Ghosts

It is the year 2026. I am meeting with a young woman in my office so she can make up her in-class presentation. She gives it, fluently enough, but I can't help but notice she leaves one earbud in the whole time. As she finishes, I say, as cheerfully as I can muster, "oh hey, you forgot your earbud." She laughs and removes it. I ask one follow up question.

She can't answer it.

Coincidence, or was she just a voicebox for an entity in the earbud? A thing made of dead language reanimated and dancing and now making her dance. Possession is real, I think, we made demonic possession real.

It is the year 440 BCE. I am on the banks of a stream beneath a linden tree with that horny old bastard Socrates. He is taking some poor young thing to school on the slipperiness of Rhetoric and the untrustworthiness of love. He's always lecturing some poor young thing about the untrustworthiness of love.

As an aside he gets into his usual rant about Writing and how it brings dead language back to life. How it hollows people out, makes them vessels for the language of the past.

He doesn't know I write all this down. He doesn't know I will send his dead words into the future, make people dance his dance (or what they think I thought his dance was) for thousands of years.

It is the late paleolithic and I am on the African plain. The young hominids are acting strange. One makes a sound, the others respond. Ok, that's not so odd, you do that to warn of a hawk or try to get some. But the way they are responding is weird. One sound and they move this way, another and they move that. They repeat sounds and act in similar but updated ways. It's a complex dance I can't quite understand.

They are part of some kind of larger group. The sounds are binding them, to each other and to something else. Some bigger thing I can't see and can only sense just enough to be deeply unsettled by it.

I do not know the word "ghost." I do not know any words.

But they will invent that word. Soon enough.