What is Spectropunk

What This Is

A monologue from somewhere in the postmortal cities, 127 PM

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Look, I'm not gonna lie—when I first started working at Hartwick's, I thought the job interview was some kind of hazing. They sat me down in the back office where the walls do that thing, you know, that slow expansion-contraction like the building's trying too hard to breathe, and my future manager asked if I had "prior experience with resonance decay" and "comfort around autonomous tech."

I was seventeen. I'd never had a real job. I said yes anyway.

That was two years ago. Now I open the Center three days a week, and I've learned that pretty much everything I said in that interview was a lie I've had to reverse-engineer into truth. School teaches you the history—Blackmere, the Veil Breach, how the first postmortals manifested scared and angry until someone figured out the whole energy compensation thing—but they don't teach you what it feels like when the containment grid under your feet starts buzzing because someone three blocks over just Stepped and the network's rerouting their signal.

They definitely don't tell you that spirit-lenses have preferences.

I work the front counter most mornings. Hartwick's Containment & Vessel Services Center is a combo spot—lens calibration up front, containment registration in the middle, vessel services in the back. It's efficient, I guess. Everything in one place. Feels a little like working in a grocery store where half the aisles are alive and the other half are negotiating their shift hours.

The lenses are stored on a rotating display rack that groans. Not like a machine groan—more like a throat-clearing groan. My first week I kept trying to find the motor making the noise until Dag, the senior tech, told me to stop looking. "They're synced to the local ecto-field," he said, which I've learned is Dag's way of saying it's haunted, kid, get used to it.

People come in wanting adjustments. "I'm seeing too many overlaps." "Everything's got a blue tinge." "My dead uncle won't stop showing up in my peripheral vision even though he's not assigned to this district." I nod, take their lenses, clip them into the calibrator, and wait for the machine to decide if it's a user error or a genuine malfunction. Half the time the calibrator just sighs this little compressed-air sound and spits the lenses back out unchanged. Working as intended.

"Maybe your uncle's freelancing," I tell them. I'm getting better at the customer service voice.

Mid-morning I usually rotate to containment. That's the coldest part of the building, and I mean cold—the kind that sticks to your skin and doesn't leave even after you've clocked out. Postmortals file in to update their manifestation paperwork, renew their location permissions, confirm their energy credits. Some of them are sharp, clear, almost more present than I am. Others flicker like bad bandwidth, their voices phasing in and out.

There's this one regular, Kessler, who died maybe thirty years ago and works the graveyard shift—pun intended—at a distribution hub across town. He's always complaining about the new routing protocols, how the NUN keeps changing the rules, how back in his day you could just float where you needed to be without sixteen forms and a supervisor's clearance code.

"Back in your day you were alive," I said once, trying to be funny.

He stared at me for three full seconds. "Yeah," he said. "That too."

I don't make jokes about the AM era anymore.

The building does this thing where it settles around noon. I don't know how else to describe it. The walls creak, the ceiling tiles shift, the pipes in the bathroom clang like someone's knocking, and the whole place exhales. Dag says it's thermal expansion. I've seen thermal expansion. This isn't that. This is the building having a moment.

I eat lunch out back near the auxiliary vents. There's a loading dock that no one uses anymore because the last time someone tried to park a truck there, the ground opened up—not like a sinkhole, more like the street just… decided it wasn't solid right then—and the truck dropped six inches before the ecto-grid caught it. Now there's caution tape and a faded NUN stamp on the pavement that says SUBSURFACE INSTABILITY – PROHIBITED LOAD ZONE.

I sit on the steps and eat a ectein bar that tastes like it were flavored by someone who heard about food once, second-hand. The vents blast warm air some days, freezing air others. Once I swear they whispered my name—Jory—but that might've been the wind, or the grid cycling, or me not sleeping enough.

You hear stories about the AM era. My grandma talks about it like it was some golden age—clean streets, quiet buildings, death that stayed dead. I've seen the history vids they show in school: old cities with no ectoplasmic grids, no spirit-lanes, no postmortals wandering into coffee shops asking if anyone's seen their daughter. It looks… empty. Peaceful, maybe, but empty. Like a house with no one home.

Now everything's doubled. The living and the dead share the same transit lines, the same jobs, the same arguments about who left the breakroom a mess. Spirits clock in before I do. Vessels walk past me in the hall, their eyes doing that thing where you can tell someone else is driving. The city moans—not just with traffic or generators, but with presence. The infrastructure itself feels aware.

Sometimes I'll be walking home and I'll pass under a streetlight that flickers in rhythm, or I'll cut through an alley where the brickwork’s frosted in hand-shaped smears, and this one building lets out a long, heavy sigh as I walk by.

I notice it every time. I just don’t slow down anymore.

Afternoon shift is when vessel services gets busy. That's the back section, past the containment floor, through the double doors that are always colder on the handles than they should be. I'm technically not certified for vessel work, but sometimes the techs call me in as backup, which really means "stand here and look calm while we handle this."

Vessels come in post-shift, post-possession, whatever you want to call it. They sit in the grounding chairs—these big padded things with built-in resonance dampeners—and wait for the spirit to fully detach. Most of the time it's smooth. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes the vessel's shaking, or crying, or just staring at nothing while their body remembers how to be theirs again.

I'm supposed to monitor the readings, watch for spikes, call the lead tech if anything looks off. What "off" means, I'm still learning. The machines help—they beep, they flash, they do that low warning buzz—but mostly I just watch the person in the chair and try to guess if they're okay.

Last week a guy stumbled out mid-session, still half-gone, and I had to guide him back. He kept apologizing. "Sorry, sorry, I'm good, I'm fine." His hands were shaking. His voice wasn't his yet.

"It's okay," I said, because what else do you say? "Just a few more minutes."

The room smelled metallic like burning wire and something sharper. Medicinal. Wrong.

He looked at me—really looked, the kind of eye contact from someone who wants their body back—and said, "Do you ever wonder what we're doing?"

I didn't answer. I just smiled and told him the tech would be right back.

I think about that sometimes.

I think about how my school guidance counselor told me this was a "growth industry." How my parents were so proud I got a job with benefits, even if the benefits include twice-yearly ecto-exposure screenings and a list of symptoms to watch for. ("Unusual coldness in extremities. Persistent auditory phenomena. Sensation of doubling.")

I think about Kessler, filing his paperwork every month, stuck in a system that didn't exist when he was alive.

I think about the lenses that groan, the panels that sigh, the building that breathes, the vents that know my name.

I think about the AM era—cities that didn't moan, tech that didn't watch you back, bodies that were just bodies and nothing else.

And then I go back to work.

Because this is the world. This is what we've got. The dead don't leave, the living don't stop, and somewhere in the middle there's me, nineteen years old, recalibrating spirit-lenses and pretending I understand what any of this means.

The past isn't past anymore. It's working the night shift. It's haunting the walls. It's breathing down the back of your neck while you're trying to eat a shitty ectein bar in peace.

And honestly?

You get used to the haunt.

Or you learn to pretend you do, and hope that's close enough.