Thursday, June 01, 2006

Chapter 4

Defero per Mortuus August 11, 2004 Encyclical of Pope John Paul II on developments involving communication with the dead.

To our Venerable Brethren

Health and the Apostolic Blessing! The Holy Church has long taught that there is a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who depart this life in God’s grace but are not entirely free of venial faults or have not fully paid for their transgressions. This has been clearly stated by the decree of the Council of Trent (Sess. XXV) and restated in the Lumen Gentium of the Second Vatican Council.

“Some of the disciples are pilgrims on earth, others have died and are being purified, while still others are in glory,” (Lumen Gentium, N. 49, cf. Eugene IV, Bull Laetentur coel.)

There is no need to remind you, Venerable Brethren, of the recent discovery of means of communicating with what could well be the souls of those in such a place or condition, The news, alas, was marred by ill-fated riots, which involved much disorder and bloodshed.

Although the belief that the purification process involves actual fire has been common in Catholic tradition (Augustine in Ps. 37, n., St. Thomas in IV, dist., xxi, q., i., a1) the Church has never issued any dogmatic decree on the subject. The main distress, rather, is the separation of the soul from God. But that there is also the certitude that once the time of purification is over, the soul will go to meet the One it desires.

There is nothing in recent developments that contradicts the teachings of the church. Prayers still avail to help the dead in their place of purification, as they have since the earliest Christian tradition and all Christians still have a duty to use our prayers and sacrifices to aid those in purgatorial expiation.

The difficulties this situation engenders have most serious implications for the moral life of the faithful, but they do not in any way change our teachings.

Back at the station Monday afternoon, Munroe found an email from a detective, Theresa Sunderland, with whom he’d worked at the Seattle PD.

Alex, hope you remember me from your time here. I was just starting in investigations when you got sick. You were pretty nice to me and I appreciated your helping out a newbie.

Hope everything is good for you in Denver.

Munroe felt a little numb after reading the email. He realized he hadn’t read a Seattle paper in weeks. When did it stop being my city? he thought. I should have known about those rapes. He was also a little shaken to see Bob Baker’s name. Baker had been his partner back on patrol and they’d shared a lot. Including Munroe’s wife, which he discovered after he’d died.

The email also dredged up the sad story of how he left the department. Although as a homicide detective, the rapes weren’t in his purview, he’d offered his opinions. Several of his superiors, including the chief of detectives, however, were still fuming over the fallout from the stupid book in which he’d been mentioned. Munroe had found himself on the outside. He wasn’t surprised his suspect wasn’t named in the case file.

He felt old and sad as he replied to Sunderland’s email and gave her the name of the man he suspected and his reasoning. He promised he’d give her any help she needed.

He was about to go to the Seattle Times website, when he saw he had a response from Cheryl Miller, the woman who reported her friend missing. Miller said she would be in the AfterNet’s religion and faith chat room from 1 p.m. to at least 2:30 p.m. today and it was already 1:50.

remainsoftheday: jesus died for our sins so living or dead it really doesn’t matter
jollycopper has entered the room
jesus31: its true I did
remainsoftheday: shut up freak, I mean the real jesus
goddessBpraised: hey, peace. we don’t go questioning identies. jesus31 has as much right to be here as anyone

Munroe recognized Miller’s username: goddessBpraised. He clicked on it saw that she was one of the moderators. He sent her a message, hoping they could chat privately.

goddessBpraised: thank god you finally showed up. I was getting bored.
jollycopper: Seems to me like you were being mom back there.
goddessBpraised: the recently dead can be so immature
jollycopper: Jesus claims to be recently dead?
goddessBpraised: Not him, the other one.
jollycopper: OK, whatever. I looked over your report. Detective Rollins already explained the police department can’t actually investigate a missing disembodied person, right?
goddessBpraised: yes, but he said he knew someone who might help
jollycopper: That would be me. Can I ask why you’re so concerned about Ms. Johnson? His notes say you only recently met online.
goddessBpraised: yes, she died just a month ago in a stupid traffic accident. she’s a Ft Carson army soldier and she got sent to India as part of the “peacekeeping mission”. She seemed to really need someone to talk to.
jollycopper: Did she have problems with her religious beliefs?
goddessBpraised Yes, I’m afraid its a familiar story. A very religious person and I think a vrey good person. When she died, she felt abandoned by God. we met in this chat room. We talked a lot. I think talking to a living person comforted her.
jollycopper: Why’s that, do you think?
goddessBpraised: Ive been alive a long time. Im 82 and thank God still haelthy, but I had a scare last year,had a stroke. I was prepared to move on and meet my friends online, but I got better. still cant type worth a damn. And I told her God gave us a gift when we discovered the atferlife. We chant question the timing of that gift, anymore than I can question why I had a stroke or why I got better.
jollycopper: I guess that’s the only attitude that makes sense.
goddessBpraised: That’s right, young … how old where you when you died.
jollycopper 62
goddessBpraised: I guess your young compared to me then.
jollycopper: So, you arranged to meet at a church?
goddessBpraised her idea. I took a bus down from Cheyenne to meet her.
jollycopper: What church?
goddessBpraised: Daniels AME, on 33rd Street. I guess she knew the minister there.
jollycopper: What do you think happened to her?
goddessBpraised: She said she was going somewhere Saturday night. meet some people, mix with the living. I said that might be a good idea. so I think shes stuck somewhere in a room or a closet or something stupid. shes doesn’t have the instincts yet to check ehr exits
jollycopper: She’ll probably get out eventually. We all do.
goddessBpraised: its not a good time for her to be trappd Think you can do something?
jollycopper: The best I can do is see when and where she was last logged in and backtrack from there. I assume you’ve been looking for her?
goddessBpraised I have messages everywhere and I keep checking all teh chat areas.
jollycopper: Tell me if you find her. I’ll also check out the church, ask around.
goddessBpraised thank you. I should go. I think jesus jus insulted john the Baptist

Munroe left the chat room. The old woman had impressed him and he added her name to his address book. Then he tackled his next task, Brian Thompson’s blog.

Brian used blogger.com as his host, the same as Munroe, so he knew his way around. Brian’s last entry was Dec. 9. His mother had posted messages asking him to contact her, the most recent posted yesterday. I wonder if I can ask blogger if Brian’s accessed his account since Dec. 11.

The page was a standard template. It was the usual young person’s blog, started when he was alive, a two-month gap around the time he died, then a lot of entries from around the world when he started his trip. There were a lot of photos of Brian with his friends — a nice if slightly dense-looking kid who enjoyed outdoor activities and school athletics. One girl appeared in several early photos and in some of them, she and Brian were either hugging or kissing. Reading some of his early posts, Munroe guessed she was Brian’s girlfriend, Karen. About three months before he died, however, he said they broke up. But reading between the lines, he guessed that she left him.

After his death, there were understandably fewer pictures. Some of the pictures were probably lifted from tourism websites: Piccadilly Circus, the Eiffel Tower and the Cologne cathedral. And there were some low-resolution pictures probably taken by camera phones, of people at restaurants and bars and in homes. They were probably people Brian had met online while traveling who had forwarded the pictures to him.

But to make up for the lack of pictures, Brian started writing a lot. He looked at the first entry posted after Brian’s death.

“Well, I’m dead now. I guess I’m lucky because I don’t remember dying, but they say few people do. My mom said I had a pulmonary embolism, which I looked up. Basically it’s a big ole blood clot and I guess it had something to do with a bicycle accident when I broke my leg.

“Mom says young people never think there going to die. But I knew I would die someday. But I thought heaven still existed for some people who were good enough. Now I know that’s not true.”

Munroe recognized Brian’s feelings. He shared them with Brian and apparently Sgt. Johnson. At least Brian didn’t go through the hell of thinking that it was only happening to him. But he also appreciated what it must be like for someone so young and seemingly healthy to die so suddenly, and then have your whole belief in God and heaven turn upside down. For Munroe, God had always been someone of whom to be suspicious, so it didn’t surprise him when God let him down.

He looked at the more recent entries and saw that Brian was sliding into depression, which wasn’t unusual, and that he was trying to find his belief in God again, which was unusual.

“There has to be a reason for this. How can there be a soul but no God?

“The Explorers say God’s design is not easy to read and that the path is not easy to follow, but that I must have faith that the destination is worth the effort. I want to believe that but I don’t think I have that kind of faith anymore. And I’m tired of being laughed at for even asking if there is a God.”

Munroe looked at the last entry.

“Mom says Mrs. Wallace is sick and she’s going to stay in Brush until her surgery. I told her I’d stick around the school and she’ll try to meet me at the latest by the 14th. Theres going to be a party tomorrow night and I think I’ll go to that.”

A clue, Watson, Munroe said to himself. Now he knew what Brian had planned for Saturday night. And then he remembered what Cheryl Miller had told him. He went back through his user log and found the chat transcript: She said she was going somewhere Saturday night, meet some people, mix with the living.

Are we getting beyond coincidence, Munroe thought. Two people, both worried about their religious beliefs, who disappear around the same time?

Munroe sent a message to detective Rollins to let him know he’d talked to Miller, but not about his suspicions, which seemed pretty tenuous. Just as he was hitting send, the floor dropped out from under him, or more correctly, someone had pulled out the chair he was on and he bounced to the floor. 360-degree field of view and I still can’t tell when one of those bastards is going to do that, he thought from his vantage point on the floor. Normally Yamaguchi looked out for his chair, although she was also the cause of some of the trouble when she put up a sign asking people not to steal his chair. For a week, a chair didn’t last at his desk for 15 minutes before someone stole it.

He decided to leave the CID room and hang out at one of the bars along the 16th Street Mall. He’d send an email to the secretary for the detectives’ room and maybe she’d put the chair back at the end of the day.

He ended up at one of the brewpubs on the mall, one of the quiet ones that had large screen TVs left on all day. Before the discovery of the afterlife, Munroe always found that bars were the best places to watch TV, and they still were. Bar owners usually turned on the subtitles to keep the noise down or so that you could follow the game even if it was noisy. So Munroe camped out at the bar and watched ESPN Classic. Unfortunately it was an old Broncos game: the stupid “The Drive” AFC championship game against Cleveland that Denver fans worshipped. Then again, he hated the Browns even more than the Broncos. I mean what kind of a name is “the Browns?”

Of course, being disembodied means you’re at the whim of whoever wants to change the channel. About an hour into the game the TV switched to CNN, and he watched one of the more intriguing things he’d seen since dying. Apparently Honda, the car manufacturer, had created a robot that could act as an avatar for a disembodied person. From what he could tell, you stuffed a disembodied person into the helmet of the robot and then you control the robot. Great, I can be RoboCop, Munroe thought, until he realized the robot was about four feet high and school bus yellow. Perhaps not the image I want to project.

After the brewpub, Munroe went back to the department. His chair had been returned and he checked his email. Nothing from AfterNet security yet, but he was notified that there was a response to his query in the Denver entertainment forum.

From: (Marco Peloske) marcothemagnificent@hotmail.com

HTH, Marco

OK, this sounds like something young, disembodied and spiritually confused people might attend, Munroe decided. Munroe checked and noticed that Marco Peloske was online, so he requested a private chat. Unfortunately, Peloske couldn’t remember who had posted the message, or whether the poster was living or dead.

He thought of checking the place out, but he thought it would make more sense to catch up on the disembodied witness reports. Besides, without Yamaguchi, he couldn’t accomplish much on his own. He sent an email asking whether she’d be well enough to come in Tuesday, then he tackled the first report: A disembodied woman saw a man peeing on the street at 10th and Grant. Time to bust some crime.

After reading and routing two hundred reports, Munroe had potentially solved two cases, including the annoying tool shed burglar who had been plaguing district three for six months. He’d noticed that one of the disembodied witnesses had used the word “schlemiel” to describe a suspicious person. For no particular reason, it reminded him of the story that had gone around the station of the man who been held for menacing and had managed to run into the same door twice while being chased by officers. He remembered from his smattering of Yiddish that a “schlemiel” was basically a clumsy oaf. The suspect had a history of burglary, and the disembodied witness picked him out of some mug shots Munroe had sent. So now Munroe was rewarding himself by watching the online play-by-play of the Denver Nuggets-Phoenix Suns game and reading another Edgar Rice Burroughs book when he realized a man was standing behind him. It was 9:15 and the CID room was empty.

The man reached forward and through Munroe to tap on the screen. He made a sock puppet gesture with his hand.

“Go ahead,” Munroe said through the terminal’s speakers. The young man, who apparently was a Denver firefighter, jumped. The man’s uniform nametag said “Morris.”

“Munroe? Glad I found you. FD needs to borrow you. Dispatch says it’s your day off but …”

“No, it’s OK, but my partner’s off.”

“I know. Look, I have the FD’s portable terminal and I was trained how to use it. We’ve got a HazMat spill and we’d like your help.” Munroe noticed that the man didn’t know where to look, his eyes kept darting back and forth. Morris was still young enough to be unsure of himself in new situations, and talking to a dead man was high on the list of new situations.

“OK, let’s go.”

“Great, OK, let me switch on the terminal. I have it … it’s right … no, here it is,” he said triumphantly after finding the terminal and ear buds stuffed into his trouser pocket.

“Do you have an armband?”

“What? What armband?”

“So you can wear it on your arm.”

“Oh, I didn’t see one. Can’t I just keep it in my pocket?”

“Only if you want me speaking to your crotch. I have to keep pretty close to it.”

“Oh, right. Uh, duct tape?”

“Now you’re thinking. Just keep it in your shirt pocket for now. All right. Lay on, McDuff. And try not to lose me.”

Munroe spent four hours with Morris at the HazMat spill near Interstate 70 and Colorado Boulevard. Chlorine had mixed with some other chemical and made a dense, deadly fog and the FD was worried that not all the workers had been evacuated at the manufacturing plant. Luckily the spill was inside the building and was mostly contained. So Munroe wandered around inside the plant, looking for the injured, although he knew that if anyone was still in the building, they were probably dead.

He had the advantage, of course, of infrared vision and unlike the firefighters, wasn’t limited by the capacity of an air pack. Luckily he found no one. A better headcount showed everyone had gotten out of the plant.

Thank God no one was in there because our response time sucked, thought Munroe. Munroe had lost contact with Morris as they were leaving the station and heading to the firefighter’s car. Morris drove half a block away before he realized Munroe wasn’t in the car with him. Luckily the firefighter was smart enough to simply pull to the side, open the car doors and wait for him.

Once they got to the scene, more comic routines ensued. Another firefighter had to tape the terminal to Morris’ arm before he got into his gear, but he managed to tape the terminal with it turned off. So they had to remove it, turn it on and re-tape it, but while they were testing the terminal, Morris said he heard many voices. Munroe also was aware of others sharing the field and he quickly realized the problem.

“Morris, you’ve got this on anonymous access. We’re picking up all the disembodied in the area. We’ve got to go back inside your car and set the terminal to single-user mode.”

Luckily they were able to get inside the car without unwanted guests and Morris was able to tune the terminal to Munroe’s energy signature.

“Sorry, Morris, I forgot about setting the terminal. Linda usually takes care of that.” The young man looked a little pale. “Hey Morris, you with me?”

“There are that many dead people around all the time?” he asked, staring straight ahead.

Oh, he’s got the heebie-jeebies. “Don’t let it scare you. Right now, I’m the only disembodied person you’ve got to deal with. Got it?” Morris nodded and they got out of the car.

But their problems continued while Morris suited up in HazMat gear. After he put on his breathing mask, his voice was so distorted that the terminal’s speech translation because ludicrous.

“Eustachian bike be file I go slide, OK?” Morris asked.

“I couldn’t understand a word of that.”

“You stake by meat while I gum in slide, OK?” he repeated.

“OK, I think you said, ‘You stay by me while you go inside.’ ”

Morris nodded.

The cross-talk act continued, although Morris found if he pushed up just a little on the breathing mask his speech was recognizable, but Munroe worried that Morris might be breaking the seal around his face and told him not to do it. In the end, Munroe just went into the building, looked around, came back outside to report to Morris, and went back for another look, again and again.

After they concluded no on was inside, Munroe and Morris held an informal debriefing, or bitch session, with the HazMat chief.

“So that went well,” Morris said.

“Yeah, if we were a volunteer fire department somewhere in the third world,” the chief said. “What the hell took you so long getting here?”

“I had to track him down. It was his day off. And I lost him once.”

“You lost him?”

“It’s hard to see … I mean. I lost him outside the PD. But mainly it was a matter of finding him.”

“I see,” the chief said. “Well, it looks like we better have a little better training once our unit arrives. We’ll work it out in the morning. Come by my office.” He left and Morris stood there looking at the ground.

“Your unit?” Munroe said, wishing he could make his digitized voice convey dripping sarcasm.

“What?” Morris asked, startled at the voice in his ear he’d forgotten. “Oh, yeah, we’ve got a dead … disembodied person coming at the end of the month.” He suddenly seemed to recognize Munroe’s unvoiced sarcasm. “Sorry about the unit remark. The chief … you know the brass … they don’t think of us as people anymore than they do … someone like you. We’re just manpower … sorry, staffing.” Morris did say the last word with sarcasm but it couldn’t be conveyed to Munroe.

“Damn, what a fucked up operation this was,” Morris said.

“At least no one was inside,” Munroe offered.

“This time.”

“Are you going to be the partner of the person you got coming?”

“Well, yeah. I hadn’t really thought of it that way.” Another firefighter walked up to Morris. “Get out of the way, Morris,” he said. He grabbed Morris by the shoulders and moved him aside so he could load a large ventilation fan into the back of the HazMat truck. “Were you talking to yourself?”

Morris walked away without answering him. “Let’s get back in my car before …” he said to Munroe. Back in the vehicle, Munroe said, “You better start thinking of yourself as … what’s this person’s name.”

“Who, oh, Sarah … uh … Richardson.”

“Well, you’re Sarah’s partner. You’re not on the line, are you? You’re not at a station?”

“No, they pulled me to do this, and for the training … you know, how to use the terminal. I still don’t know if I’m being punished. I’ve got a reputation as a fuck up.”

This kid needs some morale boosting, Munroe thought. “Did you work with a disembodied person during the training?”

“No.”

“Is Sarah … was she a firefighter?”

“Yeah, but she died a year ago, in the line. I think it was … yeah, in a flashover, in Boston.”

“OK, you’ll have to train together as a team. When we first started, Linda and I, that’s my partner, we did all the stupid stuff you and I did today. It took her a while to learn how fast I could move and that she needs to hold the door open for me and stuff like that. She even needed to learn how to walk so that she could keep the terminal field steady for me. Look, if you like, I can work with you and your … who was that we were talking to?”

“Oh, that was the HazMat captain. He just wants to chew me out. The Operations Division Chief is really my boss. They haven’t quite figured out where I … and my partner fit.”

“Yeah, that sounds familiar. Look, I’ll talk to my deputy chief and tell him about tonight’s adventure and see if I can work with you.”

“You might want to rethink that. The two departments guard their turf.”

“Yes, but at the moment, I’m their fair-haired boy … or whatever. Well, if we’re done here, how about you take me back to the station.”

On the drive back, Munroe gave Morris hints on how to work with his future partner.

Yamaguchi was in bed watching TV, idly wondering if it was time to pee yet. At least 15 minutes had gone by without a trip to the bathroom and she’d like to stretch it to 30 if she could. Peeing was her body’s response to any kind of illness or discomfort. If she had a cold, she had to pee. If she was cold, she had to pee. Fever: pee. Sinus attack: pee. I’m sure if I ever get shot the first thing I’ll need to do is pee, she thought.

The need to pee almost drove her to the point of quitting in her rookie days. She hated the whole process of going to the bathroom in full cop regalia, including the stares of the public and the hurried way they would finish their business whenever she entered a restroom.

Once in the stall, she would have to remove her equipment belt. Then what do you do with it? She remembered the time she used the coat hook on the back of the door, only to see the soft metal snap off and the belt plummet to the floor. Luckily that time her reflexes let her catch it before it hit the floor. It didn’t help that there was a sign on the door: “Use hook for coats only. No purses or heavy objects.”

Far worse, though, was the time she wasn’t paying enough attention and she dropped her equipment belt on the floor. Her pepper spray went flying across the floor of the restroom and her collapsible nightstick fell in the toilet. Of course, her shoulder mike, which was attached to her radio, which was on the belt, fell on the floor and keyed the emergency button. So for the next few minutes dispatch heard her radio transmitting the sounds of her fumbling around the floor of the bathroom with the occasional expletive.

Of course, she eventually trained herself: only use single occupant restrooms, look for toilets with a tank where you can rest the belt, or stalls equipped with those fold-down shelves.

And now Munroe wants me to come in tomorrow when I have nasty cold, a perfectly legitimate excuse for calling in sick. Of all the inconsiderate partners …

posted by Jennifer Petkus at 2:55 PM 0 comments links to this post

Chapter 3

From The Atlantic Monthly,

The trees in the Aokigahara forest can cast dismal shadows even in summer, but in the winter, the funereal gloom looks especially inviting to those who brave the maze-like trails of this haunted forest.

It’s suicide season.

“It really increases as we get closer to the New Year,” said Tetsuo Harada, an official with the Yamanashi Prefecture parks department. “Since the afterlife, it’s only gotten worse.”

The Aokigahara Jukai, literally “Aokigahara tree ocean,” has a long history in Japanese folklore and urban legend. Magnetic compasses reportedly don’t work in the forest and steep paths have sent many to injury or death, despite the stone statues of Jizo Bodhisattva that are supposed to guard the traveler.

The forest was infamous as a place to end one’s life long before the discovery of the afterlife in 1997. Yoshitomo Takahashi, a professor of behavioral science at the National Defense Medical College Research Institute and author of  “Aokigahara-jukai: Suicide and Amnesia in Mt. Fuji's Black Forest,” has said, “The problem in Japan is that there are more sites where people are exchanging suicide methods, looking for partners, than there are sites devoted to prevention.

“Now the suicide parties are organized. They pack in computers, terminals, satellite uplinks and they go online and synchronize their deaths with others around the country. And the forest, unfortunately, lures them.”

In Japan, the national government has declared the suicide problem an “epidemic that can’t be cured by medicine or relieved by public awareness.”

“Everyone knows that people are killing themselves left and right,” said Randall Levinson, a visiting scholar at Keio University’s International Center. “But they can’t do a thing about it. The problem’s gotten so bad there have been schools that have had to cancel classes — too many students killed themselves. It’s the siren call of the afterlife.”

It wasn’t a good night for Yamaguchi. Munroe counted five trips to the bathroom. She apparently never even remembered that he was there, or at least he so assumed from the fact that she never even glanced at the desk.

OK, well, I guess I never need to worry about that again, he thought to himself on maybe the second or third trip when he peeked into the bathroom and saw her perched over the toilet.

He went back to the computer and continued planning his trip for next month when she would be leaving town for a wedding and he thought he could take the trip to Egypt he’d always wanted. The website promised a living tour guide and a portable terminal with full Internet wireless access. Start in Cairo and the pyramids, then Karnak at Luxor, Valley of the Kings and finally Abu Simbel, all by riverboat and all for $500 per person. The living would die to get these kinds of prices, he thought to himself. Not that many of them are brave enough to go. With the instability of the Middle East since the discovery of the afterlife, Western tourism, at least among the living, had all but dried up.

He looked at the pictures again and thought of wife number one, Marlene, who turned him onto all things Egyptian, and also turned him off college professors who cheated on their husbands.

Next he checked his email again and found a response from AfterNet security.

From: security@theAfterNet.net

This is an automated response to notify you that we have received your inquiry . Please do not reply to …

So, nothing so far, but what else did he expect on a weekend.

He did, however, get an email from Bill Rybold.

From: (Bill Rybold) Bill.Rybold@theAfterNet.net

Bill

So Munroe researched Bill Rybold. He found several pictures from before Rybold’s death and saw that his avatar did not at all resemble him. In life, Rybold was short, dumpy and plain. Well, who wouldn’t want to look better after their death? He was 54 when he died.

Although not much to look at, he was apparently a very good businessman, rising up the corporate ladder in the very competitive Denver telecommunications world, and then surprising everyone by taking the top job in a relatively minor player in the field. But Rybold took ClearView Cable (now ClearView Broadband) into the Fortune 500 quickly.

His business expertise wasn’t his only achievement, however. He was a bona fide geek, with several patents to his name in the telecom field. And Munroe found news profiles of Rybold that applauded his business and his management skills. When he took over ClearView, he didn’t fire everyone and install his own team, but worked with what he had. There were several quotes from employees, from upper management to cable installers, which praised Rybold.

Unfortunately, he was saddled with a board of directors who wanted to take a buyout offer from a competitor, which Rybold successfully fought until his death from some kind of freak pancreatic cancer, after which Rybold was removed as CEO and chairman.

After his death, Rybold didn’t fight the removal and seemed to vanish until a few months ago when a columnist in theRocky Mountain Newsspotted his avatar at a fund-raising dinner. Since then, Rybold came back with his new persona in a big way by sponsoring the reception. Munroe couldn’t find any information on the man Rybold had hired to be his avatar.

All in all, Rybold seemed like a decent, if possibly vain man. Of course, if I looked like that, I think I’d want to find someone better looking.

He thought about Rybold’s assessment of his situation within the department.

God knows he’s right. What am I to the department besides their latest crime-fighting tool? What do I owe them? But the chief did give me a break when he hired me. And maybe I made some progress tonight and they’ll think of me as a person.

Munroe opened the v-card and saw the secretary’s email address and phone number. Then he saw Yamaguchi turn over and get out of bed for the sixth trip to the bathroom. He added the information to his address list.

About 7 a.m., Yamaguchi woke briefly.

“Alex, you there?”

“How you doing, partner?”

“I feel like dog poo.”

“Yeah, I gathered that.”

“What time is it?” she asked.

“It’s about seven. Go back to sleep.”

“Need to take you back to the station,” she said as she slowly tugged the covers away from her.

“Forget it. Look, I’ll call a cab later — Metro’s pretty good at picking up the disembodied. Is the front door locked?”

“Uh huh.”

“OK, when you feel better, unlock the door and I’ll tell them to knock and open it for me. For now, go back to sleep.” He got no reply and realized she’d already gone back to sleep with her ear bud clutched in her hand.

He realized that he’d been online seven hours straight, but the time had gone pleasantly after he’d found Melissa in one of the chat rooms. She was in New York City and she’d been dead 20 years, dying when she was 21. She died a long time before the discovery of the afterlife in 1997 and the start of the AfterNet in 2001, but remarkably she was a warm, funny, sane person, which Munroe doubted he’d be were he in the same situation.

She had found his unabbreviated sentence structure in the chat room “quaint,” while she used every contraction in the book, which he found maddening. He found it funny that at 41 years old, she was still a 21-year-old who seemed clued in to every fad of the last 20 years and apparently knew the plot of every episode of Friendsand Seinfeld.

jollycopper:   When did you start watching them?
messym:   when they startd
jollycopper:   They started before the AfterNet, didn’t they?
messym:   ? Duh.
jollycopper:   You watched them without sound?
messym:   :) watchd em at def cupls house whre i lived most of the 90s. they wre gr8, cute baby 2, and they wer young, in there 20s & they watchd alotta tv. a real barbie and ken but nice. i still keep in touch, but they wre freakd when they found out id been livng with em. funny there almost 40 now

Munroe had a hard time deciphering what she wrote at times. He bet it took more effort for her to come up with her abbreviations than to type out a complete sentence. He was wrong, of course, she was forever 21 and knew when something was hip or passé, further surprising him by using passé. She eventually gave in to his requests and began using fewer abbreviations and he had a long conversation with her. He was fascinated by how she’d spent all those years alone without going mad, and he realized that her frozen state of maturity was her defense.

He had added Melissa’s name to his buddy list and she said she’d do the same, but he had few hopes. I feel even more like a dirty old man than I do with Linda, he thought.

Linda finally woke up again about eight and unlocked the door. She stumbled through the house like a zombie and other than a few incoherent ramblings didn’t speak except to say, “Good night, Alex,” after which she went back to bed.

The taxi arrived fifteen minutes later and took Munroe to the Cherry Creek Mall. A lot of disembodied gathered at the mall Sunday mornings, using the public terminals throughout as ad hoc chat rooms. The elderly mall walkers, who enjoyed the peace and quiet of the mall before it opened for regular business, often joined them. The living were understandably curious about what awaited them and the disembodied, many of whom had no living relatives and were unable to contact their relatives on the AfterNet, viewed the elderly as an extended family waiting to happen. Most of the disembodied who attended the coffee klatch were themselves older when they died. Munroe perversely enjoyed being one of the younger ones.

The rest of the day he spent at the Denver Public Library, then the Tattered Cover bookstore and finally back to the station. He did get an email from Yamaguchi earlier in the day saying that she was alive. Back at the station, he also got an email from Yamaguchi’s mother (addressed to him through his AfterNet address), asking him whether he knew why she hadn’t returned her messages.

How the hell did she get my email address? he wondered, then realized she probably just looked it up from his postings. I really shouldn’t post my address everywhere. I hope I don’t have to change it. He sent her back a message saying that Linda was sick and that he was sure she’d return her email messages once she felt better.

And he got back a real response from AfterNet security.

From: (Steve Howland) Steve.Howland2@theAfterNet.net

AfterNet security

Munroe sent a quick email to Brian’s mother, quoting the message from AfterNet security and also asking whether she’d heard from Brian. Then he opened a browser and went to Denver.theAfterNet.net and the entertainment forum. He did a search and looked for all the messages that were posted in the forum from Dec. 5 through Dec. 11. Most of the messages were mundane: some Christmas party invitations (including a Christmas Eve get together at the downtown Tattered Cover sponsored by the AfterNet — I should remember that), a poetry reading by a disembodied author (I won’t remember that) and a plug for the Christmas lights at the Denver Botanic Garden.

So far, Munroe didn’t see anything that would be of interest to a disembodied 23-year-old out-of-towner. Of course, it was possible that a message that referred to an event during that timeframe had already been removed. So Munroe left a message in the forum asking any visitors whether they knew of such an event. He wasn’t optimistic — many of the visitors to the forum were one-time or infrequent visitors, but he couldn’t think what else to do. He also sent another message to AfterNet security to see if they could retrieve deleted messages, but he wasn’t hopeful about that, either.

Munroe spent the rest of the night and the early morning reading. He had discovered Project Gutenberg and right now was devouring Edgar Rice Burroughs. He’d remembered reading A Princess of Mars as a kid and now the idea of the ageless John Carter, fighting man of Virginia, delighted him.

About 9 a.m. Monday morning one of the detectives in missing persons came by and taped something on the side of Munroe’s terminal, with the note “Thought you’d find this funny.” It was a cartoon and was adapted from the old New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs at a computer and the caption, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” This one showed the Grim Reaper, with the trademark sickle, sitting at a terminal and the caption, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re not dead.”

Munroe stared at it awhile and just couldn’t find the humor. He knew what they were going for, but it just didn’t have the right — something. He also couldn’t figure out the detective’s motive for leaving the cartoon. Was it really just “thought you’d find this funny” or “we know you don’t really exist” or “we don’t think you should be taking a job from someone living”?

Whatever the motive, Munroe was now stuck with it until Yamaguchi was back. And should he even ask her to remove it? Would it brand him as someone without a sense of humor? — a death sentence, so to speak, among cops. At least they’d finally stopped stealing his chair. Maybe this was a form of acceptance from them. He’d never had any problems with Rollins, the detective who’d left the cartoon. Rollins was black after all; he should be sympathetic with the plight of another minority. Hmm, was that a bigoted assumption of mine?

Of course, the disembodied weren’t a minority. With hundreds of billions more dead than alive, some living viewed them as a real threat.

And Rollins might know that Munroe was there from the activity on the terminal’s screen, so should he respond now? Send an email to him? What should he say?

While living, this was a situation that Munroe had rarely encountered. He prided himself on being able to handle almost any situation — apart from ex-wives. He had been, after all, a white, male cop — lord of all he surveyed — although he liked to think he never let that sort of thinking affect his attitude or behavior. But now he found himself questioning his ability to act like a cop.

Well screw that, he thought. He opened up a new email window and sent a one-line message to Rollins: “Very droll.”

Let him figure that one out. Sometimes the ambiguity of email had its uses.

Munroe got out of the station before he had to deal with the consequences of his reply. He spent the morning at the same Starbucks and even got a few hellos from the crowd. This morning the table the terminal sat on also housed a few empty coffee cups — he didn’t know if this was an attempt by the baristas to make the table seem more homey or more likely just the attractive force between an open surface and an empty cup.

Munroe got into a chat with the others and found that two of them had been customers of this particular Starbucks while alive. And another person was still working as a consultant for the company she worked at while alive, just a block away.

Munroe had wondered at Starbucks’ financial incentive for installing the terminal, but they pointed out that aside from the initial investment for the terminal, it cost them almost nothing. And the consultant also mentioned that she had a meeting in an hour and said that she often used the Starbucks as her office.

The word “office” prompted Munroe to check his email and he saw that he had a reply from Rollins.

From: (Joshua Rollins) Joshua.Rollins@denverpd.org

Josh

The email had an attachment containing the missing persons’ report.

Munroe replied to Rollins, saying he’d contact Cheryl Miller, and then he emailed the woman, who was living, and asked if they could meet to chat.

While writing up the emails, he also saw that he’d got an email from Brian’s mother saying that she still hadn’t heard from him. She also said that she’d learned that Brian had a blog and gave him the address.

OK, two missing dead people reports a few days apart. He looked more closely at the report Rollins had sent and saw the date that Sgt. Johnson was supposed to meet Miller. Correction, possibly the same day if I take Brian’s disappearance from the AfterNet as the date he went missing. Two disappearances don’t make a pattern, Munroe thought to himself. Still, it gives me something to do.

Well, let’s see when Sgt. Johnson dropped off the AfterNet, he thought to himself. He sent another message to Steve Howland asking for that information.

Munroe decided he needed to go back to the department and made his farewells to the group. Someone asked, “Same time tomorrow?”

Yamaguchi woke up to a ringing cell phone about 10 a.m.

“Hello,” she said, after smacking her lips a few times to break the gunk in her mouth. She was a little confused and was unsure what day it was. Is today Monday?

“Why didn’t you reply to my email?”

“Mom?”

“I talked to your partner. He said you’re sick.”

Yamaguchi hated it when her mother used the phone. Her mother had paid someone to digitize her voice from recordings she had saved on her computer so she could use her own voice when calling people. Yamaguchi hated it. Although she’d gotten used to the idea of having a disembodied mother, the sound of her mother’s voice on the phone was too eerie — especially with the slight Scandinavian-like accent that the speech synthesizer introduced.

“Yes, mom, I’m sick. I think I have the flu.”

“Go to the doctor. You’re sick.”

“The doctor can’t do anything. Mom, just send me an email. Or I can chat later. I just don’t feel up to talking.”

“Did your partner stay last night?”

“What?” How the hell would she know that? “Sorry, Mom, I … think I’m getting another call. It may be important, bye.”

She hung up and didn’t answer the phone when it rang a few minutes later. Mom, don’t do this, not today.

The phone didn’t ring again and Yamaguchi relaxed, hoping that her mother had given up. This isn’t fair, she thought. I shouldn’t have to put up with her after she’s dead. I hope to God she doesn’t call the watch commander. She still shuddered at the thought of the time an officer had come to her door on a “check the welfare.” She was a rookie cop then. There were still cops four years later who could bring that up.

The fear her mother’s call had induced made it impossible for her to go back to sleep. She got out of bed and went into the kitchen. She cleaned rice and put it in the rice maker and then made green tea the way her mother had taught her. She couldn’t help but think of the last year of her mother’s life. She had stopped taking her medication and had slid further into depression.

Her mother had loomed so large in her life then. Her father had left her mother a few years earlier. She couldn’t really blame him, but after he moved to Japan, she was the one responsible for her mother. Her father paid generous alimony, but it still left her with the day-to-day care of her mother, making sure she took her pills, paid her bills and remembered to eat.

She hated to admit it, but her mother’s death came as a relief, a relief that lasted only a few months when her mother contacted her through the AfterNet.

She sat down at the kitchen table and poured her strong green tea from the small ceramic pot her mother insisted made the best tea. She could almost feel her mother’s presence.

Oh, my God, she isn’t here, is she? She ran back into the bedroom and saw that Munroe had shut down her notebook. OK, she couldn’t have been calling from here. And the last time I checked, she was still in Japan, making life miserable for Dad.

She went back to the kitchen after taking the computer with her. While the rice cooker rattled, she checked her email. She saw a message from Munroe, telling her that her mother had emailed him.

Oh great, now I’ve dragged him into my circle of hell. She also looked at the last email her mother sent her and saw that it originated from the same Japanese mail server as before.

Suddenly she felt weak and she realized she was sweating, probably from her illness but she knew part of it was her fear.

I do love her, but she’s quite insane.

The rice maker pinged and she got up and transferred the cooked rice to a pot and added water. She set that to boil. The rice quickly became a thick glop while she absentmindedly stirred it.

I suppose I could bounce back her emails. Oh right, remember the time you changed your phone number, she asked herself.

After a few more minutes, she got shoyu from the cupboard. Then she took an egg and the Ziplock of sour plums from the refrigerator. She added the egg to the pot, stirring it in. After the egg had cooked in the hot rice, she removed the pot from the heat and transferred the rice to a small Japanese bowl, her mother’s favorite. She poured the shoyu, sprinkled dried fish shavings from a small plastic package and added the plums. It was the same food her mother always made for her when she was a little girl and was sick, and it was also the last meal she had made for her mother before she died. It would make most Westerners gag but was good for little Japanese girls and sick dogs, too, her mother would always tell her.

As usual, the food did the trick. The rice settled her stomach and the green tea quieted the caffeine withdrawal she was suffering after a day drinking only orange juice. She put the dishes in the sink and went back to the bedroom and watched TV. That evening, she chatted with her mother.

 

He didn’t know how long he had been waiting for something to happen. Unable to feel a pulse or hear his own breathing, he didn’t have the cues to tell him how long he existed in the empty, dark void. He couldn’t even tell if he was restrained. He’d have to be able to detect his motion relative to something in order to tell, so he couldn’t tell if he was in a vast empty space or still in the box they used to trap him.

He had tried to see something in the darkness, but his environment was as empty of visual light as it was of the larger spectrum of which he was unaware he was capable of detecting.

Maybe I finally am really, truly dead, he thought to himself. Maybe I transitioned from being disembodied to this. Oh, that’s stupid. Somebody forced me into this, and I don’t mean God.

He thought again about the other people in the room when the walls started closing. Are they in here with me? If they were, he had no way of knowing.

Suddenly light — visible bright daylight — hit him from every direction. He was suddenly outside in a park on a gorgeous summer day, which made no sense. It was December. And he was moving. Or more correctly, he was somehow being moved, against his will. He couldn’t fight against it. He couldn’t even feel that he could fight against it. He seemed to simply be flowing, like a leaf drifting in a stream.

He watched as children played in the park and he moved toward them. A young woman, his age, with long brown hair, threw a Frisbee back to one of the children and then walked toward him. She had a smile on her face and she reached out a hand toward him, and he saw a hand clasp her hand. And he followed her and he realized she was holding his hand. He couldn’t feel her flesh, or his either, but he longed to feel it, to feel her warmth in his hand.

And then the scene faded and he was back in the dark again. The sunlight, the woman, his hand, were gone, and he wanted them back.

posted by Jennifer Petkus at 2:55 PM 1 comments links to this post