Ghost Planet Read online

  So where did a bachelor find password inspiration? Hobbies? Murphy worked too much to have hobbies. Family, maybe? My gaze snagged on a bit of scribbling I had underlined: “Hope is at Trinity.” This struck me as an odd thing to have written. Then I recalled that Hope was the name of his youngest sister.

  I glanced up at the screen. Not only had Hope followed him to Trinity, I was pretty sure I’d read she was also studying psychology. Murphy had family photos all over his apartment, but the one next to his computer showed him with his arm around a young woman who was unmistakably related to him—same fine, dark hair and clear eyes.

  Stretching my fingers over the keys, I typed “HopeMarie,” hesitating a moment before adding the year she was born. It was exactly the type of password you weren’t supposed to use, but academics were notoriously lazy when it came to such things. I hit Enter.

  Invalid password. Try voice recognition? suggested the display.

  Definitely not. How many more tries before it locked me out? One, maybe two.

  I retyped the name, tacking a “4” on the end—Hope was his fourth sister.

  Invalid password.

  Chuckling over the impossibility of the task I’d set myself, I typed “HopelessMarie.” I didn’t bother hitting Enter before rising from the table.

  On my way to the door, I hesitated. Returning to the keyboard, I backspaced over the black dots and typed “HopefulMarie.”

  The login screen vanished, replaced by Murphy’s folder stack. My eyes went wide with astonishment.

  I scanned through the folders. Patient files, research data, scientific resources. I could be interrupted at any moment—what did I most need to see? I chose the patient folder and opened the first journal, which contained text and video files organized by date. Some were flagged.

  “Audio on,” I said as I opened the first flagged video. Jumping at the sudden ring of Murphy’s voice in the room, I tapped down the volume.

  The image on screen was not of Murphy, but of a man a little older, with brown hair and eyes. He looked like a ghost—tired and pinched. Hollow-eyed and haunted. Murphy was a disembodied voice asking questions.

  “How do you feel today, Josh?”

  “Tired.” The man’s head lifted a little as he swallowed. “Better, I think.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. You had a plan when you left yesterday. How did it go?”

  Josh ran a hand through his rumpled hair and leaned back in the chair. He tried (and failed) to look relaxed. “No lapses.”

  “That’s grand, Josh. The first time, I think?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. But…” Josh’s eyes moved nervously around the room. “She’s really pissed.”

  “Let’s talk about you, okay?”

  “Sure, doc.”

  “Joshua!” The woman’s cry came high and sharp, followed by a loud thump. Josh’s gaze darted feverishly to the left.

  “Stay with me, Josh,” said Murphy. “I know how hard this is. Just keep reminding yourself she’s not who she seems to be. She’s not your mother.”

  Josh gave the camera a smile that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. “I’m not so sure about that. She threatened to smother me in my sleep.”

  I sucked in a breath and choked on it.

  “She doesn’t mean it,” Murphy replied in a firm tone. “This alien is bound to you. She can’t kill you without ending her own life.”

  Josh blinked a couple times, and gave a dubious nod.

  “Why don’t we go over your plan for the next twenty-four hours?”

  Shivering, I stopped the video and opened the text file that had been clipped to it.

  GMurphy. JRobbins - ID#US4315

  Health: continued deterioration. Mental state: agitated, excitable, signs of regression. Ghost: no sign of decline; emotionally abusive behavior mirrors subject’s childhood experience.

  Assessment: low level of confidence that subject can adapt; continuation may place subject at risk. RECOMMEND RETURN TO EARTH.

  My skin grew clammy with sweat as I read through Murphy’s notation several more times. I recalled an exchange between Murphy and Lex my first day on the planet. She had warned him about the fact he’d been interacting with me.

  There was more going on here than the academy had let on. The risk of not following the protocol was not limited to depression. If I’d interpreted Josh’s case correctly, the balance between colonist and ghost could shift if the ghost was strong enough.

  After scribbling a few lines in my notepad I moved on, opening the Research folder next. A subfolder called “Generation” caught my eye. There were half a dozen documents with long, scientific titles, and a single video file labeled with only a date.

  I opened the video, hoping it would give me a quick orientation to whatever “Generation” was. I was totally unprepared for what followed.

  The video was like computer animation. But as soon as it began running, I understood. From indistinct pink smudge at the bottom of the screen to fully formed adult in less than thirty seconds.

  The birth of a ghost.

  My chest constricted and I forced in a deep breath. Shocked and morbidly mesmerized, I played it several more times. I couldn’t follow the transitions. There were no transitions. Just a seamless morphing and expansion of tissue. I thought about the birth of the planet itself, from lifeless rock to Earth-like world in just a couple of years.

  As I reached to play the clip at a slower speed, voices drifted in from the hallway.

  “Log out,” I said, just as the door slid open.

  “Mystery solved,” announced Julia as she entered the room, setting a bag down on the table.

  Murphy stood in the doorway, glancing from me to the screen. I looked too, afraid of some visual remnant of my snooping. Nothing there but an empty login box.

  “Elizabeth?”

  Glimpsing Ian out in the hallway, I rose from the table. Murphy’s eyes followed me as I approached and brushed past him. He knew I’d been up to something. It probably wouldn’t take much effort to figure out what. The risk had been worth it though.

  “Hi there,” I greeted Ian.

  “Hi there, yourself.” He smiled, reaching to hug me as the door closed behind me. It felt good, being held by someone who was happy to see me, and I gave him an enthusiastic squeeze.

  “I’ve been worried about you,” he said, releasing me so he could study my face. “I’m so sorry about your mother.”

  “Thank you. I’m doing okay.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  His concern felt good too, and also dangerous. I shook my head, tears stinging my eyes.

  “Okay.” He gave me another quick hug and stepped back.

  “How have you been?” I asked.

  He ran a hand through his ginger curls. “Preoccupied. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking over the stuff we talked about, and I’ve been hoping to see you.”

  Lex passed by us with her ghost in tow, and I’d have sworn the look she gave me was murderous. I was going to have trouble from her if I wasn’t careful. It was a stroke of luck she hadn’t been the one to catch me in the meeting room.

  “Are you hungry?” asked Ian.

  I realized that in my excitement over getting out of the apartment, I’d forgotten to grab anything for lunch. “Starving.”

  “Wait here. Julia brought enough to feed a basketball team.”

  I stared after him as he passed through the door to the conference room, thinking about how much he’d changed since our first meeting. Unless Julia had altered her behavior toward him, it had been due to our interaction. So we didn’t necessarily need attention from the colonists to come back from protocol purgatory. I wondered if it was possible to bring back the ones that were further gone.

  Ian came back with big hunks of bread and cheese, and an apple. “Not as fancy as our last meal, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, you know, I live with a chef,” I said with a laugh. I wasn’t exactly suffering eating Murphy’s lef
tovers. I’d barely had to do any cooking for myself, and to his credit, he had yet to even give me a cross look about it.

  We picnicked in the hallway. The floor was some kind of rubbery laminate, a deep ochre color, and not too hard on the backside. I thought about suggesting we go back to Murphy’s office, but it occurred to me that maybe Ian wouldn’t want to be that far away from his wife and Murphy.

  “Can I ask you an intensely personal question?”

  Ian grinned. “That’s what shrinks do, right?”

  “I suppose. But it’s really none of my business.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Do they … do you have to listen to them having sex?” The blood rushed to my face and I wished I could take it back.

  Ian snickered and tore off a piece of bread. “They don’t. Not yet anyway. Murphy’s a gentleman, I’ll give him that. She’s only been here a couple months, and he’s insisted on taking it slow and giving her time to adjust to … well, to me, I guess.”

  A laugh burst out of me and I covered my mouth. “You’re giving him a lot of credit. He’s probably more afraid you’ll punch him.”

  Ian laughed too, but after a minute he dropped his bread onto his napkin with a sigh. “The problem is I know her, and I can see she wants to.”

  I stared at him. “How do you take it? Honestly, I would have killed one or both of them by now.”

  “By the time they started seeing each other I didn’t much care about anything. I believed what they were telling her—that I wasn’t really him.” He looked at me. “You know about Theseus’s paradox?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Greek legend. The ship of Theseus—the hero who saved the Athens youth from the Minotaur—was supposedly preserved for generations. As it aged, old boards were replaced with new ones, creating a philosophical dilemma—if every piece of the original ship was gone, was it still the ship of Theseus?”

  My mouth fell open. “What’s the answer?”

  Ian laughed. “That’s the point—who knows? Anyhow, I digress. Habitually. It drove Julia crazy. What I wanted to tell you is that talking with you has given me some kind of boost. I confronted Julia about Murphy when we got home Saturday night. I expect Alexis Meng got an earful about that today.”

  This confirmed what I’d assumed when Murphy mentioned Julia’s session—Lex was Julia’s therapist.

  “What did Julia say when you confronted her?”

  “Nothing. But she had to listen, right?”

  I grinned. “Good for you, Ian.”

  He gave a wry smile. “We’ll see how long it lasts. But listen, before they come out, I’ve been mulling over your theories, and I wanted to run something by you.”

  “Please,” I said with a nod. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Since we talked I’ve been really preoccupied with how we’re created. Besides our bodies, the planet is re-creating personality and memory, right? So the mechanism has to be more than just bits of hair or skin.” This called to mind the video I’d watched, and I shuddered.

  “I’m wondering if it has something to do with the bond,” he continued.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The planet is doing something that looks very God-like to us, right? Generating complete copies of people—whole beings—from nothing but the colonists’ memories. But there must be some kind of process behind it. Maybe part of that process involves using the bond between the colonist and the dead person to access the necessary data —maybe a combination of biological blueprints and some kind of … I don’t know … residual energy.”

  I laced my fingers together, thinking. The idea of a bond blended nicely with my symbiosis research. But there was a problem.

  “I think that makes a lot of sense, except for Murphy and me. We only met once. There was no bond.”

  “Well, you’re the shrink here, but I’m thinking there could be an emotional bond even with a slight acquaintance. I mean, we’re talking about something that can’t be measured—at least not by us—but if the two of you were attracted to each other, for example, maybe that would be enough.”

  Warmth flooded my cheeks and I cleared my throat.

  Ian gave me a quizzical look, and then he chuckled. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “Serves me right for asking about your wife’s sex life.”

  “True. You know, if you are attracted to him, I’d be awfully grateful if you’d seduce him so he’d leave my wife alone.”

  “Then I wouldn’t get to see you anymore.”

  “Mmm, true again.”

  He’d reminded me of something that had been troubling me all day. “Lex thinks I was sent to seduce Murphy. She suggested he’s been targeted because of his role here, and that I’m going to try luring him into breaking protocol.”

  Ian picked up the apple and studied it, turning it in one hand. “That actually sounds plausible.”

  “Not to me,” I grumbled. “Are we really such basic organisms that it always comes down to sex?”

  “Err, yes. At least the male version of the species.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Okay, but listen. Seducing Murphy—that’s really up to you, isn’t it? I mean who’s going to make you? Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “You’re a lovely girl, Elizabeth. Warm and generous. Bright and articulate. He may not talk to you, but he listens. Julia told Lex about your theories, and that Murphy stopped their conversation so he could hear what you were saying to me. You may be seducing him without even trying.” He handed me the apple. “There’s another way to look at it that has nothing to do with sex. Maybe you’re supposed to use that powerful, persuasive brain to change Murphy’s perception of us.”

  My frown unraveled. “Your version is much more appealing.”

  “There’s nothing to stop you trying, as far as I can see. I’d love to help you if I can.”

  I reached for his hand. “Thank you. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have a friend.”

  “You don’t have to tell me.” He squeezed my fingers.

  We sat quietly for a minute or two, just holding hands.

  Finally, I asked him, “What is Julia’s role here?”

  “She’s a doctor. Medical doctor, I mean.”

  I bit into the apple as I thought about this. “Do you think you might be able to get access to any historical patient files—files from right after colonization? I’m interested in finding out more about what happened with the colonists when the ghosts first arrived.”

  He frowned. “I can try. But she probably has secure access for stuff like that.”

  I handed him the apple. “She’s your wife. I bet you can figure out her password. I figured out Murphy’s.”

  “Why am I not surprised? I’ll see what I can do.”

  The door to the meeting room opened and our counterparts came out, looking unexpectedly somber after their lunch date. Both of them glanced down at our still-clasped hands. Ian gave my fingers another squeeze and we both stood up.

  “See you soon.”

  As I reached to hug him I thought of something, and whispered in his ear, “Let’s set up mail accounts before next time, so we don’t have to wait on them to talk.”

  He drew back and winked at me. Then he caught up to Julia, already on the stairs. As I turned to follow Murphy I almost ran into him. He’d been standing right behind me.

  * * *

  Ian’s take on Lex’s theory had cast things in a whole different light. My plans regarding Murphy had mostly revolved around using him to survive until I could figure out how to get away from him. Ian was right. I had one of the planet’s most important policymakers as a captive audience. I needed to think beyond my own personal struggle.

  Unfortunately I had been careless so far, drawing unwanted attention to both Murphy and myself. As we walked back to Murphy’s office, Lex met us in the hall. She followed Murphy inside, turning to punch the button so the door closed in my fac
e.

  “Shit,” I muttered, smacking it with my hand.

  Moving away from the door, I saw Lex’s ghost sitting in a chair against the wall outside her office. I crossed the hall and sat down beside him, my anger cooling as I examined his profile. He never lifted his eyes from the floor.

  “My name’s Elizabeth,” I offered.

  No response.

  “She looks like you. Is she your daughter?”

  His head turned slowly, and his expression took me by surprise. I had expected to see what I always saw—pain, longing, despair. The man smiled at me, eyes bright with pride.

  “Yes.” His voice rasped from disuse.

  I returned his smile. “She’s very bright, isn’t she?”

  “Like her mother.”

  “Is her mother still alive?”

  He nodded.

  “Does Lex look like her, too?”

  “Yes, very beautiful. I’m so happy.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, then closed it. I sat blinking at him. Finally I couldn’t stand it. “You’re happy?”

  He gave me the kind of look you give someone when you perceive they’re a little slow on the uptake. He cleared his throat. “Last time I saw her she was eleven. Now I see her as a woman. Her mother is lost to me, but I see her in Alexis every day. How many fathers, living or dead, get to have that?”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that she won’t acknowledge you?” I wasn’t proud of myself for this. Who was I to talk him out of his happiness? Which of us was better off?

  But he shrugged his shoulders. “I’m a ghost. I don’t think she even sees me most of the time. It’s just as well. I’m happy living in the future, but she shouldn’t live in the past.” As he said this I realized when he said ghost, he meant ghost. He didn’t know what he was.