The Ordinary Haunting II

18. New and the Uncertain Pace - Part 2a

The date was probably already a disaster from the moment I let Tay plan it. It was certainly a disaster by the time I'd taken our third wrong street and had to contend with both Tay and the GPS yelling at me to do a U-turn ("at my earliest convenience" – but not).

"Wear your seatbelt properly," I told him once we were back on the correct road and crawling slowly forward in the mid-morning city traffic. Tay pulled his head in from where he'd been trying to spot the source of the jam.

"There's absolutely no problem that I can see. In fact, the cars ahead all look like they're moving just fine. Why is only our section going so slow? Are we in some kind of engineered bubble where everyone is limited to 20 kilometres per hour? Are we part of a social experiment, with special cameras tracking the heat of our blood as we get angrier and angrier at being made to go slower than everyone else for no reason at all? I bet mine would be visibly boiling if I was alive. Actually, I'd be really interested to know what a ghost looks like on that kind of tech. Do you think there'd be any change? I feel quite heated, is my face red or anything? Hin, is my face red?"

I changed lanes, which made no discernible difference. "It's illegal to perform a social experiment without the participants' knowledge and consent," I replied, eyeing a truck ahead that was drifting a little too close to the centre line.

"Hmm, research ethics, huh... Well it would have been nice for whoever made me a ghost without my consent to have informed me properly beforehand. I hope they're real satisfied with the data they're getting."

Tay's hand lifted up, splayed against the thin spring sunshine coming through his open window. The bright rays continued unimpeded into his squinting face.

"Well no-one told us we'd become humans, either," I said. I tossed over my sunglasses. "Knowing the parameters of any experiment prior to its initiation is just one more factor influencing the data set, not the only one. If there is some almighty scientist up there watching us running around in our paper maze, human or ghost or otherwise, they're observing a whole lot of other things. Instincts, intelligence – did you know that someone identified eight different types of intelligence?"

"Now you sound like me." Tay turned in his seat and above the black Ray Bans I could see that the crease between his eyebrows had flattened out, curiosity ever the reliable relaxant for a tetchy Tawan. "Is it one of those personality-type theories? Because the scientific world doesn't generally like those very much."

"Yeah, I'm sure there's not a lot of evidence for it, but that doesn't stop it being fun, right?" I tapped along to a song on my steering wheel as finally the invisible obstruction seemed to let go of our square of traffic and we could pick up speed once more. "Try to guess what they are."

Now I really had him. Tay pushed himself up, back straight as a rod, and prepared eight fingers. "Eight, right?" he asked first. I nodded. "Okay. There's 'book-smart', so, what, linguistic intelligence?"

"Yup."

"Next would be emotional intelligence."

"Ah, break it down."

"Break it down?" Tay puckered his mouth. I checked the GPS – we'd muted it twenty minutes ago when it wouldn't stop repeating instructions because it assumed we didn't know where to go after we hit the traffic jam. "Outer and inner, you mean?"

"Right. They split it into interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences."

"That makes sense. It takes a different kind of intelligence to understand other people than it takes to understand yourself. I like this already." Tay poked his chin thoughtfully with his index finger and smiled.