Chronic Phantom
You expect ghosts to be malevolent, excessive personalities. After all, there has to be a fairly serious reason why they’ve not moved on, right? Normally revenge, justice, a bequest – heavy, dark motivations.
So the revenant I met in the Asylum was not exactly what I was expecting.
“I wasn’t finished,” he – I’ll assume it was a ‘he’, although, as with the majority of chronics, there was no way of telling – he intoned. I was posting in ‘workshop’ when I felt a sudden, searing pain; massive embolism I suspect. Then, as it passed, I tried to finish my post, but my finger went through the keyboard. You know, that is even more frustrating than ‘Firefox cannot contact the site you are seeking; perhaps Brian is having problems with attackbots. Please try later.’?”
“Nothing is more frustrating than that, when you’ve prepared a long
critique in ‘quote’, and not saved it anywhere. Certainly not death.” I’m as compulsive as any ghost.
“You could be right. Anyway, I couldn’t move on leaving that unfinished, could I? So here I was tied to the place I died, but not to where my body was, but where I really was, on the Chrons.”
“And very nice it is to have you here. We really need a resident ghost for the atmosphere, and you’re better adapted to the environment than some mediaeval shrieker.
“I suppose I ought to give you a chance to move on, though where you expect to go that's better than here, I don't know. In fact, if I die I'd like to join you here. Could you perhaps dictate your post to me, and I'll type it in for you?”
“I'm not sure I want to go either, but it's like an itch you can't get to to scratch. Well, I'd got this most splendid rhyme for…”