By Bob DeRosa
Jax didn’t believe in ghosts, even when she woke up in the middle of the night to find her dead boyfriend standing at the foot of her bed. She blinked in the dark, her mind still swimming from the bottle of wine she drank by herself a few hours earlier. She spent the evening watching her favorite show, the one with the dragons, this time configured with her new HoloVision system so it looked like the winged beasts were all over her living room. Chase was five months gone, and Jax was in no rush to get over him, no matter what her mom said, so she watched her dragon show, finished the bottle, and crawled into bed a little after midnight without turning off the system.
The sight of Chase standing so very, very still threw her because if he wasn’t a ghost, then what was he? At first, she wondered if he was a cardboard cutout, but who in the hell would sneak such a thing into her place in the middle of the night? The answer was no one. When he lifted his hand, she felt her stomach lurch, like her apartment had just turned upside down. She forced herself up to a sitting position, the words “ghosts are bullshit” echoing in her mind, even though there was no other answer for what she was seeing. No answer until Chase flickered, like when her internet connection went spotty and one of the dragons would blink out for a second.
Chase wasn’t making any noise, just blinking in and out, when he raised his hand, two fingers in a V-shape. He pointed them at his eyes, and then at her in the universal sign that meant, “I’m watching you.”
Then, Chase flickered out and was gone.
Jax took in the sudden emptiness of her room, leaned over the mattress edge, and threw up.
***
Jax spent the next morning on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and shivering while on hold with HoloVision customer service. Something was in her room in the dead of night, something that looked like Chase. More importantly, it felt like him in some weird way that she could barely describe, even to herself. But she knew what made the encounter personal, that moment that no one could understand but her.
Chase traveled a lot for work, photographing celebrities and public figures for magazine covers. The first time Jax dropped him off at the airport, she gave him the “I’m watching you” sign, meant as sort of a funny warning not to misbehave while he was gone. He called her on it, she was super embarrassed, and they had a good laugh. It later became a shorthand sign of affection when saying goodbye.
The night before Jax dropped Chase at the airport for the last time, he asked her to move into his place, an airy loft in downtown Los Angeles with a big bed and stacks of photography gear and not much else. They’d only been dating for ten months, which felt early to Jax. She said she wasn’t ready to move in yet, and Chase indicated it was no problem, but Jax could tell it was. On that last drop-off, he was late for his flight so he gave her a quick kiss and hustled off, neither of them doing the “I’m watching you” thing.
Chase flew to Austin to photograph an award-winning chef at her vegan ramen place. He was in a cab when a self-driving semi ran a red light and demolished the cab and everyone inside, leaving Jax alone to try and put the pieces of her life back together. She never expected to see him again, especially not as a phantasm or whatever the hell this had been, this vision of her lost love, giving her the “I’m watching you” sign before vanishing into the night.
When she finally connected with customer service, Jax stated simply that her HoloVision system was badly fucked, and a technician was in her living room by mid-morning. He was shaggy-haired, tattooed, with dark navy pants and a matching blue button-down shirt with rolled up sleeves. His trucker hat had a digital HV logo on it that appeared to float against the blue material.
The first thing he did was take stock of her system. She had the base unit in her living room with ceiling-mounted projectors, tiny spheres that turned the characters in any normal show into holograms, automatically resizing and blocking the images to fit in the available space. There was a second grouping of projectors in the bedroom, so if she was watching a show and moved between the two rooms, the show would transfer along with her. She could’ve installed projectors in her hallway, kitchen, and bathroom to watch a show anywhere in her place, but it would’ve nearly doubled the cost, and seriously, who wants to watch dragons while taking a poop?
Once the technician (Orion, that was his name, like the constellation) understood what he was dealing with system-wise, he said, “You know we recommend powering down the system before you go to sleep.”
“Right, I forgot.”
“The technology’s pretty new and a little buggy. Sometimes it’ll start back up with whatever you were watching last.”
“But what I saw…it wasn’t the show I was watching. It was something else.”
“On a different channel or service?”
Jax shook her head. She didn’t want to get into this at all. She was just past thirty, too young to have a dead partner, and people didn’t know how to respond when it came up in conversations. They’d always circle nervously around the subject before landing on some variation of she’s young, she’d have other chances to find love. Jax knew people meant well, but that didn’t make it hurt any less so she preferred to not get into it at all.
“It was someone from my life,” she said. “Like the system projected an old personal video. It can do that right?”
“It has access to everything connected to your Wi-Fi including photos on your phone or computer.”
“This definitely wasn’t a photo. It moved and flickered like the shows do sometimes.”
“Maybe you need faster internet.”
She sighed, her patience fading.
“My internet’s wicked fast, dude. I edit promotional content for corporate clients. The video of this person fuzzed out and then came back, and he moved like…”
She paused. Like when he was alive.
“Plus, I downloaded all the photos and video I have of this person onto a portable drive and erased all the originals from my cloud storage.”
“If the system can still access the drive, then that explains it. Kinda.”
“But I don’t have the drive here. I keep it at my mom’s place in Ventura so I’m not tempted to look at its contents.”
“Why would you do that?”
Jax sighed. Sometimes people can’t take a hint.
“Because I don’t want to look at photos or video of my dead boyfriend.”
Jax watched the realization move across his face, that she’d shared something much too personal and now they were stuck in an uncomfortable moment together. She could’ve let him marinate in it as a lesson of sorts, but she decided to cut him loose.
“So what I’m trying to ask, is how did your system project a hologram of him in the middle of the night?”
Apparently relieved at the change of subject, Orion scratched his beard and shrugged.
“I have no idea. Let me see what I can do.”
He checked all the connections. Signed out of the Wi-Fi and then back in before rebooting the system. It projected the last thing she was watching, the season one finale credit scrawl, blocky 3-D letters floating through the middle of the living room. The lush soundtrack filled her apartment, and Orion recognized it. As he worked, he chatted about the show, how much he liked the first couple of seasons but thought there were too many characters, and he had trouble sticking with it.
Jax couldn’t care less how many characters there were; she’d watched all eight seasons twice and knew she’d watch it a few more times after her current binge. Something about that world with its constant danger, dirty sex, and awesome dragons was her comfort zone.
After Orion finished checking the system, he shut everything down and told Jax that was as much as he could do without shipping the system back to the factory. He pinged her the number for his work cell and told her to let him know if anything wonky happened the next time she used it. Jax secretly approved of his using the word “wonky.”
After he left, Jax felt a little bad for getting short with him, so she made a mental note to give him a good review when the inevitable customer satisfaction questionnaire showed up in her inbox. She had a project that was past deadline, so she got into that. After Chase died, she didn’t work or do much of anything for a couple months. She’d been easing back into it lately, and her best clients were more than understanding when it took her a little longer to finish projects than before. She was still catching up on bills and really shouldn’t have splurged on the HoloVision system, but her mom suggested she do something nice for herself, maybe take a trip. Instead, Jax spent too much money so she could watch dragons fight in her living room because why not?
After finishing her project, Jax spent a couple of hours searching the internet for stories involving malfunctioning home hologram systems and dead loved ones appearing in the middle of the night. She found scattered posts on each problem, but no one seemed to suffer them both at the same time. No one but her.
She wondered if she should call someone, ask if this all sounded crazy. But she couldn’t imagine explaining this to her mother, and she hadn’t really spoken to any of her friends since Chase’s death. Her small inner circle tried connecting with her after the funeral, but it was easy to avoid their calls. They were good friends, kind, funny, and with absolutely no idea what Jax was going through. She didn’t have the energy to try and explain it to them. With all of her work done remotely and every modern convenience just a tap of her phone away, it was easy enough to shut the door and handle the grief alone. Just her and the dragons.
After giving up on her internet search, she went to watch television, but instead of turning on the HoloVision system, she unplugged it and watched a season two episode on her old-school wall screen. It took some getting used to, the spatial difference of “normal” TV, but she didn’t want to accidentally trigger some tragic hologram again. She also had no interest in sleeping in her haunted bedroom, so she dragged a blanket and some pillows out, microwaved a package of egg rolls for dinner, and watched the rest of season two before falling asleep on the couch.
She woke up a couple of hours later to find Chase standing in the middle of the living room, perfectly still, fuzzing in and out. This isn’t possible, she thought. The fucking system was unplugged. But there he was, his mouth moving like he was talking, but there was no sound.
Once his mouth went still, she heard his voice, as if it was out of sync. His voice was hollow and sterile, like it had been run through a heavy reverb filter.
“Time,” said the voice that sounded like Chase, but couldn’t be.
“You want… the time?” She looked for her phone and found it between the cushions of the couch. She saw that it was almost two thirty, but by the time she looked back, Chase was gone.
But then the sound came in again, like it was rushing to catch up to the image that was no longer there.
“It’s time,” said the voice that Jax hadn’t heard in person in so many months. It didn’t matter that it sounded like it had been run through some shitty editing software. It was the voice of her dead lover, and hearing it shoved the fear out of her belly and replaced it with a tremendous ache.
Jax slid to the floor, buried her face in her hands, and cried for a long, long time.
***
Jax thought it was funny (in an awful way) that HoloVision’s customer service AI offered to appear in her apartment as a holographic figure of her choosing. She tried to explain that the system was unplugged but still malfunctioning, which was beyond the AI’s capability of understanding. Instead, she asked to be transferred to the returns department in order to get the fucking thing out of her apartment, which was something the AI did comprehend. Though Jax was still within the warranty period, she was informed there would be a thirty percent restocking fee in addition to an hourly charge for a technician to remove the system. Jax hung up in frustration and stared at her empty wall screen.
Her eyes fell to her phone. She found the message from Orion and called him. He was on the road between appointments when he answered. She explained what happened, Chase’s hologram showing up again with the weird audio delay. That and the crap deal they offered for the return was too much for her to handle. He said he was booked solid until the end of the day, but could drop by after that. She spent the rest of the afternoon trying to work instead of watching the clock. It’s time, he said. Time for what?
Orion showed up at seven and took another look at the base unit in Jax’s living room.
“When did you unplug this?”
“After you left yesterday.”
“And you haven’t used it since?”
She shook her head.
Orion blinked in a way that seemed to indicate he was running his mind through all the possible explanations for what could be going on. “Then it can’t be the system.”
“But it is,” she said. “It looks just like it, with that fuzzy in and out, and the audio sounded like what comes out of the sound bar, only delayed and hollow.”
“The audio delays were a thing when the system first came out, but the recent upgrade fixed those.”
“Well, my system isn’t fixed,” said Jax, her arms crossed defiantly. “Not at all.”
Orion studied the base unit, scratching his beard. She could feel him avoiding her eyes.
“You can say what you’re thinking,” she said.
“What am I thinking?”
“That I’m imagining all this. That this is mental trauma brought on by grief. Or I’m on medication or should be, and the best thing would be to get out there, meet someone new, start living my life again.”
She paused.
“Am I close?”
He smiled shyly. “Maybe with the last part, yeah. But I don’t know you, so….” He shrugged and gestured at the base unit. “Can I plug this in?”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
He lowered his voice, like a doctor trying to gain a patient’s trust. “I can’t troubleshoot the system if we don’t turn it on.”
“It doesn’t need to be on. I wish you could see him, then you’d believe me.”
“Maybe you could ask a friend to spend the night.”
“To make sure I’m not crazy?”
Orion’s face fell. “I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant.”
Jax let the awkwardness hang in the air for a moment, then eased up.
“It’s okay. Besides, I haven’t seen my friends since the funeral.”
“Really?” he said, hesitantly.
“It’s my fault,” said Jax. “I’ve been avoiding human contact as much as possible. It’s one of the reasons I sprung for the HoloVision. I heard the way their sales and installation worked, I barely had to see a real person.”
“Until now.”
“Yeah.”
There was silence between them, until Orion finally spoke. “Well, to accurately troubleshoot any problem, I have to see it first-hand. Even if it’s in the middle of the night.”
Jax paused and contemplated another night on the couch, another chance to wake up and find her grief staring her in the face. She wanted this over, and even more than that, she wanted someone to believe her. Not a customer service rep or an AI hologram. A real person who seemed like he genuinely wanted to help or else why would he be over here when he could be out with some friends. She looked at Orion, checked her gut and found no alarm bells ringing, no sense of creepiness she was denying. She knew her mother would kill her if she ever found out what Jax was considering, but to do that she’d have to actually call. No, everything in her body was saying, fuck it, get this over with.
And that was when Jax asked a stranger to spend the night in her digitally haunted apartment.
***
Hours later, Jax and Orion sat on the couch, a folded up blanket and pillow stacked between them. She made some grilled cheese for dinner, and they watched the dragon show on the wall screen. During a quiet moment, she said, “Sorry this is taking so long. I already gave you a really nice customer service review. I can give you another one if you think it’ll help.”
Orion shrugged.
“That’s okay. I’m not gonna do this forever. I’m a couple night classes away from getting my computer science degree. Figure I’ll freelance after that, try and work from home. My cat will like that.”
“You have a cat? Is he okay tonight?”
“Yeah, I fed him before I came over.”
“Chase and I thought about getting a dog. But he was traveling all the time, and I’d get lost in my work, spend the whole day inside, and that wouldn’t be fair to a dog.”
“That’s a good reason to get one. They remind you to go outside.”
“I guess so. Truth is Chase and I were going at different speeds and in totally different directions. He wanted me to move in, but it was trading one empty apartment for another. I felt guilty for saying no. Makes me wonder if somehow this is all my fault. Him showing up, I mean.”
They watched a dragon soar over a mountain range, a sequence Jax loved, but this time it left an emptiness in her chest. She knew how beautiful this looked as a hologram, and if Orion could see it, maybe that would change his mind about the show. She wondered why she cared what he thought about her guilty pleasure when he picked up the remote, paused the dragon in mid-air, and said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
Jax was surprised to find that the answer was exactly the same as it would’ve been had someone asked her a week ago. “Not really.”
“Me neither. But I believe in code. Almost every modern convenience has some sort of code as its baseline. Even if it’s super basic, like turning on a light switch. Flipping the switch sends an electrical impulse that fires up the filament in the light bulb. That’s all code is, cause and effect, do X and Y happens. But now there’s a computer chip in your refrigerator and your TV and everything else in here, and someone wrote code that taught all those chips what to do. And as things get faster, sometimes the code is revised or replaced. But more times than not, everyone’s in a hurry so they write new code over the old stuff. And if it works, you don’t notice the old code is still there, trying to do what it was written to do. It’s like every piece of technology is a living thing built on top of the ghost of what it used to be. And when something gets buggy, that’s the old code underneath trying to be heard.”
Jax nodded. “Maybe that’s what grief is. We want to move on, but the old code of who we were is still there.”
Orion didn’t answer, but she could tell he was thinking about it. Maybe remembering someone he’d lost, reconnecting with how that made him feel. After a few moments, Jax started the show back up.
When the episode was finished, Jax looked over and saw Orion asleep, head nestled back against the couch, softly snoring. She unfolded the blanket and pulled it across him. She turned off the TV, took the empty plates into the kitchen, and dropped them when she saw Chase flickering in front of her little dinette table.
Jax glanced at the ceiling, knowing there were no projectors there but wanting to make sure.
“It’s time,” said Chase, his voice filtered and hollow but more in sync than before.
“Time for what?”
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The flickering made it seem like he was a video caught in a loop, trying to speak but unable to move past the current frame.
Jax wondered if he was actually frozen when suddenly he darted toward her, glitching in and out as he reached for her. She stumbled back, slamming her hip into the nearest counter. Nausea flooded her belly as she angled out the door, racing into the living room.
But Chase was already there, dead center in front of the couch.
Jax’s words came out in a breathless tumble. “What do you, what do you want? Goddammit, what?!”
Chase glitched for a moment.
“It’s time,” he said.
Jax’s voice lowered to a soft whisper. “What do you mean?”
He looked past her to Orion’s sleeping form, held his gaze there for a moment. Then he brought up his hand and gave her the “I’m watching you” sign. His eyes looked tender and sad. Jax reached out to touch him, her hand shaking. He moved his hand to meet hers. Their fingertips were inches apart when Chase blinked out and vanished.
Jax felt tears crash down her cheeks. She sobbed, rubbing her closed eyes, and when she opened them, she saw Orion fully awake, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“Did you see him?” she asked.
Orion blinked and said, “Hell yeah I did.”
***
They didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. When the first light crept in through her curtains, Jax made coffee and French toast. After breakfast, Orion disconnected Jax’s HoloVision system, repacked everything including the sensors, and took it back to the fulfillment center.
Jax reached out to a couple of her friends and made plans to have lunch in a week or so. Then she took a drive to her mom’s place in Ventura and picked up the physical drive, the one with all the photos and video of Chase on it. Her mom said it was no problem keeping it, but Jax shook her head and said it was full of memories, and the very least she could do was keep them in her own closet.
Orion called later that afternoon to tell her he’d gotten her a full refund on the system with no restocking fee. He didn’t even log his hours spent helping her, no matter how much she argued. She eventually got him to agree to a day trip to the beach, her treat, with fish tacos, ice cold beers, and a primo spot for watching the sun set over the Pacific. The HoloVision system was cool for watching dragon shows, but no footage of a sunset beamed into the heart of her living room would ever compare to the real thing.
A week later they sat on the beach and watched the sky turn deep red. They didn’t talk about ghosts or code or much of anything, and that was fine. Jax was unsure if this was what starting over felt like, but for the moment, it would have to do.
Where Bob DeRosa comes from, nice guys finish first. His screenwriting credits include Classified, Killers, and White Collar. His short fiction has appeared in Escape Pod, Every Day Fiction, and Jersey Devil Press. He has also written audio fiction for Audible, Wondery, and SHUDDER. When he’s not writing, Bob studies Kenpo karate and keeps his Little Free Library filled with good stuff. Come say hi at bobderosa.com