The Dead Speak Ill Of The Living (The Dead Speak Paranormal Mysteries Book 1)

by Robert Wilde

  A man in his late twenties, average height but slim, with wire rimmed glasses and hair that just fell about. Not your clichéd nerd, but clearly someone who lived this. Maybe she had an angle. “So how old are you?”

  “Twenty nine,” he replied confused.

  “And how did you get a job here?”

  “Oh, I finished my doctorate, and submitted some trial papers I’d written in my spare time to Dr. Scott, and he recruited me.”

  Which all sounded far easier than it had been for Dee to get a job on a newspaper, but how many people gave a shit about quantum biology? Then again, how many gave a shit about local newspapers?

  “So if my readers liked what they hear about this lab, can they work here? Is there a way to work up, or do you need a doctorate?”

  Joe sucked his lower lip. He hadn’t been expecting this. “The ten of us on the core team are all qualified, but we do have the support unit who is vital. I mean, we have a local lady who inputs all our material into the proper databases, she’s not a scientist but is picking it all up as we send it through to her, and is easily vital, without her we’d all be lost within a week.”

  “That sounds good. You’d better show me your lab then.”

  Given that this was a high tech research area, Dee was expecting Joe to do more than pull the door open with a silver handle, and then gesture for her to step inside. She found herself in a small anteroom, with a coffee machine and a pile of lunch boxes (she could see sandwiches through the plastic sides).

  “So you’re not allowed food in the lab?” Dee correctly surmised.

  “Yes, and now we go through this next door,” and again, a large, heavy, double door covered in warnings was pulled open, and again they went through.

  “I was expecting more security,” Dee wondered out loud.

  “Oh, we have the men at the gates and then the main doors. If you get past them you have the run of the place.”

  “Indeed. I won’t mention that.”

  Stepping through, Dee found herself in a large room, about the size of her old school hall, with a large number of workstations and tables scattered across it. There were no internal walls, no cubicles, and it was possible to see across the entire thing from waist height up. All was white again, but this time the sterility and minimalism of the outside was replaced by a clutter of technology everywhere, from computers to wires to things she didn’t recognise.

  “Now this looks like a lab,” she nodded, and as she spoke the other nine people in the room, six men and three women, all stepped back from leaning over round a table, snapped into attention as if the headmistress had walked in, and murmured a ragged “hello.”

  “Sorry,” Dee said raising her hand, “don’t mind me.”

  “Just a second,” said a late middle aged man, in a white coat like them all, but with greatly receded white hair and noticeable cheekbones. He tapped on a keyboard, and all the computers in the room switched their screens to black. “Just guarding our secrets.” He tried to smile, but there was something pained about his face.

  “You’re Dr. Scott?” Dee said, going over and shaking his firm hand.

  “Yes. Err…” He had literally no idea what to say.

  “How long have you been working on quantum biology?”

  “I founded the Journal of Quantum Biology twenty years ago.”

  “Oh, I see, so you’re a leader in the field?”

  Scott pulled his pained look again, and looked over at Joe for assistance. He dutifully came over and pointed back to the door. “Now you’ve seen the lab, let’s get a coffee and I can explain more about the facility.”

  Not bothering to conceal her amusement, Dee let herself be led out. When the door shut, she asked “what was that about?”

  “It’s not so much that he’s the leader in his field,” Joe said, whispering, “it’s that he is the field.”

  “Ah. The profession is somewhat sceptical?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can see why that might be. So you’ve no canteen?”

  “They don’t make enough money with one facility in use, need two to reopen it. But we have a lovely lunch budget.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, is this project short of funds?”

  “Err, no,” and Dee noted he seemed genuinely confused. “We have enough for what we’re doing.”

  “There just seems a certain amount of, shall we say, small scale work on large scale projects.”

  “Well, we could be bigger I suppose.”

  “This almost feels like you’re buried in a university burning through a rogue grant than privately funded.”

  “Monroe and Scott deal with all that.” Joe was clearly out of his depth on this one, and Dee realised she’d have to do some digging to solve the financials. Then she remembered she was writing a puff piece for the Gazette, not breaking a story of science run amok. More’s the pity.

  “But are you making progress?”

  Joe smiled. “Oh yes. We’ll make a breakthrough before the year is up.”

  Dee returned the smile. “Then I expect an invite to the press conference.”

  Doctor Scott put a hand up to his clean shaven chin, stroked the stubble, and concluded that at this rate they’d never make the breakthrough before Christmas, and there’d be a whole host of those tedious meetings to get more money. Maybe he could just let Monroe go along, although the latter did like to wheel him out like a performing monkey, get him to run through lots of long words and generally try and confuse the backers into handing over the money. What had Joe once called it? Get them going with ‘science porn’?

  “Hello,” came a voice from the other side of the lab, where Joe had just come through the door.

  “You’ve been a while,” Scott noted.

  “Oh, we had a chat over lunch.”

  Scott looked at the smile on Joe’s face, and there was a fleeting thought in the paternal parts of his mind, but whatever concern this was it quickly went. “She knew to bring lunch?”

  “We split mine.”

  “Oh yes, your palatial rolls. I’m surprised you’re so thin given you eat half of Lancashire every day.”

  “Turns out she loves food.”

  “I love food,” came a voice from the other side of the lab, “she’s just prepared to put up with your excessive sandwiches.”

  Joe turned to Jane and shot back “you can love food and not spend two hundred quid on a small plate cooked by a sociopath.”

  “Chefs get very passionate about their work.”

  “They’re all loonies who probably shouldn’t be near knives.”

  “Anyway,” Scott said to keep things on track. “It’s good you’re back, we can get on mob handed.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Ah Joe, yes there is. Although we’re certain the quantum construct is functioning, and the connections are functioning, and the software we wrote is functioning, in fact it all seems to be working, we just can’t work out what the data means. Or if it’s data. It’s just a jumble that we can’t process.”

  Joe walked over and looked at the screens on the table everyone was once again stood around. A box showed input coming from the machine, but all the analytical programs were so confused they couldn’t read it. “So the process is doing something, you just don’t know what.”

  “And it’s been doing this all morning since we switched it on” Jane explained, hand on the mouse, pointer drifting randomly in equal confusion.

  “Well it’s sort of good.”

  Scott narrowed his eyes. “Sort of good?”

  “Well, err, something is happening. We just need to find out what.”

  Remembering he was leading a team, and most definitely not a chef, Scott decided to be conciliatory. “I appreciate your attempts to lift my mood Joe, but we might have invented the world’s most expensive white noise generator.”

  “Okay, let me get into this and see what I can find.”

  Which was exactly what the rest of the te
am wanted him to say, because Scott now sanctioned everyone else going out for their lunch. This left Joe sat in front of a bank of monitors, all run from the same computer which was humming away under the desk. Someone coming in cold might have been overwhelmed by the many different readouts in front of him, but as Joe had helped build this he felt comfortable, and this was also why everyone else had buggered off to let him solve it. No pressure then, just an opportunity to impress if he could get it running.

  First things first, make sure everything really was connected and plugged in, even though if something wasn’t he’d have to lie about fixing it and come up with something software related. But a check showed their box, their little magic box of quantum possibility was secure and plugged into the power (although it hardly needed any power, a battery would do), and connected to it all. So, the easy solution wasn’t going to work.

  Joe looked around, concluded he really was alone, and debated whether to dial the computer’s intranet outside and pick up the lunchtime news discussion, which would be a flagrant breach of rules, and would give him something to listen to instead of the CD player with its strange selection of music. Joe decided not to do that, but as the thought was in his mind he accidentally clicked on the icon for the built in music player and as the computer flashed that into life…

  “Wait, Joe, wa…”

  …Joe clicked it off as soon as it began. Then he froze. Had he just heard something? Looking round, finding no one, Joe turned back to the screen. He was sure he’d heard a voice, one saying his name. An odd voice, not exactly human, almost digital.

  Looking at the screen, Joe went over things in his head. He’d clicked the music player into life, he’d heard a voice, he’d turned the music player off and the voice went. So… so had the computer just played a voice? A voice which knew his name?

  Joe returned his hand to the mouse, a thought in his head which couldn’t possibly be right. Data was coming into the computer, the computer wasn’t interpreting it. But something played…

  A click bought the music player up again, and this time Joe didn’t turn it off.

  “Oh thank Christ for that,” came a voice from the monitor’s built in speakers, which were usually filled only with the bleeps of menus opening and closing, “I thought I’d be stuck here for days before anyone worked it out.”

  Joe looked under the desk, and back at the computer, before asking “Who are you?”

  “I’m Professor Joanna Jones.”

  “And… and how are you talking? Are you on Skype or something?” Joe thought he knew the answer, because this machine had no microphone to take his voice away, which left the tantalising possibility of the box.

  “Ah, yes, I, err, well here it is. I’m dead. I guess you could say I’m a ghost. I died in this building, and I guess you could say I’ve been haunting this building. Watching what’s happening, following the development along. And then one day you put a box of quantum foam down, powered it up, and I discovered I could mould it. Not really deliberately, not really repeatedly, but as I was able to feel the point where it interacted with both me, a ghost, and your world, the physical parts of the box, okay, it moulded itself, and I realised I could talk through it. Unfortunately your programs were looking for something else, not a voice, and I’ve been stuck hoping something tried the right output.”

  Joe leaned back, nodding politely. “You’re a ghost, and we’ve built a machine that ghosts can talk through?”

  “Yes!”

  Listening to the synthesised voice, Joe felt he was on a dividing road in his life. He could get up and walk away, and everything would be normal. Or he could stay here and accept that things had just got very unusual, and would take him to similarly bizarre places. But what would a fan of Doctor Who do, when faced with his own remarkable box?

  “I just need to make a phone call,” Joe said, pulling out his phone.

  “To call Scott?”

  “Not yet, ah, yes hello, Doctor Monroe, it’s Joe... Very well thanks… I have a quick question. Where there people in this lab before us?.. Okay, and did any of them die?... Yes, I did say die, it’s just a casual question about… oh, one did, a Professor Jones, heart attack…. Thanks very much… oh, yes, the meeting with Dee went very well… no, she’s not asking about fatalities… no, really. Okay, thanks.” Joe switched the phone off.

  “So you believe me?” the voice asked.

  “Yes, yes I do. But what do we do know?”

  “Call Scott back, call your team back, you’ve just made one of the greatest breakthroughs in scientific history.”

  Joe had literally run out of the room to go and fetch Scott, and the group had moved as quickly to come back in. However, it then took fifteen solid minutes for Scott to abandon his initial assumption of being made a fool of, check the place for TV cameras, and generally think he was the rear end in some scam. But it was worth his increasing anger, and Joe’s equally increasingly vehement defence, to see the look on Scott’s face when he realised it was true, he really was talking to a dead professor.

  “Sorry Joe,” he said meekly. Joe, on the other hand, did not take the olive branch, but continued staring bitterly at the doctor.

  “He said sorry,” Jane tried, ever the teacher’s pet.

  Silence continued, so Jones broke it up. “Shouldn’t you be cracking out the Champagne?”

  “Good idea!” two of the others shouted with certainty and began to move towards the door.

  “Wait, wait,” and Scott put a hand up.

  “You still don’t believe me.” It was a question from Joe.

  “No, I accept that this is a ghost talking. But you know what happens in our profession if we say ghost, or spirit, or anything like that. And you know many devoted people have spent years in laboratories trying to talk to spirits. I am prepared to accept there have been a few interesting results, but they were never reproducible outside of a lab, and for us that means they didn’t happen. So, here’s what I propose. Before we celebrate, before we even tell anyone, we have to test this system outside the lab. More ghosts, more data, more proof.” He paused, looked at the box, and added “with all due respect Professor.”

  “That’s fine,” came the voice, “as the first my place in history is secure.”

  Joe was looking at the tangled mass of screens, wires and equipment. “You want us to take this outside?”

  “Yes. We’ll have to build a portable version. The box is small, everything else can be too. Look at all these screens, we can probably use something like your phone instead.”

  “I’m sure the budget can run to a phone.” Joe would have gladly given his to the cause, but he’d also like it back, and he knew that wouldn’t happen until Scott was dead.

  “Yes, of course. I’m sure we’ll be able to cobble something workable together.” Which, Joe reflected, was probably how they came to be in this situation in the first place.

  “Am I right in thinking Professor,” Scott began, “that you don’t really know how you created this box?”

  “Correct.”

  “And we can’t open it, or scan it, or probe it in any way because the quantum structure would change and it might break.”

  “Aaaahhhhh” the machine replied, realising the problem. “We can’t reproduce the box.”

  “No,” and Scott rubbed his chin. “We have made a breakthrough, we know it’s possible, but we can’t reproduce it. Or tell others how to.”

  “So have we really made a breakthrough at all?” Jane queried, more to go along with the doctor than believing.

  “Yes,” Joe interjected forcefully. “We now know it can happen. And if it can happen, then other people can keep pushing until they find it. The answer is here, we know where to look.”

  Scott smiled, the moment of panic gone. “Exactly. But this does mean one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t anyone damage that box. It’s all we have.”

  Dee sat in front of her laptop, trying to work out a story
while being unmoved by the rain hammering on the window behind her. She always found heavy rain creepy, and she didn’t know why. The thing about writing for a local newspaper is that most readers are after houses for sale, events to go to, stories about them and their loved ones, and occasionally even some news. What they didn’t want was an article about a science lab in the town, and so Dee knew the only people who’d read her article – besides the staff, see point three – was some arsehole who’d be looking for complaint letter fodder.

  All of which might have made the more jaded journalist write any old shit and submit it, and that’s exactly what many of Dee’s colleagues did. But she was young and still had some semblance of pride, and the staff had seemed very nice, and she wanted to do her best. So here she was, trying to explain the lab in terms an arsehole would understand. She’d already stressed that no animals were involved as they seemed very keen on that and spent ten minutes wondering if she should transition to being science writer for a major publication, as her thoughts always drifted to the majors, but that seemed as far off as the moon, but if she just…

  The phone rang, a series of staccato stabs, and Dee checked the caller ID. No one she knew, but as a journalist you had to answer, so she flicked it on.

  “Hello, Dee Nettleship.”

  “Hello Miss Nettleship. You don’t know me, but…” Dee’s radar went off, please god, Allah, the creator, whoever, be something interesting, “…I have something you should know. Call it a story.”

  “I am always looking for stories.” Please don’t be a pervert, please don’t be a pervert, please…

  “Do you have a secure email address?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I have files to send you, liberated from the computers of the laboratory you have recently written about.”

  So not completely in the know then. Hang on “what kind of files. Is something dodgy going on?”

  “Let’s just say you can break the story of your career. And many others.”

  Which struck Dee as strange, as the scientists she’d seen didn’t seem all that devious, but something bad must be afoot. An email address was duly given, and as the caller hung on the phone Dee logged in to find a collection of documents zipped together. A quick look revealed it was about the quantum brain project.