Ghost (setting)

[PlainDealingVillain]

I have a setting! It is called Ghost, because ghosts exist. It is otherwise a normal Earth, because being a ghost is extremely unconducive to affecting the course of history. How it works:

When you die, you become a ghost, one subjective heartbeat's time later. Ghosts are not made of normal matter and are totally transparent to normal light; they are visible only in ghostlight, though they can see normal visible light clearly but somewhat dimly. (You know how the electromagnetic frequency spectrum is a line? Ghostlight frequencies are shifted slightly perpendicular to that line. Second sight is an epigenetic trait, somewhat heritable, that lets some of your photoreceptors see ghostlight.) Ghosts moving at normal speed can push on non-ghostly things with roughly 1% of the force they could exert while alive.

But ghosts mostly don't move at normal speed. Time, to a ghost, is subjective; ghosts with stronger emotions experience time faster, and can therefore exert more force more quickly. Curious and attentive ghosts experience time slightly faster than the standard 1 sec per second, ghosts that are totally calm experience it at about half normal speed, but depression will slow a ghost down to 10% speed or slower. Usually much slower, because nothing is quite so depressing as watching everything speed by you too fast to react to and knowing that every moment that passes without your mood improving makes it less likely that you can recover. Without physical needs to attend to, depressed ghosts generally slow down to less than 1% of normal speed and then fall asleep, waking up objective years later and spending 90% of their subjective life asleep thereafter. This eventually affects most ghosts, and ghosts who die in their sleep or otherwise peacefully generally don't wake for a year or more and slide into this 'fugue' quickly.

Until the last century, even most ghosts who kept mobile and interested weren't aware that peaceful deaths left ghosts. This was harder to notice because ghostly forms are not quite physical, and stay visible even to ghostlight only as long as they are moving. Standing imperfectly still is enough to make your features resolve to another ghost, but a ghost which has fallen into fugue is quickly indistinguishable from fog. Recent ghostly scientists has observed this in action, and concluded that the fog that makes the world of ghosts hard to see far through is the residue of all the fugued ghosts of the past, and that given observations of the few ghosts who have held on for centuries this almost certainly means that all human deaths leave ghosts. (Some animals leave ghosts as well; dolphins, crows, elephants, and pigs are all confirmed, and some others are suspected.)

Sometime in the 20th century, though, for reasons not yet understood, it became a lot easier to leave an active ghost. Before that, the baseline energy seemed to be lower, so that only ghosts with very strong emotions could leave anything noticeable behind, creating the story of poltergeists. The current best theory is that increasing population and the mass deaths of the two world wars, Holodomor, Holocaust, partition of India, and Great Leap Forward somehow filled things to capacity such that it took less to push yourself to genuine activity. It's still very hard to communicate, since it doesn't seem to be any harder to slip into fugue than it once was and time perception remains funky, but there's been a noticeable uptick in unexplained phenomena shortly after sudden or painful deaths, and systematic investigation of ghosts has started to be taken seriously as a scientific subject.

Other features of Ghost:

Objects that had someone had strong emotional attachment to, when they break, run down, or otherwise become lastingly unusuable, can leave ghostly echoes. Some of these even seem to come alive to a degree, though no one's seen it happen to anything other than a home that had several generations of a family grow up in it over a lifetime. Pets frequently persist about as well as these; this has led to controversy among ghosts as to whether some dogs and cats are clever enough to leave ghosts on their own, or whether they stick around for the same reasons as an old gramophone or book does. Technology among ghosts tends to lag several decades behind the living world, and is scarce; there have been attempts to do small-scale ghostly manufacturing, but ghost of mines haven't been left with metal or coal in them, and there are almost no ghostly forests, so it hasn't gotten anywhere. Ghostly objects fade with time, but regular interaction with active ghosts maintains them, probably indefinitely.

Most ghosts who have stayed active have devoted themselves to some purpose; many of the oldest protect members of their family, or a specific location (usually one that has become ghostly since), or (more rarely) a cause. There are several ghostly Popes still living around the Vatican, and the Wandering Jew and Flying Dutchman are probably real ghosts.

Ghosts have been common enough through history that all but the most hardcore skeptics have believed in their existence. Most people had never interacted with a ghost's effects, but most small villages would have someone with a vivid direct story, and most people would have a close friend who had an ambiguous experience with the ghostly. These days about half of people who've been present at a death witnessed something ambiguously supernatural, and most people have a friend with a vivid story.

[DanielH]

I’d want to get a really sensitive keyboard (or typewriter, or telegraph key, depending on when I was) and try to get some two-way communication going

[pedromvilar]

What is the actual reason for the change in the 20th century?

[Ezra]

Neat! Very ghosty.

[PlainDealingVillain]

What is the actual reason for the change in the 20th century?

I haven't decided for certain, but it's definitely tied to population growth and the theory might be right.

[PlainDealingVillain]

I’d want to get a really sensitive keyboard (or typewriter, or telegraph key, depending on when I was) and try to get some two-way communication going

The living mostly don't know how ghosts work, because it's very hard to get active collaboration from any ghost that lasts, given that their timescale is frequently in flux. And a ghost that isn't Uncomfortably Energetic can't move a keyboard very effectively. The iPad keyboard accessory, which is unusually light, would still weigh 50 pounds to a normal-speed ghost; most non-specific keyboards will be getting into bench-press range.

It's possible to communicate, and would be the default plot for glowfic in Ghost, but it would need concerted effort from ghosts and possibly the cooperation of a poltergeist.

[Kappa]

Uncomfortably Energetic

...

Miles

[PlainDealingVillain]

Miles would have a hard time as a ghost, because the first time he has a depressive episode, that's it, unless he has someone with him right then he's pretty much permadead now. But yes, he would get shit done until then.

[Kappa]

The way you put it in the OP, it seems less "permadead" and more "depressive episode lasts for a couple centuries objective and then he's back up again"? It is very very hard to get a Miles to just go depressive and then stay that way, much harder than getting him to go indefinitely hypomanic.

[PlainDealingVillain]

I don't know how a Miles would react to go depressive for a week or two subjective and then come back up for air with a couple centuries having passed and no one he knew being anywhere nearby, if he goes back to mania instead of getting another depressive episode then yeah, he won't stay down. The ice bath/defenestration-level incidents might last a really long time, though, there isn't any cap on how slow time can pass.