Empty Urns Launched Into Stars

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  Fallen Stardust: A boy, an outcast and an alien must find salvation in a world of ruin. Samuel must find a medicine to cure the fever ravaging his village. Markus must find the motive that murdered those he loved. And an angel must find a future in a city crumbled into debris. But something lurks beneath the wasted world, and waking it may doom what little of humanity survives.

  The Sisters Will Dance: Blaine Woosely claws his way back to the living. He has cleaned his blood of his addiction, and an unexpected, family farm home rewards his efforts. Only, the country acres isolate Blaine when a sharp-toothed monster hunts to bring Blaine back to dark. The sad history of Blaine's blood brings magic to the country home's new master, but in the end, only Blaine himself can break his chains.

  Mr. Hancock’s Signature: The dead walk in Monteray. The corpse of a nearly forgotten farmer named Hancock arrives via train. Ian Washington remembers Mr. Hancock and vows to return the body home. Yet Mr. Hancock's body will not rest while Ian works to reopen a cemetery, and the corpse staring each morning upon the doorstep forces the town to choose between the isolation of their fear or the hope of their fellowship.

  Empty Urns Launched Into Stars

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2013 by Brian S. Wheeler

  Empty Urns Launched Into Stars

  Contents

  Chapter 1 – Digital Seances in the Dark

  Chapter 2 – A Red Flame

  Chapter 3 – Impossible Equations

  Chapter 4 – Lights of Northern Ghosts

  Chapter 5 – A False Crown

  Help Spread the Story

  About the Writer

  Other Stories

  Chapter 1 – Digital Seances in the Dark...

  "Oh Leo! It has to be you!" A voice sobbed in the dark. "I don't have the courage to ask if it's not. My soul would just vanish if your face was only a trick of numbers and light."

  Paul Seton and Marshall Lincoln held their breath. Though no light had yet seeped through their parlor's thick curtains to shed any illumination upon their subterfuge, the hearts of those two conspirators skipped whenever they heard one of the bereaved voice a sliver of doubt. Paul and Marshall had conducted so many of their ceremonies with the dead, during which none of their clients had ever pointed an accusatory finger their direction. None of the widows, parents, children, siblings, friends or enemies who visited the dark hoping to speak with whatever ghosts still haunted them had ever chosen to doubt whether the glowing faces and electronic voices revealed upon the computer monitor were anything other than the souls they sought. None who employed Paul and Marshall's services ever questioned if they, truly, peered beyond that veil that separated the living from the dead.

  But each seance still held that moment when doubt demanded an utterance, and Paul and Marshall always held their breath for fear the time had arrived when truth would flood them in searing light and sentence them to chains.

  And once again, Paul and Marshall would be saved with a voice from the other side.

  "It's me, Heidi," a man's voice spilled from from a pair of speakers set upon the velvet tabletop. "I've not floated away. I haven't left you."

  Heidi Mazel's eyes squinted through her thick glasses at her deceased husband's face flickering on the thin monitor. The face appeared like that of her lost Leonard, his hair salt gray, his beard sprinkled with flecks of the old black she remembered from those first days she had loved him. That charming glimmer had returned to his eyes. The face that smiled upon her from the monitor did not hold those dull, tired eyes Heidi had resented as the years forced Leonard to slip away from her in body and mind. Though the face was not as young as it had been when Heidi had first glimpsed it, it was Leonard's face before the sickness descended to strangle him. Wrinkles remained. Age spots still splattered across his brow. But it was Leonard's face, a face not so young that she would flee from it for the shame of her own years, a face she could kiss if only her lost husband could walk out from all those minuscule pixels of flickering light.

  "It's really me, Heidi," spoke that face. "I've lifted above my ailments. My mind is whole again. I remember. I remember our first dog, Arrow. I remember how warm it was the December we found him in the shelter. I remember we couldn't keep him out of that Christmas tree. I remember so much again, Heidi. I love you again."

  Heidi shook as she cried, and her sobs drifted around the table, a contagion none of those seated before that velvet could combat. Paul and Marshall breathed again. They had denied the truth for one seance more. One more time, their clients chose to believe. For another round, they would profit because others still embraced faith.

  Paul and Marshall smiled in the sounds of their table's sobs. Though they hid the truth from their clients, did that concealment mean they were not deserving of compensation? Were they, truly, wicked men? Paul and Marshall had devoted themselves for years to intricate computer code and microscopic circuitry in their pursuit of the Singularity. They had sacrificed it all - the homes, the wives, the easy contentment - to achieve that moment when man's soul merged with the machine to eternally live in electricity and light. They had mortgaged all of their worth, convinced that the Singularity remained only one code update away, that the Singularity waited behind just one more redesign of circuitry. And then they would deliver real joy and final peace to a world that no longer needed to fear death, that no longer needed to scrape the dust for sustenance, that would never again need to tremble in fear of oblivion.

  Yet the Singularity never answered their effort's summons. It never manifested in any chip design or strand of equations. Their pursuit made them destitute though their aims were noble. It would not be fair for them to fall so far when their only crime was daring to climb so high. Thus the decision came naturally to Paul and Marshall to offer illusionary assurances that they had vanquished death and learned the secret of warehousing the soul, no matter that they had no power to keep the spirit from dissipating.

  They crafted new circuits and code, not to capture the soul, but to instead emulate it. Variables were carefully calculated. They mined data for each client. They held digital seances in the dark. If they did not offer a truth, then they offered a service that none of their clients denied - an assurance that their loved ones would never be lost to them, that they would be more than memory and ash, that the Singularity had been achieved to elevate humankind far above death's grasp.

  Paul and Marshall breathed as the doubt burned out of the room as Heidi Mazel cried. Faith returned to her. Was it fair for Paul and Marshall to consider themselves wicked men for helping the woman rediscover such faith through illusion?

  Heidi stretched her arms toward the screen. "I'm ready to be with you, Leonard. I'll have my soul uploaded into the machine, and I will be with you."

  Paul Seton cleared his throat. He needed to be careful in tempering his clients' expectations.

  "Pardon my interruption,
Mrs. Mazel, but I must remind you of our operational constraints. Our service is very delicate. It's vital we adhere to the letter of the law."

  Heidi shook her head. "But I'm ready to go. I want to be with my husband."

  Marshall took Heidi's hand. "But you're not ill, Mrs. Mazel. You've so much life left, to share with family and friends. The law only permits the euthanization of clients whose conditions have been judged terminal by a panel of physicians. That's been the law for a decade."

  Heidi clenched Marshall's hand. "But I know I'm sick. I can feel it. There's got to be something wrong with me. Look at me. How many more years does anyone at this table think I have left? I only want to be with Leo."

  "And you are," replied Leonard's flickering face. "Life is too precious to sacrifice now."

  Heidi choked a final sob. "If you say so, Leo."

  Leonard's face smiled before vanishing into the monitor's dark. The room turned quiet and still, the only sound the humming of air-conditioners cooling unseen computer servers.

  Emily and Jasper Narmont leaned over the table's velvet cloth, their faces tight in anticipation to see the next face scheduled to arrive during that ceremony. Marshall's fingers danced across a keyboard and summoned a new spirit into the screen.

  "Mom! Dad!," cried a boy's voice through the speakers. "Oh, it's good to see both of you! I've missed you!"

  Choking on her tears, Emily could hardly look back at the young face. Jasper rubbed her shoulders and kissed her forehead before addressing his son's image.

  "We've missed you terribly, Jonah. But we're here now. We're not going to leave you again."

  Emily willed herself to meet her son's eyes composed of so many glowing pixels of light. "You look wonderful, Jonah. You'r hair's so thick again. So red. Nothing like it turned after the doctors gave you so much chemo. It breaks my heart, thinking how much medicine you took, how much you suffered. We just wanted you to get better."

  Emily buried her face into her hands and cried.

  "It's alright, mom." Jonah's face grinned. "The pain's gone. The medicine doesn't hurt anymore. I'm happy."

  Jasper squeezed his wife's hand. "What's it like, Jonah? What's it like in the machine?"

  Jonah's face grinned, and its glow intensified. "It's like a sunny, Saturday morning. There are so many streets for my bike. There are ball parks everywhere. There are even libraries, mom, filled with books and people to help me read. There's school even in here, only it's never dull. It's always so fun. And there are kids everywhere to play with. I never want for anything."

  Emily reached towards the monitor, and her finger suspended above its glowing glass. But the face in the screen offered no warmth to her touch, only a cold, fleeting charge of electricity.

  "It sounds like heaven," Emily sighed. "I'm so sorry I put you through so much suffering. I only wanted you to get better. It was so hard for me to say goodbye. I had to see you. I had to know."

  Jasper stood from the table and paced around the dark room. "It sounds like my boy is in heaven, but what happens if you just pull the plug from your machine?"

  Paul smiled softly at Mr. Narmont. "We don't know any better than anyone else where the soul goes after it leaves this world. Who is to say what waits for us beyond our machine's memory? We only provide a half-way house, a place for our lost ones to wait for us to join them before moving onward together."

  "We don't mean to threaten, or supplant, any religion or faith," Marshall added. "We're only trying to help however we may."

  "But is it heaven? How would we know if it was not?" Jasper asked.

  "I don't care if I recognize the difference," a fire burned in Emily's eyes. "It's heaven to me, and it sounds like heaven to Jonah. I don't care if my soul floats in the clouds or in some computer chip. I want to be with Jonah. I want to hold him again. I want to run next to him one more time as we try lifting a kite into the wind. I don't care where I find that."

  "We will do all those things again," buzzed Jonah's voice. "We will run and play. You will see, mom. Death will not steal anything from us. You just have to keep the faith."

  The Narmonts nodded. "We love you, Jonah."

  Jonah winked, and then, his face vanished from the glass.

  The seance's last ghost had spoken. All those who gathered around the table moved onward in their loss. The lights returned and dispelled the shadows. The dead once more disappeared from the living's sight.

  After those flickering spirits composed of pixels and binary code departed, those who had come to Paul and Marshall's table left holding more faith in the machinery told to warehouse their loved one's souls. Those clients left certain that their choice to sacrifice their suffering loved ones to the magic Paul and Marshall promised had been necessary and correct.

  Thus whatever fee Paul and Marshall might charge, in the end, seemed very inexpensive.

  "That was a really nice touch with the dog," Paul commented after the guests had departed.

  Marshall winked. "I overhead the detail at Leonard Mazel's funeral. I understand now why you insist our clients still hold services for their loved ones even though we promise that those souls live onward in our machine. There's so much information to be gleaned from listening at those wakes and funerals. I put whatever I can into the machine in case it can help."

  Paul slapped his friend's shoulder. "And you program all of that data so well into the machine. It's a marvel how well the emulation responds to our clients."

  "My fingers never drift very far from the keyboard. I set it up so I can summon several responses with the slightest flick of my fingers."

  Paul grinned. "You're as much magician as you are programmer. You almost make me willing to believe in the machine. If anyone's going to be able to eventually realize the Singularity, it's going to be you."

  In truth, neither Paul Seton nor Marshall Lincoln any longer held faith that their efforts would achieve the Singularity. They no longer believed a hard-drive would ever offer room for the human soul, that silicon would ever offer a sanctuary from whatever god waited for a soul's arrival before judgement and consequence was cast.

  * * * * *