Extracted - Chapter 22 – Sign Me Up – Part 2 of 2

 

Extracted

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 22 – Sign Me Up – Part 2 of 2

 

In Philadelphia, psychiatrist Christopher Faucet knocked on the door to Judith Rameriz’s large home.  This would be the second time he attended a group meeting there to discuss…ghosts.  Spirits.  After the last meeting, he was very much looking forward to this one.

In the back of his mind though was something that had stuck with him from his first meeting.  A single offhanded comment that had probably meant something else entirely.  They had been speaking about the impossibility of capturing a ghost so they could study it better, when one of the men there had said, “What if it’s already been done?”  Why should someone ask that particular question, and make it sound like it had actually happened already?  It had been so strange that he couldn’t seem to forget it.  He’d probably never know why the suggestion had been made.

It was only moments before Judith herself invited him inside and he had a drink in his hand.  Not all the members were there yet, but a few were.  He greeted them and was happy to note the way they greeted him.  As if he had been a part of them for years.  It was good to belong.

It wasn’t long before they were all there and the casual but academic conversation began.  It didn’t start out to be about ghosts…spirits, but it wasn’t long before the separate little conversations all merged together and they all seemed to automatically get on track.

“I spoke with a physicist recently,” Faucet told them.  “An actual, MIT professor of physics.”  That got a lot of interest from the entire group.  “Since spirits have no physical substance that we know of,” he continued.  “I was wondering how they could possibly maintain their memory, even to the extent that they seem to.”

“What did he say?” Ben asked quickly.

“Well, that wasn’t the exact question I asked,” Faucet admitted.  “I was trying to go the long way around, I guess.  But since the only states I know of are matter and energy, and ghosts have no matter at all, I asked if he was aware of any type of energy that might be able to maintain some kind of memory.”

“And he said?” Judith asked anxiously.

“He said he wasn’t aware of any type of energy that could do that, and even the memory of physical matter was limited to mostly things like holding a bit of physical shape.”

“Mm!” Ben grunted.  “Metal going back to its original shape.  Like a spring.”

“But not energy,” one of the men stated.

“No,” Faucet agreed.  “Not energy.”

Judith chuckled.  “Which means we’re no closer to solving that riddle than when we started.  Another drink anyone?”

It was later in the evening, and several drinks in for all of them, when Ben first looked to Judith, then to Doctor Faucet.  “Chris,” he said, using the doctor’s first name as they all had been doing.  “Can you keep a secret?”

“A secret?  I’m a psychiatrist.  Of course I can.  I don’t go blabbing anything at all about my patients.”

“Good,” Judith muttered, knowing where Ben was going with his question.

“If we share a secret with you, can you promise to not tell a single soul about it?”

Not having any idea what he was talking about, Faucet replied, “Of course.  Not a problem.”

“Good,” Ben said.  “What if I told you that we…this group right here that you’ve been speaking with…actually captured a live soul.”

That threw the doctor for a loop.  “You what?  That’s ridiculous!  It’s impossible.”

“Yes,” Judith said.  “That’s what we thought too.”

“Except we did it,” one of the men confirmed.

“It was an accident!” the other woman in the group explained quickly.  “We didn’t know what we had done.”

“At first,” another man added.

Things weren’t adding up for Doctor Faucet.  “Wait a minute,” he said.  “You captured a ghost.  A real ghost.  How did you know what you did?”

Ben looked to Judith before answering.  “Not a ghost.  A soul.  Someone’s actual soul.”

“A soul?  How do you make the difference?”

“Because we accidentally ripped it right out of his body,” Judith admitted.

“Ripped…  I don’t understand.”

“Hm!” Ben grunted.

“Show him,” one of the men in the group suggested.  “He won’t get it otherwise.  Nobody would.”

“No,” Ben agreed.  “We did it, and proved it, and even we can barely believe it.”

“What are you talking about?” Faucet asked.

“Follow me,” Judith said as she led the way through her house.

Faucet followed her and Ben all the way through the house and then down to the basement, where he was eventually led to a very large machine that stretched most of the length of one of the walls.  The machine was in a number of separate parts, but all the parts appeared to be similar.

“This is the prototype of the water extraction system we developed,” Judith told him.  “All the sections of it are not put together right now, and I’m not sure they ever will be.  The creation of this process though has been my life’s work, and our entire team’s big dream.  Um…the final production model that we market now is much smaller than this.  We just needed the big size to adequately get at all the parts as we developed it.”

“It is…huge,” Faucet noted as he looked at the entire length of the machine.

“Basically,” Ben continued, “the system bombards the water running through it with various wave frequencies…um…sound waves.  Those waves react specifically with different molecules and atoms in the water.  At the same time, we also subject the water to intense magnetic fields of different strengths that also affect those particles, and the magnetism instantly draws them in, removing them from the water.  The contaminants, or targeted particles, are then pulled into collection chambers where they are stored for either disposal or as many of our customers are interested in, resale.”

“Resale?” Faucet asked.

“Just the salt from seawater that we collect is so pure it can be used as table salt,” Judith told him.  “And that’s only one part of the machine.  It’s the part down here, at the end that we’re concerned with.”

“It’s also the part that a lot of our customers are interested in too.”

“What’s that?” Faucet asked.

“Gold.  Do you know how much gold is dissolved in seawater?”

“Gold?” Faucet asked.  “I didn’t think there was any.”

“Barly any,” Ben corrected him.  “It’s in such minute amounts as to be practically nonexistent, but it is still there.  And this machine can collect it.”

“Don’t get excited,” Judith told him.  She put her finger on a small metal canister.  “This collection chamber only holds about one liter.  You can run seawater through this thing for months and only collect about a quarter of an inch of gold in there, and that’s if you’re lucky.”

“But still,” Ben added.  “It exists.”

“What does that have to do with ghosts?” Faucet asked.

“Not ghosts, souls,” Judith corrected him.

“What’s the distinction?”

“With a soul, we know it’s coming straight from the body,” Ben explained.  “We suspect it has other properties as well, but of course, we can’t prove them.”

“Yet!” Judith added.

“About five years ago, when we were still working on this prototype,” Ben explained, “an accident happened.  It all started when one of our wave generators stopped working.  One of our technicians, Hector, crawled into the pipe and replaced it.  Mind you, there are hundreds of wave generators in that system and it’s something that all of us have done probably thousands of times.  But this time, when Hector told us to turn it on to make sure it was working, he screamed.  By the time we got the machine turned off and could get to him, he was unconscious.  We sent him to the hospital where he not only remained unconscious, but the doctors later determined that he was in a coma, and was likely to stay that way.”

“Until then,” Judith said, “we all thought our process was completely safe.”

“We all spent months trying to figure out what happened,” Ben continued.  “The only thing different from before that we found was the new wave generator.  When we tested it, we discovered it was putting out frequencies that were way out of line with what we had programmed it to do.  We removed it, replaced it again, and the new generator worked just as it was supposed to, as did the entire rest of the process.  So we knew whatever had happened, had been caused by that generator.”

“But,” Judith said.  “That defective generator wasn’t the only strange thing we discovered.”

“No,” Ben agreed.  “Not by a long shot.”

“There was one other thing,” Judith said.  “The system monitors the collection canisters very carefully.  Somehow, when Hector was injured, the system collected something into the gold canister right there.” She said, pointing again at the small metal canister.  The machine showed we had something in the canister.  The pressure inside it had gone up…”

“But at the same time, there was absolutely no mass inside it at all.  The atomic weight was literally zero.  Nothing.  Even though the pressure showed there was something in there.”

“Hydrogen or helium?” Faucet suggested.

“No.  With our sensors, those gasses would also show substance,” Ben explained.  “Each of those canisters have several sensors in them so we know exactly what gets collected.  And that includes a spectrometer sensor as well.  And it showed nothing there at all.”

“None of us had a clue what was in there,” Judith added.

“We literally studied everything we could for about three months before we got a breakthrough,” Ben told him.

“And when it did, believe it or not, it came in the form of a joke,” Judith told him.  “A jest.  One of us was simply trying to be funny.  One of us simply joked that maybe we had pulled out and captured Hector’s soul.  And we all laughed.”

“We tossed it off of course,” Ben added.  “But the longer we kept trying to figure things out, the more we began to wonder about it.”

“So we finally decided to test it,” Judith said.  “But how do you test for a soul?”

“That would be a good question,” Faucet said.  “I’d like to know that myself.”

“The only way we could come up with,” Ben said.  “Was to try putting the soul back into Hector, and see what happened.”

“Do what?  But wasn’t Hector still in a coma?”

“Yes.  Completely.  With no end in sight,” Judith confirmed.

“To make a long story short,” Ben said, “we kidnapped his comatose body from the facility he was in and brought it back to the prototype.  We put the defective wave generator back into the machine and reversed the magnetic field so that instead of pulling from whatever was in the pipe, it pulled from the collection canister and put it back into the pipe.”

“When we got Hector out of there, he immediately groaned, but didn’t wake up.  We had no choice but to return him to the coma facility we had broken him out of a few hours earlier.  We thought we had failed,” Judith finished.

“Except…” Ben said.  “The next morning, Hector woke up, perfectly fine, with no memory of anything happening at all.”

“He was in a coma,” Judith reminded Faucet.  “The system showed there was something in the canister, even though it had no mass at all.”

“And the moment we reversed the process, Hector woke up,” Ben finished.

Faucet did his best to take all that in.  Was it possible?  It didn’t sound likely, but at the same time, what else could it be?  “I…” he started, but he didn’t know what to say about it.

Ben patted him on the arm.  “Think about it for a while, then let us know what conclusion you come to.”

“In the meantime,” Judith suggested.  “Let’s go back upstairs for another drink.”