Ghost the Machine
I sensed a presence as soon as I clicked open the file. My projector hissed, and the light above its lens lit up, red as a laser.
Then I felt the unmistakable weight of staring eyes.
Spinning around in my seat, I saw a young girl, maybe about 18. And she looked eerily familiar.
She was my high school classmate, Laura. Who’d died nearly 30 years ago.
She looked as shocked as me.
“W…w… Where am I?” she shouted, her head cocked back, an expression of pure horror playing across her face. She was in a little low-cut black dress, sheer stockings, and black pumps. Her golden blond hair had been teased and permed. Shining in an electric white silhouette, she appeared icily beautiful.
“You’re in Tokyo, Japan,” I replied. Cautiously rising from my computer chair, I began walking toward her.
Laura’s blue eyes were widening, her smooth button nose twitching. Then she began stepping backward, pressed her shoulders to the bedroom’s white wall.
“But, like, I was just at Emily’s party…”
Laura had left Emily’s house party with two other girls. Then Laura wrapped her mom’s Mazda Miata around a tree. Instantly killing every passenger. I’d read in the local paper that one of the girls had been severed at the waist, her body literally ripped in half.
But Laura didn’t seem to remember that. Or anything past leaving Emily’s place.
“Where’s Jessy and Pam? And how did I get to… Tokyo?! And what’s up with that crazy-looking remote control?” she asked, nodding toward the smartphone in my hand. She was trembling, becoming increasingly upset.
“It’s not 1994, Laura. It’s 2023.” I replied, doing my best to bring balance to this strange league of circumstances.
“It’s what? 2000…23? No, no, it’s not. We… We were just at the party. I have to go to cheer practice tomorrow. Homecoming is next week.”
She began muttering to herself but quieted when she shifted her gaze, saw the view from the window… the glittering Tokyo skyline and its sleek skyscrapers, the sea of brake lights blinking in heavy traffic… the sprawling maze of streets and bustling neighborhood below…
“Oh my… We really are in Tokyo…” Laura exclaimed, her panicked voice high-pitched, rising like a flute. Sweeping her gaze around the room, she stopped and fixated on my computer, appeared mesmerized by my laptop, “Is that… A computer? It’s so… tiny…”
Computers of all types, back in 1994, sure were a lot bulkier.
“Oh, oh my God… I must be dreaming… I must have passed out…”
“No, you didn’t pass out,” I assured her, not sure how to break the dreadful news. She was growing paler by the minute, whiter than flowers.
“And who are you?” she lifted her thin brownish-blond eyebrows, swung her gaze back toward me and inquired. She still had the highest cheekbones I’d ever seen.
“I’m _____ _______. We were classmates…”
It was clear, after she shrugged her shoulders, swayed those hyperborean cheekbones, that she had no recollection of me. And that stung.
“And so how exactly did I get here? Did I, somehow, step into a time machine?”
I also didn’t know how to answer that, and after an awkward pause, she went on, a tad angrily, “So, okay, like, if it’s the future, show me the flying cars.”
“You know, there aren’t many flying cars in 2023. Well, there are a few. There’s this company called Alef, an aeronautics company, that just…” Laura crinkled her nose, not seeming too interested in emerging tech companies, “We do have drones, but they’re not exactly the same.”
“Drones?” she asked, before sighing heavily. “Is that better than a flying car?”
“A drone is a… yeah… never mind, I can show you later… So you only remember leaving the party, nothing else?”
“Nothing else… Just that I was leaving the party, with Pam and Jessy, and now I’m here, 29 years, allegedly, in the… future.”
“Look, it’s definitely the future and a whole different world than 1994,” I nervously started. “There’s a lot to catch up on… 9/11, Iraq, The Great Recession, social media, the pandemic… pop culture stuff like the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial, the recent Titanic submersible saga… and outrage culture, lots of words you can’t say… the ubiquity of smartphones…”
“Smartphones? What’s a ‘smartphone?’”
“This, what you thought was a remote control,” and I extended my hand toward her. In it was my iPhone. “It’s what’s called a ‘smartphone’ because you can go on the internet with it and…”
“The internet?” she interrupted. “And what is the internet?”
“The internet, uh,” I started, but Laura cut me off, “Whoa… This is like the weirdest dream ever… Now please tell me what we’re doing in Tokyo…”
“I work for the ___________ Corporation. Started in the States and got transferred to Tokyo five years ago. But I’ve liked it here. It’s amazingly clean, like even the public bathrooms are sparkling… It’s safe, too. Super safe… No filthy, deranged homeless in Tokyo, going berserk, attacking people on the subway… I tell you, only Americans put up with homelessness like that. The Japanese would never tolerate it… Here, there’s virtually no crime. You could leave a wallet fat with cash on the street, in Tokyo, and you can rest assured that it’ll either be returned to you or will still be there, untouched, if you come back looking for it.”
“Um, okay,” Laura didn’t seem particularly impressed by Tokyo’s cleanliness, safety and absurdly low crime rate.
Looking at Laura, I was most curious to know what happens after you die. Is there a Heaven? A Hell? Where had she been all these years? But she really didn’t seem to have any special knowledge or information to share. Mostly, she looked scared, uncomfortable, and was somehow starting to grow hideous, appear as artificial as a wax figure.
Soundlessly she stepped across the room, to the bed, and sat down on the end of the futon. I noticed that her spectral form cast no shadow and that as she sat on the bed, there was no indentation on the sheets.
With the severity of a statue, she again stared off at the windows, gazed out at the flaring, vertical city.
“You were driving drunk, Laura, doing over 100 miles per hour. You crashed into a tree. You, Pam, and Jessy… everyone was killed. You were the first person, my age, I knew who died,” I let go, unable to hold back. But Laura showed no visible response, her gaze remaining trained on the skyline. She appeared entranced, watching a blaze of fiery orange, like lines of smoldering embers, light up the Tokyo Tower.
“I had such a crush on you, Laura,” I confessed, “but I was too shy. I couldn’t bring myself to approach you… I was at Emily’s party that night. I was one of the last people to see you alive. I had two opportunities to talk to you, at that party… And that image of you standing at the kitchen counter, slamming shots of vodka before leaving, that image is burned, tattooed in my mind… Seeing you stumbling as you left through the kitchen, car keys in hand… I could have… I should have stopped you from getting behind the wheel…”
Just earlier that evening I’d downloaded a new AI-assisted, talk therapy app. The app claimed to compile your data- text, pictures, audio and video files- and then to use AI technology to produce and project a holographic, sentient replicant of a loved one. A ghost of sorts. A life-like, virtual rendering of someone you missed or had something to tell…
What looked like shiny tears shivered from Laura’s elegantly curved eyelashes and streamed down her face, mirroring mine. Then, wordlessly, pixel by pixel, she began dissolving, disappearing into the air, faster than thought.
Then she was gone, entirely, leaving me with only the luxury of my regrets.
