until I understood the lay of the land or could at least guess which way Nick would have to go to reach safety. The base facility lay a hundred miles from the harbor on the Antarctic Peninsula. Determining the distance frustrated me more than anything since I couldn't hold up a ruler and mark the scales, but it looked to be a thousand or so miles from there to Argentina. I had no idea if the planes could make that trip but Nick would know.
One of the hangars held a tractor-type vehicle with bulldozer treads that looked like it could make the journey to the harbor. I searched Heavenly for pilots or anyone with experience in cold weather flying. I didn't know a thing about this sort of travel, and there I was, your friendly survivalist travel agent. After asking a lot of people a lot of questions and being elusive about every aspect of exactly why I wanted to know this stuff, I felt reasonably confident Nick could escape and make his way to some semblance of safety. That, of course, didn't account for alien death rays or capture by little green men.
So now I had a workable plan. Part A accomplished. Part B: How in the world could I tell him about my brilliant escape plan? Escape from Antarctica. It sounded like a really bad movie title. A merge was the obvious answer, but could I simply think the plan to him? If only Harb had been there to help out, but he didn't answer my calls and Kyle hadn't seen him for a while. I worried about the kid. He'd been excited about working on the spaceship and helpful but I sensed a dark center lurking underneath his innocent exterior.
I figured I was worrying over nothing. Nothing could possibly harm us. More than likely Harb was off hiding from the afterworld like I was. Hiding from the other ghosts. I needed to tell someone what I was doing in case I couldn't get back out of Nick. I couldn't tell Chris, and Kyle might blab the news out of sheer excitement.
In other words, I was on my own. Somehow I had to pull this off without permanently merging myself with Nick and driving him insane in the process. Simple. Yeah, right.
Chapter 7
Before I could do anything rash, Chris pulled me back into the alien crisis that was sweeping Heavenly. Two factions existed: the apathetic faction that figured we couldn't do anything about this alien invasion and besides, being dead wasn't so bad after all; and Chris's faction which desperately wanted to fight back in any way possible but didn't have a clue how. Unfortunately for them, their faction was in the minority. I was in their camp mainly because I was dating one of their leaders. Cronyism rocks.
Chris tried to garner more support in the hopes that someone out of billions of ghosts might come up with a workable solution or some way for us to actually affect the real world, aka Earth. Kyle in his usual nerd-erific fashion gave me the situation in a nutshell.
Scientists theorized our ghosts were quantum energy echoes left by our dead bodies. We existed in a slightly off-phase dimension from our earthly reality that prevented us from directly affecting anything within, but close enough to interact with it in a limited manner. I wondered if our quantum echoes would last forever or if we'd eventually spark out like a dying light bulb.
"Theoretically," Kyle said, "we'll last as long as the universe is around. But who knows?"
I didn't bring up my tale of possessing Nick, or the things that Harb had shown me. Harb had made me promise to keep it a secret. I was glad he had. After merging with Nick, I understood the dangers.
Kyle continued to explain things to me and bring me up to speed. He didn't sound hopeful that we would figure this out. In the grand scheme of things, humans had clawed their way to the top of the food chain in a relatively short period of time. Despite my romantic notions that anything could be conquered, death seemed all too permanent.
"What
One of the hangars held a tractor-type vehicle with bulldozer treads that looked like it could make the journey to the harbor. I searched Heavenly for pilots or anyone with experience in cold weather flying. I didn't know a thing about this sort of travel, and there I was, your friendly survivalist travel agent. After asking a lot of people a lot of questions and being elusive about every aspect of exactly why I wanted to know this stuff, I felt reasonably confident Nick could escape and make his way to some semblance of safety. That, of course, didn't account for alien death rays or capture by little green men.
So now I had a workable plan. Part A accomplished. Part B: How in the world could I tell him about my brilliant escape plan? Escape from Antarctica. It sounded like a really bad movie title. A merge was the obvious answer, but could I simply think the plan to him? If only Harb had been there to help out, but he didn't answer my calls and Kyle hadn't seen him for a while. I worried about the kid. He'd been excited about working on the spaceship and helpful but I sensed a dark center lurking underneath his innocent exterior.
I figured I was worrying over nothing. Nothing could possibly harm us. More than likely Harb was off hiding from the afterworld like I was. Hiding from the other ghosts. I needed to tell someone what I was doing in case I couldn't get back out of Nick. I couldn't tell Chris, and Kyle might blab the news out of sheer excitement.
In other words, I was on my own. Somehow I had to pull this off without permanently merging myself with Nick and driving him insane in the process. Simple. Yeah, right.
Chapter 7
Before I could do anything rash, Chris pulled me back into the alien crisis that was sweeping Heavenly. Two factions existed: the apathetic faction that figured we couldn't do anything about this alien invasion and besides, being dead wasn't so bad after all; and Chris's faction which desperately wanted to fight back in any way possible but didn't have a clue how. Unfortunately for them, their faction was in the minority. I was in their camp mainly because I was dating one of their leaders. Cronyism rocks.
Chris tried to garner more support in the hopes that someone out of billions of ghosts might come up with a workable solution or some way for us to actually affect the real world, aka Earth. Kyle in his usual nerd-erific fashion gave me the situation in a nutshell.
Scientists theorized our ghosts were quantum energy echoes left by our dead bodies. We existed in a slightly off-phase dimension from our earthly reality that prevented us from directly affecting anything within, but close enough to interact with it in a limited manner. I wondered if our quantum echoes would last forever or if we'd eventually spark out like a dying light bulb.
"Theoretically," Kyle said, "we'll last as long as the universe is around. But who knows?"
I didn't bring up my tale of possessing Nick, or the things that Harb had shown me. Harb had made me promise to keep it a secret. I was glad he had. After merging with Nick, I understood the dangers.
Kyle continued to explain things to me and bring me up to speed. He didn't sound hopeful that we would figure this out. In the grand scheme of things, humans had clawed their way to the top of the food chain in a relatively short period of time. Despite my romantic notions that anything could be conquered, death seemed all too permanent.
"What
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