October 1992 · UT Austin
By mid-October, Austin decided fall was more of a rumor than a season. The air stayed warm even after sunset, and the breeze smelled like fried dough, damp leaves, and whatever chemical cocktail powered the student union's fog machines. Paper bats drooped from lampposts like they'd second-guessed their life choices. Pumpkins slumped on tables, candles flickering in little glass cages. The campus tried very hard to be haunted. Mostly it was humid.
Paige hooked two fingers into my sleeve as we crossed the quad. "You're coming. Consider it continuing education."
"Festivity isn't a controlled variable," I said.
"That sentence alone is why you need a haunted house." She grinned. "Also, the CS department's 'Haunted Lab' is mostly bad code and extension cords. It's your native habitat."
"I'm carrying my notebook," I said, as if that were a compromise.
"You're carrying that even when you do laundry," she said.
Accurate.
The lab had been transformed by enthusiasm and a limited budget. Someone had draped black cloth over the fluorescent lights to make the room moody; the effect was less spooky graveyard and more server room with a migraine. Extension cords spidered across the floor. A row of old monitors glowed green, looping grainy faces and distorted text. Motion sensors triggered distant door slams and a speaker that shrieked at irregular intervals. Students moved through it in clumps, half-laughing, pretending to be scared because pretending is part of belonging.
Paige handed me a paper wristband that said GUEST in orange letters and slipped one onto her own. She'd drawn circuit traces down the sleeves of a lab coat with a silver marker and wore a cheap witch hat at an angle that suggested it knew better. I had put on a black T-shirt and called it a costume. She called it on brand.
We were halfway through a corridor of dangling cheesecloth when the shriek started misbehaving. It was supposed to sound once when you broke a beam. Instead it triggered, kept triggering, and then trapped itself in a neat thirty-second loop that gnawed at the space behind my eyes. People laughed once, then looked annoyed, then tried to keep laughing because there was an audience.
Paige cupped a hand at her ear. "You hearing this symphony?"
"Someone nested their conditions wrong," I said, already scanning for a terminal. The console lived under a table covered in rubber rats and a bowl of candy corn that felt like a dare. I crouched, rolled back sleeves, and woke the screen. A few lines of C glowed at me like a dog that knew it had done something and wasn't sure if it should be proud.
"Of course you're fixing the afterlife," Paige said, crossing her arms and leaning against a stack of pumpkins like a person immune to consequences.
"It's bad code, not metaphysics," I said.
The loop was obvious once you knew where to look: an if-statement that fed itself when the sensor bounced, a timer that never reset if two triggers overlapped. I patched the condition, added a proper clear, and recompiled. The shriek hiccuped, stuttered like a ghost rethinking its life choices, then died into a single, dignified boo on each pass.
The little crowd nearby clapped as if we'd planned it. One of the grad students at the sign-in table gave a thumbs-up and shouted, "Part of the show!" because it's cheaper to name a bug a feature than to fix all the bugs.
Paige clapped once, exaggerated. "Ladies and gentlemen, the Exorcist of C."
The words left my mouth before I could stop them. "Guess I cast Ctrl-Alt-Delete."
She blinked, then laughed so hard she nearly dropped her flashlight. The sound hit me in the chest and did something rearranging. "Did you just make a joke?"
"Statistically rare event," I said, feeling my face threaten to betray me.
"Documented occurrence," she said, delight weaponized. "You know I'm never letting you forget that one."
I tried not to smile, failed, and muttered, "Then it's officially reproducible."
We drifted with the tide of students into the main room, where a TA in a cape was trying to make a fog machine respect boundaries. Every time he turned it off, it sighed defiantly and exhaled anyway. Someone had arranged LEDs under a plastic skull so its eyes faded in and out at a heartbeat pace. Across the room, a laser rig drew wobbly green lines on a sheet. The lines jittered like they were cold.
Paige tugged my sleeve again. "Fortune-telling by regex," she said, pointing to a poster where visitors could write a sentence and watch a script divine your future by matching patterns to prewritten fortunes. A girl wrote I WILL PASS CALC and the printer spat out SOMETIMES, FAILURE IS A KIND OF PROOF. She took a picture and laughed like she hadn't wanted the other result anyway.
We lingered long enough to watch the TA tame the fog by unplugging it, which felt like a life lesson. The shriek behaved itself. My patch held.
Outside, the night felt bigger than the building. The quad hummed with conversations and low music; windows glowed in the dorm façades like pixels arranged into a polite constellation. The paper bats along the path clicked lazily against their strings. Candles in jack-o'-lanterns guttered and recovered, tiny feedback systems fighting for equilibrium.
Paige tilted her hat back and looked at the hazed moon. "You ever believe in ghosts?"
"I believe in residual data that doesn't decay properly," I said.
"So yes," she said. "But nerdier."
"I believe in echoes when a system's been loud," I said. "And in artifacts when you compress something too fast."
She smiled at me in profile, just the corner of her mouth. "Sometimes I miss believing in the simple kind," she said. "White sheet, rattling chains. Rules you can see."
"Rules you can see are still rules," I said.
"I know," she said. "But rules you can't see feel like a dare."
We cut across the lawn toward the science building and its accessible roof. The one you could get to if you didn't mind a badly signed staircase and a door that required optimism. On the way, we passed a student dressed as an astronaut arguing with a cowboy about whether a lasso would work in space. The astronaut said no. The cowboy said he'd tie it to the moon. The truth hung between them, uninterested.
We climbed two flights, then another, then squeezed through the roof door with the polite violence required by sticky hinges. The night opened. The city arranged itself in orange and white below, a circuit board too large for any one problem set. The wind lifted the edges of Paige's coat and flattened my T-shirt against my back. Somewhere, a siren dopplered away into the east, as if it had remembered an appointment.
We split a pizza because it's what students do when they can't afford ceremony. Grease warmed my fingers; the cardboard went soft under the box where the heat had been most enthusiastic. We sat with our backs against a vent that hummed like a giant content cat.
Paige took a bite and talked around it. "You know, you didn't have to fix their ghost."
"I did," I said. "It was looping."
"Everything loops if you watch long enough," she said. "That doesn't mean you have to un-loop it."
"I know," I said. "But it was loud."
She chewed, swallowed, and wiped her hands on a napkin. "What scares you?" she asked.
"Unbounded error," I said.
"That's not what I meant."
"Empty rooms in hospital basements," I said after a second. "Lights humming, nobody in charge of the hum."
"That's specific," she said, amused.
"Being specific helps," I said.
She nodded and leaned her head back against the vent, eyes closed for a beat. "I don't like the kind of fear that makes me smaller," she said. "I don't mind the kind that makes me pay attention."
We let the wind fill the space between sentences. Below, a group in capes crossed the quad like spilled ink. Farther off, someone set off a rogue firework that cracked the sky and then apologized with glitter. The smoke drifted our way late and faint, a ghost that had missed its cue.
"I think belief and math do the same job," I said. "They both fill gaps."
She opened one eye and looked at me. "Maybe the point isn't to fill them," she said. "Just sit with them."
The idea unsettled me in a pleasant way, like standing at the edge of a lake at night and knowing it's deep but not measuring it. I took another slice and forced myself not to analyze the distribution of pepperoni.
"Also," she said, "you made a joke."
"Low-probability event," I said.
"Possible to trend toward common," she said. "If reinforced."
"That sounds like operant conditioning."
"It is," she said, and took the last slice in what philosophers might call a decisive move.
We stayed until the roof gathered a thin film of dew and the pizza box took on the structural integrity of a wet paper book. Neither of us said much. Sometimes you don't need to. The city threw its steady light outward, and the campus answered with a quieter version.
On the way down, Paige bumped my shoulder with hers. "You know you could pass for human when you want to," she said.
"I was going for unobtrusive," I said.
"Same thing if you tilt your head," she said, and let herself laugh at her own joke.
Back on the quad, music from a dorm window tried to be a party and settled for being a song. A guy in a skeleton suit jogged past, ribs glowing, feet loud on the path. A girl carrying a plastic scythe walked alone with the satisfaction of someone who had decided her own bedtime.
At the library steps, Paige snapped the elastic of her wristband. "Thanks for not fixing everything tonight," she said.
"I fixed one loop," I said.
"And left a few," she said. "Good practice."
"Exposure therapy?"
"Something like that," she said. She glanced at my hands and frowned at a black smudge near the heel of my thumb. "You've got marker."
"Collateral damage," I said.
She took my wrist gently and rubbed at it with her thumb. The mark lightened but didn't vanish. "Souvenir," she said, letting go.
"From the ghost," I said.
"From the joke," she said, and headed up the steps.
I watched her go in until the door swung shut and turned the glass into a mirror. My reflection looked like a person who had been outside himself for a few hours and hadn't broken anything. It was a start.
My room greeted me with the familiar rattle of the air conditioner and the way the desk lamp made a circle that everything important happened inside. I set the empty pizza box by the trash, washed my hands, and failed to remove the marker completely. It ghosted there, faint, insistent.
I opened my notebook. The pages carried the summer's softness and the month's new edge. I drew a small rectangle and labeled it System. Arrows entered and exited. Data in, data out. I added a small loop inside and wrote memory on it, then erased the word and wrote afterimage.
Not all clarity is volume, I wrote. Sometimes precision is silence received correctly.
I waited a second. The sentence continued without me.
Every system remembers what passes through it. Maybe people do too.
Every ghost is just a leftover signal.
Outside, the quad glowed orange; laughter drifted up in broken pieces that fit anyway. The fan hummed a steady measure. I closed the notebook and let the sound of the building settle into the room's corners. Somewhere in the hall a door closed; somewhere far off, a siren decided against coming closer.
I turned off the lamp and lay in the dark. The afterimage of the circle hung behind my eyes for a while and then faded, which didn't make it less true. I let the wind push at the window screen and didn't check its speed.
When I finally slept, I dreamed in code I didn't need to run.
Thanks for reading, feel free to write a comment, leave a review, and Power Stones are always appreciated.
(Does any one read the author thoughts when they are there?)