muse: Between the Walls

Among all the things that can happen to a man, I can think of none other than death that can so rearrange his priorities as to make everything seem unimportant.

I speak from experience. It happened to me--not once, but twice. I'm ashamed to say that it stuck the second time.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

----

Hello. My name is Abernathy, and I'm a ghost.

Or perhaps you might prefer Adrian Caspianovich Vorlaikal, or merely Adrian. And maybe I'm not a ghost but a wandering spirit, or a haint. Or perhaps I don't even exist, because God only knows--God!--that ghosts are just creations of frenzied imaginations. They're not real, such things just don't happen.

Nevertheless, here I am.

I must first say that this was not the way I expected to end up. Or, let me clarify--I've expected death for a long time, and I've gone through the physical motions once before, but I...well.

----

Sixteen years ago, a young man named Adrian Vorlaikal was a part of the United Nations' Security Corps. Not a bad sort, Adrian was--a little overeager to prove himself, and very angry at the world--but no worse than most of us are at that age. That did change.

Adrian died. The details aren't really important now, but they were very important to him, at the time. In short, he was caught in a training accident, had most of his insides splattered all over the walls--along with those of his unit--and very nearly perished right there. I say very nearly, because the United Nations decided that they wanted him dead after they'd gotten him strapped to a stretcher and stabilized. So they claimed his injuries were irrepairable until a cyberneticist could be brought in, and they cut his throat.

Literally. He bore the scars to prove it. Cryogenic stasis requires that the body be drained of blood; the scientific reasons aren't terribly important, though I am told it has something to do with fluid freezing in the capillary beds, leading to the destruction of the lungs and brain tissue. Either way, Adrian was blissfully oblivious of this fact--he was dead, after all, and he found death quite...inscrutable.

I may as well drop the pretense; you know I'm Adrian Vorlaikal, or was. Whichever. But suffice it to say I did die, and I didn't remember anything from the first time around--it was oblivion. It was two months of my life, gone. It did not lead me to expect this.

----

I'd thought I'd fall into oblivion again, silence and blackness, total nonbeing. Or perhaps I'd be called before God's eternal bar, to be brought up on charges at last for all my sins. Or I'd be thrust straight into hell; forget the judgment, I've screwed up enough to warrant it. Instead, here I am, a wandering spirit, living between the walls--without even a hint of what God intends with me.

If He cares.

If He even exists.

I'm not so sure. I've fallen in and out of agnosticism and athiesm both enough times in my life and my...death...that I've grown tired of it. I desperately want to believe God is there, and that this is merely another part of His grand plan.

As you can likely tell, I have a lot of time on my hands to sit and think about this sort of thing.

----

Perforce, my existence is a tenuous, limited one. Most of the time, I'm a silent, unseen observer to the world passing me by. I can walk through walls; I can see without being seen, I can step between one point of this earth and another as an act of will, I even have a limited form of time control--time is just a series of snapshots to a ghost, after all. I can riffle through the stack of them as easily as I ever did while I was alive.

It gets boring after a while. All the information in the world I wanted, all the listening ears on the grand conspiracies being laid out by Black SHIELD--and they were grand; I've eavesdropped often enough on the few survivors to know that much--or otherwise, all the plans of the Mavericks and the Robot Masters...they're mine for the taking.

But I don't care anymore. Curious, isn't it?

----

Oh, I cared very passionately at first. I thought--amazing! I'm the ultimate informant, serving my cause even after death.

Then I started running into the walls.

Walls? Yes. I cannot interact with the physical world as we know it, except in the most scanty, limited sense. I can watch; though I don't know how. I can...do some small, limited things. Move tiny objects.





(musenote: left half completed; gonna work on it more later. canemex, this one's for you.)