Every now and then, dead people appear inside my room.
I have complained to the apartment's landlord for months that their building's network is infested with poltergeists and should be exorcised immediately. The reply has not been hopeful. Meanwhile the hauntings have cranked from mere irregular apparitions to active disruption - changing the conditioner's temperature, simulating screams and whines around the building, messing around with devices integrated to the building's system, disrupting the network by feeding data from their deceased personalities. At one hand, this is very disruptive, speaking as someone who sometimes work remotely, requiring full-time network connection and less security perimeters than commonly used, allowing easier breaches by random thoughtforms breacking in. On the other hand, they're probably the only reason I'm managing to survive here despite meager pay - hauntings always depress rent, which is really useful for desperate precariats such as yours truly.
This apartment is not that antiquated - probably slightly less than four decades old. It's already in dilapidated state anyway. It's a five-storey building tucked within a narrow alley crisscrossed by thick bundles of cables overhead, surrounded by similarly grim, overgrown stacks of buildings. This neighborhood is resided by newly-arrived migrants eager to attain Darussalami Dream through easy access to the nexus of post-scarcity designer economy, just a station away. The metropolis of Kesh is visible from my balcony on the fourth story, across a murky tributary of Jaihan River, glimmering with holographic projections that proclaim wealth and splendor. As with most people here, I don't really have the wealth necessary to have the choice to leave - I'm what you would call a "gig worker", member of the servant class of the Information Age. Neither the esoteric priests who ordain the rules of the system nor venerable craftsmen who created the system itself, we are the cogs of the machine of the Capital, not its gods.
So after a while, I managed to get myself used to it. I ignored their pleas and whines, their repetitive tics as they mimicked activities they performed when they were alive - without much success, as the case with most ghosts. After all, ghosts are pattern-matching programs, not coherently-integrated biowares - they are
qareens, thought-forms patterned from a person's tracked activity. Avatars, if you may. They were set loose when their meatwares expired, rampaging across the Noospheric network. Sometimes they're just faint presence - like a social media account that still logged yourself in, or faint recursive patterns emerging from their daily-life activities that will fade away in less than a day. Sometimes, for those more heavily wired to the network their ghosts are much more active and capable of more disturbances and interferences. But in general, they merely emulate patterns generated by your activity, like acting out a script. People more integrated to the network have more powerful apparitions simply because their activities are mapped more accurately and extensively.
Not all dead people end up as ghosts, and not all ghosts are notable that they merit exorcism. Everyone's seen a lot of harmless irregular apparations, and most have seen active poltergeists at least once. But some places are more haunted than others, and the situation surrounding my apartment makes it a perfect haunting den of aggressive, active qareens.
Just a week ago, someone discovered a student's body in his own room here. The body already underwent decomposition by the time of the discovery - what precipitated it was a neighbor phoning the landlord, complaining of stench. Less than two months ago, a freelance journalist hanged himself on the communal kitchen right after the massive discharge undertaken by certain popular Noospheric media company. During the Nowruz celebration, a single mother was assassinated on her own balcony, her body falling down to a jubilant crowd below - her name was listed in an assassination market website along with credibly proven allegation of fraud. Their qareens all now roamed the building's corridors and sometimes peered down to me from the walls of my own room, mouthing incomprehensible machinic instructions and disrupting my work - linking to Noospheric chatters where they vented their anger and suffering during their life, random audiovisual records that served as building block for their memory now that they have became disembodied programs. And they weren't the only ones.
It's annoying, but it happens.
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The qareen appeared to me as a girl, perhaps in her early twenties. I felt a little sad when I saw her - she died far too young. Unfortunately I had a deadline tomorrow, which means my schedule didn't allow me any lengthened emotional reflection. Her thin white dress gently swept the floor as she reclined to the wall and watched me quietly as I worked with a pair of large, curious eyes, pupils tinted in clear brown, brown hair falling down her shoulder. I was quite used for this sort of behavior, frankly. At least she didn't scream her lungs out to me or repeat cutesy phrases she frequently used in her life.
She had been here in the last three or four days. I didn't recognize her - she probably died before the rent payment's day. For some reason, whenever she emerged from the walls, other qareens seemingly receded. I'm not sure whether this is caused by their lack of presence or just my lack of attention - apparently, when processing a high-resolution image, your interface might opt to reduce other non-intangible presences of code green or below. When I tried to check, her reality score is assessed at code blue: intangible, non-interfering, communicative, emergent directly from human design. Accurate enough. Except perhaps the communicative part.
I turned to her. Her eyes immediately met mine - confirming at least the minimum requirement of the communicative entity. But I'm quite curious if she could recognize my speech pattern. (Most qareens, for obvious reason, did not inherit their meatware's common speech software) So I pronounced, slowly, in my mother's tongue. "Hello, do you understand me?"
She cocked her head and immediately lit up. I almost literally could saw her brightening. She nodded in excitement. Perhaps this is what she had been waiting for the last four days? If so, I'm really sorry. I'm not really good with living women, let alone dead ones. I guess some people also called me dense at some point.
She suddenly stood. She lifted her left arm, fingers outstretched, reaching towards me. I could even see her trembling. Just how good is this girl's deepfake program?
Her fingers vanished into my clothes. Her expression immediately glitched into disappointment. I watched her in pity, but there was still job to be done.
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I wonder about ghosts sometimes.
Don't blame me, living around them will make you wonder about them too. Are ghosts the same as their living personalities - are they part of the same continuum, or are they distinct in the way a program is a distinct entity from its programmer? We spent our life being taught the latter - they're qareens, not the persons, just emergent patterns that mimicked the person's activities. But here's the question: to what extent is that not the same as actually being the continuum of the living person themselves? To what extent a person is not merely a sum of his outputs - an emergent pattern, just transposed on a skeletal vessel as opposed to the integrated hive-network? And to what extent, therefore, is a ghost the "person"?
The girl is still here. This time I ignored her - my clients just chastised me for failing to meet the deadline. Now I had another task piling up before me to finish if I want to pay the month's rent. As always, she watched me attentively, as if hoping a reaction. Sometimes she stood up and wandered around my apartment. It was small and utilitarian, as I liked. Bathrooms in this building are communal, twelve for each floor. She looked at my small collection of books, my utensils, a small number of trash slowly piling up. I'd like to think that I'm a tidy person, but lately it had been impossible not to pull all-nighters for several days straight, and it's taking a toll on my self-care ability.
She did something strange enough for me to suddenly turn to her. She mouthed a laugh - a silent laugh, watching me with her long-dead brown, bright eyes. Then she fell down to my mattress, and immediately vanished. And she didn't appear anymore for that day.
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My fiancee's name was Maya.
We grew up on Gurney Court, a narrow, bustling Kipchak enclave alleyway in the heart of the sprawling shantytown of Allahabad. Our fathers were close friends, and together they founded a small, homegrown transistor factory ten years before I was born. Naturally, this means our betrothal had been decided even before I was conceived. We had known each other as far as I can remember. We even went to the same missionary school for twelve years. During all that time our friends wasted no time to tease us, but it's not like we had some kind of hidden crushes to each other. We didn't even have a choice in our romantic story.
Maya was a loud and stubborn girl. She bullied me relentlessly when I was a kid, although she became softer as she grew older. She said she liked me, but not really in that way - and the same way goes for me, I suppose. We felt more like siblings to each other. She didn't mind marrying me, though, but probably we should officiate the rituals after our twenties.
Eventually, I guess, we did fall for each other. We spent our nights together, drawing plans when the time comes for us to inherit the factory. The factory was a few minutes' walk away, on the larger and more boisterous bazaar street of Avenue Côme Dutoit, at that time probably employing around twenty to thirty workers, most of them Turtleshroomer migrants - very bizarre people that we sometimes bullied in our childhood pranks. Business was good, our families had been affluent enough to be able to afford to buy a four-storied house on Avenue Côme Dutoit along with two other families. I remembered that she joked about how we should probably assassinate our parents to just make the takeover faster and get us a lot of money. If there's something I didn't miss about her, it's probably her sense of humor.
I missed a lot of things about her after she died.
It was a burglary. My family was away, we celebrated Nowruz in the suburbs of Azamgarh with our distant relatives. Her family was massacred - one father, three daughters, a wife, a nekomimi housekeeper. Justice was swift - the bounty hunters apprehended seven, three of whom were our parents' ex-employees. Their bodies were hanging from the Plaza of Côme Dutoit, right in front of our house, surrounded by the chatters and dazzling colors of the bazaar ambivalently bustling by as the funeral is held. We had been twenty-one, planning our wedding for the next auspicious year. I didn't weep as the imam pronounced his prayer, as the earth buried her behind a mosque we frequented in our childhood, as the insurers announced blood money compensation for the relatives of the dead. A fifth to our family as written on the will.
In the next day, I fled the house. I went to the north, crossed thousands of settlements and realms, until finally I arrived in the suburbs of Kesh. A long time ago, after a particularly long fight with our parents, a crying Maya told me that when things didn't go well, we'd elope together away from the poor, polluted district of Allahabad. We'd build a new life, together, away in the Ferghana Delta. I covered up my tracks, avoided all Kipchaks and my parents' insurers, destroyed all my devices, hacked my interface to remove all accesses by my family.
I had almost forgotten about her. I wonder why. But right now, I could almost see her clearly, her presence looming in my apartment. I could almost remember her cocky laugh and annoying tease. I could almost remember her bright, brown eyes, brown hair running down to her shoulder, as she greeted me in a summer white dress once upon a time.
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It's been a rough day for me. I had registered for the request to defer payment - I had never encountered the building's owners, my interaction with them is almost entirely mediated through machine interfaces - and only got myself approved for two weeks postponement. Now I'm scrambling to look for another client. Unfortunately, there were hundreds of thousands if not millions just as desperate as me, and perhaps with higher work scores than me. Tonight I am still without job, and therefore without guarantee of rent payment.
She watched from the corner as I vented my frustration - flipping things down to the floor, shouting and screaming like a ghost of the Noosphere. I did it more frequently lately - it's the only way for me to keep being functional during the day. As functional as someone scooped out in his room for much of the time could, anyway. She wasn't scared or anything - it almost like she looked at me piteously. Too bad I don't need the pity of the dead.
"What's your problem?" I screamed. "Why are you still here?"
For a moment, I thought she was startled.
Crap, I thought to myself. I didn't intend to raise my voice. I didn't even intend to involve her at all. As always, whenever there's her there's no one else - all the qareens mysteriously vanished, all the glitches of the unreal disappearing.
But again, she stood up and approached me. Her smile is gentle as always. I retreated, trembling, fear welling up in my throat. I didn't want her to be here, and I certainly didn't want whatever is coming, to come.
I didn't want to remember.
But there she was, slouching down and hugging me. Intangible arms wrapped around my back, fingers gently ruffling hair that isn't there. Brown eyes, watching me intently, waiting for me to speak. And at last, rushing down my olfactory senses, the emulation of scent so familiar for me, the scent I had known for years. There was something damming up inside me ever since she came. I didn't know how she arrived here, why or how. But all the memories are flashing up, from my interface rushing to my subconscious at lightspeed. I heard the sound of the muezzin echoing from the minaret of the mosque where she laid until the Day of Judgement. I remembered her words to me, her smile to me as if she was alive.
And after all these days, she finally uttered something. Words that I could hear through my auditory interface, spoken in perfect-pitch familiarity. Words that finally broke down my resistance, destroying what remained of my resolve.
"I'm here." She said, as she caressed my face with a touch that I couldn't feel.
"I'm back," I choked, finally crying.
I said it, even though I knew it's not her, or even her ghost.
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"...I mean, it's really weird." The person blabbered in fluent Middle Bazaari, clearly very excited that their eyes lit up brightly. "Most of people involved here almost always exhibited the same symptom, you see? They - almost always male, but sometimes women with certain emotional attachment, perhaps mothers in want of children, for example - will claim to other people that someone so dear to them, almost always the opposite sex, again, have disappeared without a trace or died. The catch is, this person is someone who no one else remembers. This person might as well have never existed, at all. And yet they will claim that now this person is reappearing to them - as a ghost, a shadow that stalks them from the darkness. And they want to go back at them, at all cost!"
"That's very interesting, actually." Another person chipped in. "There are actually alot of questions about this cases. For example, whether this person is actually real, and then written out of everyone else's memories, or actually false and written into the memories of those who think they're real. I don't think rewriting someone's memories is that easy, though, even in this era!"
"It's not! First of all, most people are well-equipped with security perimeters that preserve their minds from unintended Noospheric interference. Most of us also have reality insurers that reliably assess the tangibility status of presences and objects. Not to mention structural protections for our network architecture - I think almost every building and district would have them, or no one would want to stay inside them! For most of us, I suppose we need to worry more about the stability of a Turtleshroomer military junta rather than getting mind-snatched into servitude by some cute fake girlfriend!" Both of them laughed. "But still, without those protections, baseline human minds are actually fairly fragile. You don't need throughout memory erasure and rewrite for that. Introduce the little glitches, the little disrepancies. Figures inserted randomly at some point in your memory. You can't keep track of all them, after all! Especially when you cannot verify those memories one way or another - for example, because you're cutting off your relationship from your family and don't want them to take you back, you destroyed all your external devices, rewire your interfaces, or wiped out your external memories. Then all that's needed to do is hacking through the reality assessment. The invader needs to convince the system that it's harmless - Code Blue or Code Green. The fewer perimeters are there, the better."
"That's actually rather scary, now that you think about it. It's responsible for several strings of suicides, too, right? Not to mention that there are rumors of several buildings in the shantytowns and slums being set up as a 'bait' to attract these people. So they will be baited to those buildings, manipulated and goaded to kill themselves. But come to think about it, those sort of things are actually fairly expensive! That's what makes them appear to me more like spurious urban legends. Don't you agree?"
"Well, yes, but no." They laughed. "Think about it like this. There's a market in everything - and by that I mean
everything. You know how assassination markets work, right? They regulate social behavior - by whacking some of society's most unruly elements. Well. But who says it's the only reason the market prices human lives? Sometimes, the assassination market, they take off the life of an innocent, or someone random. It's not 'random', in a certain sense - the person dies by market logic. It's not something we could comprehend, though. And anyway, the assassination markets claim high 'accuracy' in its targets. Probably around ninety nine point nine percent of its targets, say, are 'accurate', according to them. But of course that's bull. The remaining zero point one percent is actually just as 'accurate'. The algorithm, you can say, sets them up for death. The reason is irrelevant."
"And you know, the same is true for the rest of your lives. There's a market that bets on your daily behavior. The largest of these are stock exchanges in Samarkand and Bukhara, and they bet at more large-scope behaviors. But markets are fractal. They exist in macro level as well as micro level. And this is truer as the economy becomes more entangled, interconnected, algorithm-deterministic. As bots race for information to buy and sell stocks, as increasingly more data might be extracted from you, we are increasingly capable to imagine how a butterfly's flap in Allahabad causes a monsoon in Ferghana Delta. You might say that this is a bad thing, but - again, randomness happen all the time. Alot of people had died of meaningless deaths in the past. What happens here is that the market monetizes, rationalizes, transactionalizes
chaos. It might seem funny and pathetic and irrelevant that someone got eaten-fucked by predatory slime molds in some random underground metro, or driven mad by some girlfriend-ghost program. But actually with the expansion of the market infrastructure to our minds, they suddenly became relevant. Which one to be eaten or driven mad will drive the global economy, and at the end, it is Pareto optimal - it betters everyone in the long run."
"Hmm. Man, I don't actually understand..." Then followed by a chuckle. "Just kidding, haha. Well, you're right. There's always the tradeoff in destroying reality in favor of higher GDP growth. Correct? But the plus is also incommensurable. Your grasp of reality might be more tenuous as deepfakes proliferate and the unreal becomes indistinguishable from the real, but have most of you actually needed it in the first place, anyway?"
"Indeed!" Their interlocutor affirmed cheerfully, perhaps rather forcibly. They seem to be rattled by their counterpart, although thankfully in a more playful way. "And here comes the end of our session. The Caliph of a Thousand Nights and myself, the Vizier of the Court of Spectacles will thenceforth retire for tonight. As a closing statement: for all of you outside, consider. If nothing is real, then anything you want to be real is real, and that's all that matters."
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As I shut my interface down, you're here standing in front of me.
My reality assessment blared the alert CODE RED as you approached me, trying futilely to impress to me that you are a dangerous entity. But it's too late. A part of me is convinced that you are real. A part of me is unconvinced about how much have you invaded my mind and fabricated it from within, and doesn't care. Perhaps it's how it works, at the end. It's never about brainwashing, never about entirely turning your mind inside out. It's always about nudging, incentives. Those who will themselves to fall into the trap will fall. Such is the way of the market mechanism.
You invoked my synesthesia, incapacitating me. I could remember your brown hair, brown eyes, white dress. The smiles that are bright and the ones that are gentle. Who cares if either of them are fabrication? Or even if both of them are...
And then, your fingers gently swept through me. And at last I felt it - the warm touch of someone I had known for my entire life, and loved for just about as long.