Excerpt from “A Hundred Billion Ghosts”

Roger Foster, the Director of the Post-Mortal Services Clinic, was a towering, spidery man well into his fifties, with a close-cropped silver beard and frosty gray eyes above which hovered eyebrows that could curl into a hundred different variations of sympathetic expression. Ryan could imagine him as a funeral director, which was no doubt what he had once been. Ryan could imagine him even more as a funeral director in Victorian times. His spindly form and pale, sharp features would have looked like death itself clad in a black suit and top hat. Instead, in defiance of the sombre funeral parlor office he worked in, he wore a lab coat with sleeves far too short for him. They probably didn’t come in his size. People shaped like him were more likely to be the subjects of experiments rather than the ones performing them.

“It’s an important distinction,” Roger was saying. “We are not talking about ‘killing’ you.”

“Well what do you call it then?” Ryan expected him to have a euphemism for this kind of thing, something equal parts science and bureaucracy. “Artificially Induced Life Cessation” or something equally clinical. But he wasn’t falling for that. They were still talking about killing him. He wanted them to be upfront about it.

“Killing you would be illegal,” Roger went on, in a speech he had clearly given a thousand times to a thousand people just like Ryan. He picked up one of many odd souvenir-shop trinkets from his desk and fiddled with it as he talked. “Murder is still a crime, though the courts remain tied up deciding exactly what constitutes a murder in these haunted times. Ending a mortal life is no longer a capital crime anywhere, and in some states is barely worse than credit card fraud. But it remains a crime nonetheless. So we can’t do that.”

Ryan found himself weirdly trusting this man. He knew it was because Roger talked in a warm, soothing, funeral director voice, the one he had undoubtedly used to convince people, at the worst time in their lives, to spend extra thousands on felt casket interiors. But he was good at it. The voice worked. If somebody was going to kill him, Ryan kind of wanted it to be Roger.

He had to remind himself again. But you haven’t decided to do that. You’re staying alive for now. Why was it so hard to stay in that frame of mind?

“What we do,” Roger continued, “is simply to extract your ghost from your body. With your consent, obviously. Your body goes right on living. Entirely unconscious, of course, but with all its biological functions intact. There’s certainly nothing illegal about that yet.”

Ryan barely caught the last word. “Sorry, did you say ‘yet’?”

“I don’t think I did. Any other questions?”

Ryan was almost certain he had heard “yet” but he didn’t feel like pressing the issue. “What happens to my body? After I’m… you know, ‘out’?”

“We keep it in a secure storage facility here. Hence the monthly fee.” Roger tapped the brochure on the desk between them, which laid out all the costs of the procedure. “That covers keeping your body warm and clean and intravenously fed until it expires naturally. You may rest assured that once you have left your body, it will be comfortable and well-maintained for as long as it continues to live. If it happens to become terminally ill and expire prematurely, well that’s just savings for you. Your monthly fee is terminated, and our business is done.”

Ryan didn’t like the idea of his body being terminally ill and him not being there to help it. But he supposed if he was going to suffer from a terminal illness, better to skip out and let his body do the suffering without him.

There remained one thing, the thing that scared him most, and he had to ask. “How do you actually… do… it?” If it hurts, he thought, there’s no way I’m doing it.

“The extraction?” Roger smiled. He set down the trinket he had been fiddling with. It was a snow globe with a little model of Myrtle Beach in it. Ryan could tell it was Myrtle Beach because most of the actual beach was taken up by the words “Myrtle Beach” in big black plastic letters. He wondered in passing if it ever actually snowed in Myrtle Beach, or if that was just the fantasy of some over-zealous snow globe designer. “Ah, now the extraction is something you needn’t worry about either,” Roger went on. “There’s nothing to it, really. Science has known for years how to create what they called an ‘out-of-body experience’ by stimulating certain areas of the brain with targeted electrical impulses. They assumed this to be evidence that such experiences were not actually a departure from the body, but merely a trick of the brain. But of course we now know that science was wrong.”

“So this is all totally scientific?”

“Oh heavens no. According to science none of this should work at all. But according to science there shouldn’t be any such thing as ghosts. And yet look out the window. There are a hundred billion of them out there. That’s why nobody listens to science anymore.”

Ryan found that hard to argue with. “Huh,” was all he got out.

Roger went on: “And the procedure is, of course, fully guaranteed.”

“Guaranteed?”

“If you’re not completely satisfied with your ghostly existence, the process is fully refundable and reversible for ten days.”

Ryan felt his eyebrows shoot up. “Reversible? I can get back into my body?”

“That’s right. For ten days. After that, the body stops being receptive to the ghost.”

“Why ten days?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Huh.” Shouldn’t he know something like that?

“Of course you need time to think. Take all the time you need. This is, after all, quite possibly the most important life decision you will ever make.”

“More of a ‘death’ decision,” Ryan said with a chuckle. He instantly regretted it because surely Roger had heard that one a million times.

Roger smiled wanly. “Once again, Mr. Matney, you are not dying. Nobody is killing you. Both you and your body will be just as much alive after the procedure as before it. You might even say you’ll be more alive than you’ve ever been, completely unshackled from your mortal limitations.”

He made it sound, just with the tone of his voice, like Ryan would be a fool to decide against it. Yet still, Ryan was battling his own survival instinct. This doesn’t feel right, he kept thinking. This man wants to kill me. He wants me to pay him to do it. I shouldn’t want this.