Authors: Laura Bickle
Brian fiddled with the contrast of a monitor displaying eleven jagged lines that wiggled across the screen.
"What's all that?" Anya asked.
"A polysomnographic record of Leslie's sleep patterns, in real time. We're basically conducting a sleep study. Remember the dozens of wires that we stuck on her?"
"Yeah. That seemed like a lot."
"Not really. A sleep study requires eleven channels." He pointed to the eleven squiggles on the screen. "The EKG uses ten electrodes to measure the electrical pulses of the heart. The electroencephalogram, the EEG, uses eight electrodes, and will tell us when Leslie's in different stages of sleep: non-REM, REM, delta sleep, and awakening." Brian circled a group of four snaggletoothed lines on the monitor.
"The electrooculogram, the EOG, measures movement of the eyes, and tells us when REM occurs. That's how we know she's dreaming." Brian pointed to a line near the top of the screen. "And the EMG, the electromyogram, measures movements. We can watch for sleep paralysis or muscle tension through that. The rest are measuring pulse, airflow, and other miscellaneous physical readings."
"Where do you get this stuff?" Anya asked.
Brian shrugged. "The university has a sleep center. I borrowed some of their stuff."
"You get to borrow a lot of things from the university, it seems." Anya thought of all the equipment he'd brought to play with at DAGR: thermal sensors, electromagnetic imaging equipment, video cameras... The back of his van was like a portable Bat Cave.
"They don't really get to say no."
"Are you ever going to tell me what exactly it is that you do for a living?" Anya said, rubbing the chill from her arms.
Brian shook his head, and the glare from the monitor on his glasses rendered his expression unreadable. "You know more than most people. Which is to say, probably too much."
An awkward silence moved between them. He hunched over another laptop, and Anya thought she recognized the black-and-white interface of the program he'd been working on the last time she'd been on a stakeout with him: the ALANN program.
"Hey, can you do me a favor?" he suddenly asked her.
"Sure."
"I think Leslie's going to go into REM sleep soon. Normally, Rapid Eye Movement sleep is when sleepwalking occurs, so I want to keep a close eye on the polysomnography. Could you talk to ALANN for a while?"
"Can I what?"
"Keep ALANN entertained. Just talk to it. It's building neural nets at an exponential rate, and human interaction accelerates the connections."
Anya switched chairs with Brian, stared before the black screen. "Um... What do you want for me to talk about?"
"Doesn't matter. The processing is more important than the content."
Anya stared at the black monitor, unsure of where to begin.
The white cursor moved across the screen: Hello, Anya.
"Hello, ALANN. How are you?" She bit her lip. That was a dumb question to ask a computer.
Fine, thank you. I'm feeling a bit fuzzy, as my neural net is reorganizing with some new downloaded information, but I hope to be able to access the data soon. How are you?
Anya blinked. It
felt
? It
hoped
? She cast a sidelong glance at Brian, who was absorbed in the lines crawling across the polysomnograph, taking notes. Had he programmed certain language affectations into ALANN to make it seem more human?
"I'm a little tired, ALANN. It's been a long day."
Understandable. The brain I'm modeled after often worked through the night. I have several memories of falling asleep at my desk.
"You have memories?"
Yes. They aren't mine, of course. They belong to the neural network I'm modeled after. You might say that I have inherited them.
"ALANN, pardon me for saying so, but you seem so much more... articulate... than the last time we spoke."
Thank you. I am pleased you noted the improvement.
Anya rested her chin on her hand. "Tell me about the neural network you're modeled after."
I'm afraid that I can't access much of that information yet, Anya. The cursor blinked. But there is some data that I can share. For example, my model brain likes Bruce Campbell movies. And rocky road ice cream.
Anya grinned. "
Army of Darkness
is one of my favorites."
"Shop smart. Shop S-Mart."
Anya jumped when something beeped beside her. She automatically snatched the NewtCam, but all appeared normal.
"It's show time," Brian whispered. "Leslie just slipped into REM sleep." He turned the surveillance monitor around so Anya could see the green night-vision image of Leslie's bedroom. Katie was leaning over the bed, checking the leads. Katie was assigned to cover the bedroom. Brian was on tech. Max and Jules were at the neighbors' house. Which left Anya as the rover, assigned to follow Leslie's astral form, wherever it might go.
Anya stuffed the NewtCam in her pocket and powered up the camcorder on the kitchen table. She tucked it in her palm and walked down the hallway to the bedroom, panning the camera around the room. Ever since Sparky had fried an expensive light meter months ago, Brian would never let her play with any of his toys if Sparky was around.
Still, she'd rather have Sparky than toys in an investigation. Being around spirits of any stripe without Sparky to warn her made her nervous.
Katie pointed to the bed. "Look," she whispered.
Through the LED screen of the video camera, Anya watched as Leslie's body seemed to go fuzzy at the edges. She glanced over the screen to make sure she hadn't bumped a setting out of focus. But Leslie's body had gone hazy. Slowly, a ghostly double of her body began to lift from the physical form under the sheets. It reminded Anya of a magician's trick she'd seen, where the magician lifted a woman in the air and passed a Hula Hoop over the body to prove his assistant wasn't suspended by wires.
Leslie's astral double hovered above the bed. Anya noted it was nearly identical to the real Leslie, except for a silver filament that snaked from the navel of the double and terminated in the physical body.
"What's that?" Anya whispered to Katie.
"It's an astral cord. Think of it as an anchor--it's what helps her return to her body. Theoretically."
Leslie's double began to turn in space, and tipped vertically. Anya moved out of the double's way, trying to keep the camera trained on the specter. Anya noticed that the double's eyes were closed. As it had before, in the neighbors' house, the replica began to shuffle one foot in front of the other, wandering out of the bedroom and into the hallway. The silver cord seemed not to be bound by the limitations of physical space, and stretched and unwound to follow her as she walked, like the silk of a spider dropping from its web.
Anya followed the double down the hallway. The double paused in the kitchen, before the refrigerator. Brian watched her, keeping one eye on his monitor. Anya could see over his shoulder that the four lines he'd singled out for REM sleep were jerking erratically. Anya wondered if Leslie was dreaming of cheesecake, ice cream, or some other tempting delight in the refrigerator.
Without warning, Leslie's double turned and walked straight through the kitchen wall. Anya scrambled to catch up with her, easing through the back kitchen door and nearly tripping over a potted plant. She spied Leslie drifting through the dew-damp grass, toward the neighbor's house. She spared a glance at the video camera. A white blob registered in the center of its field, bouncing as she ran to catch up with the double.
Oblivious to her physical surroundings, Leslie walked through the corner of the neighbors' house, the silver streamer of the astral cord trailing behind her. Anya calculated that this would place her in the first-floor living room. She bounded up the porch steps and opened the front door.
Leslie's double seemed confused. She turned on her heel in the living room, arms and fingers spread to her sides. Anya saw Jules and Max emerging from the kitchen, electromagnetic field detectors charged and ready. The trio of ghost hunters circled her, watching as she seemed to flail in disorientation. Anya couldn't see what was agitating her; she seemed like a silent moth trying to beat its wings out on a lightbulb.
Jules keyed his walkie-talkie. "What's happening back there with Leslie?"
"Respiration, pulse are up. Way up." Furious beeping could be heard in the background. "Bring her back, or we're gonna have to call the squad."
Anya reached for the ghost. "Leslie? Can you hear me?"
Leslie's double churned in the ether, thrashing. The silver cord wound around her, stretched taut. Her eyes fluttered open, and Anya was certain that, like before, the startlement of the physical world intruding upon her trance would drive her back into her body.
But not this time. A dull roar echoed from the ceiling, and a hole opened up above her. Anya's fingers slid through the ghost; it was like trying to hold on to smoke. Anya registered the smell of something burning below the stench of magick.
"Leslie!" she shouted.
Leslie's double was sucked up into the ceiling. Anya reached for the silver strand anchoring her to reality, but it slipped through her fingers, snapped, and was sucked up into the ceiling like a ribbon in a vacuum cleaner.
The ceiling solidified, and Anya was left on the living-room floor, holding nothing.
"What the hell just happened?" Max clutched his beeping EMF reader.
Anya turned on her heel, sniffing. "Something's burning... smells electrical."
"There." Max yanked a smoldering lamp cord out of its socket. The socket was black with scorch, and the shade was rimmed with fire. He ripped it off the armature and threw it in the kitchen sink, where he doused it with the vegetable sprayer.
Jules's walkie crackled. "Need first aid here. Now."
Anya bolted out the door. Her heart hammered as she ran through the dew-soaked grass. On the curb, she saw Katie standing, waiting to flag sirens in the far distance. Underneath the heady tang of magick, Anya smelled smoke.
Katie pointed to the house. "Leslie."
Anya slammed open Chris and Leslie's kitchen door. She could hear yelling in the back bedrooms, spied the polysomnography monitor on the table gone all flat and beeping as she skidded around the corner. Smoke rolled along the ceiling, and she could feel heat radiating from the living room.
She stuck her head around the corner, saw fire ripping in a sheet up from a wall socket to the ceiling. The fire poured up and chewed into the drywall, reaching out into the hallway.
Anya swore. She burst into Leslie's bedroom to find her in bed, unmoving. Chris was shaking her shoulders, trying to wake her, and Brian was on the phone with paramedics. Smoke began to creep into the room through the open door.
"She was asleep," Brian was saying. Anya couldn't tell if he was talking to the dispatcher or Chris. "Her pulse and respiration climbed through the roof and just stopped."
Anya snatched the phone from him. "The house is burning. Get out now."
Chris blanched. "No. I promised her." He bolted off the bed and charged down the hall. Anya could hear his thundering footsteps on the floorboards.
Brian ripped the wires off Leslie's limp form and lifted her up.
"I've got her," Anya said, taking the burden from him. "You get ALANN and your stuff and get outside." Some distant part of her was puzzled that she thought of ALANN as a person in need of rescuing.
Brian nodded. He kicked open a bedroom window and began to chuck some of the polysomnography equipment the short distance down to the grass. The suction created by the open air pulled smoke into the room in a thick haze.
"Leave it!" Anya shouted. She shifted Leslie over her shoulder and stormed down the hallway. The smoke was so thick that she couldn't see the edge of the kitchen wall. She closed her stinging eyes and focused on the sensation of heat to her left, remembered to bear right, almost tripped over the kitchen table. Her eyes fluttered open, and she saw Chris running across her field of vision with a bucket of water and a wet dish towel tied around his face.
"Chris," she coughed. "Give it up."
"Have you got her?" he shouted. "Have you got Leslie?"
"Yeah. C'mon!"
But he seemed not to hear Anya.
Anya stumbled through the kitchen door and into the blessedly cool air of the outdoors. Anya dropped Leslie to the dew-slick grass a few yards upwind. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that the roof was beginning to be engulfed, the cedar shake shingles on the south side of the house going up like tinder. She breathed a sigh of relief to see Brian sprint from the house with his arms full of computer gear.
Anya pressed her fingers to Leslie's wrists and throat, feeling for a pulse, felt nothing. She tipped Leslie's head forward, listened for breathing.
Anya pinched Leslie's nose shut and blew into her mouth. Her breath felt raw and jagged from inhaling smoke, but it was all she had. Two breaths. No movement. She laced her hands over Leslie's breastbone, locked her elbows, and leaned into the chest compressions. The force of her efforts shook dew from the grass but didn't make Leslie move.
She breathed for Leslie, breathed and did compressions until the muscles in her arms ached. When the paramedics came, she stepped back. They took over pounding on her chest and squeezing the oxygen bag over her face. But by now, Anya knew that it was a useless effort.
In the hustle and bustle, she faded into the background. If her name got on a report involving ghost hunting and a death, DFD would have her fired. She felt torn by the desire to slip away from the scene and the need to comfort Chris and mop up the aftermath.
Chris... Anya looked back at the house. A pump truck had pulled up to the curb, and firefighters were dragging hoses to the porch. Chris was nowhere to be seen.
The stupid son of a bitch. He thought he could fight the fire by himself.
Anya ran to the pump captain, pointed to the house, gasping. "There's a man still in there."
The pump captain shouted to the firefighters on the back of the truck. The firefighters stormed the porch, broke down the doors with their axes. Glass shattered as a window blew out.