Watching Ghosts
“It’s like looking at the stars…" she thought, recalling the moment her mother explained to her that looking up at the night’s sky meant looking directly into the past.
The following tale is from an Alternate Timeline that feasts on the events our own.
If you’ve received this transmission via digital mail, you may encounter errors that have been eradicated in the living document. Time is tricky. Use the order of alternate events as your guide.
WATCHING GHOSTS
Written by Tim Barnes
Loosely inspired by the June 5, 2023 unveiling of Apple’s Vision Pro goggles.
Event Date: 2050 (Earth Years)
The hush that overcame the crowded rows of journalists at the 2050 Nuetech-Co Special Event was one of anticipation. And Gerald Aislinn (CEO) milked it for all it was worth. His company was at the cutting edge of tech evolution. In fact, it was the edge—having introduced the first fully functional (and non-innocent-bystander-killing) self-driving car, in addition to the self-writing pencil, the biological cyber-dog, and since 2023: the Iral—a pair of goggles that digitally recreated work environments and cinema experiences. Despite initially being used by well-off perverts to explore the seedy corners of the internet, each revamp of the Iral came equipped with stunning new features at increasingly lower price points, allowing users of every tax bracket to work or play in photo-real universes from the comfort of their own living quarters.
A door slid open in the back of the auditorium for tech journalist, Morgan Stern, who broke the silence as she strolled down the center aisle in search of her seat. Once firmly planted, Gerald nodded at the control room. All light (save for the cylindrical beam covering him) faded to black. A disco version of “Also sprach Zarathustra” blared. And the new, twenty-seventh edition of the Iral, in all of its presumed glory, flew down to him via drone. “A Nuetech-Co model twenty-six drone,” Morgan noted.
Gerald spoke. “This… is the Iral Silver!”
Waves of applause exploded from the crowd. Morgan found it more than embarrassing. It reminded her of those awful elementary school recitals where parents cheered, not only for their nervous, off rhythm children on stage, but also—and likely mostly—because they didn’t want the other parents to think they were bad at the whole parenting thing.
“Nuetech-Co programs journalists just as well as it programs devices,” she thought.
But she also understood how difficult it was to resist the company’s incentives. Civilians loved Nuetech-Co. Its product launches were the new Christmas. So, journalists regularly cheered the company on for access to its next “big thing.” Glowing reviews garnered massive web traffic and boosted news org revenue. If a journalist rocked the boat too much, they’d never be brought back.
Remembering those high stakes, Morgan clapped along with her peers. She’d already rocked the boat enough with an audio piece for The Ameri-Journal titled What to the Human is the Rise of A.I? But she purposely did not cheer. Perhaps due to the troubling sense that Gerald’s eyes were locked on to her from the stage. She had mixed feelings about the old man CEO, whom she famously dubbed “Tech-Santa Claus.” Everyone seemed to trust him, which was why she didn’t. And it didn’t help that one of the few pieces of information she’d ever weaseled out of her mother regarding her father’s final days on Earth, was that he’d been working in a Nuetech-Co factory that was attempting to unionize.
She wouldn’t be surprised if Nuetech-Co had something to do with her father’s death. But she also had no proof. Anyone with information had good reason not to reveal it. And she had even experienced Nuetech-Co’s silencing techniques. The journalists invited to Nuetech-Co Special Events, for instance, were required to sign a seven-day non-disclosure agreement. It gave them a full week to do their “research” (often handed to them by Nuetech-Co) and write their “reviews” (often so glowing they could be sexts). If anyone leaked information during the seven-day embargo, Nuetech-Co blacklisted them. It happened to Morgan’s friend, Li Bailey, who by accident, revealed the name of the latest Nue-Phone implant to their hairstylist. The name was just “Nue-Phone” followed by the number “forty.”
“Ladies, gentlemen, and folks in-between,” Gerald spoke—lifting the Iral Silver above his head like a crown. “I’d not only like to introduce you to the newer, slimmer, sleeker, Iral Silver—but also highlight it’s most revolutionary feature… time travel!”
Gasps filled the auditorium as he described an application called YESTER. “It recreates physical spaces from any part of Earth at any point in the past,” he explained. “YESTER’s authentic three-sixty-degree historical imagery is made possible with a Nuetech-Co system that combines data we’ve gathered from the James Webb telescope, GPS, the Encyclopedia Britannica, DNA test kits, and generative A.I.”
Morgan settled on sorting out the exact details of “how” later, but she had flashes of understanding as Gerald lowered the Iral Silver over his eyes for a demonstration. “It’s like looking at the stars…” she thought. She recalled a summer night with her mother in Prospect Park when she was eight years old. Hours after the snacks from their evening picnic were devoured, her mother, Karmen, explained to her that looking up at the night’s sky meant staring directly into the past. “It takes time for all that light to reach us. And by the time it hits our eyes, those stars are probably off doing something else.”
Gerald asked the crowd to power their personal Iral goggles on so that he could share his visuals with them via Neu-Cloud. Many were already wearing them. Morgan, however, had to dig through her purse. Once on, she saw a live feed of Gerald’s demonstration in her own Iral interface. He selected the year 1963, and they floated through a crowd at the National Mall in Washington D.C., a mile away from Martin Luther King Jr. giving the “I Have A Dream” speech.
Through Gerald, she could not only hear the reverend, and see his minuscule shape in the distance; but she could also hear the murmurs of the strangers in the crowd. Real people who had marched to experience what was to Morgan, history, but to them, history in the making. “Hush your mouth,” a 1963 woman on the left whispered to her young son. “Martin’s speaking.” Both of their faces were blurred.
Gerald lifted his hand, and thus contorted YESTERs virtual footage of the space so that he could hover above the crowd and get a birds-eye perspective. Then, overcome with emotion, he removed the goggles and tears rolled down his face. It was uncomfortable to watch. But civilians would love hearing about it.
“You’ll notice, many of the people in the crowd are scrambled…” added the Nuetech-Co CEO. “That’s one of many safety features we’ve installed in YESTER. In fact, certain parts of the past are are totally blocked off. We’ve coordinated with world leaders to disable access to M.O.C.s—moments of concern...”
His voice trailed off as Morgan focused on what she could personally gain from YESTER. If all of this was true, and she was able to witness the past, perhaps she could use it to answer the questions that always haunted her. “Where did my father go that night when I was seven? And who dumped him into the river?” Her late mother, the press, and even logic told her that her father killed himself, but she was never truly convinced.
Gerald handed the goggles back to the drone and gave his sycophants their directive. “For the rest of the day, each of you here are able to test out the Iral Silver before it hits the market in five months. We simply ask that you respect our seven-day embargo. Twenty Iral Silver’s are available for use in ten-minute increments in the lobby, and our operators will gladly assist you in navigating the system. Happy travels!”
While standing in line to test the Iral Silver for what felt like hours, Morgan reviewed her limited notes:
YESTER is not dissimilar to Nuetech-Maps. Only, instead of seeing the exact detail of a present-day street, you can, I assume, roam through ancient Greece, or 1950s Harlem, or Jurassic Florida?
Due to lag issues, the decade of 2040 is not viewable… yet.
When Gerald cries, he looks like a dumb little—
A Southern voice interrupted her concentration. “Hi! I’ll be your Iral operator for the next ten minutes. What’s your name?”
“Oh. It’s Morgan. Morgan Stern.”
“Love that name. So strong and earthy.”
The young man, with a name tag labelled “Carl,” placed a pair of Iral Silvers over her head. Wearing Iral Silvers of his own, he monitored their shared experience.
“So, we’ll just press that red YESTER button like so…”
He guided her into the YESTER application—where months and rows of numbers hovered over live footage of Earth. She chose with trepidation: June 5, 2023—the day that her father’s body was found floating in the Hudson. Her plan was to use that moment as a starting point and then slowly rewind so that she could follow the body and discover who dumped him there. A new prompt emerged on YESTER, asking for a location. She typed a response onto the meta-pad and was transported to the Hudson River Parkway in 2023. She heard the moving water and the wheels and horns and music of nearby cars. However, the entire area was visually scrambled, like static from an ancient television. She rewound, and fast-forwarded—but the section remained impossible to witness.
“Darn it!” Carl interrupted. “Looks like you found a scramble zone. Let’s get you to another point in the past to witness.”
“I know one!” Morgan swiftly typed a new time and place: her parent’s home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on the last night she remembered her father being there. But the home, and the surrounding block were also scrambled.
“Two in a row?! You have some serious bad luck. And you only have three more minutes left on this test run before you have to get in the back of the line. Hmmm…” He hummed a tune that sounded familiar to Morgan, she just couldn’t place it—and then landed on an idea. “How about 1863?”
Morgan went along with his suggestion, but drifted internally… back in her memory… toward Prospect Park… where her eight-year-old self turned to her then alive mother and said: “If looking at the stars is like watching ghosts… maybe someone out there in the future is watching dad giving us a tickle fight!”
She focused back on what Carl was guiding her through on YESTER. They hovered through a crowd in 1863. But she was tempted to turn the digital wheel of time forward to that 2030 night with her mother… so that she could look upon her once more… only this time, with adult eyes…
She chose not to. Because she did not want to see her cry.
“Let me in!”
The words woke Julius Stern up, but Morgan’s face blipping onto the left goggle of his twentieth edition Irals made him leap. “Must’ve fallen asleep wearing these damn things again,” he thought. He removed the goggles, wondering if the vision of his older cousin was a dream. He hadn’t seen or heard from Morgan in the three years since Auntie Karm’s funeral, not for his lack of trying.
“Come on, Junee. I know you’re in there.”
It was the real her alright. Growing up, Morgan, and all of his relatives for that matter, called him Junebug, which eventually devolved into Junee. He turned to a wall box, where Morgan’s projection also appeared, indicating that she was in the lobby.
He almost kept her waiting, but then heard:
“I brought doughnuts!”
He buzzed her in.
She was smart to bring them. She was smart about everything.
While chewing on a Raised Glaze with Sprinkles, he felt like one of those easily bribed cops in a goggle-flick. The sugar rush helped him focus less on his hurt feelings and more on the subject she rambled on about after swearing him to secrecy.
“Damn. Was he cute?” He asked this in response to her description of watching Abraham Lincoln—the real Abraham Lincoln—give The Gettysburg Address 1863.
“No. Actually weirder looking than his photos suggest. But, for the time, sure. Yeah. I guess he was kinda cute. Be cuter if he freed the slaves earlier, but—”
They were falling back into the same banter patterns of their youth. Morgan was Junee’s favorite cousin. Perhaps even his favorite relative. It felt nice to joke around again.
“So, essentially… the Iral Silvers are, like, time lenses.”
She was taken aback by his accurate, punchy, two-word summary. “You should really consider programing advertisement algorithms.”
That felt like a dig, and brought the fun to a halt. In the past, Morgan was more than direct about how she considered it a waste of his potential to pour his entire savings into a fledgling goggle-game startup instead of attending a prestigious college.
Sure, Happy Frogs failed miserably in the goggle-game market and led to his divorce. But that marriage was destined to fail anyway. And he had a pretty great relationship with his daughter Cori’s stepdad, who happened to love Happy Frogs.
“What do you want from me?” he asked sharply.
“Why do you have to phrase it like that?”
“You only came here with doughnuts because you want something.”
“Come on, Junee. Of course I do. Ninety-nine percent of bringing doughnuts is because you want something in return. The doughnut industry is built on people needing a cheap way to seem thoughtful to someone who is either doing, or about to do, something for them.”
“No. We could have had this conversation on our Irals. And you could have had a Neutech-Co drone deliver the doughnuts. What are you doing here in person?”
Morgan stood up and stared at his twentieth edition Iral goggles. “I’ll tell you. Just not in front of that.”
They stood in his restroom, just close enough to hear each other’s whispers over the music blasting in Junee’s living room and the running cold shower water.
“For the rest of the day, I have access to the Iral Silvers at Nuetech-Co headquarters for my review. I want to go back there and use them to figure out what happened to Pops. But I can’t on my own because, for some reason, the area where he was found in the Hudson, and even my childhood home, is completely blocked.”
“And you want me to help you figure out how to un-block it…”
“Can you?”
“Morgan… I—You know that he wasn’t…”
The look on Morgan’s face halted him from finishing the sentence. He had hazy, yet pleasant memories of Uncle Ron—her father. The toss of a baseball… The smell of fried fish... A smile quickly rising below a crown of mustache hair…
By the last doughnut, he had figured out a workaround. All she had to do was go back to Nuetech-Co for another test run and attach a small data magnet to the goggles. It’d give her five minutes of unscrambled time while using the Iral Silvers, and him a secure link to monitor the Iral system from afar and warn her if she was in trouble.
She looked at her watch—“Where did all the time go?”—and headed out of the door.
Junee spoke to the empty room. “Nice spending time with you too, Morgan.”
She did her best to ignore the camps of houseless people on the two-block journey to her vehicle. They wore tattered first edition Irals, meant to distract them from their hunger and thirst. But it didn’t stop one woman from looking at her through the lenses and shouting “Where’s my doughnut?!”
The perfect tug at her guilt.
Morgan logged her destination into the Neutech-Co traffic matrix of her vehicle. It zipped into the streets of Los Angeles toward Neutech-Co HQ.
Morgan whispered to Junee through a Nuetech-Lobe she placed in her ear. “You sure this is gonna work?”
“Hell no,” he responded. “But I don’t think that’s gonna stop you.”
Of the twenty Iral Silver lines in the Nuetech-Co lobby, Carl’s was the longest. It would take an hour and ten minutes for her to reach the front of it and log into YESTER with him; but she figured it was worth the risk of waiting. He was, after all, the youngest operator. Perhaps she could use his naivety to her advantage.
Gerald Aislinn entered briefly with a cohort of executives trailing behind him. And again, seemed to be looking directly at Morgan as he spoke. “I hope that you will all enjoy these final hours of experiencing the Iral Silver and the YESTER application. And I look forward to hearing your reviews. All of them. Even the challenging ones.”
She looked back at him, unblinking and with no fear. Seeing him up close revealed no sign of a soul lingering beneath his flesh. He was all numbers. And she was more than certain that he and his company murdered her father. Why else would they have blocked so much information about him? She just needed the proof.
“Morgan Stern! I was worried you wouldn’t come back. Ready to give YESTER another test run?”
Her anger must have blinded her from the progress she’d made in the line.
“Ready as ever.”
Carl hummed the same song as before while lifting the Iral Silver over her head, but she grabbed it from him.
“I think I know how to wear an Iral,” she said in her rudest tone.
It flustered the upbeat Carl to such a degree that he didn’t see her apply the tiny data magnet to the left side of the Iral, away from his view.
“Well then… where would you like to go?” asked Carl.
“I’m locked in,” confirmed Junee in, who with his own pair of Irals gained full control of Morgan and Carl’s YESTER experience. "Morgan, that song he’s humming gave me an idea. Repeat after me.”
Repeating Junnee, Morgan spoke to Carl. “How about August 15, 1965, Shea Stadium?”
Carl’s eyes went wide. “Ooh! Great choice. I love The Beatles!”
Morgan hated The Beatles, but the game was on. Carl bobbed and dance along to “Twist and Shout.”
In her secure link, Morgan decided to start at her childhood apartment on the last night that her father left the complex. There was no static. And as she hovered over the entrance of the building, she saw her seven-year-old self, waving at him from above through the window. She waved back at herself. Even made eye contact. But then focused on her father, who was also waving back at her younger self from below. She wanted to follow him as he dashed away to a subway station, but saw something else in the window: her younger self holding a baseball bat.
She removed the goggles, forgetting that they still had the data-magnet attached, and ran to the exit.
“Wait! What’s wrong?!” shouted Carl.
“Nothing…. it’s… I just don’t like The Beatles.”
She ran down the steps and into a holographic garden where all of the birds, plants, bees, and scents were fabricated.
“Morgan?”
It was Junee. She forgot he was still in her ear.
“Did I miss something?”
“No. I did.”
She removed the Nuetech-Lobe from her ear and tossed it into a holo-bush.
Long blocked memories invaded. She remembered that night. Her mother had grown so paranoid about Nuetech-Co busting her fathers union efforts… There were strange phone calls... People following them in grocery stores… Every piece of tech felt like a spy… And any reassurances her father gave that everything would be okay wasn’t enough…. He gave her mother a gun. And to Morgan, a metal bat to keep under her bed…
“If you ever see an intruder,” he told her, “Hit ‘em with this.”
Morgan remembered that he was going of to a meeting. It must have been a union meeting… It was really late... Right before his early morning shift. So he wouldn’t have been back until the afternoon…
But something must’ve happened.
“Yes. That makes sense…” she thought. “They must’ve fired him that night.”
But the young Morgan from the window didn’t know that.
All she knew was the sound of someone sneaking into the apartment. And the figure of a man. And the feel of a metal bat in her hands. And the smash of it hitting that man’s skull. And the sound of her mother rushing in and telling her to go back to sleep because it was only a dream. And the sound of Uncle George’s old beat-up truck. And sound of laughter while being left alone in the apartment with his son—her cousin—Junee, while and her mother went away to “take care of something.”
Knowing how bad it looked for a Nuetech-Co factory worker to suddenly be found dead in the water, the company must have blocked any further investigations into how it happened, pressuring the authorities to label it a suicide.
Tears rolled down her face as the figure of a man walked toward her through a holo-tree. It was Gerald, holding the data-magnet, unblinking and with no fear.
Haunting. Really brilliant story, Tim.