After Life (Power Reads Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  Cuba, Havana and Mexico were the first to be quarantined, along with Belize and Puerto Rico. Florida followed, then Georgia. Within days the east coast of the USA was a no–go zone. Outbreaks in West Africa, Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean followed, the disease spreading with what seemed like impossible speed across the world’s equatorial regions.

  It has been, as the American president had once said to his beleaguered nation, “only a matter of time before humankind’s arrogant abuse of his environment provoked the wrath of nature. Now, shall we reap the whirlwind.”

  Seven billion souls lost. Less than a billion left alive now, in cities–under–siege scattered across the globe. The fungus had made the leap to other species of mammal in less than a year. Ninety per cent of species had succumbed: horses, cats, dogs, rodents. Avian species, once infected, had been the most prolific carriers, but the skies were now empty in all but the northern most countries, hence the profusion of airborne insects: they had flourished in the absence of rodents and birds.

  ‘Hurry,’ Reed said, his flickering holosap image becoming more defined as they got closer to the compound. ‘You only have a few minutes remaining on your filter.’

  Marcus quickened his pace, but even in his increasingly desperate state he was careful to avoid touching any foliage around him for fear of further compromising his Hazmat suit.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he breathed, his voice heavy with the exertion in the crushing heat.

  The northern hemisphere was where the pandemic’s dramatic advance was finally slowed. Colder seas, bitter winters and permafrost defied Apophysomyces and created a natural barrier. Boston, New York, London, Reykjavik, Moscow, Tokyo and Vancouver had all been spared – for a while. All had likewise been forced to become fortress cities as millions tried to flock in from the south, desperate to escape the disease that then flourished in the slums they created outside city walls around the globe. Images of thousands of men, women and children screaming for help as their bodies decayed, their flesh literally falling from their bodies, haunted Marcus’s dreams as they had done for years now.

  Only Marcus’s credentials as a biologist had saved him. His family had died in a refugee camp somewhere in Pennsylvania that was finally overrun by the disease two years after it had first emerged.

  ‘Reed, one–seven–nine–five–Hotel, request entry to decon’ unit, over?’

  Reed was calling ahead for Marcus, letting him conserve his filter by not talking, although by now the sheer heat was enough for Marcus to be sucking in air in wheezing breaths as he struggled to the edge of the compound.

  ‘Roger, Reed nine–five–Hotel, I have you visual. D’Souza, six–eight–seven–three–Bravo, confirm filter green?’

  ‘Confirmed, Bravo,’ Marcus gasped his reply. ‘Suit breached, filter at two minutes remaining.’

  ‘Roger, enter now.’

  The compound was a large dome of rigid, pearlescent plastic that shone in the harsh sunlight as though somebody had dropped a gigantic upturned dish in the middle of the bayou.

  An exterior door to the compound opened with a hydraulic hiss, leading to a tunnel of plastic and more safety doors. Marcus heard the whisper of air moving out of the tunnel: the dome maintained an air pressure higher than that of the outside environment, ensuring that if it was breached, air could only flow out of and not into the dome, thus preventing contamination by any airborne pathogen.

  ‘Bravo and Hotel inside the entry port,’ Reed said, and promptly vanished.

  Hotel and Bravo were the dispassionate but universal radio call–signs for Holosap and Biological, a quick and simple way to distinguish between the living and the after–living, as Marcus’s mother used to call them. The memory made him smile as his suit was doused in chemicals able to kill Apophysomyces dead on contact, the liquids spraying from multiple hoses set into the tunnel walls. Outside of the soil or a living host, like many infectious diseases Apophysomyces was easily destroyed by suitable chemicals. The nutria tucked under his arm squirmed violently as it was drenched but he managed to hold onto it.

  Marcus completed his decontamination routine before dragging himself out of his suit and entering the compound itself, the door shutting behind him swiftly and trapping the animal inside.

  The living space within was reasonably large and designed for permanent, self–sufficient habitation. Solar powered, it contained gardens for growing food, livestock pens, living quarters and a water–filtration unit all arranged around the laboratory at its heart. Everything was designed to sustain two people for a long duration stay.

  Kerry hurried down through the compound toward him.

  ‘Marcus!’

  Marcus, his body throbbing with pain and his vision blurring, collapsed against a wall and slid to his knees, his breathing choked in his throat and his heart racing.

  Kerry, her long dark hair flying in a tight pony–tail behind her, dropped to her knees in full flight and slid across the polished tiles of the compound to his side, shoving a syringe between her teeth as she collided with him and yanked his shirt sleeve up his arm.

  Marcus saw the bite marks on his arm, saw the inflamed and swollen flesh either side of the puncture wounds as Kerry pulled the syringe from between her teeth and eased the needle beneath his skin right above the wound. Marcus winced as the needle went in and the bitterly cold antivenin flooded into his arm.

  Kerry emptied the syringe into him, slid the needle out and pressed one finger over the puncture wound. She reached up and with one hand gently pushed Marcus’s damp hair from out of his eyes.

  ‘Hang in there,’ she said. ‘It’ll take a while for this stuff to work its magic.’

  Marcus nodded as he saw Dr Reed appear ghost–like nearby, his projection flickering as he watched.

  ‘You’ll live,’ the biologist said prophetically. ‘Couple of hours and you should start to clear up, then we can get back to work.’

  Kerry glanced over her shoulder at him. ‘You’re all heart, you know that?’

  ‘He’s alive,’ Reed pointed out, ‘which is more than can be said for me. How are your samples coming along?’

  Kerry stood up from Marcus’s side, careful to cap the syringe. ‘Multiple tests but nothing’s coming up.’

  ‘We’ve got some more samples for you,’ Marcus said weakly and gestured behind him to the airlock. ‘Water and a nutria.’

  ‘You got a live one?’ Kerry asked in amazement.

  Without waiting for a reply, she dashed to the decon’ unit door and peered inside to see the mammal sniffing its way around the confines of its new prison.

  ‘It looks healthy, apart from that leg!’

  ‘It’s doing better than me,’ Marcus whimpered. ‘Took a bite for that damned thing.’

  Kerry appeared not to hear him. ‘Is the water from the same site?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dr Reed replied, ‘within fifty to seventy metres.’

  Kerry whirled from the door and began marching toward her laboratory. ‘I’ll get right on it.’

  She breezed past Marcus, who glanced up at her. ‘Any chance of some help here?’

  ‘You’ll live, so grow some balls okay?’ she called over her shoulder as she vanished into a nearby corridor. ‘But do shout if you think you’re dying again.’

  Marcus sighed and looked across at Dr Reed.

  ‘Humans,’ the holosap muttered with a shake of his head and a wry smile.

  Marcus watched the holosap flicker out and vanish, probably to reappear somewhere else in the compound. He shivered, partly from the poison wracking his body and partly from the odd sensation of living in a compound that was, in some respects, haunted.

  He didn’t like to dwell on it much, but now, slumped against the wall after nearly dying from a fatal snakebite, he wondered whether he too could live on after his body had succumbed to whatever fate awaited it.

  There were one hundred trillion neural connections in the human brain, and those synaptic connections could be recorded, copied a
nd resurrected much like a computer hard drive. Decades ago, scientists had taken heated diamond knives and divided human brains into slices one forty–thousandth the width of a human hair. They had then sliced them down to a thousandth of even that slenderest width, so small that the connections between individual neurons became visible.

  Mankind’s ability to store data had grown so rapidly that long before the end of the first decade of the twenty first century, man was recording more data in two days than his entire history up to that point. Digital life loggers, as they had been known, had been recording their lives via cameras and thus creating recordings more accurate than could be created by the fallible human memory. Even by the early 21st Century, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans coupled with blood–flow monitors had enabled scientists to “read minds“ by matching brain blood flow to images watched by test subjects on a monitor. Even when denied a link to what the subjects were seeing, the programs devised showed a pixellated image of the subject’s view, a window into their minds. The truly digital brain, made possible by advances in quantum storage, had been just around the corner.

  So, unfortunately, had The Falling.

  Scientists had tried regenerating victim’s bodies, growing new organs via healthy cadavers to combat the disease; livers, lungs, hearts generated via donor stem–cells. Brains were mostly water like many organs and could be recreated, but not with the essential essence of the original owner: the memories, the personality, the soul. But only through the digitizing and copying of a human brain at immense resolutions could their essence at the time of death be captured, and their souls saved for perpetuity.

  Death, as they said back in the day at MIT, was just a mitochondrial chain–reaction, and even that could be stopped with sulphide, cyanide and carbon–monoxide, effectively arresting death in mid flow.

  Marcus shivered as he wondered what his own cells were going through.

  The generation of a holosap merely required the mapping of the owner’s brain, much of which was made possible by earlier work in numerous fields. Microscopic probes lit up synapses in living neurons in real–time by attaching fluorescent markers onto synaptic proteins, allowing scientists to see how neurons changed with new data; “hard light”, which used the properties of photons to manipulate their momentum to mimic molecules with mass and thus encode light data into a cohesive holographic image of the deceased human; modulators to produce the image in full colour with a thirty hertz refresh rate in three dimensional space; and quantum storage units to hold the data accumulated by a lifetime’s experiences in place.

  There was only one thing that Marcus felt the folks at Re–Volution hadn’t got quite right.

  Kerry reappeared with a blanket and knelt down beside him, covering his shoulders as she tugged at his arm.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘it’s off to bed with you. I don’t want you dying in the hall.’

  ‘You’re all heart,’ Marcus mumbled in reply.

  Marcus felt that there was a stark difference between Kerry and Dr Reed, between a human being and their holosap digital cousins. Kerry had come back to check on him.

  Dr Reed’s holosap had not.

  ***

  9

  London

  Arianna felt numb as she sat in a holding cell at the police station.

  A paper cup of water trembled in her grasp as she stared down at it, strangely fascinated by the ripples within. You’re in denial. Your brain is seeking ways to avoid thinking about what has happened. Focus. Think.

  She didn’t want to think, didn’t want to consider what had happened. There was no sense to it, no reason that she could think of to explain why she was now sitting here in a tiny cell after being arrested at the site of her adoptive father’s gruesome death. Just a few hours before, everything had been absolutely fine.

  Arianna could not even look at a picture of her son, Connor. Her belongings had been confiscated upon her arrival at the station. Often, in times of crisis she had looked longingly at her son’s image and asked herself what she would have done for him were he here, drawing strength and moral integrity from his memory. Though she could not admit it to herself, often she found more strength in her son that in god Himself.

  ‘Oh God, Connor.’

  Five years old. Blond and with cute green eyes that had matched his father’s, the only bit of that man she allowed into her conscience these days. Connor had been the light of her life and his absence ached through her heart with its every beat.

  And now this.

  Water spilled across her hands and she blinked. The paper cup was crushed in her clenched fist, liquid running in droplets across her shoes.

  ‘Volkov!’

  The sharp command jolted Arianna off the uncomfortably hard bench in the cell. She looked up at the digital speaker on the wall above the door. ‘Stand facing away from the cell door. Place your hands behind your back and then stand within reach of the hatch!’

  Arianna obeyed the command as a small hatch opened in the cell door at waist height. Moments later rough hands cuffed her wrists and the cell door opened. She was led by a portly officer bearing the stripes of a sergeant to an interview room further down the corridor. Inside awaited Detectives Han Reeves and Myles Bourne.

  Arianna was guided into a seat behind a table in the room and her cuffs were removed before the sergeant left the room.

  ‘Tuesday, five forty–eight pm,’ Reeves intoned for the benefit of the recorder set into the wall alongside the table. ‘Detectives Bourne and Reeves, interview of suspect Arianna Volkov for murder and acts of terrorism against ...’

  ‘What?!’ Arianna gaped at Reeves, who didn’t miss a beat as he continued.

  ‘… the corporate headquarters of Re–Volution Ltd in the city.’

  ‘You’re accusing me of terrorism now?’ she uttered in disbelief. ‘I nearly died in that explosion!’

  ‘Indeed,’ Han agreed, ‘but conveniently you did not. The explosion occurred just at the right time to provide you with cover on the opposite side of the street. You entered the building, then immediately exited again and crossed the street. You walked to the very spot, the only spot, that close to the blast that allowed you to survive. Two other pedestrians fifty yards further away from the building died from shrapnel and debris wounds.’

  Arianna struggled to speak.

  ‘For God’s sake, how the hell are you coming up with all of this? I forgot my security pass and turned to go back for it. I work for that company, detective!’

  ‘My point exactly,’ Han agreed, ‘lots of very wealthy and very dead clients. Lots of people who would need counselling, for a generous fee no doubt.’

  ‘That’s thin,’ Arianna uttered. ‘People die all the time without needing me to blow them up.’

  ‘As a stand–alone conviction we agree,’ Myles said, ‘that the charge might be considered thin. But when we combine your miraculous survival with what happened to Alexei Volkov, and your previous convictions…’

  Arianna stared at the younger man for a long beat before she spoke carefully. ‘Connor’s father wrecked my life.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Han said. ‘Explain to me what happened.’

  Arianna’s fingernails bit into her palms. She focused on her fists, forced them to relax.

  ‘I got pregnant,’ she said, almost whispering, as though the words would not hurt so much if she could barely hear them. ‘When he, the father, found out he told me he wanted to terminate the baby.’

  ‘And you disagreed,’ Han said.

  ‘There are only a few million people left alive on this Earth, detective,’ Arianna shot back, ‘the idea of ruining a life that hadn’t even begun yet didn’t appeal to me.’

  ‘Maybe your partner felt becoming a father would ruin his life?’ Myles suggested.

  Arianna glared at Myles but said nothing.

  ‘So then you took his life from him,’ Han replied as he looked down at a charge sheet before him on the table. ‘You hit him across the
head three times with an iron bar, the last blow struck when he was already unconscious. He was in hospital for two months in a coma before he died. No upload.’

  ‘He threatened my child,’ Arianna snapped, ‘told me that if I didn’t terminate the pregnancy he’d do it for me.’

  ‘So you said in court,’ Myles replied. ‘No witnesses though, and no testimony from your former partner’s friends, colleagues or family suggesting any hint of violence toward you.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have,’ Arianna said. ‘They all saw me as the rich girl with the powerful father. They hated me.’

  ‘How come you ended up with this guy then?’ Han challenged her.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Arianna said. ‘It was a mistake. He was from the rat–runs, someone I’d known since growing up in the boarding houses. We’d kept in touch. He was into bootlegging, you know? Alcohol. We sampled some of his stock. Things got out of hand.’

  ‘Your father must have been appalled.’

  Arianna cringed. ‘He understood well enough.’

  ‘And your son?’ Myles asked.

  Arianna glared at the young detective. ‘He died, aged five, from The Falling,’ she spat, some of the old fury rising in her blood. ‘He couldn’t be uploaded because he was too young to have an implant fitted.’ Arianna fought back tears. ‘Re–Volution isn’t interested in saving children, they don’t possess enough personal wealth to make it financially viable.’

  Han Reeves leaned forward on the table, his voice a little softer now. ‘You see where we’re coming from here, right Arianna? You’re a woman who has been in court for murdering a man; you had both motive, means and access to Alexei Volkov at the time of his murder and you were both the last person to see Alexei alive and the last person to leave the Re–Volution building before the blast that killed dozens of its employees.’

  ‘To what end?’ Arianna uttered. ‘I kill Alexei and then try to destroy the very place that can protect my future? What the hell sense does that make?’