Living_Smoke

A science fiction story by Peter Sibbald.
Note: this story is incomplete.

 It is hard to say when it all started. Since the disaster, it has been suggested that a similar outbreak happened in the dark ages, and that it merely subsided to the point of not mattering - without ever ending altogether - and remained thus dormant until the outbreak of the 21st century. The Attack of the Shadows generally refers to the necrophobia outbreak of the 21st century (the ailment has been dubbed necrophobia to make it sound like a tangeable and treatable disease), but it is not entirely clear when it stopped being moot and became a serious problem. Most historians draw the line at the 2013 Moscow Event.
 On May 5th, 2013 in Ramenki Morgue, Moscow, everything seemed normal. Of course, everyone admitted that the morgue was creepy, but that, it was believed, was just due to the presence of human corpses in the building - it was no creepier than any other morgue or funeral home, probably less. The place was certainly less creepy than your average graveyard, not "haunted" by anyone's definition. The neighborhood was, indeed, a slum, with much homelessness and despair, but that does little to explain The Event. When all the workers left for the night, there were 317 bodies in the facility. The next day, May 6th, The Event, caught everyone - even the most superstitious - off guard. They tallied the bodies at 305.
 Missing human corpses can sometimes prove tricky to explain, but not like this case. No manifests or documents were tampered with, and everyone remembered the names of deceased absentees clearly; these were human corpses declared dead by professional doctors, permitted to cool at their natural pace to room temperature, having no pulse and left in the vaults of a morgue - kept under lock and key - for an average of 2 and 1/3 days before they disappeared. There was always the possibility of theft, but the locale was not that kind slum wherein any necromancer, witch-doctor, or cannibal would have trouble fitting in. The possibility was, of course, investigated, but nothing of the sort was found, and that by the time that investigation was carried out - on May 8th - there were bigger and more disturbing questions.
 By 12 noon, on the 6th, Local news agencies attempted to cover the story. It was a humiliation to those news agencies, and for once the russian government tried to make their press inform the public, and their press refused. The irony was mocked by most, but offended others. Totalitarianism had left the public in the dark, and now so did free press. Rumours inevitably spread like wildfire, and took on a variety of ludicrous forms, but the fact is that the truth, in as much detail as we have since discerned, would have sounded perposterous as well.
 On the 7th, some American and Canadian news Agencies caught wind of a ghost story and figured this would make one heck of a story. They arrived in Moscow at 1 A.M. local time, wide awake from jet lag. Talking at a pace and loudness tailored to their own time.
 "You belive in ghosts Mack?"
 "Nah, if ya can't measure something it don't exist. All the scientist nerds I've met tell me there's no ghosts so there aren't any. You?"
 "Of course! I mean, I understand you're type. You don't beleive in 'em 'cuz you never seen 'em. I was like that before I saw my first ghost too. But if the stories are what they sound like, you'll be a believer soon enough."
 "What makes you so certain?"
 "Well, where do you think the bodies went?"
 "Ah, Bill, people steal things in America, and I hear it's worse in Russia. What makes it impossible for some thugs to just hack into the vault and make off with the corpses?"
 "And do what with them?"
 "I dunno, I'm not that kind of pervert or cultist."
 "That's the problem: this was a klepto-ridden slum - granted - but just 'cuz you steal watches and sell them in dark alleys doesn't mean you're a cannibal too. I don't think that theft adequately explains the facts."
 "I must admit, you have a point." This was a third person, holding a sound boom and sitting at the end of the bench seat, "The locals aren't that out of control, and not out of control in that way. I hear even the murderers sometimes leave bodies with money in their pockets: they've lost respect for their country, but not for the dead. But, I've never really believed in ghosts, not entirely, and I wonder if ghosts make the situation any easier to explain. I mean, aren't ghosts supposed to be wondering souls which cannot rest in peace because they either have unfinished business, or do not realize that they are dead?"
 "Yeah, so a ghost picks up its own body and walks out-"
 "How do you pick up your own decomposing corpse without it occurring to you that you're dead?"
 "Er... Well... S'pose it's unfinished business?"
 "Dealing with the body is the morgue's business, and they are generally quite respectfull. The bodies were only dead for about two days - hardly overdue for burial or cremation - and in good hands. These particular bodies, according to my research, were treated in accordance with their respective wills. And if you turn go-through to slip through the wall won't the body fall through your hands and land on the vault floor."
 "The ghosts can sorta turn themselves and the bodies go through to the wall but not to each other, and they're O.K. with the morgue, they just have something to tell us, and their decisions would make sense to us if we knew what they know."
 "So what makes them any more of a suspect than anyone else? A living person can have something to say and no-one listening, and stealing a corpse, as you would point out, grabs attention."
 "Because, Phil, the living have other means of communicating. They physically can speak, and you would expect them to think of graffitti or murder first."
 Mack interjected "We're here."
 The van screeched sideways to a stop and the crew jumped out. Before they got to the morgue's front door, they saw it opening. The news crew jumped back, whether scared that it would be a theif, or that it would be a zombie. After getting a bit closer to the van than to the door (with the exception of the reporter, who stood a third of the way from door to van) they started up the cameras.
 What happened next is subject to debate. One thing that has come under much scrutiny is the film footage. It is believed that chemical, lighting or other conditions may have caused halucinations in the witnesses, but there is little reason to suspect that the footage was in any way tampered with. It starts with the timestamp 1:15.
 "This is Mack O'Rony, reporting live from Ramenki Morgue, where some bizare events are alleged to have taken place. We have just arrived less than a minute ago and a mysterious figure seems to be exitting the building... Er... wearing nothing but a toe tag."
 Mack was in the centre of the shot, with the door - still completely shut - slightly behind and to the camera's left of him. The hinge was on the camera's left of the door, and a guard stood to the right, in the shot, of Mack, but roughly the same distance from the camera than the door, so as to be one or two steps from the front wall of the morgue. The guard was staring, paralyzed with fear into the air at head level right in front of the door, and Mack kept glancing over his shoulder at the exact same place. The camera shifted it's atention seconds after the recording started to the exact same vacant point in space. The camera started slowly bumping up and down, while gaining distance from the door.
 The guard screamed "Eto Sarov Karakowski! Eto mertvyi paren, telo kotorogo propal bez vesti!" This translates roughly as "That is Sarov Karakowski! That is the dead man whose body was missing."
 "Could somebody translate that? I don't speak russian." Blurted Mack, glancing in random directions.
 Witnesses and tangible evidence suggest that someone across the street from the morgue, thus well outside the camera's view, openned a second story window to shout, "He says zat zees eez zee missing dead guy!"
 "Oh, well th-"
 "Uh, I think you should take a look at... HOLY SHIT!"
 The first voice was Mack again, the second was Bill, the camera man. The camera fell, and hit the pavement at an awkward angle, ricocheted once and landed facing to the camera's left of the door. The camera was on it's right-hand side, and the van's rear doors, open, were halfway off the edge of the view.
 "RUUN!" Bill hyperventilated a little then continued, "GET IN THE VAN! IT'S COMING!"
 The camera shows half of Bill from behind enter the edge of the veiw, then dart into the vehicle.
 "What's all that about?" inquired Phil, nervously. A sound boom was set down in front of the camera, blocking most of it's veiw. The camera jerked it's view downwards, then back up towards the door.
 "The camera doesn't show- ...AAH!"
 The camera fell again. This time it landed mostly upside-down, propped - as it would later be found - on the sound boom. The door, and Mack's feet were in plain view.
 "RUN!"
 "What's everyone getting so-"
 "MOVING, BLACK SMOKE! IT'S LIKE IT'S ALIVE OR SOMETHING!"
 Mack turned slightly at the waist towards the door, then started, calmly by comparison to everyone else, before Phil finished his last remark. "I don't see-"
 "THE CAMERA DOESN'T SEE IT EITH-"
 "GOOD GOD! NOW I SEE IT!"
 "QUICK GET IN!"
 "SVYATOE DER'MO!" The bilingual local's voice, presumably from the window. This exclamation meant roughly "HOLY CRAP".
 Mack's lower half is seen running towards and to the left of the camera (which was now the camera's right).
 "I'm in! Step on it!"
 The door can be heard slamming.
 The guard exclaimed "CHTO ONI GOVORYAT?!" meaning "WTF?!"
 "You guys left the filming equipment-"
 The guy in the window was shouting back and forth with the guard as the driver spoke.
 "WE CAN GET NEW CAMERAS! IF WE DIE, WE LOSE THAT SHIT ANYWAY!"
 "The wing mirror shows noth... AHH!" The driver's account of events says that he saw the living smoke when checking over his shoulder, but that it had no reflection in the mirror. It was hard to judge distance, the smoke being amorphous as smoke typically is, and thus difficult for any of the witnesses to say whether or not it cast a shadow; it was like a shadow itself. Later sightings of similar phenomena say that the living smoke disappears in light.
 Before the driver finished saying "AHH!" the squeeling of tires was heard.
 "Kamera ne videl yeg-"
 "IYEEE"
 A window slammed. The guard's legs left the camera's view.
 The camera rolled for two and a half more hours. One other incident involving screaming was recorded, similar in nature: some night-shift guards in the building stepped out the door, leaving it open, and stepping past the camera. The screaming takes place moments later. At 3:45 A.M., local time, a person is seen walking up to the camera, calmly picking it up, and the filming stopped then.
 The next morning, things cleared up a little, but not much. People stopped seeing things, but remembered exactly what they saw. The guard was found in the fetal position in a dumpster two blocks away, saying something about flying serpents with glowing red eyes. The window guy had his window shut, his door locked and kept his lights on for the rest of the night. He does not remember sleeping, and swears he saw a human skull out his window. The witnesses to the second sighting were found curled up in separate street corners, muttering about bats and spiders. Everyone agrees that these things came between 5 seconds and 10 minutes after the living smoke.
 * * *
 Now it seems fitting to allude to traditional mythology regarding vampires. They were supposed to live in coffins and castles like some modern stories, but their forms were not limitted to caped humans and bats. Capes were normal attire in context, and vampires could also turn into a fine mist, capable of slipping through door cracks. Vampires were not supposed to cast shadows, survive in good lighting, or have reflections. Camera's did not exist that long ago. Like the modern myths, stories varied between people dying, then waking up as vampires, and the other version where one became infected when one's blood was sucked by a pre-existing vampire.
 If situations like the Moscow Event were to take place in midieval Europe, it is difficult to imagine how else they would have described it, and like all legends, such phenomena would get exaggerated with each re-telling.
 I digress.
 An Australian news agency later joined the situation in Moscow, and before long things got as close to sorted out as they would get for a while. The western-world news agencies unveiled the pieces of evidence, with commentary like the account of the Moscow Event presented here, and, obviously, no claims as to what actually took place - just speculation about hallucinogens, elaborate hoaxes, hallucination inducing illnesses, etc.
 Similar situations arose shortly thereafter around the world. They came to be known as "living smoke" sightings. Stories like this swirled together with local legends and superstition in some third world countries where education was not sufficiently available, and in places lacking the resources, or with more desperate things to do than give the dead proper burials, or whatever the local ceremonies might be, were quite susceptible to these events.
 Everyone always saw the dead at the exact same place in any given scene. The manner in which everyones' gaze coincided with something invisible to the camera in the Moscow Event is difficult to explain with hallucinations, and in some cases - including the Moscow Event - hoaxes are unlikely as well. There was not enough time between contact with eachother and the sightings for the witnesses to coordinate such a stunt.
 Yet there was also some inconsistency to the eyewitness accounts. It seems that in nearly all of these occurences, everyone remembers the deceased subject facing, directing their attention and/or even pointing directly at the observer. Multiple observers can see the apparation looking directly at themselves, even when observing the figure from completely different angles. The guard outside the Russian morgue and Mack had looked at the unoccupied point-of-intersection of everyones attention from more than 90 degrees apart, and yet both recall being stared at. Then, contrarily, there is astounding consistency with which the nature of the vivid vapour is described, and yet it, too, seems to direct itself at whoever we ask. The clarity, or conversely the "dreaminess", of the monsters seen after the smoke varies - many witnesses see nothing at all, or sometimes the deceased individual again.
 Much of this is explained if we subscribe to the conjecture that everyone involved sees what they expect to see. First, when a dead body is missing one expects to find it- the body of the exact individual whose body is missing.
 Then, it is speculated, some environmental influence - maybe chemical, biological, psychological, magnetically resonant or something else - interferes with the presence centre of the witnesses' brains. This would cause them to feel that someone was nearby, living, breathing and consious. It is an established fact that setting up magnetic fields to converge on the centre of the brain responsible for keeping track of how many beings one's senses have picked up causes that centre of the brain to malfunction, giving the impression that one percieved a different number of beings. A strong reaction of that brain tissue leads one to feel "watched" by the additional beings. For reasons not even speculated about, the brain, during these incidents, sees one more living breathing person than is acually there, and the vision of the dead person plays that role.
 Next things get ugly. Once the location becomes easier to observe - such as if one looks for shadows or reflections, if one reviews video footage, or the area becomes well enough lit (the chain reaction rarely takes place when it would normally be easy to tell what is happening, such as in broad daylight), the observer temporarily snaps out of it. When one observes systematicly the mind scrutinizes it's environment and cannot be decieved even by itself. This takes place almost instantly, leaving the observer with the impression that they never saw the figure's reflection photo or shadow whatsoever. This makes the observer not know what to expect.
 That is a problem when you are in a state of seeing whatever you expect; everyone there suddenly does not know what they are seeing. It becomes a blind spot in their senses: they do not know what's their, so neither do their senses, and this in turn causes a vicious spiral of uncertainty. The blind spot grows and approaches them, taking on a completely amorphous and blurry-bordered form (because they don't know what shape to expect the blind spot to be in). This all takes place in a fraction of a second, starting when the observer suddenly looks directly where they thought the dead person was.
 The final phase is fear. We humans are so used to having an astoundingly detailed and complete awareness of our surroundings that we take it for granted, and cannot stand to lose it. Like fear of the dark, we imagine the worst-case scenario consistent with what we know about our surroundings, and react accordingly. One expects to find evil lurking just around every corner (like the monsters under a childs bed or in their closet), and every shadow to which our eye's cannot adjust holds our worst nightmares. Once again, this is a bad combination with seeing what one expects to see, explaining the final phase of the encounters.
 There are only two things left to explain. The odds against the disappearance of a body, the forms of impaired perception which cause one to see what one expects, and the sensation of presence - all happenning to multiple people at the same time - in numerous instances worldwide - are hard to dismiss as a mere coincidence. The odds against everyone seeing the same person in the exact - sometimes down to the inch - same place with even more striking similarities when one looks at the accounts (rarely does one witness see the dead man point when annother does not), are likewise difficult to overlook.
 This sounds like a horrible thing, but there is a silver lining to these happenings: they did not affect reality in any way. Seeing demonic snakes does not make them real, or change anything which is real in any way. Remember that the worst thing believed to have actually taken place during the Moscow Event was a high-end camera being manhandled, dropped a few times, and finally stolen. From the fact that we know what was recorded it is obvious that the thief was eventually caught, and the digital memory - far more valuable at that point than the camera - was completely intact. It turns out that with minor repairs, the camera was restored to perfect condition as well. There is only one recorded incident wherein one such encounter actually killed someone.
 The tale can be looked at as proof of karmatic justice. A Somalian warlord had just finished skinning half a dozen hostages (executed priorly by a firing squad), because their families were falling behind on their ransom payments. They hung the pelts in trees in the families front yards as a warning then went to bed and slept soundly (they were used to this) until rudely awakened at around 4:00 in the morning, May 28th. Several of them remember having innards flung at them by their victims - all of them, that is, except for the man who had, himself, done the skinning and participated in the execution. He did not remember what he saw, because he died of a heart attack when he saw it. As I said, karmatic justice: not the nicest person in the world, and a quick and painless death. On a more serious note, however, the man was the first casualty of the infestation, and it is ruefull that he went through the psychological torture of seeing whatever he saw.
 After sunrise, the families of the deceased woke like any other day. They did not find pelts in their trees - those had disappeared like the Ramenki Morgue bodies. They had not yet been told that their kin were murdered or mutilated, and so did not expect such, nor think anything unusual when the deceased were seen alive and well at their doorsteps bright and early. They listened to the deceased tell stories of escaping with minor injuries, and never underwent living smoke sightings because they did not find anything sufficiently unusual to warrant scrutiny, plus it was in good lighting. Their only negative experience would be the disappointment of finding out that their loved ones were, indeed, presumed dead.
 * * *
 The infestation - whether demonic or simply bacterial - had claimed it's first life with that warlord, but others were soon to follow, in a different manner.
 On May 30th, one of the guards who had shown up in the Moscow Event woke up with blood in his mouth. He jolted to complete awakeness upon realising that it was not his own. It was his family's blood. He found his head resting on his youngest son's corpse, and his wife was back in his and her bed, with an open wound on her head and his bite marks on her neck. Before long, he noticed his brass alarm clock on the floor next to the bed, with blood on it. The man screamed bloody murder, as anyone would. Then he curled up and cried. His wife and children were definitely dead, and he had no recollection of how this took place. He shouted in emotional pain. Who could have done this? Could it have been him? That's what the neighbors thought when they woke up, and heard his sobbing through the cheap walls. The first neighbor knocked, and he let them in, uncertain about what to expect, but convinced that things could not get worse. This curious friend jumped at the sight, and called the police. The "suspect" was found forensically guilty, and locked up for practical reasons, although lie-detector tests showed that he truly did have no clue how the scene came to look the way it did.
 Polygraph tests are unreliable, but large numbers of people being found by lie-detectors to have no intent of deception can add up. Like the Moscow Event, episodes like this happened later and elseware. Many people who experienced living smoke sightings - including McGus "Mack" O'Rony, the news anchor - found themselves in the middle of horrific crime scenes. In almost all cases, physical evidence found them guilty and lie-detectors - including sophisticated EEG and MRI tests - found them completely baffled.
 The situation became clearer as prison marshals watched these scenes unfold in prison cells. Inmates who had killed everyone in their homes one night, and who had awaken with no recollection of the crime - usually this happened around one month after the associated sighting, plus or minus a week - would almost invariably attack their cellmates vicously in their own sleep. These murderers came to be refered to as "sleep murderers."
 The mental state of sleep murderers was like a combination of several previously known and well-documented pathological conditions. Sleep walking and sleep talking are common nuisances. Homocidal psychosis can lead people to have fits of uncontrollable rage and violence, even against people they know and love, and often unprovoked. One characteristic of such fits is that the brain stops recording memory: a person in such a fit cannot react based on experiences during the fit from more than a few seconds ago, and will have no idea what they did when they snap out of it. These tantrums can start and stop abruptly and without warning. Nocturnal lithophagy, or "sleep eating", can kill the afflicted individual, as those with this condition frequently eat non-food items in their sleep with no recollection of it in the morning: if they sleep walk up to something sharp or poisonous they die. Clinical vampirism is a mental ailment which causes people to feel a pathological need to drink human blood. They will feel that it is a physical need like that for food or water, but neither satisfied by water nor food other than human blood. "Necrophobia" as we dubbed the condition, starting from sightings, was like all of these rolled into one. In short, living smoke sightings exposed the witnesses brain to something other than the hallucinations - if, indeed, they were hallucinations - the sightings turned many witnesses into complete and utter basket-cases. What's your problem? Everything!
 A particularly studied sleep-murder fit might be that of Yung Chi, in Shang Hai penitentiary. It was June 2nd, and the man was awaiting trial for his first episode. By this time, 11 other people - who would later be diagnosed with necrophobia - worldwide had been tried and convicted of murder, and the ailment was scarcely documented or understood at all. Yung Chi was sleeping seemingly soundly one night when the guards noticed him snore increasingly loudly, then stop breathing, wake up partially and commence breathing quietly again like a routine case of sleep apnia. Yung's muscles were visibly tense like restless leg syndrome or even an epileptic seizure.
 Then he rolled violently out of bed. He moved jerkily with all his muscles flexed and shivering. It was as though something were remote-controlling him, but could only throw so many switches at a time, making it difficult to move multiple joints co-ordinatedly at once, as though having never been in a human body before. In these spasm like movements, he stumbled - as though struggling to balance in even his quadropedal stance - backwards towards the back of the cell.
 One guard exclaimed, "Huai chuaengshaong!", chinese for "Back into bed!"
 "Taingzhih zuoi rehnhey tyuraende doingzuoi!" meaning "Stop making any sudden movements!"
 Yung made a hissing-gargling noise in the back of his throat. He and kept moving back, squinting tensely whether the flashlight got in his eyes or not. He reached the back of the cell and fell over onto his right shoulder. With his left toe and knee still on the floor, not seeming to notice that his shoulder was on the ground, he lifted his right leg into a tightly curled position with his foot flat against the wall. His right arm lay almost fully extended, with the wrist in an unusual position, and his left hand was supporting part of his weight by the fingertips, touching the ground just beside his left shoulder, which in turn was low enough to force his elbow to extend past his back. Still touching the wall and floor with those points of contact his bashed his left shoulder and his chin repeatedly into the floor, making a gravelly grunting noise, and blinking during the impacts. His right arm sprang behind his back, as if he did not expect his back to be in the way. He made a high pitched crying noise as he did this. Flicking his left arm past his left-hand side as one might flick one's index finger with one's thumb, he smacked his hand - which seemed to be typing on a keyboard in thought would be there - into the ground at a considerable velocity, kicking up dust and making a noise louder than his vocalizations. This impact propelled him upright, into a sort-of hands and knees position (except that his left foot was still pressed against the wall).
 The spazzing inmate stopped for a second, rearing slowly back with muscles clenched.
 "Taingzhih zu-"
 Yung interrupted with a cry which he has never been able to replicate while conscious. Biomechanists and linguists debate how, and even whether or not a healthy human set of vocal chords could make such a noise. It sounded like two blood curdling screams, one from each gendre, and a bucket of marbles being dropped out of a second story window all at the same time, like a dense crowd dieing a Phillip Wylie novel.
 The guards held their breath in shock for a second while Yung pounced across his cell. Witnesses aren't sure if he even touched the ground en route. The loud clang of the impact was heard throughout the complex, and the scene made the guards jump. Yung collapsed into the floor, awake.
 He cried in pain. His eyes shut in pain and his hands holding his head.
 "Ay! Waw de tow!" meaning "Ow! My head!"
 "Tamai!" meaning "Gosh darned, fouling piece of crud," only in slightly stronger language.
 "Tamai, waw de tow!"
 It was nearly ten minutes before anyone managed to give the man any help. The guards were obviously relectant to open the cell door (for all they knew it could happen again). Eventually a guard handed the bleeding prisoner a bandage and head dressing through the food/handcuff slot. The guards then handed the man a pair of handcuffs, and instructed him to, when he was ready, put them on behind his back, so that they could safely enter. With no recollection of the last few minutes, he did not see why so much caution was reasonable. Couldn't they see he was injured?
 After he did this, medics were ready with a neck brace and a full-body restraint which served as a stretcher. Medical examination found he had no idea what took place, a survivable concussion, and a fracture in the forehead of his cranium. He was strapped down every night thereafter.
 Inspectors found the deadbolt - a 5 mm diametre, 10 cm long bar of austentitic steel - bent nearly half a degree across it's full length. The damage was visible to the naked eye upon close inspection. This kind of damage would be a lot for a single blow from a sledge hammer, let alone a headbutt.
 A forensic engineer with background in biomechanics looked at the deadbolt. The investigator asked where the body was, and was shocked to hear that the man survived - surviving a blow to the head like that should be physically impossible even for a trained soccer player. It made sense for the guards to have been shocked by the situation: kevlar vests offer little protection against blunt force trauma, and a blow like that could easily break all the ribs it hit.
 Yung Chi made a full recovery from the head injury. Sleep murdering is still seen as an untreatable lifelong ailment. It does not, however, come with narcolepsy or hypersomnia, meaning that a person can stay awake when priorly awake in an ordinary manner, and taking paralytic drugs before sleep usually treats all of the symptoms.
 A locksmith was able to heat the deadbolt to a glow by acetelyne torch, and bend it straight.
 It has been noted that people appear to increase strength during fits of sleep murder. This is not supernatural: mothers have been known to lift cars to save their children, and people with no training zapped by electricity have been known to jump distances which, if measured and documented, might constitute world records. Human muscles possess the ability to exert far more force under extenuating circumstances than they can under normal circumstances. Some ailments associated with mental handicaps have a side-effect of increasing the density of muscle fibres resulting in tens of times more strength than usual - this is known by the somewhat derogatory name "retard strength". Sleep murderers have normal muscle fibre density, but like a person with a siezure, can summon up abnormal strength. Unfortunately, little is known about the biophysics of sleep murder, and the analogous situations mentioned have very distinct explanations, and many more exist.
 As for surviving the impact, people sometimes live through surprizing things. People get lobotomized by crowbars, pickaxes, swordfish or other items, and sometimes survive. In this particular case the skull fracture allowed the brain to swell without causing dangerous amounts of pressure, and several other coincidences allowed survival. That many sleep murderers survive astounding things remains unexplained, but there is probably nothing supernatural about it.
 In parts of the world where medical treatment is less available, these people tend to die of their wounds. In parts of the world where restraining devices and prison cells are in short supply, desperate situations simply call for desparate measures.
 * * *
 At first, this was thought to be the worst of it. Then there was a disturbing corpse disappearance in North Korea, on June 17th. The body was of a sleep murderer, who had been executed by electricution without a fair trial (the evidence was looked at and the man had no apparent explanation, and obviously no attourney). A british statistician heard the news and quickly looked into all the living smoke sightings. Sure enough, the vast majority had been convicted for, or at least suspected of, murder. All had either an anecdote of hallucination, or told stories which no-one would believe. The pattern was unignorable: this ailment was contageous.
 This was unsettling. There were obviously many countries which could do nothing to bring the pestilence under control, but even in developed countries, there were problems. Quaruntining the bodies of the known infected did not stop the bodies from disappearing, nor did it stop them from being spotted outside the quaruntined areas. The plague - be it natural or supernatural - was spreading and it seemed that nothing could stop it. The pathogen - be it parasites, bacteria, viruses, demons or ghosts - remains exceedingly elusive to this day. Without knowing what the pathogen is one cannot even begin to make a vaccine, let alone a cure. Antibiotics and parasiticides seemed to have little effect.
 On the 20th, William "Bill" Woodsworth - the cameraman in the Moscow Event - died from a policeman's bullet. This was because he was sprinting through his appartment building killing people in the hallways. The officer of the law showed up to find him drinking the receptionist's blood, saw him look at the police officer and screech, and the officer panicked outright, shooting the man once in the chest, and hearing gurgling noises he shot again, at the head this time, out of fear and shock. In the policeman's defence, it was a pretty gruesome scene long before the first shot, and while the second shot was uncalled for, it was better than if the officer had not been there at all.
 By this time the infestation was well enough known for everyone to recognize it when they saw it. Examiners did not take long to confirm the obvious, but then again, it would not take long for living smoke sightings to occur.
 Within hours of the man's death, his body was placed in a newly designed "maximum security morgue" (there's a term you didn't hear back in the oughties). The vault was literally air-tight, and locked from the outside. A digital camera watched from a corner of the ceiling. The camera was closed circuit, sending it's observations to a remote location, where they were recorded in high redundancy and parity-check. That way, if something did go wrong, at least some knowledge would be gained.
 53 hours post-mortem, Bill's body "evaporated". The remotely- stored footage shows the body blackening, then breaking into some sort of fine particulate matter which seemed to become suspended in the air. The surreal soot was not recognized by living smoke witnesses as living smoke, but appearing somehow different. In any case, not much footage was found. Within seconds of wafting into the air, the plume engulfed the body, and diffused enough to be seen clearly through, leaving only the shroud and toe-tag behind. The swarm, or cloud, or whatever you want to call it