The Second Slice

3

Owain was having a dream. It was not unpleasant, or even strange, but he was acutely aware of it. He was dreaming that he was waking. He had dreamed that he was awake--what an odd thing, when one thought of it--before. Then someone had rung a bell, and he had awakened to find a stranger walking away with lumpy pockets. Once the stranger had told him to sleep on, and he had. Once he had found the stranger to have pockets full of gold, and Owen had thrashed him soundly before sleeping again. He was not yet awake enough to know what was happening. He felt as if he were riding on a mighty wave.



4

When they reached the Liffey, Min and Rafael turned left, towards the Convention Center, and the part of Dublin they knew from the Connectivity Conference. They weren’t sure where they were going, but felt certain there would be plenty to see along the quay, and fireworks later above the river. They were right. On this night when the veil between the worlds is thin, there were plenty of Dubliners about to celebrate in nearly as many ways as there were Dubliners, which in 2039 was nearly one and a third millions of people, many of them new to Britain and to Dublin.
Most were as awed by the spectacles of Samhain as the two young techies,  who seemed to be enjoying it all. There were ghosts and ghouls and witches, but also a very large number of very high-tech frankenstein-like creatures, robots and androids gone bad and wandering the streets a bit drunk.

‘What,’ Raf asked, ‘do you make of all this whole ghosts wandering about stuff? Do you think there’s really anything behind the myth, some memories of real events that have gotten embroidered over the years?’

‘It’s odd. When I was wondering how I might dress for tonight, immediately I thought of the Korean stories of gwishin, spirits that live in this world although their ‘place’ is somewhere else. As a scientist, I wonder. Could some energetic field have a ‘personality’ and exist with no body as we understand them? If there are, as we have come more and more to accept, other universes besides the one of which we are aware, is there communication between them?’
‘I think the reason I wonder about the basis of such celebrations as this is the difficulty we have measuring events that are very subtle. Just think of all the radio waves that we’re walking through right now, but we never notice them. There could be all sorts of other forces that we’re walking through that we would also never notice, and with no clue how to build detectors for them. But you might have a clue. You’ve made some pretty subtle discoveries.’

‘Your helmet reminds me of the people who wear aluminum foil on their heads to keep secret agents from reading their minds. No offense, I hope.’

‘Well, it’s 3-d printed from thin plastic and weighs nothing compared to the real thing. It doesn’t even block my bluetooth earbuds. But, maybe crosses made of some alloys, perhaps with specific ratios between the two parts, did detect or fend off malignant force fields. Interrupt them some ways.

We didn’t have a lot of crosses in Seoul when I was growing up. Did you see them in Sao Paulo? Did there seem to be anything special about the way they were made? ‘

‘If there was, I didn’t notice it. But I wasn’t looking at crosses as scientific instruments.’

‘And holy water. Water, holy or not, is used to destroy witches and vampires in a lot of legends. Maybe it dampens some sort of vibrations.’

‘You seem to know a lot more about ghosts and goblins that I.’

‘When I was a very young girl, I would spend summers with my grandparents in Yongchon, up by the Chinese border. It had been a center for metals and chemicals for many years, and my grandfather had become a collector of ancient lore about metallurgy and what we now call alchemy. Some of his lore, actually, led me to try different alloys to develop the antennae that we make to detect gravity waves.’

‘My family prided itself on its heritage as scholars, but I was never encouraged to value the old folkways. It was all science and football. We were resolutely looking to the future. Did I miss something?’

‘I don’t know. You seem to be doing well enough now. You have convinced your company to build the sorts of antennae most manufacturers tell us are impossible. But enough family history. Let’s see what we can see on this night that begins the darkness.’