Ghost of a Smile by Simon R. Green Page A

is that? I wish it could have happened while I was still alive. That I didn’t have to die to find love.”
    â€œMe, too,” said JC. He put his arms around her, very carefully, not quite touching her. It was difficult because he couldn’t feel her, but he did his best. She put her arms around his waist, without quite touching him, and leaned her head almost on his shoulder, so their faces could be side by side. Hardly any space separated them, but it might as well have been forever. Their mouths were close, but they couldn’t even feel each other breathe. Because only JC was breathing. It was tense, and it was awkward, but it was the best they could do, so they stood that way for a while.
    â€œAre you sure you can’t feel anything?” said Kim.
    â€œNot even a ghostly chill,” said JC.
    â€œSooner or later,” said Kim, “you’re going to want someone who can touch you. A lover who can hold and comfort you.”
    â€œI want you,” said JC. “You’re all I ever wanted, even when I didn’t know you existed. I love you, Kim.”
    â€œAnd I love you,” said Kim. “Oh JC, it’s a cruel world, sometimes.”
    â€œHey,” said JC. “If it was a cruel world, we never would have found each other.”
    â€œYes,” said Kim. “There is that.”
    â€œIsn’t there any upside to being a ghost?” said JC. “I mean, there are things you can do that I can’t.”
    â€œWell,” said Kim, “sometimes, when you’re sleeping, and it’s a long time till morning . . . I go flying over London. I let go of gravity and fall upwards, into the night sky, and I go soaring over the rooftops. See the bright lights turn below me like a slow Catherine wheel, see the traffic roaring back and forth like so many toys. And sometimes I fly up among the stars and look down at the Earth, like the most precious and most fragile toy of all.”
    â€œYou see?” said JC. “I can’t do that.”

    Back in Room Three, Melody had finally found something useful. Happy moved forward so he could peer over her shoulder and watched very secret files appear and disappear on the screen in response to Melody’s fingers flitting over the keyboard. It was all very scientific.
    â€œAll right,” said Happy, after a while. “You’ve got that smug and triumphant look on your face, so what am I missing? What have you found?”
    â€œLD50,” said Melody, sitting back in her chair so suddenly she almost head-butted Happy in the face. She folded her arms and scowled at the screen. “And I don’t feel smug, or triumphant. This is not a good thing to have found. LD50 is the dosage at which the new drug is expected to kill half of the test group. Lethal Dose, Fifty per cent. Not something you should be finding in a drug being tested on volunteers. But this LD50 file is quite definitely attached to the Zarathustra project. It seems to be posing the question of what happens if the affected subjects can’t or won’t die? If they insisted on surviving, what should be a Lethal Dose?”
    â€œAre you saying . . . the scientists deliberately gave these people a drug so strong they expected it to kill half the volunteers?” said Happy. “How the hell did they think they would get away with that?”
    â€œYou’re not listening,” said Melody. “Yes, under normal circumstances, half the recipients should have died. But what the scientists really expected was that this new drug would keep them alive. By changing them so much they could survive something that would quite definitely kill normal people. LD50 was the final test, the proof that they’d achieved what they thought they’d achieved. I think . . . whoever was in charge of this project wasn’t too tightly wrapped. They were playing with people’s lives!”
    â€œOkay, I’m thinking illegal ,