IJ study archive

Gately, the wraith, and the figurants (p. 831)

quote

The wraith said Even a garden-variety wraith could move at the speed of quanta and be anywhere anytime and hear in symphonic toto the thoughts of animate men, but it couldn’t ordinarily affect anybody or anything solid, and it could never speak right to anybody, a wraith had no out-loud voice of its own, and had to use somebody’s like internal brain-voice if it wanted to try to communicate something, which was why thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts, from inside your own head, if a wraith’s trying to interface with you. The wraith says By way of illustration consider phenomena like intuition or inspiration or hunches, or when someone for instance says ‘a little voice inside’ was telling them such-and-such on an intuitive basis.

Context

The wraith — JOI — explains the physics before the assault: a wraith has no out-loud voice and can only communicate by borrowing an animate man's internal brain-voice, so wraith-thoughts arrive indistinguishable from your own. This is the mechanism that makes the lexical flood on the next page possible, and it quietly rewrites every over-lexical word in Gately's narration book-wide as a possible ghost-fingerprint.

In anthology