Sing to Life

By JadeRabbyt

Chapter 26: Ghosts in the Machine

A periodic rustling of the grass nearby caught Danny's ear as he looked out over a small cliff. He glanced over to see Alex top the hill, but at his inquisitive look Alex only dropped his eyes and shook his head. Danny turned back to his view. He'd expected as much.

The wind had picked up in the last couple hours. The sky stayed as black and harsh as ever, obscuring view of sky or sun, the harsh light blending with the shadows. He hadn't seen a single animal since he'd hiked up here, not even a bird. Time had all but lost itself amid the piles of black on the horizon, but it didn't take a genius to know that time no longer existed in abundance.

Alex knew that, too, probably better than Danny himself. The older ghost stood stolidly at a distance, glaring out into nothing. Danny wondered where he'd gone and come back from, but he supposed it didn't really matter anyway. Like as not, Alex would find some way to mock him for asking, and Danny wasn't up for that. He hadn't slept since before Alex had broken him out of the thermos, and as much as Danny wished he could face this with calm resolution, which is what Sam would have wanted, Danny had only grown more restless as the hours passed. He couldn't help it. This was like a conversation destined to remain forever unfinished. Danny would never know if he could have stopped either Alex or this black stuff. He'd never know why he'd been saved in the thermos during his town's destruction or why something saw fit to arrange for his freedom once it was safe. Likewise would remain the mystery of Alex and the lesser jerks like him, how they got to where they were, why they did the things they did. Danny reconsidered. He could live with that last mystery. Motives raised an eyebrow, but actions changed the world.

Something cracked in the distance, a sound like the sky splitting from the earth at its horizons, shredding the silence like the quick slash of a chainsaw before allowing it to solidify once more.

Alex snorted. "Not long at all, now. We'll be the last, or at least, I will."

"Are you proud of that?" Danny's voice sounded disembodied to his own ears.

"I'd rather have been the first."

The sky started to lighten. The whole earth stretched out below his lookout point—from the city on the horizon to the sharp green forest, over the rippling fields and up the hillside's rocks, it all began to shine with the brightest of lights, like something incisive and brilliant had been turned on the world, seeing through its color and form and reflecting instead off its heart, lighting and being lit in the process. In spite of the brightness, Danny felt no discomfort. The change had happened in himself as well, producing a gasping space, not a void but a basin, somewhere inside him. The world around him began to shimmer and glitter, and he felt the first mental wounds as the deconstructing force went to work on his mind.

XXX

Alex had seen it too, the miraculous lightening of the land, and he could see the familiar glittering cloud clear as day when it descended on the hilltop, coating the sky and everything under it. The shimmering air picked up Danny's body and splashed him with black flecks as it tore away his mind, the flecks growing into covering blackness. Alex backed away as the ground below and the land beyond spotted with the same black flecks which quickly grew into pools lakes and oceans of blackness as the last human being on earth dissolved into nothing. As the blackness spread over the earth below, something else started to happen.

The light got brighter.

Although the blackness spread, the light simultaneously got brighter.

Alex blinked and rubbed a hand across his eyes. He wasn't seeing things. The light was getting brighter, and in a final searing flash it torched away the physical. Alex's psychological processes took a flying leap into infinity and turned up on the other side of reality. The land and its creeping blackness had gone, replaced with shimmering blankets of electromagnetic forces and churning storms of photons. A chaotic jumble of infinitely small clear things bumped and rocked one another in the space overhead, but beyond that lay a field of something thick and rich and protective. Past that, mostly emptiness, but Alex could sense things burning. Tiny things from far away told him that other things too large for any man's imagination burned and exploded, imploded and punched holes in reality as they traversed the sky above.

Alex gulped. He'd seen some of this before, daydreamt about things like this when he was still in high school. He knew what this was.

Step by step he tagged the things with names. It could only be stars, those huge exploding things he could sense. Their messengers were neutrinos of all different colors, and the things directly above him, that clear, photon-obscuring jumble—those were clouds. The thing between the clouds and the stars… Alex knew he knew it. He could see its purpose, to bounce off the spitfire cosmic rays and solar winds, which didn't look at all like wind, more a storm of Diana's arrows, but he supposed that might be a wind of sorts… Magnetic field. That's what that deflector thing was, the earth's magnetic field, and the aurora borealis didn't hold a candle to the full-fledged thing itself. The thing, and everything for that matter, stretched into dimension upon microscopic dimension and as Alex tuned his vision up, he saw them all merging into one great curling colorful thing. The Grand Unified Theory personified, he guessed. It looked like everything in the world that had ever made him smile, and it moved like a mathematical proof. Alex remembered buzzing through those things like nobody's business in geometry class, following logical step after step after step… That was how this moved. Proving itself, using its ectoplasmic derivatives and guided by a will of sorts, to force it down into reality, into tangible things like tables and chairs and sunbeams and human beings. Alex could have spent the rest of his life gaping at it.

Not that that was really saying much, he remembered with a jolt. If he could see like this, then as beautiful as it all was, bad things were about to happen. Danny himself, Alex saw, was pretty much dead already. Feeling like the world's most psychotic telescope he adjusted his vision, back to where the ectoplasmic and the solid things merged. A question from him produced a long-forgotten answer, roughly drudged up from his high school investigations.

'…proxy waves. Elementary particles and, quite probably, all large objects, have a corresponding proxy wave. This wave gives a layout of all possible positions for a particle. This is necessary because particles do not move like rolling soccer balls. They move like magic things, spontaneously appearing and disappearing at will. Proxy waves are able to tell us the probability that a particle will "appear" at a given spot. However, definite predictions are impossible. The best science can ever do with quantum mechanics is approximate.'

Even so, science had been able to do some pretty amazing quantum things, TV being one of them. They never had been able to determine whether the proxy wave was real—something that could be visualized, or just a useful theoretical device. Alex could recall the name of at least one scientist who thought it was real, though he'd been widely received as a crackpot.

'Before a measurement, a particle can be represented only as a probability. According to science, without the ability to measure it, a particle does not exist. Humans measure particles unconsciously all the time: particles of water are measured as rain from the sky, particles of ash as a breath of smoke rising from a chimney. However, until we have some way of "looking" at them, the rain may be belching from the chimney and the smoke might be cascading from the clouds. Before you "look" at everyday objects, there is a very small probability that they could be anywhere at all.

'Objects choose their positions during the process of a measurement, though they follow the direction of the proxy wave when choosing where to appear. The proxy wave identifies possible locations and guides the object into one of them. The mystery of precisely how a proxy wave "decides" where to put its object—which one of the many probable spots to choose—is called decoherence and has remained an inscrutable mystery to modern science, and many dismiss the matter as a problem for metaphysics.'

Alex chuckled. At the moment, he was something of a problem for metaphysics, too. Logically, he shouldn't be able to see any of this crazy stuff and only did because he'd been modified to carry around that black goo and open a transdimensional portal, so he might as well check out this 'decoherence' crap.

With a little squinting, Alex managed it. The ectoplasm was bumping the matter into this or that place within the boundary of the proxy wave equation, but until it had been officially bumped into reality, the stuff stayed invisible on the higher-dimensional planes. Alex stuck his hand out. Apparently his limbs followed the same elevation as his vision, because he could 'bump' things around too, disregarding the automated process, which were done by the fifth force with a little help from other, less destructive processes. That 'sparkle-air-and-black-goo' force was the one primarily in charge, though. Hardly thinking about it, Alex made an atom of oxygen disappear on one side of the field and reappear on the other side. He did it again with something larger, one of the boulders. It appeared on the other side of the field as well, still without much effort. The experiments took no time at all. His mind had jacked itself up to light speed. He took a good truckload of dirt from the ground, modified it for ectoplasmic effectiveness, and threw it into the sparkling air. The sparkle hiccupped and continued as normal.

Alex's eyes boggled and his mouth, or the higher dimensional equivalent of it, dropped open. If he could make this thing hiccup, maybe he could stop it entirely. He'd need something larger, something more powerful, something he wouldn't have to waste time adjusting and converting. Alex would never be able to bring it down by hand. He'd need something faster, more efficient, something that generated plasmic substances naturally that he wouldn't have to waste hardly any time calibrating. What he needed was something like—

"DANNY!"

XXX

It was a lot like falling asleep, in a really painful, horrible, torturous way. Danny's only consolation was that at least it was almost over, but he couldn't keep his mind on that long enough for it to give him any kind of relief. He'd lost his vision completely but Danny could feel that thing ripping him apart, just like the goop had with Sam. It came as a complete surprise when something started trying to yank him back together. Danny yelped at the sensation. Something buzzed in his ear. Too weak to talk, Danny wondered what it was.

"Shit, goddamn this transdimensional—Is that you ya little moron?"

A mild wave of confusion breached the pain.

"It's Alex, dipshit. Wake up right now and start getting really pissed off. NOW, I said. I can't hold you together on my own!"

More confusion. Alex must be reading his mind somehow… but why…?

"We can save the world but if you just lie down and DIE then the world's going with it!"

Danny flared up like a firework at that. Alex laughed—Danny still couldn't see a thing—as he skimmed off the generated power and threw it up like a shield. Danny's mind snapped together like opposite poles of a magnet. "That barrier isn't going to hold for long," Alex shouted. "So we need to get something straight right now. First, we can kill it, or at least explode the universe, which is just as good so far as I'm concerned."

"Isn't the universe exploding a bad thing?"

"Not if the people blowing it up are already dead meat anyway. Shut up and listen. Second, we're going to have to cooperate completely or something will screw up and we'll blow ourselves sky high, got it?"

"Uh…"

"I'll take that as a yes. The catch is that we're kind of going to have to share brains for a little while."

"I have a problem with that."

"Don't be such a whiner. I can't do a thing without your power and you can't see a thing without my targeting instructions."

The link was forged in a second leaving a tingle in the back of Danny's mind. A map of blurry light reached his mind. At roughly the same time, Danny realized that his body had gone missing. "What happened to my body?"

"I think you'd better not ask."

"Okay." Danny sensed Alex's mind whirring at a million miles a minute just beneath his own, only muted, like sitting in a car going over a bumpy bit of highway. "Are you sure about this?" The whirring quickened to a humming that made Danny extremely nervous. Save for the light blur, he couldn't see a thing…

Alex ignored his question. "Okay. I think I know what I'm doing now. You might want to uh, kinda brace yourself a little bit…"

Before Danny could ask what exactly Alex meant by that, he rocketed forward in the direction of a spinning, flashing, gut-wrenching nowhere that put a big ball of vomit right at the back of the throat he, fortunately, no longer had. It spun him around like a sock in a clothes drier or a speck of dirt on a boat's motor fins only much, much worse. "What are you DOING!"

"Amplifying your output."

Danny didn't want to know what that meant. He clenched his teeth and sat back for the ride. Just when it seemed like he was going to faint or pass out or just plain drop dead, just when the shield Alex had built was about burst open wide, the spinning stopped and Danny found himself absolutely weightless, but he definitely didn't feel any better. "Alex…?"

"You're going to hit something in a second. When you do, I want you to blow it up like a fucking hydrogen bomb."

"I'm feeling kind of sick right now."

"Well if the imagery helps, puke like a fucking hydrogen bomb. I don't care which you do so long as the thing you hit starts to break when it happens."

Danny flew through nothing with baited breath, waiting to hit this mysterious thing he was supposed to explode, and when he did it felt more like being caught in a tangle of delicate threads than the brick wall he'd been expecting. It felt nice, kind of, but the ensuing sensations were not. Something did a one eighty in his head and dropped into his stomach, and at the same time, his psychological taught skin shrank violently down on his psychological skeleton. In was a little like being put in a juicer with dynamite exploding in his guts, but the web disintegrated, and then Danny was on the move again, starting to spin and get nauseous while Alex whooped in his ears.

"That was fan-TASTIC! Did you see that? I guess you couldn't have, but it was… It was really, really cool. We can do it. We can… Oh shit."

Danny started. "What? What's happening?"

"It's reconstruction. Shit. We're going to have to work faster."

"No! I can't take any faster."

"I know that." A sound like teeth grinding ensued. Alex kept him circling at a steady rate, using the constant energy to keep the opposing force at bay. It was taking more and more effort, and even Danny could tell that the odds were getting slimmer. "Why don't you let me try this?"

"Try what?"

"You give me some of your power, just enough to see where I'm going. I could sense things you couldn't in there. I can hit closer to the target." It was true, and they both knew it. A perspective from the inside of the enemy was always more precise.

"…but you're a moron. You'll screw it up somehow."

"Shut up and give me the damn power, Alex."

Alex complied. The lights brightened and sharpened into shapes, waves that stood in for matter, Alex told him. Proxy waves. "Use your instincts. You won't know the names of everything you see, but you'll know its purpose, and that's enough for our purposes." He snickered. "I made you swear."

"That was your bad influence."

"I'm sure it was."

"It was! And why are you wasting time? Rev me up."

The cycling started again, same as before, Alex doing whatever it was he did to multiply Danny's already present potential. Whatever it is wasn't any worse the second time around, but the targeting-power boost made it more difficult to handle. Danny didn't say anything to Alex, though the feeling got transmitted instantly between them. Alex returned it with skepticism, something to the effect of 'crybaby.' He launched Danny shot free once more, and the halfa landed in the same web, recently regenerated, but before he let the bomb go off he dug farther into it. He came upon a junction, lots of wirey sparky thunderingly noisy things, and then he let the juicer-dynamite rip over him.

"That was a little better," Alex said.

Danny took his time recovering. "You jerk. That was a lot better than last time."

"Fine. Let's just see you do it again."

Danny did do it again. And again, and again, and again, and he started to get used to it. Back and forth, time after time, web after web, but these were new webs, now. Alex only shot him back to the same structure once or twice. The rest of the time it was done right the first time, and as the two practiced, the action became a routine, growing more efficient as they got used to manipulating each others minds. The stressful back-and-forth arguments disappeared entirely, and Danny occupied himself with his work, strengthening his resilience to the power and working on tolerating higher levels of energy. Alex retreated completely into himself, ceasing to mouth off and concentrating solely on making the necessary navigation adjustments.

Danny lost track of how many times Alex had thrown him out, but he never got bored with it. Rarely was the ride smooth to the most efficient point of detonation. When Danny shot out to strike this time, though, he started to hear a kind of odd static, like a radio on the wrong station.

"Alex?"

"Yeah?"

"What's that?"

Danny hit another web and did his thing. Alex was ready with an answer when he sent Danny into another charging orbit. "Not sure, but I think it's a good thing. Stuff is starting to look a lot less distinct on my levels."

Something in his thoughtful tone made Danny nervous. "Would you remind me again of what the goal here is, exactly?"

"To take the universe out with us?"

Danny felt a faint hesitation as Alex launched him back out, a human shot-put. "I thought you said we could save it."

"I thought maybe we could. Now I think the best thing we can do is take it down with us."

"Since when was that the plan?" Danny tried in vain to skid to a halt. There was nothing to skid on. He was over empty space. "That makes us just as bad as this stuff!"

Alex's voice came from a distance. "I don't think so… It doesn't matter anyway. This should be the last one."

"The last what?" Silence. Danny felt the shared undercurrent running faster with his own anxiety and whatever Alex was thinking. Something cogent popped up from it, but Danny couldn't catch it in time. There was something about a psychiatrist, but nothing that made any sense to him. Alex's part of the line had gotten muddled with something rigid and inflexible, logic dipped in concrete. "Alex, the last what? I'm not going to blow up the world."

"Actually you'll be blowing up the universe, but you don't exactly have a choice. Don't worry about it. I'm pretty sure this will all work out fine, anyway."

Danny wondered what was 'fine' according to Alex, but he didn't have time to ponder it. Danny crashed into another web, this one thicker than the others. He tried to use his sight to maneuver away, but Alex had taken the sight back and left him blind again.

"No!" Danny couldn't help it. He could give up and let the power explode, or he could die and the power would explode anyway. Straining, Danny did what he could to mute the effect and pushed the panic button, that big red button he'd always seen in the movies, the one marked 'total nuclear annihilation.' His skin shrunk and the destructive power aching in his chest blew out and up and left the web in tatters. But this time, even without his vision, Danny could sense the whole thing dissolving.

"Alex?" He couldn't feel the other ghost anymore. Around him the web collapsed, and something groaned on the air, both impossibly distant and remarkably close by. The sound emanated and echoed from everywhere around him.

"We did it, Danny. We kicked its ass."

"Alex! Where are you?"

The groaning became a screeching, and it wasn't coming from Alex. Danny didn't think it would sound this bad had he knocked out a critical support pillar from a twenty story hotel building. Things that Danny couldn't begin to identify started to shiver and fizz all around him, sending a multitude of unpleasant sensations up what had been passing for his spine lately. If the fizzing creeped him out, then what came next terrified him. Things started to shrink that weren't supposed to shrink, space itself contracted and heaved as time raced back and forth indecisively, everything accelerating and whirling as all things tangible and intangible dropped through a hole in space, a hidden void beneath, catching Danny up with it. He tried to catch hold of something, but once again his grabs met the dead void.

Panic blasted him. His body was gone and Alex had betrayed him and the universe was imploding and nothing made sense! He was in a tunnel but he'd hit a flat plane and something would change his mind and throw him up and down and back and forth until Danny forced his spectral senses closed against the booming colors and racing lights and waited.

When it came, the silence arrived like thunder: a few crackling noises, and then absolute silence. Or close enough to it.

"Ugh…"

Danny opened his eyes to see Alex materializing in front of him, complete with arms, legs, and an expression somewhere between high and… high. "That. Was. FUN." Alex shook himself loosely, a goofy grin on his face. "Or at least really really interesting."

Danny discovered he had hands again. He was overjoyed to see them, and he hugged himself protectively, not daring to look around just yet. "Are we dead?"

"No." Alex yawned, gesturing vaguely to a spot that Danny couldn't see. "The universe is reconstructing itself, sans the blackness thread. I think that's what it's doing, anyway." Alex squinted at the blur. "It kind of hard to tell from this distance. Our world lines stop here, so… The point is that we'll be deconstructed and reinserted once it hits the point where you first saw the black stuff. Where you met me, I guess."

Danny got the sense Alex's 'universe' was in a dimension he couldn't see, at least not from this place of limbo. Danny swore he'd never take three-dimensional objects for granted again. "So what happened? What'd we do?"

"Nothing but the big bang in reverse. I put too much energy in too many places and physics had a breakdown." Alex laughed. "Not something that can be cured with Prozac, but it's doing well enough on its own, I think."

Danny looked at the blur. It stretched all over under their feet. He didn't know what they stood on, but it was solid and transparent, and that was something to be thankful for. To the sides and up above lay a rich, grayish darkness that felt more like a security blanket than an evil entity. "So things worked out okay? No more problems."

"No more black stuff, no more problems." Alex shimmered faintly. "I can kind of see something else happening. All over the place."

"Like what?"

"The black stuff. As a part of the physical system, it must have been part of other universes, too. Or at least some of them, depending on their topology and the way their symmetry broke."

"Whatever that means. So what's happening?"

Alex grinned, still shimmering as he looked beyond Danny. "It's deleting itself. Those that already have things like me are unraveling, and those that haven't been activated yet are simply quietly deleting that component."

Danny nodded, daring to let relief leak into his adrenaline-charged tension. "That's good."

"Mmyep."

They both watched, waiting for their own world to finish fixing itself. Alex had a very nice kind of smile on his face, one of mingled pride and joy Danny had never seen on him before. "You really live for this stuff, don't you?"

"Yes. I used to, anyway. Maybe I'll get another chance at it, but I've always loved physics. Used to look up at the sky every morning and imagine the stars going up like the Fourth of July. Very relaxing."

Something in there gave Danny a distinct sense of déjà vu. The psychological bump he'd sensed in Alex's current before they got separated sounded vaguely familiar, and he hadn't had time to think about it at the time. What had it been? Danny tried to remember. Something about a psychologist, he was sure, and the concept carried that same kind of weird warmth as he was getting from him now.

Danny gasped, stabbing an accusing finger at Alex. "You had the hots for my sister!"

Alex grimaced. "That's a lie. That's a horrible wretched lie and—"

"I don't believe it. I never would have believed it." Danny stared at Alex like a zoo animal. "You, I mean, whoa."

"You should at least be happy because it kept me from killing your mother. Not that it matters since she ended up dead anyway," he mused.

"Oh, thank you, Alex. That makes it all fine and dandy then, doesn't it." Danny slapped his forehead. "I just don't believe it. You and Jazz—"

"Look, if it makes you feel any better the feeling wasn't mutual," Alex snapped. He went back to gazing at his universe. "In any case, it's almost at your stop. Get ready for something weird."

The words hung in the air. Danny looked at Alex, smiling flatly. "Was that supposed to be funny?"

Alex was not amused. "Drop it."

Danny glanced down at his fading hands. They lost their solid look, becoming a projection that grew fainter every second "I guess… Thanks Alex. For helping"

Alex rolled his eyes. " Yeah, well. Took me long enough."

"But you did." Danny's voice faded to a whisper as his body phased out. "Just don't do it again."

Alex gulped. "No problem."

Danny winked out of limbo and dropped into the world once more.

A/N: There's a lot of real science mixed in here, particularly with Alex's proxy waves (more conventionally called psi waves), so I sincerely apologize if any of it was confusing. I tried to do my best. (Psst! The quoted stuff about proxy/psi waves in the middle segment from Alex's POV is all real science. Now if your parents try to tell you that fanfiction is a waste of time, you can tell them that you learned a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics from it. :) )