He looked at the buildings around him. Languages and Woodwork. Not really his thing. He’d had classes here of course, but Gideon had told him to start where his memories were strongest. He looked at the school hall to his left. Assemblies, Drama, exams. They just blurred together. He nodded to Amber and carefully started to walk along the pathway to the next set of buildings.
This was where things got dangerous.
The school looked deserted, but he knew better than to trust appearances. To Amber’s sensitive ears the noise she had barely been able to hear was beginning to get louder. It still didn't make sense to her, it sounded faintly musical in a really, really bad way. She thought about mentioning it to Ghost, but he had a far away look that warned her to keep as still and quiet as possible. She would mention it later, if they survived that long.
The science block was on the right. Memories came flooding back… As a child he’d been forever asking “Why?” and was so dissatisfied with the answers he’d developed frown lines in his teens. As he got older he understood more and more the approach of adults’ “lies to children”. Teachers would say things that sounded right and then use long, confusing explanations if questioned, but if you had time and thought about what they said you knew that something wasn’t right. It was ironic; science tried to explain everything in concrete terms and yet, when it came down to it, it revealed nothing. Science was all just theories; and those were disproved on a fairly regular basis. At one stage it had become so bad that some scientists even started to treat the “truth” as “what reasonable people think”; or to be more precise, what they thought.
Different people approached science in different ways; Ghost followed Schrodinger’s Way. Statisticians had tried to predict the future using mathematics, but for all their equations you never really knew what would happen until it happened. Science was transforming. In the 20th century it had been beaten to sterility by scientists, chaining it with formulas and strapping it with logic. But something had changed. For those who looked for it there was an art and poetry within science. Some people called it magic. Some weren’t sure.
People were sensitive enough about the boundaries between the sciences; was biology more chemistry or physics? Pointless hours were spent debating these inconsequential questions. Why was it so important to humans to put things in boxes, that’s what Ghost wanted to know. Try and tell a scientist that astrophysics was in fact an art form or that there was a musicality to molecular biology – that’d really heat-up the debate!
Ghost accepted that there were no fixed boundaries and he used this to his advantage. He could push against reality like it was a piece of elastic, feeling the different possibilities, temporarily entering alternate realities, finding the one he wanted and then let it snap back to become, well, real. Few shared Ghost’s skill, and of those that did there were even fewer who were as sensitive to the repercussions of what they did.
New levels of scientific discovery were being found all the time. The previously held taboos of human experimentation and tampering with the laws of nature were now more of a faux pas that were tolerated and ignored. Mutations, although random, had been the focus of some people’s efforts. Some had combined their experiments on people and animals with their ability to use Schrodinger’s Way, using it to affect the mutations. Largely they’d been influenced by folklore and myth. Amber’s made her look like an elf, with almond-shaped eyes and elongated, pointy ears, but there were other, less pretty outcomes. Why did people agree to be turned into monsters? Who knew? But they did. Much as society tended to turn a blind eye to gangs’ “turf” as long as they stayed there, so it was with monsters and the depraved ‘scientists’ who created them.
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