The Limbo between the long shifts.

Most of my working hours are now packed into Saturday and Sunday. Apart from a few short sessions during the week. This earns enough to cover the bills and leaves maximum time for writing. As long as it stays stable it will be fine. As long as it’s stable I can adapt to it.

It does mean unusually early rising (ie before noon) on two days and a long shift on each day. This night is the limbo between. Too tired to give much of a crap tonight and have to be up early(ish) tomorrow so I suspect the Saturday blog will become a bit of a random thought experiment.

I like random thought experiments. I also like Dr. Who, which can trigger such random thoughts.

Flaws in the latest two-part story include the Cybermen being under the control of the Master. If that were true then they would always have been under his/her/its control. He would have been the equivalent of the Daleks’ Davros. Yet another originator of the Cybermen is messing with the time line too much there. Also the idea of turning corpses into Cybermen with nanoparticles that magically produce all the armour and weaponry around the corpse. Too much.

On the plus side, it tied in nicely with yesterday’s post – even among what should be a homogeneous and obedient population of cybermen there were a few rebels. Two at least. Danny Pink and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. If there can be rebel Cybermen (and there have been at least two rebel Borg – Seven of Nine, and Hugh, aka Third of Five and a couple of rebel Daleks too) then no matter what they do to us, resistance is never futile.

There is a hell of a giveaway for the Christmas show. Danny Pink will be back. How can I be certain? We’ve already met his grandson, the astronaut at the end of time. Therefore he is not really dead. I also suspect that the Master/Mistress teleported away rather than being disintegrated, since there was a blue flash (as with other teleport instances in the programme) and not a red one (the disintegration flash). He/she was shot by a Cyberman but that only clouds the outcome, it does not make it certain.

I am annoyed at the death of the clever geek girl. I liked her. She worked out who the Master was on her own. It had to be explained to the Doctor.

The Master did reincarnate quite prettily this time. Even so, I couldn’t… I’d keep seeing his earlier incarnations, including the very early one with the Fu Manchu moustache… *shudder*

Anyway.

The two-part show was based around the idea of an afterlife run so beurocratically you’d hardly notice you’d died. It even had a smarmy official with an iPad and a lot of intrusive questions. It did set me thinking.

Note that the following is not meant to be taken as fact. This is storytime thinking. Not science thinking.

What if… ghosts die?

I’ve played with this idea before. In ‘Samuel’s Girl’ I took the lazy way out and had the dead ghosts moan on the wind. There might be a more interesting way.

There are quite a few reported sightings of ghosts and yet when you consider how many billions of people have died through the ages, these sightings become extraordinarily rare. By now we should be shouldering our way through them. Where do they go? Why do we only ever meet the odd stray one living in an abandoned building or jumping out at passers-by?

Theory – we do not see the afterlife’s civilised part. We only ever happen across their homeless strays, or those among them who seek contanct with another world in the abandoned buildings. Most of the afterlifers have forgotten this life and don’t believe in us. Those of us we consider cranks and weirdoes meet the next life’s cranks and weirdoes.

What if that afterlife is not infinite though? Reported ghosts do tend to fade with time. A few persist. Well there are now seven billion of us and only one Reaper. He’s bound to have a backlog.

Suppose ghosts have a finite lifetime. It’s probably a lot longer than ours but they eventually die and become ghosts of ghosts. Ghoosts.

What if a few of the ghosts see the ghoosts and are regarded as cranks and weirdoes by the other ghosts?

Further, do ghoosts die? Do they then become ghooosts that only a few ghoosts see?

Is that the meaning of infinity? An infinite recursion of death, an infinity of afterlives and each one refusing to the see the next one, or the one before?

Are we really at the start of it? Perhaps there is a level before us, some of whom see us and are even now investigating whether we are real. Perhaps some of those the ghosthunters communicate with are the level before us, not the level after. Maybe we are the maze-rats studying the scientists.

Maybe it’s a circle… Eventual reincarnation after passing through a huge cycle. Maybe those cases of quick reincarnation – the very very rare ones that look pretty convincing – are short-circuits.

Either way it comes out pretty much the same. We die. A lot. Over and over again. Then we pass Go, collect $200 and roll the dice again. There is no end to it.

It’s not a pleasant scenario but then horror writers don’t write about cuddly puppies or fluffy kittens unless they are in conjunction with blenders or things with large teeth.

There is a short story in here somewhere. Possibly a whole collection. I’ve now written it down here and will print this out so it won’t be lost in among all the other stuff in my garage-sale of mental organisation. Then I’m going to let it stew for a while until it gets sparked.

I think… I think the idea itself is sufficiently disturbing. The stories it could spawn might turn out to be extraordinarily disturbing.

If I can work in tobacco and booze, they will be terrifying.