This is a science fiction short story, still in progress.
On March 11, at 1:18 pm EST, ghostly apparitions of humans appeared at power plants, transformer stations, and random substations all over the planet. CNN was the first major news outlet to report the occurrences, although people took to Facebook, twitter, Friendster, Orkut, and Renren to report the sightings about thirteen minutes earlier than CNN.
People quickly discovered that photos didn’t capture the spectral bodies, so Instagram was largely useless in spreading the news.
Monica was sitting in her home office in Boston, fighting with a new WordPress template for a client’s blog when her cell phone buzzed. Caller ID indicated it was ex-boyfriend-turned-best-friend, Li Qiang, who preferred to go by the name “Lee.” They’d met in Boston five years ago when she was at Emerson studying journalism and he MIT. He’d moved to California about two years ago, but they remained close.
“Monica! Did you hear? Isn’t this amazing? Me and the guys, er—and gals, are having quite a party here, trying to figure out what’s going on. Wanna watch? Open a page to our webcam.”
“Of course I know! You know me… always connected to the Internet.” Monica struggled to keep her phone from slipping out between her head and shoulder. Why hadn’t she just put Lee on speakerphone? Her fingers danced across her keyboard as she retweeted several tweets, then opened up yet another browser window and clicked the bookmarked URL to Lee’s webcam at Caltech, where he worked in the Physics department as an experimental physicist. “Gottcha,” she said as the page opened and she picked up the live view of one of Lee’s colleagues talking about the multiverse.
“So, what’s the ‘net saying?” Lee asked. We’re pretty focused on a scientific explanation here.”
“So far we have astral projection, ghosts, and aliens.”
“The expected fare… well listen, I have to run, but you know I’ll keep you posted.”
“And me you,” Monica said as a tweet caught her attention, “talk to you soon.”
