After Life (Power Reads Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Your mind is still the same,’ Arianna replied. ‘Only your circumstances have changed.’

  LeMarke nodded vaguely. He understood, she knew, but understanding and accepting were two vastly different states when undergoing such a dramatic transformation. In her career, Arianna had successfully integrated over four hundred struggling holosaps into their new lives, helping them cope with the mental anguish of being effectively both alive and dead at the same time.

  LeMarke’s image flickered, a tiny glitch in the transmission. Arianna glanced out of the windows across the city. The Thames wound its way between tower blocks like a snake of molten metal, the sun blazing to the east behind towering cumulonimbus soaring like angel’s wings into the heavens. A flicker of distant lightning danced low across the skyline. The spring storms were starting again, right on time. She could see dark grey veils of rain falling over the forests that entombed the south.

  ‘How did I die?’ LeMarke asked.

  Arianna did not look at the data–roll by her side, a sheet of glossy electro–paper that detailed LeMarke’s final moments. She liked her clients to see that she had read their cases in detail.

  ‘You were working outside of the city,’ she said. ‘A pair of wild dogs got the better of you. You died before the gate guards on Westminster Bridge could reach you.’

  ‘Will I feel again, Reverend?’ LeMarke asked her.

  She smiled. The questions were always the same and always followed the same format. It didn’t matter if the newly uploaded holosap was a mathematician or just a lucky lottery winner, the human desire for contact and comfort was undiminished. The scientists might rely upon evidence to move forward in life but in matters spiritual they still, like all human beings, deferred to other authorities.

  ‘Your brain will rewire itself, just as it would when you were physically alive,’ she replied. ‘The holonomic networks act like neural networks, able to reconnect after trauma. You know this, Professor.’

  LeMarke gave a meek smile, glanced at her. ‘Sometimes you’ve just got to hear it.’

  ‘I know,’ Arianna said. ‘Your sense of taste, touch, even smell will eventually return, although they will differ from how you remember them. How that happens is your expertise Professor, not mine, but happen it will. Coordination will improve, cognition will become less erratic and further memories should form naturally within just a few days. Right now, the best thing that you can do is simply try to relax and wait for it all to come to you.’

  ‘Just like that, eh?’

  ‘Just like that,’ Arianna confirmed. ‘Don’t try to force it, just let your body do its thing.’

  LeMarke chuckled as he looked at her. ‘My body?’

  ‘Is exactly as it was before,’ Arianna said, ‘as is your brain. You may be a product of quantum light but you’re still a human being. Don’t let anybody tell you any different, especially yourself.’

  It was sound advice that fell like honey from her lips, but it tasted sour. Arianna believed not in immortality but in a higher power, and somehow it seemed to her that uploading upon death to become a holosap was somehow dodging a bullet that was inevitably going to find you in the end. She didn’t understand how holosaps could see, hear, touch or think, although she recalled from memory that the living human brain actually worked much like a hologram. When holographic brains first emerged they had automatically created neuronal links to the senses that mimicked normal brains; eyes, ears, hands and so on. But, trapped in a computer, they had been unable to express their senses in the normal way. Everybody knew the first words uttered by the very first holosap, Adam, when his computer generated brain had completed its neuronal links and achieved self–awareness for the first time.

  ‘Where am I?’

  Adam, the creation of celebrated neurobiologist Cecil Anderson, had been born and deactivated many times by his sensitive creator. Modern human rights groups liked to remind holosap objectors that the longer Adam had been trapped inside a computer the more agitated and upset “he” became. Human beings, they pointed out, were nothing without language and movement. It was only when Anderson created a human hologram and projected the digital brain’s primary sensorium into three–dimensional space using a phenomenon known as “hard light” that Adam finally was able to express himself as a human being and his fearful, angry persona vanished.

  Unfortunately, even Anderson had not been able to predict the rapidity with which the holonomic brain melded to its holographic body. Sight, hearing and even a quasi–sense of touch were generated by the holonomic networks until the holosap looked, felt and acted just like its deceased human counterpart. A new species had appeared, had evolved some said, and there had been no turning back.

  God created Man in His own image, had once been the legend. Then, in the secular age, that Man had created God in his own image. Now, in this latest chapter in the crucible of human endeavour, Homo sapiens had created Holo Sapiens in his own image, and rendered God irrelevant.

  Arianna realised not for the first time that despite her distaste she also viewed LeMarke, like all holosaps, as just another human being. About a third of her clients were living humans suffering from all manner of bereavements, illnesses, injuries and such like. As a bereavement counsellor and priest, her job was simply to ease their transition from a state of injury or grieving to one of contentment, or as close as she could get them to it. Ultimately it was down to the individual to finish the job. Arianna merely provided support and consolation, and she suspected that her presence as an ordained priest, one of the last now in a firmly secular world, gave them some sense of comfort when the divine was viewed with suspicion at the best of times and outright disdain the rest.

  She did not like holosaps, however. Who did, really? The whole thing was an abomination of what it meant to actually be alive. Sure there weren’t many of them, just a few thousand, but that was only because so few people could afford the astronomical sums required to properly insure their minds for future use. Futurance, the lawyers called it, somewhat cynically. Those who could upload were invariably powerful and influential, and nobody doubted their influence on the living members of government.

  ‘This is going to take some getting used to,’ LeMarke said finally.

  ‘Just like us all, human and holosap alike,’ Arianna replied.

  LeMarke looked at her for a moment as though considering his words. His eyes dropped to her white collar, stark above her black shirt and trousers, and then drifted across to the chrome Crucifix on her office wall. ‘Do you, still, believe? I mean really believe, despite all of this?’

  ‘With all of my heart.’

  ‘Do you have an upload waiting?’

  Arianna kept her voice even. ‘Yes, it was gifted me but I don’t intend to use it.’

  ‘Use it,’ LeMarke said, ‘because people like you are needed wherever you may be.’

  Arianna smiled as LeMarke turned for the office door and then checked himself.

  ‘You’re getting there,’ she observed. ‘By the time we’ve had another couple of visits there’ll be no stopping you.’

  Arianna stood up and saw LeMarke move to shake her hand. This time he caught himself a little quicker, grinned ruefully and reached out to a spot of thin air at his side. LeMarke’s image blinked out and vanished. Only the projection plate remained, set into the carpeted floor. A gentle, digitised voice echoed through the office.

  ‘Connection disengaged.’

  ‘In every sense,’ Arianna murmured to herself.

  A blinking light signalled another communication, but this time from the living. Arianna smiled as she tapped the screen. Another holographic projection appeared, but this time it was relayed directly via a camera in another building in the city, the holographic imagery clearer and sharper than LeMarke’s ephemeral form.

  ‘Papa!’

  Alexei Volkov was a tall, broad shouldered man with a round, content face born of decades of experiencing both the best and the worst the world had to
offer.

  ‘Rebyohnuk,’ Alexei replied with a broad grin in lightly accented Russian, ‘my child. Have you finished your morning’s work yet?’

  ‘Got another client before lunch, Gregory Detling,’ Arianna said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I need to see you, if you can spare the time?’ Alexei said. ‘After Gregory’s appointment, of course.’

  There was no urgency on his face, no timbre of alarm in his voice, but somehow Arianna sensed something behind his words. ‘Is everything okay?’ she asked.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Alexei assured her. ‘Can you make it to The Ivory for lunch, say two hours’ time?’

  ‘Wouldn’t miss it, papa,’ she smiled.

  ‘Ti takaya chudesnaya,’ Alexei winked.

  ‘Oh, I’m wonderful now, am I?’ she giggled. ‘And you are too kind. See you later.’

  Arianna disconnected the transmission and grabbed her jacket, slipped it over her shoulders and walked from her office. The tiny church, once known as St Matthews, sounded hollow as she walked between the pews. Long gone were the days when the faithful rejoiced in these halls, or any other for that matter. The need for faith, for a belief in the afterlife, had long since been swept aside in the wake of mankind’s digital immortality.

  On the ancient brickwork of the church was a faded piece of crude graffiti that somehow she had never quite been able to remove.

  “You haven’t lived until you’ve lived again.”

  She had never figured out whether the graffiti had been made by a believer, a cynic or a comic.

  The street outside was quiet. Scattered sunlight glinted off countless windows, the brightly illuminated tower blocks contrasting sharply with the deep grey clouds looming across the horizon and trailing skirts of falling rain beyond the river. Arianna walked toward the embankment, veering off through Whitehall and then away from the river again until she approached the towering edifice of the Re–Volution building.

  Her appointment was with a holosap by the name of Gregory Detling, a former property magnate who was making waves across the city. He had uploaded six years previously after a heart attack had ended his ninety four year tenure as a human being on Earth. He had been survived by his beloved wife, Svetlana Rokovitch, a Moscovian who had fled the Motherland long before The Falling and settled in London to work as a model. Fifty nine years younger than her husband, their relationship had endured even his death when she had, to the amazement of the media, declined her share of his considerable fortune and placed it in trust for him. The laws governing holosap control of privately owned corporations had long been debated by parliament, amid claims by human rights groups that holosaps should be able to continue their work after death.

  Two years after Gregory Detling’s upload, Svetlana had died in a train wreck. Her cranial injuries were such that she was unable to upload, leaving her husband bereft. Now, he had initiated a legal challenge at the High Court asserting his right to die again, and requested Arianna as his spiritual advisor. Her father Alexei was openly backing Detling’s legal challenge. An ardent supporter of the right–to–die–again campaign, he funded victims who wished to recant their uploads, something that Re–Volution forbade on the grounds of lost revenue.

  Arianna strode into the expansive lobby of the building, checking her reflection in a mirror. Long, light brown hair in a neat pony tail, two–piece black power suit with its stark white collar. Modest heels. She didn’t look too bad, she guessed, and a damned sight better than she would have done without the salary she pulled down from the Hope Reunion Church and her freelance psychology work for Re–Volution.

  Across one wall was emblazoned an emblem tagged with the Re–Volution logo: a human figure holding a stylised glowing torch aloft before them.

  See the light.

  The echoing of conversations competed with countless footfalls as members of staff hurried from one meeting to the next. Between them, on pathways of thick glass that crossed the lobby floor in a giant X, several holosaps strolled and conversed. Streams of light flickered and glowed beneath their feet as they walked. A pair saw her and nodded in greeting as they passed by, their shoulders occasionally passing through each other as they strolled.

  Arianna smiled politely but kept her head down. She had almost reached the security checkpoint when she remembered that she had left her security card back at the church. She cursed, turned and hurried for the exit, glass doors shielded with mirrors that made the lobby seem darker and the holosaps brighter than they should be. She pushed through the doors and sucked in a lungful of fresh air.

  The pavement was peppered with big spots of damp as the first heavy raindrops splattered down from the turbulent sky above. She could smell the odour of rain, of the dirt ingrained into the pavement wafting up as it was drenched as she opened an umbrella and stepped out into the road.

  Pedestrians hurried to avoid the rainstorm, sheltering their heads from the giant droplets as a crack of thunder split the heavens above and reverberated through Arianna’s chest. She checked both ways for the hiss of gas–powered taxis but saw none as she hurried across the street. The rain began to fall from behind her, driven by the storm front’s winds, and as she stepped up onto the pavement she turned her umbrella and lowered it across the back of her head to protect her as another crack of thunder smashed across the sky.

  The shockwave hit her first. It felt as though a car had driven into her at speed. The air spilled from her lungs as her vision blurred, and she thought that she felt hundreds of raindrops hit her umbrella until she saw chunks of glass and masonry blast by in a cloud of debris.

  Heat scorched her legs and hands as she was lifted off the pavement and hurled over a low wall onto a damp lawn. Arianna hit the muddy ground, and as the blast thundered over her she glimpsed the lower floors of the Re–Volution building vanish in a boiling cloud of smoke and flame as a galaxy of glass stars rained down across her.

  ***

  4

  Alexei Volkov was not a man who delighted in his fortune. Not any more, anyway.

  His embankment house overlooked the surging waters of the Thames River, the churning green water swollen from the rain seething down from heavily laden skies and running in rivulets down the glass before him. Some of the other gated homes nearby glowed from lights turned on against the growing gloom despite the hour, the owners risking the crippling electricity bills for the sake of a little heat and light.

  Alexei’s home was filled with windows of tripleglazed glass that allowed prodigious quantities of natural light to flood into its interior. He had been raised by poor parents on the Kamchatka Peninsular, about as far from the rest of humanity as it was possible to get. Both of his younger brothers had died before their tenth birthdays of illnesses brought on by poverty and a lack of medical care. Alexei alone had survived, and had realised that his only chance of living a full life was to get the hell out of Siberia and join the rest of civilisation.

  It was a great irony that having escaped from the icy grip of Kamchatka, Alexei had then made his fortune in water. The dramatic alteration of the planet’s climate over his lifetime had seen the Mediterranean and Africa paralysed by drought to the extent that their entire populations had either perished or sought refuge further north in Europe. Sensing an opportunity, Alexei had invested in defunct container ships that had once carried oil and had them refitted to carry fresh water. Thus had his company, H2O2U, been born. Forty years later, it was one of the few major corporations still standing independent of either government or the holosaps.

  Water was the one thing that his adoptive motherland had plenty of. As the locals often said, they were pissed on daily either by the holosaps or the sky. The shifting climate had resulted in disruption of both the jet stream and the ocean circulation around the United Kingdom. Contrary to long–held popular beliefs, global warming had not resulted in a balmy English climate but in fact had heralded falling average temperatures, bitter winters and damp, stormy summers.

  At
least now, Alexei mused, the English had some real weather to worry about.

  A deep boom shook him from his thoughts as it reverberated through the building and he glanced out of a broad window across the city. A flare of lightning snaked white fire across the clouds above, briefly illuminating the gloomy skyline in a halo of light and casting into sharp relief a billowing black plume of oily smoke rising from within the city.

  His first thought was for his adopted daughter, Arianna. She worked close to where he assumed the blast had detonated. Revolutionaries, those opposed to the holosaps on religious grounds, frequently attacked the company’s distinctive headquarters, claiming God’s will as the motivation for their atrocities. His second thought was for his deceased wife, Natalya, whose passing had forged within his heart a dense pall of sadness that time would not heal. A victim of The Falling, she had died long before uploading as a holosap was possible.

  Alexei squinted his ageing eyes to focus on the plume, and saw a reflection dance in front of the windows. Alarm fired through his synapses and he whirled in time to see a masked man plunge something deep into Alexei’s belly. Pain bolted through Alexei’s stomach and danced through his tendons as electrical currents seethed through his body.

  Alexei gagged as his legs collapsed beneath him, the sound of a Taser device clicking in his ears as he squirmed in agony on the polished floor. Through his pain and his blurred vision he saw more men flood into his living room, all of them wearing face masks, black combat suits and carrying weapons. Rough hands bound his wrists and his ankles and he was dragged through the room and down a corridor to his bedroom.

  Alexei felt himself being lifted onto his bed and pinned down as the rough hands loosed the restraints on his limbs only to refasten them to the ornate iron bedstead. Thick tape was affixed across his mouth, making his breathing difficult as he tried to suck in air.