(no subject)

Ray might have been the Ghostbuster best known for his occasional need to sleep with the light on, but he's far from the only one.

Some nights Peter wasn't so good at getting to sleep either.

It went with the job, you know? One day you're humming along doing just fine- the bottom line's looking good, the publicity out on the street's mostly positive, the last couple of government agencies you heard from were doing their jobs right for once- and then the next, you get a call to get the spook of the week out of the produce section at a Waldbaum's in Astoria. And, you know, that'd be fine if the thing didn't have a nasty little trick where it didn't have an appearance of its own so much as it reflected the people you, the witness, personally knew were dead. Not cool. Amazing trick for parties, maybe, but otherwise not cool at all, especially when it meant you thought Grandma V. was chucking cabbages at your head. Peter was seriously glad when that one wound up in the box. Only problem was, it stuck in the ol' noggin, and come one or two in the morning on the first night without a call in weeks, it left him thinking just a little bit harder about his own mortality than he really wanted to be. Not conducive to a good night's rest at all.

Ray had a fondness for going up on the roof when he had issues, but Peter wasn't all that big on the idea. Perspective was not what he needed. Ray might be okay with the world being an enormous place and him being a teeny tiny speck in the middle of it, but Ray was- not to put too fine a point on it- weird. Brilliant man, loved him like a brother, but weird. Peter did not deal well at all with feeling small, or seeing the whole size of the job in front of them. Not that he didn't think he could do it, but jeez, that kind of thing was a fast ticket to about twelve kinds of neurosis. He was pretty sure the world did not need Peter Venkman, Overcompensator.

The problem was that not thinking about the fact that the world was a whole lot bigger and a whole lot weirder than it'd seemed like back when they started didn't change things, and not facing the fact that he was pretty darn sure he was gonna get old and retire or die before making all of the marks on the world that he wanted didn't change things either. And by 'things' he meant 'the fact that sleep wasn't coming'. He wasn't gonna bury the unpleasant thoughts or ignore them, no sir- he just wanted to deal with them in, you know, the morning. After he'd slept. Once he had his brain in order and could face up to that kind of thing. Not at two AM on a November night like this.

Sadly, talking sternly to his brain did very little in the way of good, so Peter swung his legs over the edge of the bed, grabbed a robe, and headed downstairs. He needed to talk to somebody, and he wasn't going to wake any of the others up, so-

Just like he thought, the car was waiting, its blue scanner light sliding dimly back and forth behind its grille. "Hey, Uncle Peter," Ecto said quietly.

"Hey, kiddo." He padded silently across the garage floor to pat one of the tailfins. It was still kind of a disturbing experience even after two years, talking to the car as if it were a person, but he figured he'd make the effort. "How's it going?"

"Going okay," said Ecto. "The Nikkei's up by four points."

"Seriously?" said Peter. "What're you keeping track of that for?"

"Mr. Tully says it's very important to make sure that your investments are at least partly geographically diversified, 'cause you can't always count on any one country in the long term no matter how strong the economy's been for the past twenty or thirty years."

"... you have investments?" said Peter, blinking a little.

"Not yet," Ecto answered. "Dad's gonna start giving me an allowance soon, though, and then I'm gonna."

Somehow, he hadn't pictured the conversation with the car going like this. "No offense, Ecto, but I gotta say- what do you need investments for? Don't we take care of everything you need?"

The scanner light brightened a little. "Oh, sure," Ecto said. "You're really good about that- but there's other stuff I want too."

"You're kidding. Like what?"

"I wanna not have to worry about gasoline," said Ecto. "That's gonna run out someday. I wanna be ready when it happens."

"... huh," said Peter, looking at the car. "Seriously? That's the kind of thing you think about? Alternative fuel investments?"

"One of 'em," said Ecto. "I want my own radio telescope array, too. Or at least I wanna use one a lot. I wanna see what's out there in the rest of the universe."

"Ecto, you're not even two years old yet."

"So? I think fast and I don't sleep."

"Because things bother you?" said Peter curiously.

"No, because I don't sleep," Ecto answered in a patient tone. "I don't have to. I can shut stuff down, but I don't work like you do."

"But you worry about stuff like we do..."

"Well, yeah, but everybody worries. Animals worry. I just go idle."

"That's not sleep? I would've thought that would be pretty much the same thing."

"No, that's offline. Idle's something else again. I can try and tell you if you really wanna know, but you have to promise me something first."

"Why not," said Peter. "Lay it on me."

"You hafta promise to try and stop looking at me like I'm something weird. I know you're not used to machines like me, but can you at least try?"

"Considering that it sounds like we've got a lot more in common than I thought," said Peter, "that might not be all that hard after all. Hang on, I gotta get a chair for this."

They found Peter asleep with his feet up on Ecto's hood the next morning. "Don't wake him," the car said very, very quietly. "He's had a long night."

Miskatonic Medical Alumni Association Newsletter - 1925

In Memoriam

Summer 1925 Obituaries

IVO SHANDOR, MD, AIA, class of 1912, died July 2 in New York City following a months-long illness. He was forty-one. A man of many talents, he earned his undergraduate degree from Miskatonic in 1906 and stayed on there to achieve his MD and a degree in architecture simultaneously before completing an internship and residency at Tufts.

He served as a medical officer in the Canadian Army during the Great War, making many striking advances in the realm of battlefield surgery. Upon retirement from military service, he turned to a peacetime career in architecture, winning great renown for his design of several revolutionary New York City apartment buildings. His fascination with Theosophy and his discussions in philosophical circles were unrivalled in New York City. His tragic collapse on March 22nd resulted in his admittance to Manhattan State Hospital, where he remained until his passing. Shandor was a lifelong bachelor, but leaves behind a significant circle of friends and acquaintances in the Theosophist movement.