Holiday Spirits

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It must have been just after Thanksgiving when I died. I hadn’t paid much attention to the date at the time, being preoccupied with more primal concerns, but when Tilbey, my partner in our wraith-like afterlife, asked me what I wanted Santa to bring me for Christmas I suddenly remembered the season.

“A body,” I answered immediately.

Tilbey laughed. His voice sounded thin and distant, like a ghost’s voice should. That wasn’t on purpose; it was a side-effect of the mass cancellation process. The stronger we wanted our interface with normal matter to be, the more energy it took, so we had adjusted the coupling constant as low as we could go and still manipulate our tools—which in free-fall was pretty low. That meant the energy-equivalent of our vocal chords didn’t push very much air, so we couldn’t make much sound when we talked. But it was enough to get the message across.

“A body?” Tilbey asked as he plugged a fiber-optic data line into the control computer we were installing onto the stardrive. The jury-rigged monstrosity (the stardrive, not the computer) took up nearly half of Tilbey’s quarters, and most of it was electrical rather than optic, so we had wires and converters and light pipe running every which way. “What do you want a body for? It’d just cost you tons of fuel to move it around. And then you’d have to watch out all the time that you didn’t damage it.”

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