Sheathed in Silicon

Chapter One

[Next]

Sean was falling.

He felt nothing, but nonetheless he was falling. Of that Sean was certain.

-

“Hello Mr. Kelly. You’re just on time for your 9 AM appointment,” the pretty, smiling woman seated behind her desk said as she stood up to greet him. Sean smiled reflexively back at her before he refocused his gaze on her offered hand. His eyes caught sight of the white nail polish she had on her finely manicured nails. “It’s the little things,” he thought before taking her hand into his and shaking it softly.

Sean had learned a bit of this and a bit of that from past girlfriends, but there was one in particular who’d opened his eyes to much of the grooming and preening that some women still did. When he was in his teens and twenties, Sean simply hadn't paid attention to those small things. His eyes, like most males, had glazed over and gone myopic when they were meant to be appraising them. Nice earrings? Didn’t care. Cute shoes? Didn’t care. Polished nails? He didn’t care! It used to be that he’d only had eyes for the more primal facets of what made a woman, well, a woman. A good figure. A pretty face. Good teeth. Plenty of plush on her chest, and lots of storage space in the back. To him, most of those in some combination could have offset any other personal defects. At least for a while.

Then it happened that the girl he had very nearly made into his fiancée finally explained to him (with much cajoling) why she so studiously engaged in these minute vanities that neither himself nor nearly any man on the planet factored into their appraisal of a woman’s beauty. He hadn’t been so stupid as to not realize that these were signals to other women, but what he hadn’t grasped was that they were supposed to also be signals for men. They were meant to give insight into who a woman was on first sight. Something like a set of natural, cared-for nails was meant to be as good as exchanging a business card from one person to another. It conveyed a meaning, “I am refined. I take care of myself to this standard, what about you?” And admittedly, Sean did not. He was a three-day-old beard, jeans and a t-shirt kinda guy.

Which was why that relationship finally hit the rocks and sank.

To some degree or another it was the receptionist’s job to take pride in her appearance, but it was more than that as he now knew. In that mere glimpse he perceived that her nails had been covered in more than just a dollop of polish from some nameless company, and what’s more he knew that this woman was refined enough to be well outside of his league. Which made a certain kind of sense considering he had showed up to this meeting at Everlast Enterprises sporting said three-day-old beard, jeans, and t-shirt.

“Dr. Miller will be with you shortly,” the nameless woman said as she retracted her hand and returned to her seat.

“Thank you.”

-

Hadn’t it been warm just a few moments ago? Or had it been hours?

Sean didn’t know, but now it seemed cool wherever he was.

What was he doing again? Oh right, falling. But… why? Did it matter?

Sean’s mind calmed once again, and he simply stopped caring.

-

“And as you can see here…” Dr. Miller patted one of the aluminum drums that were settled on steel supports which lifted a good five feet off the ground. “This is one of our thermoses.” Sean’s stomach got a little queasy when he thought about what was inside, but then noticed the doctor had softly caressed the drum before he pulled his hand away. That made Sean raise an eyebrow, a habit of his whenever he grew inquisitive.

“Each one can contain up to 45 of our Charges, and we currently have over 150 just such thermoses waiting to be used.” Sean was about to open his mouth but thought better as soon as Dr. Miller began speaking again. He had come to listen after all.

“This facility resides next to no major fault lines. There’s never been a flooding incident within a hundred miles. We can run the entire building in a suspended mode for two months without needing to refuel the generators.” As if he were reading his mind, the doctor then answered the next thing that had popped into Sean’s head. “That’s just the facility of course. Each thermos has enough supercooled nitrogen to keep all of our charges safely immersed for up to three years before boil-off becomes an issue.” The doctor’s friendly smile did little to set Sean at ease with this place. Why would it? He was basically at a graveyard.

Sean hadn’t sought out Everlast Enterprises on his own. A friend of his by the name of Charlie had recommended them to him. Everlast were holding onto some of his wife’s eggs in case of an emergency, and incidentally, Everlast also had a division dedicated to something that piqued Sean’s interest: human cryonics.

“How cold does it get?”

“Why? Are you thinking about taking a bath in one of these? I wouldn’t recommend it.” The doctor laughed at his own bad joke before going on to actually answer the question. “Oh, it’s a frigid negative 196 degrees centigrade in there.” He raised his hand and touched the side of the thermos again, and once again Sean noticed. “Cold enough to kill you almost instantly.”

“The thermos can self-regulate at that temperature; we just need to top off the nitrogen every now and then like I said before.”

“How long have you guys been doing this?”

“Oh, since the eighties! But we’re primarily invested in agriculture. We got our foot in the door when the president of the company wanted to cool things down for himself.” Dr. Miller grinned. “I’m told he was spry for an octogenarian, but it wasn’t like he was getting any younger.”

Sean hesitated before asking his next question. This place was so odd. Aesthetically it reminded him of a chemical plant he had done some contracting for, but in practice it was much more terrifying. “And how many customers are here?”

Dr. Miller’s face grew stern. “We don’t like to think of our Charges as customers. Nor do we like to present ourselves as just a company. It's in bad taste. No, we want to be stewards for the future, not technocratic crypt keepers.”

“Right, Charges. There are how many exactly?” Sean asked Dr. Miller.

“Well, this facility houses about a thousand right now, but demand grows more and more with each passing year. We’re probably going to have to expand our operations here within five years in addition to setting up further facilities just like it across the country.”

“You guys anticipate this”—he gestured around the expansive open floor that was lined with row after row of metal thermoses just like the one they were talking in front of—“giant place to fill up so soon?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why?” Sean was baffled. If it had taken Everlast almost half a century to get 1000 “Charges,” why would they be filling up so quickly now?

“Personally? I believe it has to do with the fact that people know the great things they’ve been promised are right around the corner, but they were born just a little too early to experience them.”

“But what would facilitate such interest?”

“The Net probably. More people are significantly better read, scientifically speaking, than we were twenty years ago. CRISPR, life-extension drugs, cellular rejuvenation, and so on are either here but we can’t use them, or they’re just around the corner and by then,” Dr. Miller snapped the fingers of his free hand. “Too late. You’re gone.”

“I see. And so instead of dying, cryonics is just going into something of a long sleep?”

“Ah. Make no mistake—you will be dead.”

Sean frowned. That wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“Is there a problem?”

“Well, I don’t want to die, and I definitely don’t want you to kill me.”

“We all have to die!” Dr. Miller chuckled. “At least for now anyway. That’s what makes this whole system work. In order to live again, you’ve first gotta die, but don’t fret. We won’t be the ones killing you.”

Sean was becoming less and less convinced that coming here had been worth his time. This whole thing had at first seemed rather silly, a novelty for rich people from decades past, and it was starting to feel that way now. Instead of stuffing themselves in giant pyramids awaiting resurrection, they were turning to aluminum drums in basements. He grimaced at the imagery and then went on, “You know, your website was pretty sparse on details as to how exactly you’d bring someone back to life after they’ve been dipped inside of one of these nitrogen baths.”

“Ah-ah!” He tisked and waved a finger. “Remember, we don’t kill you. You go about your life normally, live, love, all that good stuff. Then when you expire? We bring you here.”

“You didn’t answer my question. When I die, how do I live again?”

“We don’t know yet.” The good doctor had put it bluntly and without hesitation.

Wonderful. He was going to have to remember to send Charlie a rather unkind text once he was done with this tour.

“So, if I understand you,”—he began to count off his fingers—“I’m still going to die.” Another finger. “You don’t know how you’re going to bring me back to life.” A third finger. “And you don’t know when that might be. This isn’t what I had been expecting.”

Annoyingly, Dr. Miller's smile just turned into a grin. “I know. Most people have all sorts of wacky ideas as to what we do because of video games and movies. They think you just go into ‘cryosleep’ and hibernate, then eventually we just prod you with a stick enough so that you’ll wake up.”

“That’s more or less what I am looking for.”

“Well, sadly that’s not what we do. I wish it were, but it is not. Our Charges”—he tapped the side of the thermos—“are gone for now, but one day they’ll be back.”

“How do you know?”

“The science says so. We know that it can be done, we just don’t know how it’s done. That’s why our Charges come to us: to hedge their bets. Eventually you’re going to die, that’s a certainty, but at some point in the future we’ll be able to bring you back. Why not take the chance? You’ll be dead anyway.”

“Like a bunch of necromancers in lab coats,” Sean said. That got Dr. Miller to bark with laughter.

“Why yes, something like that.” Miller flexed his hand out against the aluminum.

“Dr. Miller.”

“Yes?”

“Why do you keep touching the thermos that way? No offense, but it’s odd.”

“None taken.” He looked up at the cylinder and the grin turned into a half-sad smile. “My wife’s in this one, and one day I’m going to join her.”

Sean could feel the air in his lungs leave him, as if he had stepped on a bomb. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Why be sorry? We’re just apart for now, not forever.”

-

Sean groaned as he stirred once more.

It was colder now, and he felt that he was falling even faster than before.

But what had woken him? Was it that?

There, a pinpoint of light. Or rather, he thought it was light. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. And it wasn’t going away.

He groaned again and tried to shut the light out of his mind so he could go back to sleep, but still it shined.

-

Dr. Miller held Sean’s attention for another hour as he toured him around the facility. Miller had even wanted to take him to one of their operating rooms but found the theater occupied and the area restricted. Someone in there was being vitrified.

Vitrified.

That was one of the new words he had learned today. Meaning “to make like glass.” Dr. Miller stressed on more than one occasion that this process was what kept cryonics from being pseudoscience. Dr. Miller explained to him that anyone could freeze themselves, that was simple, but to vitrify someone? That was not. He found the explanation of how the process worked to be fascinating, if morbid. The specifics were unimportant, but what mattered was that when you froze something, you damaged it. The liquid in the object would freeze before it cracked. And that cracking could never be avoided. With vitrifying though, you were changing the composition of the material. You gradually cooled whatever it was you wanted vitrified over time, and this prevented the liquids in your brain from shattering your gray matter into a fine powder.

“It wouldn't do you much good if we froze you but also destroyed your brain in the process,” Dr. Miller told Sean. While he was not entirely sold on this idea, there did at least seem to be some sort of rigorous science at work in the background. Dr. Miller even offered to show Sean a video of a group out of Germany that vitrified a kidney of a rabbit if he wanted to see the process up close. That was when Sean heard the whine of power tools from within the OR. Before he could even ask, Dr. Miller had begun to answer Sean's unspoken question, “Oh, they’re just cutting off someone’s head.”

“Excuse me?”

The doctor shrugged at Sean and then restated his answer, “They’re cutting off someone’s head.”

Sean gaped.

“What? You didn’t think we just vitrified your whole body, did you?”

“I most certainly did!”

“Now why would we do a thing like that?”

“Because, because it’s important.”

“Not really.”

“How can you say that?”

Dr. Miller shrugged a second time before responding. “The idea that your mind and body are one in the same is very old and outdated, Sean.” He waved him off. “You may as well be placing stock in the four humors or think drinking mercury will cure your arthritis.”

“Then I really don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“How could you even possibly bring me back to life with just my head?”

“Through cloning, of course!” Dr. Miller flashed him yet another bright smile. “Any society capable of bringing someone back from the dead will logically also be able to clone you a new body, attach your head to it, bingo-bango, and you’re good as new! It’ll be like you never died in the first place.”

The man was absurd, and this place was equally absurd. He stared at the back of the doctor’s head as he continued on his way from the operating room. But damn if he didn’t seem confident.

-

The light grew from being a pinpoint to a blotch, and Sean was falling ever faster.

He began to feel something that he had not felt in a very long time.

He began to feel something that he remembered was called fear.

-

Sean was slouched over his laptop; it had been three months since he had gone to Everlast and he still hadn't made his decision. The doctor and receptionist had been nice enough to send him home with at least some of his questions answered, a few pieces of reading material, and Dr. Miller's email address just in case he wanted to contact him about anything that was left lingering up in that mind of his. The good news, he supposed, was that he had until the rest of his life to decide. The bad news was that the end could come at any time. As a kid and teenager, Sean's parents had always said he was neurotic. Now that neurosis had really started to flare back up as he approached middle age.

His mother said it was because he was still single and if he would just have settled down with that nice girl she liked so much he wouldn't be so alone with his thoughts. There might have been some degree of truth in that. When he was younger, Sean had never wanted kids or even really to get married. Recently though, he would feel a deep impulse to go out and not just get laid but procreate with someone. In a brief few seconds, he could imagine his new life with some faceless woman as a parent. Meeting her, falling in love, marrying her, having her become heavy with their shared love, being there when she gave birth to their child, holding their child in his arms. Holding their child in his arms? Sean shuddered; he thought only women got baby crazy. Now he was certain that his mother's paranoia of dying without grandkids was starting to rub off on him.

Secretly though, did he want that? Did he want a family? No. Of course not, that was just a flight of fancy brought about by anxiety when thinking about his impending doom. Just his body trying to convince him to give in to its natural programming and help make a few kids before he expired. Sean was above all that. It was why he was going to live forever, and not just turn to worm food or be spread to the winds as ash by people who pretended to care. Fuck that, the future was his. He just needed to be patient.

The document on the monitor of his laptop said before he did anything else, he would need to update his license so that he was no longer an organ donor. It apparently had something to do with keeping the state from delaying any vitrification efforts, and as he had come to find out, time was of the essence with that sort of thing. Dr. Miller had even told him, “Did you know that 1.9 million neurons will die every minute after brain death? Any delay will make successful recall unlikely.”

-

Sean gasped in pain as the light began to drill directly into his mind. He wanted to look away so badly, but wherever he turned the light just followed.

The chill had become all-encompassing, and the temperature continued to drop. He was so cold, but he could not shiver.

Sean's body refused to react to anything the right way, or in any way that he tried to will it to move. He wasn't even certain if he had a body.

Then something shook him, and the falling began to come ever faster.

-

It was cold in Colorado, but then, when wasn’t it? The mountain that he was dangled over was covered in fresh powder and the people propelling themselves down its side were insects at this height. The gondola, crowded with life, swung gently with the wind. It wasn’t the cold that bothered Sean though, it was the height. The swinging certainly didn’t help, and each time the vehicle teetered he was reminded of how far of a drop it was. Certainly no chance of surviving something like that. Despite the cold, sweat had begun to bead down his head. All thanks to the anxiety that was festering in Sean’s gut. Shit, he was getting up inside of his own head again. Just himself cooped up in there with all the bad thoughts about death.

Then, without warning, Cindy slipped a calming arm around his waist. She hugged him close before snapping a photo with her phone. Sean blinked at the flash, and she smiled. He glimpsed the photo on the screen before she pulled her mittened hand back to her face to study the image. In the picture, Cindy was smiling, but Sean just had a look of surprise on his face.

“We're going to have to do it over,” she told him as her finger hovered over the delete button.

Sean shook his head and exhaled out of his nose. “Did I ruin another one of our vacation photos?”

“Yes,” Cindy teased him.

He lowered his own gloved hand over the one she had on her phone and gripped it lightly. “Leave it. I am sure you’re adorable in it, as always.” She looked up at him in response and a small smile pulled at the edge of Sean's lips. “Besides, I'm supposed to be the goofy one after all. Let me look goofy.”

“Okay.”

Sean had met Cindy three years ago while he was at a software conference. He’d been sent there to evaluate the different Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE) toolkits that various security firms were trotting out for the year. For the past three years, Sean had been working as a contractor for OMNITECH. They currently had him seated as a security advisor. It wasn't exactly his forte, but he knew enough to get by, slowly bulking up on his knowledge as he worked. His being a contractor was probably the only reason why he’d scored the position in the first place. The corpo conglom didn’t want the overhead of bringing on a full-time employee, and so, if they wanted to send him out to a conference to be sold some software that would ultimately make his job easier? Hey, why not, it was their money to burn.

He had been making his rounds through the booths over the past two days, mostly talking to the same people about network security. Sean had already shortlisted some ICE from a few different firms within the first few hours of the first day, and his overlords back at the home office seemed content with his findings. Now it was just a matter of burning time until he was recalled. Which was how he found himself making small talk with a graybeard by the name of Chuck. Sean had quickly picked up that the only people hocking ICE worth a damn were guys relegated to the smaller booths on the fringes of the conference. Companies with not a lot of money or marketing, but a solid product. Companies that would linger around just long enough to be bought out by a massive corpo conglom. Companies like the one that Chuck worked at.

Then there were corpos like the one with the booth babes, a couple hundred feet off from where he stood. Women who were hired not because of what they knew, but because of how they looked. These were the firms with a lot of VC money or ones that had been around forever and belonged on the NASDAQ. Corpos that had stopped putting out a proper product years ago and just ran on autopilot as turnkey operations. Sean had zoned out of his conversation with Chuck when he noticed a certain phenomenon happening again. One that he called “The Firewall”.

The Firewall was something he had first picked up on when he was a bright-eyed eighteen-year-old at his first tech conference. It always played out the same, and it always made him laugh. What was The Firewall? Well, simple. The pretty women who manned these booths would inevitably attract the most attention, but not the most foot traffic. Most of that attention was from afar by men who had never spoken to women for more than 30-second increments at a time. These men would crowd around the booths but never get up the nerve to actually step foot inside of them, let alone make conversation with the incredibly bored women who were just looking to go home. Sean had met a few of his girlfriends at conferences just like this one simply because speaking with anyone who could pick up on social cues and wasn't just ogling you from a distance gave the illusion that they were a functional human being.

And that was how Sean connected with Cindy.

He excused himself from Chuck, already resolved that he'd be the first one to breach The Firewall. Fortune favors the bold, and all that. As he made his approach, the gaggle of bent-necked nerds lifted their heads to look up at him while he waded through No Man's Land and stepped inside the booth's perimeter. Sean reckoned himself to be confident, something of a showoff even, but he was wholly unprepared this go around. The woman who greeted him did not have the stand-offish personality of a typical booth babe, nor did she even look like one. Instead of being something of a tart with some work done, this woman was like a doll. Petite, giant green eyes, brown curly hair, freckles, and a perfect smile. She was also dressed unlike the other girls that were waiting around to dip into their practiced routine of being just cordial enough to the pencil necks. Where they wore a top that stopped just below their ribs and was paired with incredibly short shorts in order to show off as much skin as their employer thought they could get away, her outfit was much more casual. Nerdy even.

For a top, she wore a hoodie from her university. It was branded with its initials: "BYU." She was a Mormon? Interesting.

"Hello! I'm Cindy!" she peeped before extending her hand for him to shake. He took it gently and felt how soft it was, then was surprised when she placed out her other hand and wrapped it over his before initiating the movement. This caused him to raise a brow and smile a little. Curiouser and curiouser.

Sean realized he was still holding onto her hand well after she had finished shaking with him. This faux pas caused him to blush and stammer, "S-sorry about that." There went his confidence.

"It's alright." She grabbed the hem of her sweater with both hands, becoming much more reserved. The social misstep had seemingly thrown her off balance as well. "So... have you heard about EXOCOMP?"

"Who hasn't?" Sean remarked. "They’re the largest provider of ICE in the US."

"Yup!" She grinned. "And that's why we have the largest booth here." The two other girls in the booth had switched from their holding pattern to complete disinterest now that Cindy had Sean taken care of. Their phones almost magically appeared from somewhere in their skimpy outfits and they tuned out.

"Of course." He glanced about at the kiosks that filled the area, each with a screen that glowed and flickered from sales video to sales video of the various products that EXOCOMP had on offer this year. "Where is everyone?"

"You mean potential customers?"

He nodded.

"Not here. Most of our business is done through direct sales with major corpos, and retail. Conferences like this just seem to get..." She gestured to the crowd of guys that he had passed. "Onlookers." He smirked; at least she knew the game. "I've told my bosses that it doesn't make sense to rent so much square footage when no one ever really comes here anyway."

Sean pressed on with the conversation, trying to be nimble and get far away from the awkwardness from before. "Do you work these conferences often?"

Cindy sighed and let her shoulders droop. "All year long. This is my second year and I'm feeling burnt out."

"Really, the whole year?"

"Yeah," she said with an exasperated tone and shut her eyes. "I even have to travel internationally. Mostly to China, Korea and Japan." Cindy shrugged and continued complaining, "And my Mandarin isn't even very good."

He chuckled. "You speak four languages?"

"If you can count my mushed mouth linguistic ability as speaking," Her lips pulled back into a full smile. "Still, I'm lucky, my sister is an interpreter for the UN, so she helps me. Now you want to talk about being a polyglot? She knows almost two dozen languages."

Sean whistled. "I've never been very good with languages that I couldn't type with a QWERTY and even then, I'm not very remarkable. Ended up failing high school Spanish twice."

Cindy giggled at his failings. Good, he was disarming her. "So, who are you with?"

"No one at the moment," Sean told her absentmindedly. Cindy tilted her head at this as he realized what he had just said. "I'm mean, I'm a contractor. I don't represent anyone."

"Oh."

He fumbled with his wallet and pulled out a business card, offering it to her. "Right now, I'm just a slave for OMNITECH. Toiling away. Getting free trips to places like this. Setting my own schedule. It's a misery," Sean joked.

She took his card and studied it before squirreling it away inside of one of the pockets on her hoodie. "I might have to consider turning free agent when I end up going pro."

"Pro?"

"Yeah. I am only sticking around with EXOCOMP until my stock is vested, and then I-am-outta-here!" She mimed swinging a baseball bat. "For my first job, this isn't so bad though."

First job? Just how old was she? Sean had suddenly become very self-conscious of the gray hair that had started to take over his head. "I'm 24, in case you were wondering." He started to open his mouth to speak when she cut him off, "You're an easy study."

"I guess so."

Just then a group of men in business suits arrived, extremely conspicuous against the backdrop of guys in jeans, bad haircuts, and forests of flannel. Cindy's eyes went to them; it was clear that she needed to go speak with them as the two booth babes got up from their lounging to attend to the men. The pair now wore broad smiles and emanated a fake air of excitement. Sean decided it was time to make himself scarce.

"Well, thanks for the chat." He reached out to shake her hand goodbye, and then she did the double grip shake again. He figured she probably did that with everyone, but still, it was a nice feeling. As he turned to go, Cindy called out to him.

"Hey, if you have any questions, give me a ring." His phone buzzed, and her contact card was on the screen. Cindy Shell. In the portrait she was wearing a pink hoodie and extremely wide-rimmed glasses. They suited her.

-

The buzz started and there was more of him now, Sean was sure of it.

He wasn’t sure what he meant by “more,” but he felt bigger. More aware. With that came the sound and not just the light and the pain.

It was like an ever-present buzz, and worse it was accompanied by a tingle that itched him in maddening ways. He wanted to scream STOP but no words came from his mouth, he was mute.

Then once more that damnable light that he couldn’t escape grew brighter, biting into his mind and causing his very being to throb in discomfort.

The light seemed to pass him now too before it flickered and died on either side of him. The flickering sped up as he continued to fall. He was still accelerating.

-

They met for a few days every month at different conferences across the US under the guise of him needing to keep up with different advances in ICE. The bean counters at OMNITECH didn't even notice. What were a few extra plane tickets and hotel stays to a company worth nearly a trillion dollars? Eventually, they stopped being mere acquaintances when the two met at a bar after a conference in Colorado.

"What about Aspen?" Sean inquired.

"What about it?"

"I don't know. There's snow, and skiing, and snowboarding if you're into that."

"Can you even ski?"

"With the help of one of those magic carpets I can!"

Cindy giggled. God, he loved that sound. "Why are you even asking this?"

"I thought it might be fun to go there this weekend. Just rent a little cottage in one of the villages and hit a couple of Black Diamonds."

"Ooo. A cottage in the hills with some strange older man? I wonder what you think we would get up to."

"Uh, drink hot chocolate? Perhaps roast some chestnuts over an open fire."

"Nice try." She smirked and nursed her beer some more.

Sean thumbed his and set it aside. "Ah, it was worth a shot."

That was when she surprised Sean by leaning her head into him and sighing. "I suppose it was." Her cheeks were flushed. The pair were only on their second beer, there was no way she was drunk.

"Hey, what're you—" Sean started.

"Just shut up and enjoy it." She nuzzled up against him some more. Sean didn't need any more of a signal. He wrapped his arm over her shoulder and brought her closer.

"Let's go back to your room," Cindy said quietly into his chest.

Sean's heart nearly flatlined. There wasn't enough liquid courage in him yet, but apparently two beers would have to do. He moved his hand down to one of hers and squeezed it to get her attention.

“Yeah?” she asked, almost sleepily.

“Are you sure?” Sean would have never needed to ask a question like that before with any of his past dalliances, but this was different. She was different. Not only was he nearly two decades her senior, but she also looked so delicate that he was scared she might simply ghost him at any time. He had often wondered what she told her friends about him, let alone her family. Maybe she didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone. He had been fine with that. Just being near her had been enough.

“I am.” She squeezed his hand back.

-

The buzzing continued to grow louder. Everything continued to grow more intense for that matter.

The cold. The pain. The light. The sound. The acceleration.

He had been trying to grit his teeth for some time now just to try and dull the stimuli, but he found he had no teeth to grit. This had been where the fear had begun to take hold of him.

He knew he was somewhere. He knew he was falling. He knew about everything else he was feeling; he just could not get his body to respond. It was like the entirety of his being was paralyzed.

Sean had once had a bout of sleep paralysis but the nightmare he was in now was far worse.

The light grew brighter and on came the pain.

-

Their legs were entwined under the sheets. He held her close and lightly stroked her hair as she snuggled up against his warmth.

“Did you know that men typically have higher body temperatures than women?” She said quite matter-of-factly.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, there’s a theory that it’s a vestigial trait from our primordial selves. Meant to get women to unconsciously desire to snuggle up to males during those cold nights.”

“Interesting. I had no idea.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure if I buy it though.”

He snickered.

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“How did you know I love skiing?”

“I snooped a little,” he admitted, embarrassed. “Found some pictures of you on your profile from when you were cute as a button and on the slopes.”

“Are you saying I’m not cute anymore?” Cindy mock pouted.

Sean rolled his eyes so hard that they nearly fell out of his head. “Jeeze, what a drama queen.”

“Am not.” She pinched his stomach.

“Fine, you’re not a drama queen. You’re a dramaturgical princess.”

“I’ll take it.”

They were silent for a few moments as she drew patterns out on his abdomen with one of her fingers.

“I already rented the cabin.”

“How impulsive.”

“Nah, just hopeful. I was thinking we could kinda make it our thing. Y’know?”

“Hm,” she purred. “Maybe we could.”

She tapped the finger she had been drawing with on his chin and looked up at him hopefully. He tilted his head down and they shared another kiss.

-

This year was the third time they were out for their annual excursion to Aspen. Cindy had just finished taking another picture of them together, this time while they were in the gondola. She was worried that he had ruined it, but he had chided her against deleting it. Sometimes imperfect things were better.

They had been floating above the slush below them for several minutes now. There evidently was a hold up somewhere ahead of them, and Sean was beginning to feel a little nervous. He had never been a fan of heights. Cindy meanwhile had her nose buried in her phone, busy uploading and tagging the photo no doubt. He was thankful for that; she wasn’t trying to hide her relationship with him like he had feared when they first started going out. Still, he hadn’t met her parents yet. The talk about those two had never come up, and he never prodded her about them either. Best to let sleeping dogs lie.

The gondola swayed softly with the wind, and Sean took a fretful glance out of the foggy window ahead of him. It was a long way down. Shit. He tightly gripped the ski poles that dangled from his wrists. He was trying to transfer some of his anxiety into them. Did they really have to stop here? Cindy noticed the stern look on his face.

“Hey, relax. We’ll be moving again soon.”

“Yeah—you’re right. I just don’t like where we are.”

“What do you want to do tonight after we get back to the cottage?”

“Ah, I dunno.” His eyes were fixed straight ahead as he tried to ignore the uneasiness that his surroundings were making him feel. Sean still appreciated what she was doing, trying to take his mind off their present situation.

“Maybe we could watch a movie. Or just catch up on some TV.”

“If you want.”

Sean thought he heard a noise. It was like a faint grinding. He blinked and then asked Cindy, “Do you hear that?”

Then he heard a man toward the front of gondola speak up over the quiet murmuring of the rest of the group, “What the fuck is that?”

Sean’s head flicked to the side to see what was going on. The murmuring grew louder, but he couldn’t see over the heads of so many people in front of him.

He saw what the man had seen and said under his breath, “Holy shit.”

Then everything turned to chaos.

Like a train of freight cars trying to slow down all too quickly, several gondolas from up ahead had come loose of their brakes and were speeding down the cables as they bucked and broke against one another. The sound of the people and metal screaming filled his ears.

He had instinctively reached for Cindy, trying to shield her from the collision, but they were tossed apart when the gondolas impacted. Shattered glass went everywhere, as did the bodies inside. Nearly everyone was flung up against the walls of the cabin. Then they shook and were flung wide again. Bodies smashed into bodies and people wailed for help in unintelligible tongues.

Sean could feel his heart pounding a thousand times per second. His vision begun to blur as he started to pass out. In the mayhem, he could only make out flashes of Cindy’s pink jacket before someone else covered her up again or she was jostled to an entirely different part of the gondola.

Sean was vaguely aware that they had started to cartwheel. He could feel his stomach doing flips. Then Sean found Cindy’s eyes among the turmoil. Blood ran down her face. He was about to scream when the darkness took the words and world from him.

-

“CINDY!” Sean shouted with all of his strength, but no sound could be heard.

There was a buzzing noise that reminded Sean of a hacksaw sawing through bone. The sounds cut in and out from two different directions around him. Without any indication as to why the buzzing would stall and be replaced with a mess of clatter that fired back and forth around him.

Then a voice broke through, "-net training is done."

"About time," a second one spoke.

The darkness had finally receded all the way. All that remained was the bright white light that had been tormenting him for so long.

“CINDY!”

“Ah, would you look at that. We’ve got a live one.” The buzzing had been replaced with intelligible words.

“Indeed. Check the reading on the EEG.”

“Should I put them back to sleep?”

Sean screamed in rage as he tried to figure out what was going on, tried to move, tried to see, tried to speak and again the sound did not emanate from him inside of him. There was just nothing. It was like he hadn’t even spoken.

“No, leave them be. This one might be a fighter, and the increased brain activity will help with the mating process between the wetware and the housing.”

He tried to move his head as he shouted some more, “WHERE’S CINDY? WHERE AM I? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

There was a soft, discordant sound that vaguely could have passed for a chuckle. “'Sin-D?' I wonder... Were they a collective, perhaps? Do the records show how this one died?”

They could hear him even though he could not hear himself.

“No, this one was cooled before the First Sundown. Nothing survived that.”

“A pity. Well, maybe they’ll tell us what Sin-D was later.”

“WHY CAN’T I MOVE? RELEASE ME!”

The chuckle came a second time.

“Stop playing with the subject and get back to work.”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

“As you insist.”

“ANSWER ME GOD DAMN YOU!”

“Come now, it’s time to attach the Binder. I thought this was your favorite part.”

“It is.”

“Good, then do it. I’ll make the connections and load up the firmware for the housing.”

Sean continued to scream as the sound of a power drill erupted nearby, and the terrible grinding of metal on metal as something was riveted into place. He didn't stop shouting for several moments after the drill died down and something finally something clicked inside his mind.

“STOP! I SAID STO—AAAAHHHH!”

“They felt that!” Said the first voice in mocking tones.

“Excellent. We’ll test the Binder later to see if it took. It’s time to get the peripheral senses online.”

“Should we leave the vocalization for last?”

“What, what did you just do?” Sean muttered pitifully. He had suddenly been cowed by a stabbing pain which had been so acute that he nearly blacked out.

“Of course. I don’t want to hear this one actually screaming for hours while we work, do you?”

“Not really.”

“Let’s get started with the visuals and then move onto the tactile senses. Begin connecting the retinas to the housing, and I'll go load the optics.”

“Please stop, just tell me what is going on,” Sean pleaded.

There was a burst of static that sounded like wind blowing over a microphone. Was that a sigh?

“Fine. What do you want to know?”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Kill you?”

Somewhere nearby the chuckle came again. “How deliciously adorable.”

“No, we're not going to kill you. Quite the opposite in fact. We're reviving you.”

“Reviving me?” Sean asked.

“Yes. What do you think we're doing just this moment?”

“Why would you need to revive me? From what? Why I can't move?” He didn't understand, this didn't make any sense.

“This one is thicker than most.”

“We're reviving you because you were dead.”

“I don't believe you,” he hissed.

“Your belief is not required. You'll see soon enough anyway.”

“See what!? What will I see?”

It was too late. The voices had gone back to work and had started to ignore him once more.

“Oh. Is that an optical projector?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I haven't seen one of these in years. Does that mean...”

“Yes.”

The chuckle came on once more. “Now that! That is decadent.”

“String it together and I'll boot up the program.”

“Certainly.”

The drill came to life once more, then the sound of more riveting, and what he thought was a welding torch sparking.

“Careful, you'll set fire to us yet again.”

“That was one time!”

“One time too many.”

“Do we have confirmation of a visual feed?”

“Yes, the optics have been powered up, we just need to turn on the connection now.”

“Let's offer them a choice.”

“A choice?”

“We can either let them see us first or themselves.”

“Fine. I am not sure why I indulge you.”

“Yay!” The voice got very near and very soft. “Hello, Little Subject, we have a decision for you to make. I am sure you heard me, so choose.”

“I,” Sean spoke hesitantly. His mind was still reeling, failing to grasp what was going on, and being pressed for an answer just made him more confused.

“Come now. You must choose, or we'll choose for you. Either way, you're going to see.”

He hesitated some more. “I, I...”

“You want to see yourself? If that's what you desire, so be it.”

The white light warbled and then flickered like an old tube TV being shunted from one channel to the next. At first, he did not understand what he was looking at. There was a dull gray box in the center of his vision. It was surrounded by cables on all sides, most of them plugged directly into the box. What stuck out the most to him was how wrong his sight seemed; everything was tinged in sepia.

“What's wrong with my eyes?”

“Nothing.”

“But it isn't normal.”

“That's the new normal.”

“The new normal? What am I looking at? I don't understand. A box?”

The chuckle seemed to be right on top of him now. “Look carefully, doesn't it remind you of anything?”

“I don’t understand!” he pleaded and was forced to look again; the box wasn't a box. It was smooth and rounded along the edges. Roughly obloid. There was a glow from various points of light along the top and several holes that had been drilled into it to hold a curved panel in place. The overall shape seemed familiar, and then he realized what they were showing him. "No, it can't be."

“Yes, it can be!" The chuckling turned into frantic laughter. "That's your brain inside of its new home.”

"Stop that immediately," said the other voice in an aggravated tone.

"Fine."

“I get it now,” Sean said with some mirth. “This is just a dream. I must have hit my head after the accident. Does that mean I'm in a coma? Where's Cindy?”

“Again, with this ‘Sin-D.’ They're trying to rationalize now. I wondered when that might start.”

“I can assure you; this is no dream. You're really here. We've really revived you, and that's really your brain inside of that housing unit.”

“Prove it.” Sean dared.

“If you insist.”

A hand (no, an instrument?) slipped into view along the bottom. Its “fingers” were long and needle-sharp. One of them slipped into a port along the top of the box, and he felt a presence. It reminded him of someone standing a little too close behind him. Then his vision shifted, blurred. “See? With just a little bit of tuning, we can make your mind do what we want. Influence your senses.” His sight returned to its new, sepia-toned normality.

Sean suddenly gasped in pain as the probe at the edge of the instrument prodded deep inside of the port. “Inflict pain.”

Then the pain vanished, and he wanted to shudder as he felt a wave of pleasure, which reminded him of when he had been given some morphine after he’d had his appendix removed. “Give you pleasure.”

“Whatever we wish, we can do so long as we have access to your braincase.”

The hand retracted and the presence went away.

“I still don't believe you,” he said indignantly. “The mind is great at playing tricks.”

There was the sound of air blowing over a microphone once more.

“Shall we reveal ourselves?”

“I suppose so.”

His vision twisted around like someone had turned his head in their hands, blurring as it did so before coming to a sudden stop.

-

It was then that Sean noticed how shallow his depth of field was. He could barely make out what was directly in front of him, let alone the things in the distance. Sean was certain he was in a room though, a well-lit one that was white. He was also aware of the pair of bodies that stood before him.

“Knock it off," Sean said in a most disgusted tone.

The cold chuckling began again. "I always enjoy it when they're confused." At last, he understood that this sound was coming from his left. The being standing there was the source of the noise. They were a dark color, which he could only perceive as potentially a gunmetal gray through the sepia haze. They stood at an indeterminable height, but they were exceptionally wide. Their head was teardrop-shaped, with three different sized red lenses built into the face. Below that was a grate, which conceived was some sort of mouth. It waved its needle-tipped appendage down at Sean before it answered, "We're human, just like you."

"Of course you are, but those are pretty good costumes. I bet they cost quite a bit of money."

"Costume?"

"A disguise." The other one spoke up at last. Its mouth moved as the words were formed, but the metallic tinge to its speech undercut that this was just an affectation. It could speak just as well with its mouth closed. This one was a dark flesh tone, but from what Sean could make out of its upper body they were crisscrossed with lacerations that glowed. It raised a hand and reached out toward Sean's vision. Instead of five fingers, there were a dozen little spindly ones that resembled the legs of a spider that ended in nubs. Sean shuddered, or at least he would have if he could. He could hear a rapid tapping sound as the little spindly fingers began to thump up against something firm just above his head. Strange, he couldn't feel that. Once again his sight warped and warbled before settling. "I've enabled the facial expressive functionalities."

He tried talking again thinking that they had fixed his mouth, but no sound came. "I still can't speak." Sean paused and then tried again, nothing. "How are you able to hear me anyway?" he asked quizzically.

"We'll get to fixing your speech, but to answer your question, there's a monitor over your housing unit that's automatically translating your vocalizations into text for us," the one to his right said. "Keep talking, by the way, it'll make the neural net's job of training for translation easier." Unlike the one to his left, this one on the right gave Sean the impression that they styled themselves as something of a surgeon. Impassive, methodical, single-minded. All the hallmarks of a surgeon.

The room was quiet for a moment, aside from the sterile hum of electronics. "Say I believe you. Where am I then?"

"You're in the heart of Metro. More specifically you're at Revivification Center 6 under lease by OMNICORP," Right told him.

"OMNICORP." He considered the word slowly. "I used to work for them. A few years ago."

"Sure you did," tittered the Left.

“What happened to Everlast then?”

“No idea what an ‘Everlast’ is,” Left replied.

"I'm going to start winding up the shell. You mount the face and prepare the housing for transfer," instructed the Right.

"Alrighty," Left said in a vacillating sing-song voice.

The Right moved outside of his field of vision and the Left stepped up to him. Its needle-like fingers grabbed onto something, and Sean's vision began to lower. Then there was a shake, a hiss, and a violent clack. He sighed, as he was now at waist level with Left. Their body was like a twisted band of noodles, just coils wrapped one over the other in a tight pack as if they were a squid. "That certainly is impressive looking."

One of the tendrils that made up his body rose up from the ground and tapped lightly at Sean. "You have no idea." Left ran the tendril down the side of Sean's vision. It was so odd that he couldn't feel any of this. Was this a symptom of being in a coma? Was this just an elaborate trick of some kind and he had been administered some sort of paralyzing agent? "I don't normally ask this, but what is your name Little Subject?"

"Sean."

"Shaw-n." Left tested out the word. "You holdovers have such odd names."

"What's yours?" Sean tested. Maybe he could ingratiate himself with these nightmare tormentors enough that they wouldn't kill him.

Two of the tendrils lifted up from the ground and made the universal sign for a shrug. "Does it matter? You may call me what you wish." The tendril on the right jabbed to the side outside of Sean's field of view. “They certainly do.”

"Stop lazing about and get to work," Right spoke up from somewhere unseen.

"Aye-aye, Captain." Left chuckled and then lowered a hand into Sean's vision from the top. Its fingers sunk down into a panel in front of Sean, and there was a click and a whir. "Alright Shaw-n, I am going to be mounting the software for your housing unit. Prepare yourself, it's going to get a little bumpy."

Two arms lowered from the ceiling and peeled open revealing fork-like tongs. They were each fitted with a horribly long needle that were coming straight for him. Sean began to panic, trying with all his might to will his body into movement. "Wait! Stop! PLEASE STOP!" he gibbered as the arms grew closer and homed onto him with mechanical precision. "What're you doing!?"

"I just told you, I'm mounting your housing unit. I've got to inject your wetware with some meaty progs first so it'll take." There was that sound that wasn't quite a sigh.

Sean's world shook again, and then there was pain. "Stop!" He protested a final time as the pain knocked him into near silence as if the wind had been kicked straight out of his lungs. Then without mercy or warning, he began to feel himself being filled with cold. "You're killing me!" Sean rasped.

"Killing you would be counterproductive," piped in Right.

The cold and stabbing continued for an unbearable length of time and then without warning, they stopped. In the absence of the stabbing and the cold, Sean's mind begun to throb in pain. "Christ... Christ," Sean whined, practically sobbing—if he could sob. The arms pulled away from his head and retracted up into the ceiling.

Left twisted its hand inside of the panel, and the panel began to turn with the movement. To either side of Sean, there were several hisses that went off in rapid-fire.

"Tethers are terminated. Hoist their housing unit."

Left twisted their wrist inhumanly on itself once more, rotating another 180 degrees. Mechanical whirring sounded behind him and he felt himself rise. He couldn't see what was happening or feel it for that matter, but Sean was reasonably certain that something had grabbed onto him again. And now he was being lifted into the air. Left's head came into view and they stopped there practically at eye level.

"Hello there, Shaw-n." Left's trio of lenses rotated on themselves, refocusing and narrowing their view on him. This had to be a nightmare, no costume was that good.

"You're not real," Sean stammered.

"Sorry, but if you're speaking, I can't hear you. The monitor’s been disconnected." The back of Left's horrible hand stroked the front of Sean's vision in a sickening gesture that could have been meant to be tender. "Don't fret though, we're nearly done." Sean tried to shudder, to pull away, but still, his body refused to react to his commands.

"The shell is ready and powered up. As best as it is going to be anyway," Right said from behind him. "We're ready to commence the joining."

Two of Left's tendrils clapped together loudly. "Finally!" There was too much exuberance in their voice for Sean's liking.

Left began to pull away from Sean, but they weren't moving—he was. Left waved at him with one hand and many of its smaller, tentacle-like arms. He desperately tried to turn his head about, to look around him, but his vision was fixed squarely ahead. He could not look away to try and find the doom that he could almost feel was encroaching on him from behind.

Servos whined and then his field of view narrowed even further as darkness approached on either side of his vision. He stopped abruptly, and then nothing happened. Sean began to panic once more as Right stepped back in front of him. Now he was holding some sort of transparent tablet in his spindly hands. One finger out of a dozen hovered over a portion of the tablet that Sean could see but was unable to tell the color of thanks to the damnable sepia hue that now plagued him.

"This will hurt." That was all the warning he got as Right pressed down on the tablet and Sean heard a sound like a drill directly beneath him.

-

"Sean."

He heard his name being called. It was a voice that was familiar to him, it was sweet, and he'd recognize it anywhere.

"Wake up."

Sean groaned as he fought his eyelids in a battle of wills. Eventually, he won and they began to flicker open. Standing over him was Cindy. She was still wearing her winter apparel, albeit slightly torn. Above her was the sky, gray and full of clouds, and the sun was directly overhead. He exhaled and the air fogged with his warm breath in front of his mouth. "Cindy?"

"Who else would it be, dummy?" She smiled.

"What happened?" he croaked in reply as he tried to shift his weight beneath him, but the pillowy snow sank with his movements. "Snow..."

"Yeah, we were in the gondola. Don't you remember?" Her face turned to concern, and she rubbed her nose with her sleeve. "God, it's cold out here."

Sean's hands gripped at the slush, and he heard it crunch in his fingers. The cold wetness began to eek through his gloves, and even through his insulated pants and jacket. "I remember we were falling."

"Yeah, that was pretty scary." She laughed down at him. “Now get up. We’ve got to make it back to civilization before it gets dark.” Cindy gestured beyond his vision. He tilted his head up and saw that she was pointing to the blur in the distance that had been where the gondola had started sending them up the mountain.

Sean tried to push himself up again, and this time found purchase in the flattened snow. “Where are all the other people?” he murmured as he pulled his knees up to his chest.

“What other people? It was just us in there.”

He listened to her and knitted his brow. That wasn’t right. “No, there were at least a dozen of us. I saw it. It was crowded.”

“Wow, you must have bumped your head pretty good on the way down.” Cindy snickered and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Come now. Get up and we’ll be alright.”

Sean frowned. This didn’t seem right. He thought for a moment about the weird, terrifying dream he had just experienced and then began to stand.

“Something wrong?” Cindy asked him. He looked up from the snow.

“No, I just had a strange dream is all.”

“You’ll have to tell me about it later.” She began to walk away as he finished standing.

“I suppose I will.” Sean surveyed the land. The mountains looked different. There was no snow on them, and the light seemed too dim despite the sun overhead. Even with the clouds, it should have been brighter.

“Hurry up slowpoke!” Cindy shouted back to him. That was odd, when had she gotten so far away?

Sean stopped again as a punishing wind blew against him. His hands rose in self-defense, trying to shield him from the snow-filled onslaught. “What the hell?” he murmured and tried to press on, only to be pushed back into place by the wind a second time. The chill had caused his teeth to begin to chatter, he set his jaw and attempted to step forward for a third time.

This time the wind came with such fury that he fell. He didn’t stop falling.

His world began to somersault, each flip nearly causing him to puke. Dizziness came over him almost immediately and he felt himself screaming. The snow-blanketed ground continued to spin in place over him again and again. He felt as if he was folding inward on himself.

Then with a sudden sense of whiplash, he began to spin on his side. Through burning, tear-filled eyes, he noticed his position had changed. Now he was falling from the sky, flipping from one side to another in a completely uncontrolled roll. Incapable of making a noise except for the sound of his heart beating like a jackhammer in his head.

Perspective shifted again, and now he was back inside of the gondola. Cindy and he locked eyes as they were splayed helplessly on opposite sides of the gondola’s interior. The din of dying people and the whining of metal filled his ears, dampening even the sound of his heart. He flexed his hand and reached out. Desperate to grasp the girl who was just feet away but may as well have been a million miles apart from him.

There was a crunch, and Sean found himself in the middle of the wreck. The cabin crushed in on all sides. None of the bodies around him stirred. He flailed, and only felt pain before blood rushed up from his mouth and through his nostrils as he hacked up a sound closer to a squelch than a cough. Sean lifted his hands and looked down at himself.

A piece of metal at least as thick as his thigh jutted out from his abdomen, covered in his blood and viscera. There was too much of himself outside. There was too much of himself everywhere. “This is it,” he thought. Blood flooded his lungs, and all he could do was gurgle as life left him.

-

“They’re baaaaaack.” The washed-out singsong of Left’s voice churred through the air as his vision flicked from black to static, and then muddy sepia. His vision was canted off its axis to the right.

Sean erupted with emotions as he began to cry. He vaguely realized that Left was knelt upon the floor, its many tendrils shaking with work as they scrubbed and polished something directly below him. No tears came though, only the sound of keening as he wailed.

“I was dead!” his voice warbled like a radio set in between two stations. “Oh, God. I was dead.”

“What part of ‘revivification’ did you not understand?” Left lifted its head up and looked directly into Sean’s eyes, their tendrils still scrubbing and polishing away.

Sean tried to move, but still, his body refused to obey.

“I was dead,” he repeated to himself. “I was falling and then I died.”

Left’s many arms pulled away from their work down below. “Sounds rough.”

“I don’t understand,” Sean squeaked as his voice vacillated between a low baritone and screeching soprano. “Is this… Is this hell? Am I in hell?”

“You’re not the first one to ask me that, but no one’s ever explained to me what exactly Hell is.” Left’s tendrils started to work again.

Without any forewarning, there was a loud slam and the sound of footsteps as Right’s feet stepped into the top of Sean’s vision. A glimmering hand grabbed the front of his head and tilted it up. Right frowned and began to look over Sean with an appraising eye. “You’ve done a good job of cleaning the shell up.”

“What happened to me?” Sean whispered through static hiss.

“Your brain seized as soon as the contacts met for the joining. You’re lucky. Most don’t get to skip out on their shell’s synthetic nerves meshing with their organic ones for the first time.” Right continued to look him up and down.

“How long was I out?”

“About forty units,” said Left from below, out of sight but still working diligently by the sound of that grinding.

“You might call them minutes,” Right told him. “How easy is it for you to vocalize?”

He gasped. He hadn’t even realized he had been speaking. “It’s, it’s fine.” Then he considered how he sounded. “What’s wrong with my voice?” Right only half paid attention as he snapped his many fingers on either side of Sean’s skull and then around the perimeter of his head, testing Sean’s hearing.

“The vocoder is trying to find a stable signal,” Right told him, and then stepped back, examining the tablet they had in their hand.

“Why can’t I move still?” A tendril shot up from below and grabbed onto his face, tilting his head down so that Left could look straight into him with their burning optics.

“Because silly, it’s too dangerous for that.” They wagged a finger at him. “There’s no telling what mischief you might get up to without the Binder activated.”

Sean’s head was flicked up as Left pushed his head away, and he was now looking at the bright, white ceiling. “Please… just tell me what’s going on.”

“We have always found the different ways holdovers animate themselves to be intriguing.” His view changed yet again as Right lowered Sean’s gaze back down to his.

“It’s a lot like what the Fleshies do!” Left cried, and Right nodded in agreement. “Which I suppose makes sense because you were a fleshy.”

Right’s eyes bore straight into Sean’s. They had taken on a terrible glow. “The odd thing is that your bodies never seem to acclimate to their new forms.” He tried to shake his head out of Right’s hand. “You still try to breathe. You still think you need to piss. To shit. To eat. And all of the other disgusting things that organic bodies do.”

“What do you mean I’m not breathing?” Sean asked incredulously.

“You have no lungs. You can no more breathe than either of us.”

Sean then became all too aware that he had in fact not been breathing. He tried to gulp in air, but none came. “I can’t breathe!” his voice strained as he continued to try and force his lungs to inhale and exhale.

This time it was Right’s turn to sigh, it was one out of pure frustration.

“Please,” Sean gasped. “Stop this, I just want to wake up.”

“As I said before, you are awake,” Right told him in a chilling monotone.

“You’re going to scare them,” whined Left, as if they couldn’t conceive that Sean was already terrified.

Right removed their hand and shrugged. “Fine, but I’ll leave it to you to explain. I have no love for the decompression phase.”

“If I do that, can I be the one to activate the Binder then?” Left asked eagerly, the sound of polishing coming to a brief halt.

Right shrugged again. “If you wish. I’ll finish loading up the rest of the progs.” They began to tap on the tablet once more and stepped away from the pair.

“Yes!” Left exclaimed and then in a flash drew themselves up to their full height. They were terribly tall now, with a height advantage of several feet over Sean.

Sean continued to gasp in a futile attempt to breathe. “How?” It was all he could mutter in an electronically tinged croak.

“How what? How are you alive? I think that’s self-explanatory. We were told to bring you back, so we did.”

“But how. How did you do that?”

“Simple. You were vitrified, so we un-vitrified you.”

Vitrified. Sean hadn’t heard that word for several years. He recalled Dr. Miller in the basement of Everlast explaining it to him. “No... I was dead.”

“And now you’re not. Isn’t that great?” Left chuckled at Sean as they lifted two tendrils and place them on either of his shoulders. At least that’s what he thought they did because he still couldn’t feel anything. “I am not sure how you ended up inside of that tank we hauled your head out of, but everyone I’ve asked says they paid to have theirs put in one.”

Left tilted their head and continued, “I’ve always felt that was so odd. Cutting off your own head just to sit in a vat of nitrogen.”

“You’re telling me that they got to me in time?” Sean whispered in disbelief.

“I suppose so.” Left pulled up a third tentacle and tapped him in the center of his vision. “Whatever that means.”

“All I know is that you were in there, and you were selected to be reanimated.” Left’s tendril shook his head from side to side rapidly and then they stopped. “Aren’t you lucky?”

Sean said nothing and was quiet for a time. “Where am I?”

“Yet another question you’ve already asked. Can’t you be a bit more original? You’re in Metro, Revivification Center 6, leased by—”

“Leased by OMNITECH,” Sean repeated what he’d been told earlier. “But where is that? Is that in the United States? Is that in Colorado? Where?” His shifting voice became more demanding as the questions continued to flow out of him.

“I don’t know about any of those places, I just know Metro. Perhaps that was what you called this place back during, well, back during whenever you were first alive.”

“2030,” Sean told Left. “It was 2030 when I died, I am sure of it. How long has it been since then?”

“Again, I don’t know. We don’t use that dating scheme,” Left replied to him in soft tones. “To me, it’s the fourth year of GAMMACORE and ESPER.”

“GAMMACORE and ESPER?”

“That’s right.” Left exaggerated the pronunciation of the last word, holding onto it for several seconds. “They’re currently worth the most out of all the corpos in Metro, meaning they’re in charge. ESPER is the junior partner of course, but that could change in the next quarter if GAMMACORE posts some significant losses. They’re about due for it.”

Sean was baffled. “Fine. I suppose if this is real then you cloned me a new body like Dr. Miller said, but why all of the theater? What was that about organics and synthetics?”

Left burst out laughing. It was hard to tell that it was laughter over the bursts of static that came with the sound, but Sean knew it for what it was. It was several moments before they calmed themselves enough to speak.

“Clone you? My dear, did you really think OMNICORP would spend money like this just to give you a shell that’d break down in a few years?” Left shook their head. “No, no, no. You’re already on the hook for enough credits as it is. Be glad they didn’t do anything so extravagant.”

“Then what exactly did you do?” Sean placed stress on the word ‘did’.

“Nothing out of the ordinary if that’s what you’re wondering.” Left tapped a tendril against their own face for once. “We just turned your glassy little brain back into flesh, put it inside of a housing unit, and then attached that to a retired shell.” They twisted about on their tendrils so as to stand in profile, “You’d be surprised how much all of that costs though. Don’t worry, you’re going to get the bill before we’re done here.”

Sean paused, terrified of the question he was forced to ask, "What do I look like then?”

“We usually hold off on doing the display until after we’ve turned on the Binder.” Left walked around Sean and shuffled behind him on their many tendril appendages. “Speaking of which. Can I do that now?”

“Yes,” Right responded from somewhere in the room. “I’ve finished prepping the last of the packages.”

Sean suddenly had his head thrust forward. “Hey, wait!”

“This is going to be cold,” Left declared and then he felt as if he were being probed. It wasn’t painful like the stabbing pain had been, but Left wasn’t lying when they said it was cold. To him, it was as if someone was pouring a slushie directly into his brain.

“Ah!”

“Just bear with it, you’re nearly there.”

Windows began to flash in his vision, popping up and closing with such rapidity that if it wasn’t for the fact that Sean couldn’t blink he would have missed them. They continued to manifest and fade away in increasing numbers until most of what he could see was just windows. Along the bottom of his sight was a bar that had begun to fill.

“Holy shit, this is really real.”

“That’s what we’ve been telling you.”

As the bar approached completion, the windows slowed down considerably. He could read what they were saying now. Or at least he could if they were in an actual language and not barcodes. Strangely, as they continued to blink on and off at their slow pace, the barcodes began to form into something very nearly intelligible to him.

The bar finished filling, and the probing sensation went away. However, now he could feel a presence just at the back of his mind. It was like being stared at from across the room. Sean really didn’t like it.

“Why do I feel like something… Something is inside me.”

“Something in your head? That’s because something is in there.” Left pulled Sean’s head back all the way so that he could look up at them. “It’s the Binder.”

“You keep saying that, but you haven’t told me what a Binder is.”

“It’s an incredibly low-level process, may as well be actual organics for how low it is.” Left’s three eyes ‘blinked’ as the light flickered inside of them flickered on and off. “It exists to keep you from doing anything naughty and helps incentivize the things you should be doing.”

Sean would have raised an eyebrow if he could, “Such as?”

“Self-harm. Violence. Destruction of property. That sort of thing.” Left stroked the side of Sean’s face again. He really hated them doing that. Even if he couldn’t feel it. “On the other hand, the Binder makes sure that you want to keep your battery pack charged, gives you an urge to want to earn money.” Left chuckled before pulling their tendril away. “All that, and much, much more. I’m sure you’ll come to find out what you can and can’t do as you go about your days.”

“How is that even possible?”

“The Binder is tapped directly into your CNS. It takes real-time EEGs which in turn allows it to more or less read your mind.”

Sean was horrified. “Get it out.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do that. That shell of yours is OMNITECH property, and until you pay it off, that Binder is going to stay there.”

Left pulled up a host of its arms. “Besides, it isn’t so bad. I have one. You’ll come to find that the Binder has your best interests in mind.” Left started up an attempt to indoctrinate Sean. “It feels good to work. It feels good to recharge my battery. It feels GREAT each time I pay off a little more of my debt.”

“I didn’t, I didn’t want this.”

“Oh yes you did,” Left informed Sean, “I know all about how people used to keep records on paper. It’s basically the only thing that survived the First Sundown. OMNITECH has them to prove that you signed up for all of this.”

Left pushed Sean’s head from behind, this time angling it straight ahead. He felt a surge of anger well up inside of him, “I’m telling you; I didn’t want this!” The voicebox screeched some more as it tried to manifest the volume at which he was yelling.

“Then why did you pay to have your head vitrified? Did you really think you could live forever on someone else’s dime?” Left chuckled yet again. “No, no. You racked up quite a debt since OMNITECH started counting. That Binder in your head is going to be there well after my own is gone.”

“They can’t do this! I’ll sue them!” He had turned frantic as he considered his options, and coming from a very litigious culture, the threat of a lawsuit was still something Sean considered very real. That was until Left began to laugh uproariously.

“You can’t sue anyone, silly. Even if you could, it takes money to do that, and you’re going to be so far in the red that it’ll be hundreds of years before you could even think about doing something so foolish.”

“Don’t patronize me.” Sean stewed in anger. Not even being able to look anyone in the eyes was maddening enough. To have his defiance thrown back into his face just made everything worse.

“I’m not, I am just explaining the reality of your situation to you.”

He seethed, “I hate you.”

“Now, now. Don’t go all sour on me just because you made a decision you regret.” Left wrapped its tendrils around Sean’s body. He couldn’t feel them still, but he could see the edges of them along his periphery. He felt as if he was in the grasp of a boa constrictor that was preparing to strangle its prey. “Besides, if you hate me now...” Left whispered. “You’re really going to hate me when I show you what you look like.”

Sean felt real fear yet again. It was true. He still had no idea what they had done to him, even if they had explained the process.

“I think it’s time we activated the viewscreen. Don’t you think so?”

“Fine.” It was Right. They hadn’t said anything in so long that Sean had nearly forgotten they were there.

He heard a beep and then a massive, black panel began to lower itself down from the ceiling in front of Sean.

He was waiting to feel his heart thud away as the anxiety grew, but there was nothing. Why would there be? He didn’t have one anymore.

“Let’s take a look.”

There was a second beep and Sean’s mind seized.

-

“What do you think?”

Cindy held up a photo album that obscured the bottom half of her face and looked at him with her great big doe eyes. There was a new photo inside of it. It was a picture of the two of them at a beach in the Cayman. That hadn’t been a cheap holiday, but he considered it well worth the price. They had made some good memories there.

She was sitting on their bed, the comforter wrapped around her legs. She had on a very loose-fitting shirt that only made her look even more adorable than she already was. “Well?”

“I think it fits perfectly. You’re organizing by our vacations, right?”

“I am indeedy.” She flipped the photo album around and laid it in her lap. “Still not sure what else to add though.”

“What about that picture of you playing with the dolphins?”

She was deep in thought as she considered the pages. “Maaaybe.”

“You were having fun until that one blew water on you.” He grinned thinking about how miffed she had been at what could have been considered a very rude act. That was, of course, assuming dolphins knew how to be rude.

Cindy frowned. “It wasn’t so funny when you thought you were going to die when we were rock climbing.”

“Hey!”

She giggled and then closed the album, and when she did, he felt she was closing the album on him.

-

“Little Shaw-n. Come back to us.”

When his eyes rebooted back into their sepia tones, he could see that Left still had him tightly coiled in their tendrils, but there was more than he was willing to deal with on that screen. Even with significant portions of the shell obscured. If anything, the tendrils did him no favors as they accentuated various assets.

“Good God.” The horrible statement caught in his nonexistent throat.

The thing that greeted him on the screen was horrifying and could not possibly be real. The shell had the appearance of being female, which was bad enough, but all the details and the shapes nearly caused him to seize up again. There was no face to speak of aside from a convex mask. The shell was full-figured, but not so grossly overexaggerated as to cross into parody. Running up the legs and the arms were honeycombs that showed off how the interior of the limbs were mostly hollow. On the chest was an ample pair of breasts without any definable features, just a perky set of teardrops and nothing else.

The shell seemed to be mostly be made of hard, curving surfaces aside from the breasts and abdomen. Around the head was a facsimile of hair, the strands pulled back behind the head and each made of thick cord. He couldn’t tell the color due to these damnable, unseen eyes, but there was a distinct difference in tone where the softness ended, and firmness started. If he had to guess, the chest and abdomen were gray, but the limbs and head were blue or black.

“It’s not so bad. I spent the entire time you were out the first time getting you cleaned and polished.” Left pulled the shell closer to themselves. Sean grimaced. “You should thank me. Before I did that, this shell was in real bad shape.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” he whispered some more; his voice was a quiet stir of static bursts in the air. Then the face lit up and a bright symbol filled it, one he was well acquainted with from his time on the Net:

;(

“What the fuck is that!”

The symbol shifted.

):<

“It’s your face. It can’t express full emotions. Too complicated for a shell so old. So instead it projects an image of what you’re feeling as you’re feeling it.”

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Sean whined.

“I am not, but I would relax if I were you. Things could be worse.” Left chuckled as they unwrapped the shell that he fervently denied was his. “Much worse. I’ve had to put holdovers just like you in walking protein pack dispensers before.”

They rounded on him from the front, blocking his view of the screen. “Do you know how long a person can hold on before the pre-canned advertisements they’re forced to blurt out every few minutes begins to take a toll on their psyche?”

Sean didn’t want to know the answer to that.

“Not very long,” Left teased before grasping Sean by the hands of the shell. “There are some upsides too.”

“Bullshit. Change me back. Now.”

Left ignored him and continued without stopping. “Gynoid shells like this can take a real beating, they’re made to last, have surprising strength, and a couple of very high bandwidth data ports.” Left slithered an arm around the back of the shell’s head, teasing it forward. “Although mobility and range of motion will leave something to be desired.”

Left took their more normal hands and took those of the shell in their own before they turned the palms of the shell up. “Your sense of touch will also be severely limited when not doing certain things.” That was when Sean noticed the bumping, stipple pattern on the palms and fingers.

“What the hell are those,” Sean said in a weak, horrified tone.

Left made one of their trademark chuckles. “I am sure you’ll figure it out.”

“Please, I beg you to put me back.”

“No can do, Little Shaw-n. Once you’re in, you’re in. Until the Binder releases you, that is.”

“I demand that you put me back!” He screamed each word with force until the vacillating tones finally broke and there was a smooth, dulcet that just so happened to have their voice raised.

“My-my voice.”

“We probably should have mentioned that. This shell is equipped with a vox that’s meant to sound only one way, and your voice has just come into its own.”

He could do nothing but stare down at the shell’s hands and begin to cry again. The sound of the unknown voice made him keen all the harder. “This is not my life!”

“It is now,” Right said as they joined Left. “Whether you like it or not, until that debt is paid, this is how it’s going to be.”

“I’m going to kill myself.”

“No, you’re not. You can’t.” Right tapped on his forehead. “The Binder will know, and I promise you that it’ll stop you from making any rash decisions.”

Sean began to sob even harder than before; no tears graced his now nonexistent eyes.

“Stop it,” Right said viciously. “It’s always the same with you people. We revive you and nothing is ever good enough.” Right smacked the side of the shell’s head, forcing it to shift to the side. “You made your decision, accept it. If you didn’t want this you shouldn’t have come here.” He growled; it was the sound of metal scraping against metal. “You should have died with everyone else when it was your time. This world has moved well on without you.”

Sean was too stunned to say anything.

There was a beep, and he felt the shell relax. The joints shook and the knees buckled from under themselves.

“There. You wanted your freedom so badly; I’ve given it to you.” Right planted a foot on the shell’s chest and pushed it backwards with enough force to topple it over. “You have ten of your minutes to get out here, and if you’re not I will summon OMNITECH Enforcers.” Right stormed off, but Sean couldn’t see it; he just heard it as the unseen door slammed.

Left stood like a statue. “Well, I guess the show’s over.” They reached out with their tendrils and heaved the heavy shell back up into a kneeling position. “I don’t have much advice for you but trust me when I say you’ll want to start earning money as soon as you can. Your Binder will make life rather unpleasant if you don’t.”

They tapped a tendril to their chin, thinking. “You should be able to summon a rudimentary overlay that’ll give you limited access to the Net.” Left paused and then started again, “I would suggest you take advantage of that. At the very least it’ll help you find charging stations, among other things.”

Sean couldn’t move. He was still trying to process what had happened to him in what felt like an instant.

“Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but we have more Subjects to process today, and my workmate has already given you an ultimatum.”

With shaky arms, Sean leaned the shell forward. There was a whine of servos as he willed it to move. The legs dragged beneath its frame, and then it pushed off the ground. He vaguely noticed that only the front pads of the feet felt as if they were touching the ground. As he made the shell take a step forward, the gait felt entirely unnatural and the shell nearly fell over again as it tried to keep its balance.

“Ah, it may take some time to adjust to the way the shell moves for you,” Left cautioned. “Just don’t think about it and you’ll be fine.”

Sean willed it to move forward again, and the shell shook some more but at least it didn’t fall over.

Instinctively he lifted the arms to reach out and steady the shell on something, anything. Left caught it and held the form straight.

“I can’t do this,” came the unnaturally feminine voice that had taken over Sean’s.

“You can, and you will,” Left urged. “I would be lying if I said I didn’t take pleasure in applying Binders to people, but you’ll see. It isn’t so bad. I can’t even remember if it’s my Binder making me do it, or if I just wanted to do it in the first place.” Left shrugged. “I figure it doesn’t matter anymore.”

The tendrils parted and Left literally pushed the shell straight through their tentacle form, and toward a blank wall. It took a second, but then an orange highlight outlined a rectangular shape, identifying this as a door. Sean used the shell's hands to tentatively reach out, and with a loud sliding sound, the door opened.

What was on the other side Sean had not even the slightest bit of fortitude remaining to prepare himself for.