The Ghost in the Machine

by David Rudd

“After the eeeeexplosion it’d beeeen quiet for aaaa while before the dust settled and the screammmming began.”

That was the opening of Dad’s latest story. He’d always wanted to be a writer but never made it. You can see why. Begrudgingly, he’d settled for the life of a chartered accountant. Since he’d retired, though, and we’d lost Mum, he’d resumed his dream of getting into print. He’d fish out his old collection of rejection slips, neatly bundled and dated. The comments were depressingly consistent: prose arid, plots contrived, characters unconvincing. What was left? Well, good sentence structure, spelling, and grammar.

When I was younger, Dad would read to me from his own favourite writers — mostly long-forgotten authors from equally forgotten magazines — but sometimes, he’d try to slip in one of his own creations. I’m sad to say that, even then, I endorsed the reviewers’ comments, often adding my own hurtful additions: “Not another turkey of yours, is it?” I cringe at my own insensitivity.

This said, reading the opening paragraphs of his latest effort, I was reminded of those comments. This was far worse, though. Dad could at least type and spell back then. I’ve only subjected you to the opening sentence but, believe me, it went on in similar vein.

“What’s with the sound effects, Dad?”

“You what?”

“The ‘eee’s and ‘aaa’s?” I pointed them out to him. “Is thee Lancashire accent returning?”

“Ah! I see what you mean.” Dad tutted for a while. “It’s that electric typewriter. If you depress a key too long, it repeeeeeats.” I had to chuckle at this demonstration. “I think I’ll go back to writing by hand.”

“How about going forward, Dad. There’s this new invention called” — I pantomimed the scare quotes — “a computer?”

“I just think handwriting allows you to consider more carefully what you’re doing.”

“But you were using an electric typewriter!”

“Yes, a mistake, I admit it. That’s why I’m going back to handwriting. It’s what Josiah Hogarth did, after all.”

Hogarth was an obscure Edwardian writer who’d been active in the penny-dreadful market. My grandfather had a collection of these fragile publications, otherwise long forgotten. Hogarth’s stories were a family tradition, an obligatory part of our Christmases.

“If Josiah were around today, I’m sure he’d be using a word-processor. In fact, computers would probably feature in his stories. You need to write for today’s audience. I mean... explosions in flour factories, Dad? Come on!”

“Oh, you recognised Hogarth’s ‘Memento Mori’”?

“It’s hardly disguised!”

“It’s a sequel. They’re all the rage nowadays.”

“Exactly! It is the ‘nowadays’.”

Hogarth’s “Memento Mori” was a family favourite, opening with the explosion mentioned above. Many are injured, but there’s only one fatality, Billy, who’s literally blown to bits, such that his torso is the single part given a proper burial. But, over time, various other bits turn up: fingers, an ankle, an arm, a rib, a leg bone. These appendages are passed to relatives as keepsakes, or memento mori, as the Victorians liked to term them.

These bony fragments then start to cause mischief in their new homes. Poltergeist activity is rife: the bones rattle and move about, plates are thrown, drawers emptied, furniture topples and beds shake. It’s a very effective ghost story, for there is no pat denouement. Perhaps the tale has haunted me for so long precisely because of it’s open-endedness.

“Memento Mori” made such an impression on the family that we adopted that phrase for whenever something was broken or there was an unexpected noise. “Another memento mori!” someone would say, although back then I thought the phrase was “moment tomorrow,” meaning that there was more to come; which, given this tale’s lack of resolution, was quite apposite.

Anyway, having wedged my geeky foot in the door with Dad, I pursued my advantage. “And speaking of nowadays, why don’t I lend you a laptop? I’ve got one I’m no longer using. I’ll teach you the basics. You’ll love it. Most writers use one nowadays.”

After a few more exchanges, Dad agreed and, despite the usual problems early on — like shutting down the machine before he’d saved his work — he took to it better than expected. He was particularly tickled at the way he could move around whole lumps of text.

What was most impressive, though, was the sudden improvement in Dad’s style. And here I have a confession to make. There’s a commercial AI package called “Quillbot.” I should say that I’m a software engineer, so I’m more than familiar with such programs. Basically, I’d reverse-engineered this package, taking its key benefits as a “writing assistant” — which is how it’s advertised — and concealing it within Word itself.

I’d also fed it Hogarth’s corpus of stories, so that the software could make more bespoke suggestions about Dad’s style, drawing on the master’s plots, his imagery, sentence structure, and so on. Dad, of course, knew none of this, although he knew his writing had improved. He now regularly called me to share his efforts. I’d never heard him so buoyant since before Mum died.

For several weeks, things went on in this positive way. Then I got a call from a far more despondent man, more like the Dad of old.

“There’s something wrong with this computer, Francis. I’ve just printed out a draft of my story and it’s... it’s full of gibberish.”

“You didn’t let your fingers rest on the keys again, did you?”

“Course not!”

I went straight round. I didn’t want him losing faith in the computer.

I admit that I, too, was bewildered when I saw his printout. It read as though affected by Tourette’s Syndrome, strange words exploding out of Dad’s sentences. I made light of it to him, putting it down to some virus, which I’d soon get sorted.

Secretly, I made a note of the strange interpolations, which I later looked up. Some, like “vazey” (moronic), I’d never heard of; other words, though I was aware of them, turned out to have a more offensive meaning than I’d previously realised. “Thingumbob,” for example, as a word for testicles, or “a lickspittle” as an arse-licker.

I guess I should then have come clean to Dad about Quillbot, but I never considered it responsible. He was certainly shaken and, as I only learned later, it put him right off computers for a while.

Events then took an even graver turn. Dad phoned me early one morning to say he’d had a terrible night. Thinking it might be another computer glitch, I went straight round.

“I thought I was on my deathbed,” he announced.

“You should have phoned me! Did you ring for a doctor?”

“There was a doctor there,” he said.

“Where on earth were you, Dad?”

Initially, I thought he said he’d been rushed to A&E, but then I realised he was talking about his dream self, which had been put on life support, an EEG monitoring brain function. It then got even more complicated. Dad started mentioning Willy, whom I recognised as his version of Billy from “Memento Mori.” In Dad’s version, Willy has been blown up in an accident at a nuclear power plant. But, although Dad was now talking about a fictional character, he persisted in using the first person, as though he himself were Willy, lying on a gurney, monitors and tubes sprouting like tentacles, a skullcap on his head for the EEG. Around him, so Dad said, the medical staff were talking about head trauma and general organ failure.

As if I wasn’t finding it hard enough keeping up, separating his dream from his written story, Dad suddenly shouted: “And then I was wide awake, sitting bolt upright in bed. Yes, in my own bedroom. Here, at home. No hospital equipment anywhere.” Dad’s eyes travelled the lounge as though in search of familiar surroundings.

He continued: “It’s like those moments you get in stories, where you feel you’ve been cheated. ‘It was all a dream!’, you’re told. I lay back down, but then,” and here he clutched my arm, “a tall figure was bending over me, wearing a frock coat and silk cravat: a Victorian. I can still see him, standing behind my head, cradling it in his hands so that I was looking into his upside-down face.”

Clearly, Dad had not actually woken up after all. I tried to keep the mood light: “So what was this character doing? Phrenology? Feeling your bumps?”

Dad ignored me. “Next, I was back in A&E with the bleeps and flashes, and I realised I’d not woken up at all. That Victorian figure was just part of my dream.”

Dad paused and had a steady pull at his tea before continuing. “I could hear voices at the end of my bed. And you know what they were discussing?” He addressed me as though I were still a child listening to one of his bedtime stories. During these, Dad would pause at strategic moments with just such a poser, refusing to continue until he’d elicited some sort of response. So I gave an acknowledging grunt. He lowered his voice. “They were talking about my life support... About... turning it off!”

“Wow!”

“I SHOUTED!” Dad said, appositely stentorian. He seemed to be reliving the experience. “Or, I thought I did. And I leapt up. This time, I was really awake. In my bedroom. Alone. No tubes, no strange men, though I did have to put the light on and check.”

I must have smiled at this, for he looked at me critically, as though I wasn’t taking him seriously enough. He grabbed my lapels and pulled me closer. “What if my life support had been turned off? What then? Would I ever have woken up?”

I wanted to point out that it was just a dream, that pins and needles or cramp might have produced such disturbing imagery, but I held my tongue.

After another hour or so, he’d quietened down sufficiently that I felt I could leave him. The one thing I did suggest, as I was saying goodbye, was that he should write down his dream, turn it into something creative. He liked the sound of that.

Sure enough, when I went back that evening, I couldn’t believe it was the same man. He was not just relaxed but excited about the prospect of writing up his dream tale, and I thought we were back to normality until he asked, “Do you think it could have been Hogarth?”

“What, your inspiration? I thought he was behind all your work.”

“No, I mean that Victorian figure by my bed. Do you think it was Hogarth?”

“Well, anything’s possible in a dream.”

“You see, I don’t think he was a malevolent presence after all. I think he was showing me how to create something creepy. So, when he cradled my head, he was channelling ideas to me. That was what was showing on my EEG: creative brainwave patterns. Hogarth was beaming inspiration my way!” Dad waved some A4 page printouts in my direction.

What could I say but: “Go for it, Dad!”

I left him to it. He was happy, that was the main thing, even if I’d become a guilt-ridden wreck! I worried endlessly about Quillbot. Could it have been responsible, especially given that I’d primed it with Hogarth’s complete works? A spectral crib-sheet, was that what I’d created?

It was only a couple of days later that Dad showed me his finished version of “Memento Mori” unimaginatively retitled “Mementoes.” After recent events, the tale sounded quite familiar. In it, Willy ends up not in a mortuary nor in bits, but in a hospital, where he dies after his life-support is turned off. His brainwaves, however, live on, and when future patients are hooked up to this EEG, they too suffer Willy’s harrowing experience: the horror of the explosion, the traumatic awakening. They scream, rip out their electrodes and run amok.

I was unexpectedly impressed with his story, and tried to tell him so, but he kept interrupting me, wittering on about being sorry for how he’d disappointed me.;

“What disappointment, Dad?” I finally asked.

“Because I’ve not used that word-processor of yours.”

“But you did... didn’t you? I mean, this print-out came from the laptop, right?”

“Well, it did but, as I said before, I never used it for actual word-processing... if that’s the right term. The thing kept running away with me, changing my words, ‘processing’ them, I suppose. You remember that strange nonsense it generated before? Well, I was continually deleting stuff like that. In the end, well, I just ignored it.

“Where did your words come from, then?”

“From my head, of course, thanks to Hogarth’s inspiration. I wrote it in longhand, as I told you before, then transcribed it onto the laptop, checking every word.” There was silence as we eyed each other. “Don’t look at me like that! I’m not a complete Luddite, Francis. Longhand doesn’t mean wielding a quill!”

I almost choked. “Sorry,” I said. “You surprised me there because, well, there is this writing aid called Quillbot—”

“Killbot?” laughed Dad. “What? For writing whodunnits?” Dad mimed a stab to the chest. “He was killed in the Library by a Robot with a Zapper!”

I couldn’t get over Dad’s remarkably buoyant mood, which formed such a contrast to my own unsettled state. I was the one now suffering sleepless nights.

From what Dad had said, Quillbot was blameless and me, too. Unless — and this idea was increasingly in my thoughts — some sort of reverse engineering had taken place whereby Hogarth himself had been reconstructed from his stories. Could his persona have emerged from that corpus, granting him a more perceptible presence, just as the fictional Willy’s brainwaves had lived on? I couldn’t escape that image of Dad’s head being cradled by Hogarth.

I know, I know! I’m sounding less like an engineer and more like a deluded crank. But it does strike me that, in our AI age, we may need to update our traditional notions of ghosts. Phantom traces, deep fakes: such wraiths now seem to lurk everywhere, if only digitally.

Eventually I calmed down, and Dad did, too. I realised I’d never fully comprehend what had happened but, whatever it was, the outcome had been positive. His story was published just a couple of months after the medical crisis. At the grand age of 66, Dad was as happy as Larry. He was a published author. On top of his pile of rejection slips, this formal acceptance took pride of place.

And this success seemed to open up a stream of creativity, such that Dad now has a number of stories under his belt. Aside from that, he’s a changed man: healthier, more gregarious, and looking years younger.

* * *

I said above that I’d stopped worrying about those crazy events. Well, that was the case until BBC Radio broadcast a reading of “Mementoes.” Dad was delighted, and the programme garnered great reviews, apart from a few dissenting voices complaining that the story had somehow “infected” them, given them nightmares, et cetera. You must know where this is going...

Of course, there is a more benign explanation. I mean, good scary stories are, by definition, expected to evoke terror and fear. So, perhaps, some listeners had enjoyed the play to the extent that they’d wanted to run with its theme of traumatic contagion. In a world where trivia goes viral, where we’re all drowning in fake news, isn’t that equally plausible?

Dad, of course, has no such concerns. He’s in no doubt that Hogarth’s spirit lives on and, so long as no one mentions plagiarism, I guess I’m happy enough to let the unexplained stay that way.