Yesterday morning was good. Got almost to the halfway point in the new outline, came up with some neat, neat twists that have me excited about the rewrite, and that also have me excited about sitting down and writing this morning. There is nothing like a good question to spur good answers … and the question for the day is … How does a dead man use the phone?
Yesterday, today, and Midnight Rain
The dead man’s voice (recorded prior to death, maybe from a verbal will?) is programmed into a voice synthesizer**, which translates typed text into the dead man’s voice. Place the VS output speaker next to an open receiver, have your evil-doer on an extension so he can listen and respond directly to whoever the dead man is calling, and voila.
**Something like this: http://www.rcsys.com/chips.htm
Dead people dial 10-10-666 and then the area code and number for quick, convient calls from the netherworld. 🙂
OK then…without further definition regarding "something else" (which may come by E-mail if you want a dialogue), I’ll assume the original question of the day was rhetorical 🙂
[g] And in fact, I mean something else.
PS — There was an Analog essay in the mid-80’s on the subject of the physics of ghosts that might be relevant. A web search on related topics might be helpful, but that’s the limit of my contribution to the problem this morning.
Humm……How does a dead man use the phone?
Do you mean an articulated body (e.g. Zombie) or a spirit (ghost)?
If the latter, most people seems to presume that ghosts must containt at least some residue of the electromagnetic elements of the body. Hence interacting with the phone system whould be a matter of interfacing electrically; the degree of finess and amount of "power" used probably being proportional to the person’s living knowledge and their ability to move further "downstream" to conduct the interface.
Note that this ignores conservation of energy and entropy considerations in such an interaction, so it is necessary to assume that a ghost will have finite "lifetime" of phone converstations before either expiring by using up its base energy charge (which may not mean dissolution; depending on whether there are NON-electromagnetic elements as well) or being forced to recharge by absorbing environmental thermal or electrical energy (is that why ghosts feel cold?) or other energy sources which might be available in the spirit world, or a combination of both.
If you mean a zombie-type, I presume that he is animated and picks up the phone and talks (and is more articulate than the usual image of a Zombie).
If you mean something else….