After Death(21)

The information that he’s taken this mental voyage to discover appears herewith on the windshield of the Tesla, as if displayed on a computer screen. From the archived video provided by a multitude of high-definition security cameras, he reviews the activities of investigators who entered the facility after its decontamination. Some wear black jackets emblazoned with bold, white letters—ISA. Of the multitude of ISA agents swarming the building, one seems to be an outlier, never associating more than briefly with the others as he tours the premises. He spends time alone in Shelby Shrewsberry’s office and then proceeds to camp out in the office of Dr. Simon Bistoury. His head is shaved, his features bold, his profile like that on an ancient Roman coin.

From within the imaginary Tesla, through the medium of his avatar, Michael now watches archived video of Bistoury’s office in which the ISA agent watches earlier archived video of the cafeteria that had been converted into a temporary morgue. He rewinds and watches the video of the agent as the agent repeatedly rewinds and watches a sequence in the morgue. Resurrected Michael sees the agent discover the moment when the sheet over dead Michael rises and then slides to the floor.





Michael had awakened from death an hour before he rose from the posture of a corpse. For a few minutes, aware that he was himself but also more than he had been before, he lay there processing the impossible. He dared not move until he understood his condition. Initially, his heart had not been beating; neither had he been breathing. As he listened to the mortal stillness of his body, a double fear came over him—horror that darkness would take him again and forever, as well as dread of the future that might lie ahead of him and beyond all human knowing. If total terror had seized him, he would have thrust up from his makeshift catafalque at once. However, he knew much about the work being done at Beautification Research and understood that, even as dangerous as it was, good might come from it as easily as evil. He realized that the marriage of living archaea and nanobotics had succeeded in some way that neither the scientists on the bio team nor those on the tech team anticipated. The stasis from which his mind had first ascended now relinquished its hold on his body; three minutes after regaining consciousness, he had felt his heart resume beating, and he had breathed.

For fifty-seven minutes more, he’d remained motionless, in a wonder of self-discovery, reaching out into the world beyond this world, the coded world that is born of this world but is not patent or tangible, the world of the internet and the cloud and all that is virtual, a shadow of reality and yet with the power to shape the truth of which it is only a dark reflection. Soon he realized that he was no longer merely a user of the internet and all sites and systems linked by it, but also that he could be of it, not just as a fish is of the medium in which it swims, but rather as water itself is of the river. He had no need of a computer to plunge into the currents of data. In that chilly morgue, lying under a sheet, he had reviewed the security video and other archives of the facility to learn how the staff of Beautification Research became infected and to witness how rapidly they perished. He saw himself fall dead. He suspected he might be unique, the only one among the deceased to pull a Lazarus. If that proved to be the case, the government and the technology companies partnered in this enterprise would consider him to be a miraculously transformed lab rat that must be studied further, as a possible whistleblower who could expose them to public outrage and congressional investigation, as a likely litigant who might drain their bank accounts, and as a threat to their power by virtue of his own. One thing they would not consider him: a human being like them, with inalienable God-given rights and a heritage of freedom.

As he had at last risen from the cafeteria table and the sheet had slid off him, he had reached into the video stream flowing from the camera and replaced the pixels that composed his image. Second by second, as he made his way out of the room and then the building, he erased the visual record of his escape. He’d known that eventually they would discover that he had gone missing. He only hoped to gain time to better understand the power that had been given to him and how best to use it.

He could have bought more time by erasing all video from all cameras; in the first few hours following his resurrection, he had not always been thinking clearly. Nevertheless, he perceived value in letting them gradually discover what he had become. With time to consider his astonishing capabilities, they would grow increasingly fearful and separate into factions, each with a different view of how to find and capture him. A fugitive is safest when the posse that’s after him is frightened and filled with division.





Now, in Michael’s strange new life, his avatar sits in the front seat of the metaverse Tesla, where archived video from earlier this very day plays on the windshield, showing the nameless agent repeatedly viewing morgue video recorded four days ago.

Michael gives voice to a new destination, the computer system of the Internal Security Agency, and in an instant he is rocketing through the fantastical maze of highways, as if he is a boy at play in a life-size slot-car setup of infinite complexity. In seconds, the imaginary Tesla penetrates the highly guarded ISA data center that, in the real world, is located in Utah. In those archives, Michael seeks and quickly finds the order dispatching a team of agents to Beautification Research after the catastrophe that occurred there. One by one, he flips through the agents’ files, each of which includes a photo as well as a name, until he finds the man with proud Roman features, who is as noble-looking as Julius Caesar but whose eyes suggest a Nero who sets fires for pleasure and delights in the suffering of others. Durand Calaphas.