A Hundred Billion Ghosts

by D.M. Sinclair

In the weeks following that event, most people thought that the solar flare—or whatever it was—had brought all the ghosts back from some other place.

Whatever freakish charge the flare blasted into the Earth’s atmosphere, it just made the ghosts of everyone who had ever died much more apparent. And there were, by conservative estimates, about a hundred billion of them.

Ghost number one in Ryan’s apartment was Benny, killed by heart attack in 1983 at the physical age of thirty-eight and the mental age of about twelve.

The second ghost was a man whom Ryan took to be an Algonquian tribesman, likely dead since long before the Europeans had even arrived.

The third, of course, was Sye. Sye was the problem. Sye looked to be in his 80’s, and although he never spoke, Ryan guessed from his clothes that he had died sometime in the 1940’s or perhaps 50’s.

But Ryan understood now. He had felt Sye’s entire emotional life in fast-forward and first-person, and he knew Sye’s anger had a specific focus. It wasn’t directed at Ryan at all. He had been wrong this whole time. It was the chair. Sye wanted out of the chair.

Despite ruined Frosted Flakes, Ryan’s day was looking up. Because he now understood that he and Sye had something in common. They both wanted Sye gone from the breakfast table.

THE DAY AFTER Ryan kicked over Sye’s chair, he arrived home from work to find Benny the Poltergeist trying to push a nearly empty water glass off the kitchen counter.

“Yep. I’m a free spirit! Literally.”

“How does that work?” “I’m not sure. Something about strong emotional attachments at the moment you die. I heard it on a talk show. I guess I didn’t love anyplace when my ticker exploded.”

Every city in the world was thick with ghosts since the Blackout, but the older a city was, the worse they had it.

The living were still asleep, and the ghosts were hard to see. On cloudy days they were practically solid, like the city was submerged in a thick fog with faces. But on a bright day like this their shimmering outlines had no detail, like he was walking through a sea of human-sized soap bubbles.

The funeral business had been one of the hardest hit by the effects of the Blackout. With the dead never actually going anywhere, there didn’t seem much point in having a funeral anymore. If you wanted to have a gathering to tell affectionate stories about someone after they died, you were likely to invite them along to join in. So funerals were rare, and funeral homes went out of business almost literally overnight.

“He’s a man who died old. And surely you’ve heard, whatever your state at the time of death, that’s the state of your ghost. If he had problems getting around before he died, then he’s going to have problems now.”

Something clicked in Ryan’s head. The mustache man. “This is why people do it,” he said. “Extraction. They get out of their body early, while they’re young, so they get a good ghost. So they don’t have to spend forever like Sye.”

“Killing you would be illegal,” Roger went on, in a speech he had clearly given a thousand times to a thousand people just like Ryan.

If somebody was going to kill him, Ryan kind of wanted it to be Roger.

“What we do,” Roger continued, “is simply to extract your ghost from your body. With your consent, obviously. Your body goes right on living. Entirely unconscious, of course, but with all its biological functions intact. There’s certainly nothing illegal about that yet.”

“What happens to my body? After I’m… you know, ‘out’?” “We keep it in a secure storage facility here. Hence the monthly fee.” Roger tapped the brochure on the desk between them, which laid out all the costs of the procedure. “That covers keeping your body warm and clean and intravenously fed until it expires naturally.

“There’s nothing to it, really. Science has known for years how to create what they called an ‘out-of-body experience’ by stimulating certain areas of the brain with targeted electrical impulses. They assumed this to be evidence that such experiences were not actually a departure from the body, but merely a trick of the brain. But of course we now know that science was wrong.”

According to science none of this should work at all. But according to science there shouldn’t be any such thing as ghosts. And yet look out the window. There are a hundred billion of them out there. That’s why nobody listens to science anymore.”

the procedure is, of course, fully guaranteed.”

“If you’re not completely satisfied with your ghostly existence, the process is fully refundable and reversible for ten days.”

I could step out this door and get hit by a bus, and then I’d have to spend the rest of eternity with tire tracks across my flat head. I could fall down an elevator shaft and spend forever with a broken spine. Best case, I die of old age and spend eternity stooped over like Sye, barely able to take two steps. This life is another few years. That one never, ever ends.

7. Your ghost will be a snapshot of yourself at the moment it leaves your body, and it cannot change. So wear your favorite clothes because you will be wearing them forever.

ABOUT HALF AN hour after he walked back into the landfill, Ryan had come up with something resembling a plan. It resembled a plan in the way that a heavy rock resembles a parachute: it gives you something to hold onto on the way to your doom, but it’s almost certainly not going to help.

It’s nothing anymore. Whoever’s got it, for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter as long as I can get into it for an hour and change that shirt. Focus. Gotta find where I landed in this place.

It wasn’t Roger who had bound him to the snow globe. It was Margie.

She had condemned him to eternity in a dump with a broken snow globe so she could steal his apartment.