Chapter 17

Meat still not answering. OK, let's look around and see what we got. Look for the manual.

We ghosts have two ways of getting information and skills - we can get it the same way meat does by reading, watching and practicing, and we can add on memories. Instant expert.

In the early days of ghosting, memory addition caused problems - panic attacks, catatonia, even berserker behavior. Each ghost has a different sensorium map to the others. Elemental analysis may have been keyed to taste for me in my deep miner body, for example, but the ghost who occupied the body after I transferred may have had the elemental analysis keyed to his sense of touch instead. My memories of how to run the miner would be both useless and terribly confusing to him. We may be ghosts, but we still have some human limitations.

The answer, after much trial and effort amongst us ghosts, was training memories. The raw data for each action, played through a dedicated input and personallised to our unique somatic map. Once we had the custom memories, that was it. We cannot forget. Only ghosts in a completely new type of body ever had to learn the meat way.

"Read the bloody manual" was not a punchline for us - it was a way of life.

No manual. Fuck - I am paralysed until I get it. Oh I could play about - but in the environments we work in that could be dangerous for the surroundings - or for myself.

Open channel to ghost command, output to screen.

"Where the hell is the manual? I want to get moving."

For obvious reasons GC comms is standardised.

Any news or entertainment in here? Nothing new. Only what I have in memory.

Net access port?

Found it. Locked. I am starting to panic a little. What the hell am I this time? And why does GC not respond?