Ten By Ten

It took quite a long time before anyone was able to piece together what had happened, what was still happening. We now know that on Dec. 3, 2027 at approximately 10pm the formerly dead started coming back in spirit form, as ghosts, to use the vernacular. Not just the recently deceased either, but all of them, all of the dead, everyone who had ever died on planet earth, at any time since the dawn of consciousness in man (or thereabouts), had come back as a ghost. These ghosts were of the particularly frustrating, annoying and sometimes, though infrequently, deadly variety. They had a knack for releasing piercing wails at all hours of the day or night, scratching or biting the still living, and any other number of habits all seemingly designed to irritate, bother, and generally make living with or near them, downright impossible. And, unfortunately, as you might imagine, there were quite a lot of them. Estimates put the number at greater than 100 billion. For comparison the earth's population at the time of the rising was right around 7 billion. The dead outnumbered the living by a little over ten to one. The excess of ghosts to living humans has increased significantly since that time, mostly as a result of the actions of the ghosts themselves, but also, that of the living, and how we reacted to them.

Fortunately, and it took a very long time to figure this out, each ghost was confined to an area of only ten feet long by ten feet wide. This area extended below the ground to approximately the center of the earth (This is believed though not proven. We know deep sea divers exploring the Marianas trench at a depth of around 36,000 feet have encountered them. One of those encounters was deadly for an unfortunate diver whose air supply hose was violently yanked free from their pressurized suit at a depth of 16,000 feet) and at least to a height of low earth orbit (Passengers and pilots in airplanes and astronauts on the orbiting space station have encountered them). Each individual ghost was not capable of moving out of this fairly small (at least from the perspective of the living on the surface of the earth) cubic area. Of course, there was a lot of overlap between ghosts with some areas seeing huge concentrations. It is thought that the most heavily haunted ghost cubes contain greater than a hundred thousand spirits. Those particular cubes are instantly deadly to any unfortunate living who stumble in to them. Death comes quickly from a torrent of scratches and bites and ruptured ear drums from the shatteringly loud combination of wails.

Ghost cube distribution

The distribution of the ghost cubes is of course of the highest interest, and a thing about which our current information is far from complete. Trying to piece together the exact death locations of over 100 billion people is, obviously, impossible. It is greatly complicated by the huge timespan over which deaths have occurred on the planet and the fact that the earth has changed significantly in that time. This includes movements of land masses and oceans, etc. Because of this, and the great variety of ways and places in which people have died the ghost cubes can be found in almost all places on the planet. There are of course exceptions. The very north and south poles have seen few (though not zero) humans (specifically humans that have died there) over the course of history and many (in fact most) parts of the oceans have relatively low concentrations of cubes or none at all. Compared to the entire surface area of the earth the ghost cubes occupy only a very little space, but the entire surface of the earth is not habitable or at all useful, and, unfortunately for the still living, those parts that are tend to see the highest concentrations of ghosts.

If one does the math, and many, many have, and assumes 100 billion ghosts each occupying a ten by ten (100 foot square area), and assuming no overlap between ghosts, that works out to approximately 3.6 x 10^5 square miles. A large area to be sure, however, it is about a thousand fold less than the total surface area of the earth, which, according to modern estimates, sits at approximately 510 million square km (5.1 x 10^8 km2) or 1.97 x 10^8 square miles. Add to that, the fact of the significant overlap between many ghost cubes, and the total area occupied might seem insignificant. Even if we only consider the habitable parts of the earths surface which is estimated to be around 2.4 x 10^7 square miles, the total area not occupied by ghosts still exceeds the parts where they are found by at least a hundred fold. Of course, that free space shrinks by another 100 square feet every time another person dies. The problem lies not so much with the density of the cubes, but rather with their seeming randomness and our own inability to devise any method of detecting them, save direct human (living) encounters with them. It has also proven very difficult to mark their exact locations. Early in the rising millions of small orange flags were planted in an attempt to do just that. Thousands of professional ghost cube "detection and marking" units were deployed across the globe, but it quickly became impractical as the high stress and high mortality rate of the job made it harder and harder to find persons willing to participate. Prisoners in some countries were pressed into service into d&m positions, sometimes under threat of execution or sometimes with the promise of freedom after a certain period of work. Their are or were however only so many prisoners to go around and today d&m activities have all but ceased but for the most dedicated (and crazy) of the remaining living.

Attempted communication

All attempts at communication with the dead have thus far proven unsuccessful. By deduction it seems obvious that they are aware of the living who enter their cube, otherwise why would they react and wail and scratch. Moreover, they must have awareness of the exact location and roughly what a human body looks like and is composed of. They tend to scratch on exposed skin suggesting some awareness of the presence of clothing or at least a remembrance of where clothing could be expected to be found and where not. And, as the diver example suggests they seem to have some understanding of the requirements for life, such as the need for air to breath underwater. Arguably however, this may have just been a random event, with the ghost simply grabbing onto whatever it could and yanking. Clearly, they are also able to manifest themselves physically at least partially or how could they cause scratches and pull hoses, etc. However, at most times it seems they exist as mist like phantasms which the living can pass through with ease, and generally without any recognition that they have done so. It is only in cases of ghost attack or other unexplained physical phenomena (e.g. dishes being thrown across a room, doors being slammed, etc.) or when the wailing starts that it is possible to know for certain that you have encountered a cube.

End log entry 1 - 12/10/30