It’s an old house. Close your eyes and you can actually smell the years. All of the corners have been worn smooth as generation after generation has eroded all the sharp edges away into a polished sheen. It smells like stubborn dust and potpourri. When the wind blows, you can hear the old timber creak and sing its response. The new additions are obvious, whether it’s the table that doesn’t have enough water spots or the armchair that is stitched with nylon while the rug it sits on is hand-spun wool. Time is a slow writer, but it always leaves its signature.
Sometimes, that signature moves. Sometimes it even speaks.
I’m supposed to be fixing my elderly neighbor’s computer. Let’s be honest, her issue is probably just dust-bunnies in the fans and a heavily fragmented hard drive. An easy fix, especially if I can convince her to upgrade to a solid state drive. The case is one of those decade-old Dell monstrosities that’s built like a Panzer and equally difficult to break into. Even so, I should’ve had the inside exposed five minutes ago.
If only the soldier would stop staring through me towards the front door.
Mrs. Nannette doesn’t see him, obviously. Nobody ever does, except me. He doesn’t see us, either- the Echoes never do. Realistically, he’s not conscious, or aware, or sentient- however you want to put it. He’s just a rerun of someone who once was. Right now he’s nervously adjusting his woolen gray coat and his flat-topped hat, glancing at the door as if expecting important company- possibly a wife with a newborn baby he’s meeting for the first time? Or maybe it’s the end of the war and he wants to meet his victorious Union adversaries with what little dignity he has left.
That’s depressing, I know. It’s just how the Echoes are, though. I’ve seen hundreds of them by now, in as many locations, and there’s always an air of regret and disappointment. There’s also a lot of fear and anger. It’s very rare to encounter an Echo that was imprinted through positive energy. Happy people don’t leave much of an impression on the world, apparently. Suffering, however? Man, that stuff lingers. There’s probably some really deep and philosophical point in that, but I haven’t bothered decrypting it yet. I’m generally too distracted by the fact that I see dead people almost any place older than my shoes.
Thankfully the soldier is starting to flicker and fade, as though his personal antenna reception is on the fritz. He’s turning away from the door and as he does, he begins to dissolve, gradually transitioning from mildly translucent to entirely invisible. I assume that whatever happened after he stopped waiting for the door wasn’t important enough to be recorded. Chances are he’ll reappear tomorrow, same time, same place, same bat channel. Or maybe he’s got a few other starring appearances in the house for different reasons. You never know with these things. Some are on a constant loop, some are more sporadic, with a less defined routine. The lady sobbing at the base of the hickory tree on Anders Street, for example? Yeah, she only shows up on Wednesdays at sunset. She even adjusts for Daylight Savings Time, however the hell that works.
With the soldier gone to...wherever it is Echoes go when I can’t see them, I can focus on the task at hand. I was right- dust everywhere. I’m not sure how long it’s been since someone cleaned in here, but it wasn’t any time even remotely recent. I can tell this chassis is no virgin, though- there are old fingerprints in the more lightly dusted parts of the chassis. Skin oils act like glue for dust, did you know that? Whoever was in here last- a grandson, maybe, or possibly just some acne-riddled spaz from Geek Squad- did a horrible job with the cable management, which completely screwed the airflow and caused dust to clog up the intake fan and the CPU heatsink. Amateurs, man, amateurs.
As I begin to clean out the dust and remodel the wiring, HGTV style, my mind wanders back to the soldier. Who was he? What was he waiting for? When did his imprint happen and how soon after it did he die? He was mute and it was short replay, so it obviously wasn’t incredibly significant. Nevertheless it was important enough that the memory lingered even after he left this mortal coil. Sometimes the Echoes are of the moments of a person’s death and those are the worst. Generally, however, they show the person alive, albeit usually in some form of stressful situation. The one thing they all have in common is that they’re not interactive; they can’t hurt you. They don’t even know you’re there.
That’s the thing with Echoes: they’re not ‘ghosts’. I don’t believe in ghosts, ironically enough. Ghosts just don’t make sense, on a scientific level, the same way the concept of an ‘Afterlife’ totally conflicts with the Law of Conservation of Energy. I mean, I guess you could technically make an argument for ghosts within the whole ‘Multiverse Dimensional Plane Interaction’ viewpoint or whatever, but I’ve never seen any Echoes that displayed any sort of self-awareness or ability to interact with the updated world around them.
That’s what separates ghosts from Echoes, in my opinion; ghosts have some level of consciousness and awareness, whereas Echoes don’t. Instead, they’re like a hologram on loop- just replaying a portion of their life over and over ad infineum. Echoes are human moments in time, captured and repeated. Judging by how many of them I’ve seen walk straight through walls in remodeled homes or navigate non-existent pathways on empty lots where a house once stood, they don’t even adjust for the changes in the world around them. Well, except for Daylight Savings Chick, I guess. I’m still really confused by that.
I’ve thought long and hard about why Echoes exist and why I seem to be the only one aware of them. After many hours of thoughtful contemplation, not to mention a few mind-altering substances ranging from P.B.R. to cheap weed and Cow Pie Fungii, I’ve narrowed it down to two likely causes. The first possibility is that I have some form of schizophrenia and these are all just delusions, like Tyler Durden flashing his junk between film frames. Occam’s razor would infer that this is the most likely situation, but as far as I’m concerned, Occam can shove his razor right where razors are not supposed to go. I don’t feel crazy, dammit.
Yes, I know that’s exactly what a crazy person would say. Just because I’m potentially insane doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Moving on.
My second theory is lightning. Okay, not lightning, exactly, but electricity or maybe electromagnetic fields in general. See, I recently saw a picture on Facebook that showed a tree that had been struck by lightning. Instead of burning to ash or outright exploding, this tree split right down the middle. Inside, you could actually see the charred path of the electricity as it travelled through the trunk, like a river through a canyon. The same thing has happened with people who survived lightning strikes, where they’re sometimes left with scar tissue that looks like a lightning bolt (the real kind, not the cartoon style or the kind on a certain Boy Wizard’s forehead), engraved into their skin. It’s honestly quite beautiful to look at, really.
This got me thinking about how our brains work. See, all creatures, human beings in particular, are living, breathing, electrical generators. While we don’t produce any more than a few watts at any given moment, we generally live pretty long lives. Cumulatively, that’s a lot of electricity over the course of a lifetime. And if you think about how our brains work, that’s where the bulk of the electrical action happens. Every time a synapse fires, it’s a tiny little lightning bolt lighting up one neural pathway or another. The inside of one’s head is an incredibly miniscule and complex thunderstorm.
When you get right down to it, we’re nothing but a map of neural pathways in a fleshy shell. Our memories, our personalities, our entire minds- the entirety of our mental existence is just a pattern for an electric current to follow. If you could somehow map out all of those pathways with perfect accuracy, you could essentially make a photocopy of an entire mind. What if that’s what an Echo is- a copy of a mind at a given place and time, imprinted on the fabric of our reality, like scar tissue after a lightning strike?
In the same way greasy fingerprints can be immortalized in dust, maybe each of us leave our own residue on the world around us. Maybe certain moments in certain lives leave more residue than others and those residual moments manifest in the form of a snippet of a person’s life. Given a strong enough electrical field emanating from someone, like in moments of stress or trauma, maybe the imprint is strong enough to be visible to weirdos like myself who give them pompous nicknames like “Echoes”.
Or maybe I’m just crazy and I should finish fixing this computer before Captain Confederacy comes back with no pants and a musket or something.