from the engine-room when Bobby comes out of the galley and sees her.....he lusts after her.....and the ectoplasmic concentration here in the ghost-dimension is triggered by this emotional spark.....a ghost comes up behind Maria, and snatches her away.....Bobby stands dumbfounded staring down the now empty passageway......

Maria finds herself seemingly speeding through the void away from the ship.....she tries to scream for help, but nothing happens.....she feels as though she is frozen in an instant, but also moving through space and time in some way.....the ship recedes into the distance until it is gone.....

In the ghost-dimension, thought and action are pretty much the same thing.....if you think of something happening, it happens.....a "ghost", or a node of the ectoplasmic overmind, has pictured itself procuring what it was that the node of human overmind called "Bobby" wanted for himself....and so, since ghost-mind has the power in this realm, Maria finds herself gone from human company......she is transported to a ghost metropolis .........

Ghost Punk

Ghost Punk, originally uploaded by Alan Zero15.

more problems with ectoplasm

Stacy got pissed off when she reached for her hairbrush and a ghost came through the bulkhead and snagged it away before she could grab it.....a hairbrush wasn't so bad, but Charles had lost his sidearm the same way the other day.....ghosts with guns.....that's just wrong.....

The Chief was trying to make contact with some kind of chief ghost....he said that the last time he had been in this haunted dimension they had eventually encountered ectoplasmic authorities....ghost-cops.....and the cops had turned them over to Otherworldy Immigration, and they had been deported back to reality.....our normal reality.....hopefully the good ghosts would get us again this time, before some punk-ghost gangbangers found us and sold us to a freak show in Lost Vegas.....the Chief said he had heard of that happening.....Stacy didn't know if she believed that crap or not.....

Casper

Casper-Friendly-Ghost-1, originally uploaded by tlink21.

dang ghosts

Hans....Third Rate H. Benz.....had galley duty again....well, it didn't amount to much....all you had to do was kind of wipe up around the food processors and dispensers and smile at the others as they wandered in and out on their off watch hours, looking for something to eat .....Hans would just as soon lie low and take it easy anyway, this lost in space thing had his stomach in knots....it was one thing being on board the flagship or one of the carriers....that was like being back on a station, or even a city on one of the new worlds....but this being stuck with a hand full of other ratings and the crazy Chief on the smallest spaceship he had ever seen or heard tell of was something else....and they were telling him that they had left normal reality, and were in the realm of Ghosts.....

Hans dialed up a doughnut, and left it on the table on a paper napkin while he went to get a cup of coffee....turning around to get the doughnut, he saw a silvery blob suddenly appear out of nowhere, and glom up the doughnut! As quickly as it had appeared it was gone.....Hans started shaking and screaming.....

The Chief had to hold a briefing, and explain to the hands that, yes, ghosts were going to act like ghosts you might see in old cartoons or something....they could come through the hull of the ship and do pretty much anything they fancied.....they probably wouldn't hurt anybody or cause much trouble really....but if they sensed that you wanted something....like a doughnut, say....then the ghost folk might very well just take that....just to see why it was thought to be something desirable....Chief said he knew this, because he had been here before....but nobody had heard of this much, since Fleet had classified all reports of cross-dimensional experience....at the express order of Treaty High Council.....

Second Rate B. Scanlon, Bobby-Boy to the females aboard, had difficulty adapting to the current situation....he started acting a little nuts, looking scared and anxious, ignoring his duties, acting angry.....it came to a head shortly after the Ghost briefing.....Bobby-Boy started yelling at the Chief .....calling him a damned ass-hole who had gotten them all screwed by acting like a shithead and getting them all damned to some kind of bizarre Hell.....he hurled his coffee cup across Commons, aimed poorly at the Chief......

The Old Man ordered him to his bunk, under disfavor.....Scanlon told him to get fucked....military orders couldn't mean anything outside of reality! The Chief said "Systems, two gravities for Rate Scanlon." Bobby sat down real quick.

"You see how it is now don't you?" stated the Chief...."Systems control all objects on board this vessel, including human objects. And I control Systems.....by voice command if need be. I doubt if any of you can get our asses out of ghost space, so you all better just go along with my way of thinking....OK?"

Later, back on the bridge, the duty pilot asked the Old Man if he thought they could get back home somehow.....

"Affirmative on that son, all we have to do is find us a Casper."

"A casper?"

"A friendly ghost."

Space Ghost

Space Ghost, originally uploaded by DrPantzo.

out of the frying pan

Chief was seated at the command station on the bridge, with First Rate F. Seeley in the pilot position to his right hand.....Seeley was trying to make sense of the incoming data from the far sensor array.....but it all just seemed wrong.....the values were nothing he had ever encountered before.....

"Chief, what's going on? Where are we exactly? Navigation parameters are not reaching any coherence."

"Well, Frank, when the attack came the enemy released a whole swarm of advanced hunter-killers.....probably Machine weapons purchased from unregulated sources further down towards Center.....they took out the rest of the Group, and they were after Ready too.....so I did the only thing I could think of....I took us where a Machine won't go."

Frank Seeley sat and waited for the Old Man to continue.

"You see, the Machines fought a war once with the Ghosts.....the inhabitants of the next layer over in the Multiverse....and the Machines got their butts kicked.....so no Machine weapon will cross over the dimensional membrane....not even to fulfill a killer function in hot pursuit."

Frank thought about this carefully.....

"So, the sensors are acting strange because the physical constants in this layer of reality do not compute compared to the constants embedded in System?"

The Old Man turned and smiled at the pilot....

"You got it the first time, son.....things seem strange because they damn well are strange....we escaped getting blasted to bosons by going a little sideways during a jump.....enough to slide through to the other side .....we're in Ghost territory now....."

ambush!

Privateeer Space - Explore the reaches of space, originally uploaded by Liqueur Felix.

what a situation

I told that damn fool that we were pushing on into a region that wasn't safe.....but a Commodore of a Fleet Battle Group with her head up her ass doesn't listen very well to a civilian "analyst" foisted off on her by the politicians sitting in their offices back home.....back in Treaty space. I had been out here before, when she was still a Cadet at Academy, and I had been scared shitless that time, with us almost blowing the engines on the old Respect as we powered away from the hostile ambush......And here we were again, chasing after "pirates and hijackers" at the whim of the "important commercial interests "......

Trouble is, these "criminal elements and interstellar terrorists" are better armed than we are.....and they are on their home turf this far in from the frontier, almost to Machine Space.....The idiot bitch did one thing right, as far as I'm concerned anyway....she tried to get rid of me and my "paranoid fantasies" by ordering me to stand off from Fleet while she "punished" the enemy....she stuck me in a little Fifth Class with a junior crew she thought she could do without, and told me to go ahead and perform my analysis of the situation to my heart's content, just keep out of the way of the professionals.....

So the unknowns came out of nowhere and wiped out her Command.....and here I am, in a little tin can with a bunch of kids to babysit, with only a vague idea of how to get back to where any other humans are......

Ready

Gunboat-FFE, originally uploaded by kafka47ca.

Jefe

Maria didn't like what the Rotation said on the Duty Roster.....she had been moved to Engine Room on the Graveyard....well, at least she wouldn't be standing watch with that jerk-ass Bobby-Boy anymore.....but she was trained best for Comm, not Engines....whatever.....

"Hey Kim, how did the Old Man get to be Chief anyway? He's not an officer.....I don't even think he's enlisted....isn't he just a civilian with a Warrant or something?"

Kim gave her a blank look.....Kim is good at blank looks....."The Jefe is Chief because of three things, Maria....K, C, and P.....keys, codes, and passwords. It's true he doesn't have any formal Fleet rank to speak of, but he controls this vehicle, because he controls Systems."

"Five things really" interjects Stacy, ducking through the bulkhead into the station..."Keys, codes, passwords, voice recognition and biometric scan. All that makes him the absolute master on Fleet Auxiliary Vessel Fifth Class Ready.....detached from Command by circumstances....."

That sums it up pretty good, Maria realized.....the circumstances being that the rest of their battle group had been rendered into subatomic particles by the alien heavy weaponry.....the Old Man had jinked and twisted them through the chaos of the action, and they had jumped at emergency power as far away as they could get.....which left them out here god knows where, a dozen lost souls, ten thousand light-years from home.....

space elf

elf in the space .jpg, originally uploaded by www.maykee.com.

Greenwich Mean Time

After a three day drunk, I wandered out of my hotel room and down towards the docks.....it was December 2nd in England, so it is also December 2nd here in Port Martini, thousands of light-years down from the old Solar System....down towards the dense heart of the Milky Way....down here on the frontier between the ancient Machine civilizations and the worlds of man.....It was getting on towards evening in London, so the illusion of day was turning towards the illusion of night here in the artificial environment of the big rock-mounted space station called Port Martini, the center of Frontier Region Five, as recognized by the Omnibus Treaty.....my way to the dockside dive bars led me through a large public plaza, which for some reason was more crowded than usual.....oh, they are getting ready to light the Christmas Tree.....there is a simulation of a children's choir......