...And We Will Have Snow

Chapter 4-7: Q Dreams

At dinner, Ray started telling everyone about Ghost Mode.

"I called it that because Xayna's only link to the QAR was through the Q. She had no physical interface."

There was no shortage of questions.

"What does that mean?"

"How is that possible?"

"There must be an explanation."

Bear said, "Why not give them a demo?"

"What? How?" Ray wasn't sure what he had in mind.

"It's Xayna's idea. Just have everyone wear their lenses. Then they can see her like you did. Maybe Mom and Dad can come too."

"Wow. I'm having trouble keeping up, but that's right. QAR lets us see ghosts. Dema and Cern have explained about ghosts before. They can help with this."

Since it seemed like nobody else really had a clue what Ray was talking about, it was quickly agreed to meet in the lounge with QAR lenses on and active.

Soon they were all assembled, with Sedna and Kore between Bear and Tengri, Marian and Drake off to one side, Ray on the other with Cheryl beside him, beaming fondly. Bear went into his Xayna dream, and she responded. He imagined her sitting in the empty chair facing him. He had no trouble getting the QAR to deliver an image of her sitting there. As soon as he could see it, the others began to pick it up too. Xayna was with them.

Bear said, "Welcome to our island, sweetheart."

She blushed shyly, then smiled in a way that lit up like the sun.

She looked around. "It's good to see you all at last."

She was greeted with smiles and nods and "It's good to see you, too."

Bear reached out to his mother and father, and shortly they appeared as well, seated on either side of Xayna.

Drake said, "This is amazing. Cern, are you and Dema wearing your lenses?"

"We thought we'd try it without, like Xayna. It seems our link to Bear is strong enough we don't need them."

Ray said, "As soon as Bear sees them in his shaman dream the QAR picks that up and feeds their images to everyone through their lenses. That makes more feedback and the images get stronger."

Drake nodded, and said, "Resonance. That always helps."

Cern said, "In Romania we met a ghost named Avram. Dema was deep in her shaman dream, getting strong resonances from being in her ancestral homeland. Avram was drawn to that, to her. He was surprised that we could both see him. But he was projecting his self-image very strongly."

"But only you could see him, right?" said Kore.

"He said some others could see him, but not many. Belief in his kind had faded."

"Were there many others like him?" asked Drake.

Dema replied to this. "Like him, not so many. But bodiless spirits are everywhere. Some are simply between lives, will come back as people or other animals. Some are content to dream, perhaps being the spirit of a forest, or a mountain." Xayna was nodding her Haida agreement.

Dema went on. "Others are more active, and seem to think of themselves more or less as people. There's one at the door now. Sedna, could you go let him in?"

Sedna got up quickly and went to the front door. She came back accompanied by an old man dressed in a a rumpled green suit.

"This is Mr. Green," Dema told them. "We met him in England."

Tengri cocked his head for a moment, then closed his eyes, and took off his lenses. "Ah," he said, and glanced from Mr.Green to Dema and Cern, and Xayna. It was obvious that he had joined them in the shaman dream.

"Mr. Green," said Tengri, "Welcome. I've heard many stories about you."

"Not all of them bad, I hope," the visitor replied.

Ray said, "Oh, I get it now too. I wondered why you had Sedna let him in. Then when he came in the room with Sedna, I saw him before the QAR had enough feedback to augment his image. Mr. Green, you are augmenting it yourself, aren't you."

Mr. Green nodded assent. Dema said, "Mr. Green lives on the edge of the Q. I can always find him there. When I invited him here he was able to come through the Q to our island, but he wanted some local matter to manifest his presence."

Mr. Green spoke up. "Yes, what you have done here is fascinating, and I am very pleased Dema thought to invite me. But I prefer to draw my substance from the earth rather than from inside people's houses. Once I do that I have to use doors. But they must be opened for me."

Others began to catch on. Knowing what he was, it was a little more evident that he was speaking to them inside their heads. Some took off their lenses as Tengri had. They found they could still see Mr. Green quite clearly, but Dema, Cern and Xayna began to fade.

Ray said, "It's another old shaman trick, right? You get the Q to help you create a resonance with a bit of matter, and that helps you influence the Q dreams of other people to accept your presence."

Mr. Green nodded to him again.

"But Dema and Cern and Xayna aren't doing that. They're letting the QAR use data coming from their Q dreams to augment what everyone else sees, so they are more like ghost images. You could do that too."

Sedna turned her attention to Ray and said, "But isn't the reason QAR works in the first place that we are all ghosts to it? Dad?"

Cern knew what she wanted him to say. "Remember Vlad? He took the matter augmentation trick to an extreme. His body was a golem, an animated accretion that he overlaid with a glamour. In a mirror, he looked as blank as a statue. He did it so he could have a physical body to inhabit. What Sedna is reminding us is that we are all spirits inhabiting our physical bodies. The difference is that instead of accreting them we grow them. Ray's QAR doesn't know that."