Clockwork ghosts and the patterns of departed souls comprise a techno-synergetic society. A microcosm of human habitation flies across the vast loneliness of space. Generations aboard it live and die. So long have the people travelled that to them time and history and people of Earth recede into phantom remembrances. Memories collect in the Library of the Dead – so many. Thousands. Until even the oldest among them fade and are kept alive in a second life – memories of memories.
Paul Jessup’s ‘The Music of Ghosts,’ published in Issue 272 of Interzone, is an elegant symphony describing the journey of life that spans centuries. The populations of Earth have been lost to a raging disease. Survivors terraformed an asteroid to mimic the gravity, the air, the forests of home. The urgency of scientific minds created this safe haven as a hope to live beyond the destruction of their planet – to endure long enough to make it to the second earth that floats on the star shoulder of Pleiades. It’s seen by Patrick Mann as a false representation. Perhaps also a false hope. It is a time of resurgence and new discoveries. It’s a place where the voices of the dead coalesce as musical signatures, dancing and playing as giant holographic foxes – embodied harmonies of light and sound that form the vibrational codes that create complex electrical maps of human memories. As did their physical vessels once contain all the threads of ancestors in their blood.
But time is illusionary. It is a man-made construct which relies on the movement of celestial bodies. And in awareness of this, the people of Earth, from Generation Alpha right through to Generation Skeleton Light, are held in an endless, timeless purgatory until they actualise their goal in reaching their final destination. Technology has gotten them here, borne from intelligent minds. But in a time where androids themselves are ancient, and the love of that technology is depended upon and yearned for – something to keep the loneliness away – the human as a radiant, energetic being is forcibly changed, broken down to the most vital of all purposes. Some of those will serve to become ghosts – captured in technically primitive electrical phantoms that lead the dwindling descendants on.
Millions of crowded ghosts existing in a library. The thoughts and actions of history all balled up forming a forgotten technical-Akashic anthology of recorded wisdoms…if one only knows the right code to access, understand and interpret them. Destined, they are, to become the echoes on a lifeless satellite while the progenitors of a new human culture throw themselves back into exploring the mysteries of life in a new world.
By J.K.A. Short
