The Real Ghosts

The Real Ghosts
''“Some political theories die and go to heaven; some, I hope, die and go to hell. “''

David Sorensen froze as he picked up the eraser by the whiteboard. A strange, eerie silence had struck at the auditorium. The last student had just left through the door after a barrage of questions about the upcoming exam. David was about to leave too, but the strange feeling kept him in place. A tingling sensation danced across his spine and pain shot through his chest. There was something about the atmosphere of the place that had changed: it was not that everything felt colder, it felt wrong.

The old professor glanced about the room and his gaze instinctively landed on the windows. The campus outside was completely empty. Tall trees with contorted branches were beset by the evening wind - a ghastly breeze that shrieked at him from outside the walls. He cursed his own superstition and turned to the whiteboard to erase the rest of his writing.

A plethora of terms had been outlined on it. One of them stood out from the rest. Three letters that had been known and studied by David Sorensen for his entire career. But today, they seemed wrong. Glaring, threatening, foreboding. As they were erased, blurry smudges of the red marker still spelled out the acronym that John von Neumann morbidly coined for his doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction.

M.A.D.

David retreated out of the auditorium with his phone and his jacket. His steps echoed faintly as he paced across the corridors faster than he normally would. A poster on the wall that had previously been upright had dropped one of its corner pins, resulting in it hanging at a tilt. His own face was plastered across the paper, sporting a sickly smile that put strain on his aged and wrinkled features. “Sorensen’s Final Lecture: A Recap of the Nuclear Dilemma” could be read in bold. The old scholar was way past his prime. A long career of brilliant academic achievement lay behind him, but he was finally happy to finally be getting his late retirement.

Then the feeling washed over him. The same shiver, the same sting in his chest. The wind shrieked anew and David felt his throat turn dry. Even through the asphyxiating blanket of fear, his rational mind was still at work. There was nothing to be afraid of. These reactions were simply the result of his own reptile brain’s inadequacies. He was too old, too intellectually distinguished, to give his own childish spooks any merit.

But despite this assurance, he saw it. It had flicked into view as he blinked. As David froze in his tracks, unfettered and undiminished horror gripped him.

What was before him was a man, or rather a contorted sketching of one. As if only the remaining smudges of a person that had been erased. Despite the blurriness of the apparition, Sorensen instantly recognized it. Carefully, slowly, he called out into the silence.

“John?”

No answer. John von Neumann stared back with an apathetic grin. The sole hairs on the long dead man’s balding scalp lay slicked back in characteristic fashion. He was dressed in a suit, sporting the same sharp gaze that stared out of his portraits years later. But this ‘thing’ in the university hall was not him. David could feel it. Something had taken Neumann’s image. Something that was not an individual entity, but a force. A plume of smoke that had somehow manifested into the figure before him.

A flash of memory came and went. A discussion he had had with a student that seemed hellbent on proving the existence of the supernatural. Sorensen had, with a sly smirk, stated that the only real type of ghost in this world was far from paranormal. This type of ghost could possess countless humans and lead on the deaths of countless others. It haunted the halls of the university and the world beyond. It could make dead men talk and could be just as evil as any demon. It could possess victims and make them do terrible things. The real ghosts, he had claimed, were ideas.

That is what the apparition was: an idea. The manifestation of a concept that had taken the incomplete shape of its creator. But something was off. It had, as all ideas have, been twisted by time and by the influence of others. The familiar faces of these others began to fill the corridor. Some entirely clear, some blurred and faded in their contours. Every single idea that had ever haunted the minds of men, clad in the image of their architects. But the vision was brief. Suddenly, the stinging pain returned in twice the volume. Clutching his heart, David dropped his phone and fell to the floor.

Death loomed, but for some reason he was content. He knew now that his own ideas would live on, here, to forever haunt the halls of the learned and the learning. Ghosts that would carry his face among the giant thinkers that he had revered for so long. With his final breath, David Sorensen called for one final inquiry. He wanted to test his hypothesis. “What are you?” echoed across the corridor.

Suddenly, the phone that he had dropped blared, loudly and continuously. Dread filled the fading professor’s failing heart for the last time as he looked upon the words that had formed in the display. ''“EMERGENCY ALERT: Ballistic missile threat inbound Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”'' He wanted to scream. As his eyes rolled up in his sockets, the apparitions’ horrid and mechanic answer to his question resounded across the corridor.

“Wrong.”