The Dead as Spies

On many accounts, the dead live among us.  One of the more interesting ones, from, as I recall, an Eagle Scout and man who became a psychiatrist, is Return from Tomorrow.  The dead can walk through walls, travel at infinite speeds, fly, and are invisible.  Such is my own belief, at any rate, as it applies to spirits who don’t go somewhere better.

Imagine a spy program where recruits are taught all the elements of observation, what to look for, what to take an interest in, then shot to death for graduation.  Imagine such a thing making sense if there were some established means of maintaining contact with them.

This would, if you will pardon the term, be a living spy program.  We could focus on what is essential.  We would not need to capture all elements of every last action of every last human on Earth.

I wonder about a program for precognition too.  How would that work?  If you can “see” the future, can you change it?  This is an old question, asked many times in many science fiction and fantasy novels.

I watched “Edge of Tomorrow” last week, and pondering it, it occurred to wonder what happened to the woman each time after she shot Tom Cruise.  You don’t see those shots.  You just see him getting shot over and over.  Does she look at him, as his lifeless body bleeds out, call a medic to transport him away, then pack off and die the next day every time?  Is each of these events a new universe?   Some physicists would say yes, which means that the real woman (I forget her name, rank, and the actresses name) actually dies thousands of times.  So too does the “real” Tom Cruise, except that some part of his consciousness transitions between universes.  What is he, if his body stops in time, but his mind moves?  I will say that, as a major movie star (as they say) he has over the years picked a lot of conceptually interesting movies, like Vanilla Sky, this one, and Oblivion.

As I think I’ve mentioned–over some time horizon I have probably mentioned EVERYTHING which recurs for me–I have telekinetic powers in my dreams.  I was playing with some bits of paper last night in a dream–moving them around in clouds of different shapes–and it occurred to me that my real arm is actually hollow.  This thought occurred to me in the dream, as I was looking at my dream arm, which was semi-translucent. The matter within it is, from a strictly empirical perspective, nearly as empty as empty space.  The apparent presence of something solid is a sort of electromagnetic trick, when in reality all the molecules within my arm are nearly all empty space.  When we lift something with our limbs, we are practicing, therefore, a species of telekinesis.  All the other kind is is realizing we don’t need what look like arms.  We can project onto space, and to a great extent, control it.

I’m not quite sure what I am saying, but there is truth in it, I feel reasonably certain.  I felt it strongly.