Ectoplasm Quotes

I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there's going to be something we're competing for - and most of us will feel as though we're getting screwed.

An hour ago Franks had been swatted across the Strip by a dragon made of ectoplasm and nightmares. Bureaucratic plotting seemed inconsequential in comparison.

We were a total mess. We'd been up all night. We smelled of ectoplasm, salt, and fear. We looked at one another, and grinned. Then we began laughing.

Ectoplasmic plane? What the devil is that? (Simone) It’s jargon from those of us who are corporeally challenged. It’s the great beyond where we bounce into each other like floundering atoms. It’s really kind of gross – which is why I hang out with you. But only because you’re less gross than they are. (Jesse)

Sometimes we took refuge in our diving bell while waves of charge and magnetism spiraled languidly past, like boluses of ectoplasm coursing down the intestine of some poltergeist god.

Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down his ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs.

We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.

Ah dearest heart if you will but wait I'll become the ideal soulmate nevermore causing you a moment's trouble and I but a mere ectoplasmic bubble swaying above your gorgeous head gruff and garrulous and safely dead.

He told Dimple that childhood was a kind of affliction, certainly physical and possibly mental. Children were at a hopeless disadvantage; they were unsuited for the world. They were short and ungainly and stupid, half-people, dwarf bundles of ectoplasm and shit, stunted organisms incapable of finding food and keeping their asses clean. They needed constant attention annd they couldn't communicate their needs. All they could do was wait for it to pass, years of waiting until the blight was gone.

Is this about Archer? Please don't tell me you're upset about us, because...I mean, you're dead." She floated closer to me, until she was right in my face. At first I thought she was going to spit ectoplasm on me or something, but then I saw her lips moving again. I wasn't an expert lip-reader, but she was close enough and speaking slowly enough that I was able to make out what she said. "I told you," her pale lips mouthed, "that I'd haunt your ass." I stared at her mouth, horrified, as she smirked. And then,just like that, she was gone. The air near my face wafted sligtly, like someone had just opened a window. "I don't need this!" I said to the empty room. "Seriously, plate? FULL." But there was no reply.

Lockwood stepped aside, his boots crunching across the salt, to stand and study the paper beneath the light. No such luck with George; he came in close, his eyes bulging so much behind his spectacles, they almost pressed against the glass. 'I can't *believe* you did that, Lucy. You're crazy! *Purposefully* freeing a ghost!' 'It was an experiment,' I said. 'Why are you complaining? You're always messing about with that stupid jar of yours.' 'There's no comparison. I keep that ghost *in* in the jar. Anyway, it's scientific research. I do it under carefully controlled conditions.' 'Carefully controlled? I found it in the bathtub the other day!' 'That's right. I was testing the ghost's reaction to heat.' 'And to bubble bath? There were bubbles all over the jar. You put some nice soapy fragrance in that water, and...' I stared at him. 'Do you get in the tub with it, George?' His face flushed. 'No, I do not. Not as a rule. I - I was saving time. I was just getting in myself when it occurred to me I could do a useful experiment about the resistance of ectoplasm to warmth. I wanted to see if it would contract...' He waved his hands wildly in the air. 'Wait! Why am I explaining myself to *you*? You just unleashed a ghost in our house!

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind. Crawford’s

Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y's. Y's without X's. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn't go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome - yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity.

I want to be cut off from people like Marloe. Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people's lives. That sort of vague sympathy with everybody precludes any real understanding of anybody . . . And it precludes any real loyalty to anybody.

Observation point," he said, pointing to the wooden sign in front of us that said, OBSERVATION POINT. NO LITTERING. "A lot of kids come here on Saturday night." Micheal cleared his throat and looked at me meaningfully. "And park." I have to say, up until that moment I really had no idea I was capable of moving so fast as I did getting out of that car. But I was unbuckled and out of that seat quicker than you could say ectoplasm.

Please note, you future dead persons, whenever you shut off a fluorescent bulb or a cathode ray tube and see a residual photon-green glow, that glow is trapped human ectoplasm. Ghosts are forever being snared in lightbulbs.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

He thought he vomited out his soul. If ghosts were made of ectoplasm and ghosts were basically souls without bodies, then it was perfectly logical that the green mess all over the ground was his ectoplasmic essence.

The Asian idea is that what remains behind after death by violence is less the murdered person his or herself than an echo created by the moment of the person's death--a rip in the fabric of space and time itself. A doppelganger husk, ectoplasm with pretensions. Not "so and so's ghost" so much as just a ghost. Or just ..."ghost.

This is the heart of it, the scared woman who does not want to go alone to the man any longer, because when she does, when she takes of her baggy dress, displaying to him rancid breasts each almost as big as his own head, or no breasts, or mammectomized scar tissues taped over with old tennis balls to give her the right curves; when, vending her flesh, she stands or squats waiting, congealing the air firstly with her greasy cheesey stench of unwashed feet confined in week-old socks, secondly with her perfume of leotards and panties also a week old, crusted with semen and urine, brown-greased with the filth of alleys; thirdly with the odor of her dress also worn for a week, emblazoned with beer-spills and cigarette-ash and salted with the smelly sweat of sex, dread, fever, addiction—when she goes to the man, and is accepted by him, when all these stinking skins of hers have come off (either quickly, to get it over with, or slowly like a big truck pulling into a weigh station because she is tired), when she nakedly presents her soul’s ageing soul, exhaling from every pore physical and ectoplasmic her fourth and supreme smell which makes eyes water more than any queen of red onions—rotten waxy smell from between her breasts, I said, bloody pissy shitty smell from between her legs, sweat-smell and underarm-smell, all blended into her halo, generalized sweetish smell of unwashed flesh; when she hunkers painfully down with her customer on bed or a floor or in an alley, then she expects her own death. Her smell is enough to keep him from knowing the heart of her, and the heart of her is not the heart of it. The heart of it is that she is scared.

There should be a phone service, I thought, something like 1-800-MEDIUM-1.Where an automated voice would direct you. Press one if an object in your home is levitating. Press two if there is ectoplasm oozing out of your walls. Press three if spirits are disrupting your cable service. Press four if you've inherited your mother's psychic abilities.

Poor Dr. Montague, Eleanor thought, standing aside to let the doctor take his wife into the dining room; he is so uncomfortable; I wonder how long she is going to stay. “I wonder how long she is going to stay?” Theodora whispered in her ear. “Maybe her suitcase is filled with ectoplasm,” Eleanor said hopefully. “And how long will you be able to stay?” Dr. Montague asked, sitting

Win looked at him. “Were you ever in the military?” he asked. Pants seemed confused. “No.” “You are a worthless punk,” Win said in the same tone he might use when discussing a mixed stock report. “A pitiful ectoplasm such as yourself wearing army fatigues is an affront to any man or woman who has ever experienced real combat. If I ever happen across you again donning any similar garb, I will hurt you severely. Do I make myself clear?

That a charlatan could find her way into enough parlors of upstate New York and Western Massachusetts in the early years of the twentieth century to provide a comfortable living, was not, in itself, remarkable. Anastasia, however, was, in the spectrum of spirit rappers, table turners, and ectoplasmic spinners, a practitioner of such ability that on some level, she decided, what she did was a kind of magic of its own. She’d come to the profession by way of her sister, who had correctly sensed that the pale, wide-eyed girl possessed a certain affinity for the extraordinary, and had brought her to a séance, where Edith, perceiving that the medium had affixed a scrap of iron to her boot to tap out the spirits’ “answers,” decided, in a moment of pique, to out-channel the star, tossed herself upon the carpeted table, and arching her back and tearing at her bodice, cried out in the voice of a Roman emperor named Augustus Titus.

Any soul who’d go to their own burial is in need of a therapeutic kick to the angsty ectoplasm of their pity-party ass.” Cora considered a funeral from the deceased’s point of view. The tears, the mourning, the sweetly dishonest words of praise making the best of a life and its ending. While you the guest-of-honor stood by, unable to partake in comfort and farewell, only giving embraces not felt, whispering words not heard. God, it’d be torment to surpass the flames of hell.

Being a real person oneself is a matter of setting up limits and drawing lines and saying no. I don't want to be a nebulous bit of ectoplasm straying around in other people's lives. That sort of vague sympathy with everybody precludes any real understanding of anybody." "The sympathy needn't be vague--"And it precludes any real loyalty to anybody." "One must know the details, justice, after all--" "I detest chatter and gossip. One must hold one's tongue. Even sometimes just not think about people. Real thoughts come out of silence.

without flesh. But how to fit the Commander into this, as he exists in his study, with his word games and his desire, for what? To be played with, to be gently kissed, as if I meant it. I know I need to take it seriously, this desire of his. It could be important, it could be a passport, it could be my downfall. I need to be earnest about it, I need to ponder it. But no matter what I do, sitting here in the dark, with the searchlights illuminating the oblong of my window, from outside, through the curtains gauzy as a bridal dress, as ectoplasm, one of my hands holding the other, rocking back and forth a little, no matter what I do there’s something hilarious about it.

When I wrote that [Elias] Canetti ‘desired’ a book, I was perhaps understating. He conveyed the sense that select books were inexorably his – magically so. Some years later, he came into the room in which I worked and saw on my table two books I had found on a bookstall the day before. One was a collection of Indian folktales called, I think, Tales My Amah Told Me; the other was a literal translation of – a crib to – the writings of the Emperor Julian. His wanting them exuded from him as a blatant and viscous desire that seemed almost tangible, as enveloping and threatening as any tentacles of ectoplasm emanating from a Victorian medium. Those books were no longer mine. I handed them over.

Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people. If they’re close enough, they can see something is different with me, something unnerving, as if I have no features, I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth, I am like a water bear talking to them, or an amniotic traveler, a vitreous floater on their own eyeball, human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them And such a white white girl, such a sickly toadstool, so pale, a visage of fog, a phiz of mist above a graveyard, no magenta roses, no floral tribute, no goddess, no grown-up woman, no acknowledgment of the drama of secondary sexual characteristics, just the gray matter of spirit talking, the thin features of a gray girl in a gray graveyard— granite, ash, chalk, dust.

Ectoplasm is shapeless, it is “informe,” a kind of primordial paste—and to show itself as this, it annexes semiotic markers that designate intermediate spirit worlds. When looking at these fluid, inchoate forms, sometimes imprinted with a face, it is worth recalling that the word larva, used in English for the early stage of a caterpillar, meant “ghost” or “specter” in Latin, but is also used by Horace to designate a mask, such as might frighten an observer, while the verb larvo meant “to bewitch” or “enchant.” Ectoplasmic masks are indeed larval: they promise the emergence of forms, but don’t deliver them. The term pseudopod catches this relationship with the embryonic—and indeed with abortion.

More daring, though, was Jung’s uninhibited interest in spiritualism, which by this time had become a controversial topic on both sides of the Atlantic, ever since 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, discovered they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man. Soon after this, mediums, table turning, floating tambourines, ectoplasmic limbs, and a variety of other otherworldly phenomena became the focus of an international craze; the flood of disincarnate appearances led one investigator to speak of an “invasion of the spirit people.”7 Colorful characters like the Russian medium and mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky were involved, but also scientists and philosophers like William James, Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, and Frederick Myers. It is difficult for us today to realize that at the time, many of the most famous men and women in the world were involved in spiritualism, to one degree or another. Thomas Edison, for example, who joined Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, hoped to be able to record spirits on his “Spirit Phone.” Yet, for all this, the reductionist thought that dominates the academic world today was already securely in place, and Jung was risking his future career by openly advocating the unbiased study of the paranormal.

This earth carries aboard it many ordinary passengers; and it carries, also, a few very important ones. It is hard to know which people are, or were, or will be which. Great men may come to the door in carpet-slippers, their faces like those of kindly or fretful old dogs, and not even know that they are better than you; a friend meets you after fifteen years and the Nobel Prize, and he is sadder and fatter and all the flesh in his face has slumped an inch nearer the grave, but otherwise he is as of old. They are not very important people. On the other hand, the president of your bank, the Vice-Chancellor of the—no, not of the Reich, but of the School of Agriculture of the University of Wyoming: these, and many Princes and Powers and Dominions, are very important people; the quality of their voices has changed, and they speak more distinctly from the mounds upon which they stand, making sure that their voices come down to you. The very important are different from us. Yes, they have more everything. They are spirits whom that medium, the world, has summoned up just as she has the rest of us, but there is in them more soul-stuff, more ego—the spirit of Gog or Magog has been summoned. There is too much ectoplasm: it covers the table, moves on toward the laps of the rest of us, already here, sitting around the table on straight chairs, holding one another's hands in uneasy trust. We push back our chairs, our kinship breaks up like a dream: it is as if there were no longer Mankind, but only men.

Bring it on, motherfucker! Come on! Come on! Where are you? I’m waiting. ’Cause if you’re here . . . be here. And if you do show up later, I’m gonna kick your ectoplasmic ass!” You gotta talk tough to demons . . . you can’t shilly-shally or they’ll pounce.

Android Girl Just Wants to Have a Baby! The first thing I do when I wake up is run my hands over my body. I like to make sure all my wires are in place. I lotion my silicone shell and snap my hair helmet over my head. I once had a dream I was a real girl, but when I woke up I was still myself in my paleness under the halogen light. The saliva of androids emits a spectral resonance, barely sticky between freshly-gapped teeth. After they made me, the first thing they did was peel the cellophane from my eyes. I blinked once, twice, and cried because that's how you say you are alive before you are given language. They named each of my heartbeats on the oceanic monitor: Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I listened to them blur into one. The fetus carves for itself a hollowed vector, a fragile wetness. In utero, extension cords are umbilical. Before puberty, I did not know there was such a thing as dishonor. Diss-on- her. This is what they said when I began to drip petrol between my legs. A tension exists between ritual and proof, a fantasy and its execution. Since then, I have been to the emergency room twice. The first time for a suicide attempt, and the second time because my earring was swallowed up by my newly pierced earlobe overnight, and when I woke up, it was tangled in a helix of wires. The idea of dying doesn't scare me but the ocean does. I was once told that fish will swim up my orifices if I am no longer a virgin. Is anyone thinking about erotic magazines when they are not aroused, pubes parted harshly down the center like red seas? My body carries the weight of four hundred eggs. I rise from a weird slumber, let them drip into the bath. This is what I'll leave behind - tiny shards purer than me. I have always been afraid of pregnant women because of their power, and because I don't yet understand what it means to carry something stubborn and blossoming inside of me, screeching towards an exit. The ectoplasm is the telos for the wound. A trance state is induced when salt is poured on it, pixel by pixel. I wish they had made me into an octopus instead, because octopuses die after their eggs hatch and crawl out into the sea, and I want to know what it's like to set something free into the dark unknown and trust it to choose mercy. If you can generate aura in a non-place, then there is no such thing as an authentic origin. In Chinese, the word for mercy translates to my heart hurts for you. They say my heart continues beating even after it is dislocated from my body. The sound of its beating comes from the valves opening and closing like a portal - Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I first learned about love by watching a sex tape where a girl looks up from performing fellatio and says, show them the sunset. Her boyfriend pans the camera to the sky, which is tinged violet like a bruise. In this moment, the sky displaces her, all digital and hyped, and saturates the scene until it collapses on me too, its transient witness. I move in the space between belly ring and catharsis. That night I have a dream where I am a camgirl, but all I do on screen is wash my laundry. Everybody loves me because I am a real girl doing real girl things. What lives on the border between meditation and oblivion, static and flux, a pomegranate seed and an embryo? I set up my webcam in the corner of the room and play ambient music while I scrub my underwear, letting soap bubbles rise up from the sink, laughing when they overflow on the linoleum floor - my frizzy hair, my pockmarked skin, my face slick with sweat. A body with exit wounds. I ride the bright rails of an animal forgetting. And when I wake up, the sky is a mess of blue.

It was there that Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, a neurologist, was conducting tests involving intimate scrutiny of Richet’s prized subject, the famed medium Eva C, who was thought to issue ectoplasm, the “miracle fluid,” from between her legs.

Would ectoplasm be considered an amenity? As I have said, I personally define an amenity as a specific and unexpected add-on to the hotel experience.

The bunny did not respond. Instead, it gave Danton a look that said clearly, “I’m not going to set a single ectoplasm-laden foot into that room, you stupid fuck stick.” It was a little weird because I normally didn’t get the impression rabbits cursed much, but evidently, I didn’t know them very well.

(For the uninitiated, “ectoplasm” is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins’s writings on religion.)

To synopsize this kind of ectoplasmic yarn with any degree of fidelity would be to connive at criminal boredom, and I have no intention of doing so, but it might be fruitful to dip a spoon into the curry at random to gain some notion of its flavor.

SCHIBEUGEN.– Oui. C'est le petit espoir qui vous reste. L'épuisement. Ce qui vous guérira, en fin de compte, ce sera une incommensurable lassitude. Vous vieillirez, vous vous étiolerez, et avec la faiblesse viendra le repos. Certes, vous n'aurez pas la force de vous réjouir, mais pas celle non plus de crier, de protester ou de souffrir. Une douce sérénité vous enveloppera. Vous serez calme, calme, juste un petit moignon de vie déchue, repliée sur elle-même et bien ordonnée. Une épaisse couche de cendres recouvrira vos amours passées, présentes, inachevées, inaccessibles, et qui, de toute façon, vous auront renvoyés à votre solitude. Ensuite, doucement, très doucement, sans sursaut ni amertume, vous commencerez un jour à agoniser. Plus rien ne vous intéressera, ni l'agitation ambiante, ni Dieu, ni l'espoir, ni le sens à donner à votre vie. Il vous restera juste assez de force pour tourner vers l'avenir un regard fermé, un regard qui lui aussi se brouillera peu à peu. Jusqu'à ce que vous mouriez. Oui, misez sur l'épuisement. (p. 105-106, extrait de Kroum l'Ectoplasme)

FÉLICIA. –[...]Il vous a ramené quelque chose ? LA MÈRE. – J'ai tout ce qu'il me faut. FÉLICIA. – Un petit téléviseur ? LA MÈRE. – J'ai déjà un téléviseur. FÉLICIA. – Made in Germany par exemple. LA MÈRE. – On voit très bien sur le mien. FÉLICIA. – Un manteau en cuir ? Un porte-monnaie ? Un foulard ? (elle regarde autour d'elle. Renifle) Enfin… LA MÈRE. – Ma chère madame Félicia, mon fils est revenu sain et sauf. C'est le plus important. Il est en bonne santé, il travaille et gagne sa vie, qu'est-ce que je peux demander de plus ? D'ailleurs, c'est lui qui s'est payé son voyage en Europe. (KROUM L'ECTOPLASME)

Sweetheart there’s nothing. In the sense of ectoplasmic—what’s that? a girl asks— certainty. There ain’t no devil. She laughs . . . No god either. You’re it! Science? It’s a baby. I hate your big tongue, the Satanist girl says in her own voice.

Are we kin to autumn rains? Do we rise in mists from wetland moors? Do twighlight fogs seem similar? Do we prowl or run or lope? Are we shadows on a ruined wall? Are we dusts shaken in sneezes from angel tombstones with broken wings? Do we hover or fly or writhe in October ectoplasms? Are we footsteps heard to waken us and bump our skulls on nailed-shut lids? Are we batwing heartbeats held in claw or hand or teeth?

My mother lived in dread of my father. I think that’s pretty much all I can say about her, leaving aside her obsession with gardening and miniature goats. She was a thin woman, with long limp hair. I don’t know if she existed before meeting him. I imagine she did. She must have resembled a primitive life form—single-celled, vaguely translucent. An amoeba. Just ectoplasm, endoplasm, a nucleus, and a digestive vacuole. Years of contact with my father had gradually filled this scrap of nothing with fear.

Pale women fainting at the sight of a specter. Dark-haired men brooding on a foggy English moor. Psychics conducting séances. Photographs of the dead and of ectoplasm, the ghostly substance of the spirit world. All standard stock in horror stories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…but not always fictional.

In my thinking, the entire South beyond my hometown was just one sprawling countryside of ectoplasmic Colonel Sanderses on horseback chasing runaway spirits until the Rapture.

Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people. If they’re close enough, they can see something is different with me, something unnerving, as if I have no features, I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth, I am like a water bear talking to them, or an amniotic traveler, a vitreous floater on their own eyeball, human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them.

People tell you the computer is just a handier, more complex kind of typewriter. But that isn't true. The typewriter is an entirely external object. The page floats free, and so do I. I have a physical relation to writing. I touch the blank or written page with my eyes - something I cannot do with the screen. The computer is a prosthesis. I have a tactile, intersensory relation to it. I become, myself, an ectoplasm of the screen. And this, no doubt, explains, in this incubation of the virtual image and the brain, the malfunctions which afflict computers, and which are like the failings of one's own body. On the other hand, the fact that priority belongs to the network and not to individuals implies the possibility of hiding, of disappearing into the intangible space of the Virtual, so that you cannot be pinned down anywhere, which resolves all problems of identity, not to mention those of alterity. So, the attraction of all these virtual machines no doubt derives not so much from the thirst for information and knowledge as from the desire to disappear, and the possibility of dissolving oneself into a phantom conviviality. A kind of 'high' that takes the place of happiness. But virtuality comes close to happiness only because it surreptitiously removes all reference from it. It gives you everything, but it subtly deprives you of everything at the same time. The subject is, in a sense, realized to perfection, but when realized to perfection, it automatically becomes object, and panic sets in.

It took everything Annika had not to charge herself up with a million volts and turn that little spectral bitch into a smoking blob of ectoplasm.