This was the start of a novel idea I had a few years ago about a man investigating his own death after his resurrection. There were a few good moments I was able to sketch out but I’ve was never quite able to find a tone or outline a plot I was totally happy with. Someday I’ll solve that mystery and find an ending for this one.
I stepped out the door into a glorious downpour of hot rain and stood smiling, enjoying the sensation of the torrent hitting against my new skin and wondering what to do next. It was February 30th, five days before my birthday and two weeks since I had been murdered. They say the first death is the hardest; I’m not exactly keen to find out if that’s true any time soon so I hope that saying’s true. Answering the question of how old I am is vastly more troublesome than it once was. I was born thirty-nine years ago but this body is in its mid twenties and was made ten days ago. Despite that and other complications I think the trade-off of having made death into only a minor inconvenience has been well worth it.
What now? The question pounded through my head.
Most of the time the biggest problem resurrection clinics had was editing out the memory of dying from a resurrectee to avoid it being particularly traumatic and upsetting. I had precisely zero recollection of my death, not because of overzealous editing but because I’d arrived that way with two days of memories missing in the kind of last-ditch, fingers-crossed, all-shouting mindstate broadcast that memplants used in the direst of emergencies. I’d been assured that outside of the military and extreme sports fans that this capacity is almost never used. My personal clinician had been palpably excited to have a client with such an interesting case history as myself; I suppose in the niche world of resurrection clinicians someone arriving as an “unannounced E4 hypercast” was about as exciting as things got.
Well if the circumstances of my death were remarkable I have to confess to a sensation of disappointment at the ordinariness of my life. Like just about everyone in this fine nation of ours I’d had the usual bouts of learning, short career stints and years of uninterrupted debauchery that made up a well balanced life. About the only vaguely interesting thing I’d done was have a fifteen year monogamous relationship with the woman who was mother to my two children. We’d even had an old-fashioned marriage ceremony. I mean it’s hardly the kind of thing you’d bring up at a party as a look-how-cool-I-am talking point but in the back-story of Marcus Merson this was about as wild as things got.
Even had the circumstances of my mysterious death not been, apparently, incredibly unique and intriguing I think I’d have to find a new talking point as contrary to all prevailing clichés I’d not left the clinic to be met by a small crowd of loving family and friends. My ‘wife’ of fifteen years was nowhere to be seen. I knew this was going to be the case. Over the past few days the clinicians had gently broken the news that things had gone a bit wrong in the relationship. This hurts me more than anything because I haven’t changed.
Everybody knows dying changes people. You have two weeks where all you do is reflect and remember. At the start your past is just information and there’s no connection. It takes intensive therapy and co-operation to integrate all of that into coherent and contextualised memories of your life. You’re expected to reprioritise and reassess. It’s natural that for lots of people past relationships don’t matter as much and they feel that resurrection is a natural point to break things off and shake things up.
That wasn’t me. I succeeded in making it all feel as real, as important as it ever did. Maybe it’s even stronger than it was. It was all so distant at the start but I made it matter; remembered meeting her, falling in love, the marriage, the kids, the whole life lived together. I was so keen on getting back to living that I didn’t really care about what I’d died.
And now here I am standing alone embracing the feeling of rain to drown out the hurt, the anger and the sorrow of being rejected. I can’t stand here forever so back to that important question.
What next?
The obvious and dull answer would appear to be take the waiting car and go home. I felt like a little obvious dullness might be just the thing I needed after my recent excitement. It was your standard freefare aircar with the current style of being almost completely transparent save for some minimally opaque apparatus. I pushed myself through the slightly greasy field door and sat on the rather gorgeously patterned verdant couch within. I suspected and quickly confirmed that my vself had subconsciously arranged for a car with a seat that matched my tastes. I had my vself tell the car to take me home as I wasn’t really in the mood to talk.