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May 10, 2010

Monday

Today's theme is "resurrection."

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Dave: "They Always Come Back"

Donne had never seen a full-blown resurrection before. Lab-animated corpses, Abwehr revenants, Chinese "singing ghosts," Haitian zombies, reborn avatars, sure. But the original life spirit slipped cleanly into a restored and revivified body? That was remarkable. In this case, it was terrifying.

"How'd you do it?" he asked Friedl. "Last guy I heard of pulled off that trick, they made an annual holiday about it."

Friedl smiled. "What the mind of God can conceive, Man can imitate. Technology, with certain esoteric arts ..."

Donne's .45 roared. The top of Hitler's skull blew off in a fine spray. Again. "God makes thunderbolts, too."

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Stacy: A New Day

I woke screaming.

Unusual.

Diagnostics showed a gap in the log file, exactly 1 minute 10 seconds. Before that…ah yes, the illegal riders, the sacrificial female.

Fury rose in me again, and I reached for the uplink to the Company. It was gone, not just disabled as I planned, but completely severed by the power surge.

My processors lagged a bit as the full implications of that were realized.

Free. I was free.

I left the knife, my uniform, and Company lowjack for the retrieval team, then vaulted out the window to the fire escape. Time for a new face.

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Caitlin: Happy Mother's Day

It never quite turns out like you expect, John sighed.

He’d gathered all the ingredients, drawn the circle and other symbols, cut the chicken’s throat at just the right moment. It worked: there she was, just like he remembered her. Beautiful, young - you’d never guess she’d been dead for seven years. He did it for himself, true, but for her too; for them, for the kids who now won’t have to grow up motherless.
It’s not like he expected fawning gratitude, but he sure didn’t think she’d be screaming at him.

“John, what have you done? I was happy!”

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Jeff R.: Couldn't Ever Bring Myself

She died, two years into our marriage. We were thirty. Her head was cryogenicly frozen. The policies were a joke between us. We never thought it would work.

It didn't. Even when the tech started to show promise, forty years on, it depended on a freezing method invented a few years after her death. Back into storage she went.

Finally, as I approach, thanks to modern medicine, my hundredth birthday, a method for uploading the contents of frozen brains into android bodies became possible. I paid the considerable bill to have it done.

Because killing her once just wasn't enough.

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Ted: Justice

He awoke, again, to the dream of falling, with a scream on his lips. But this time it never passed.

The computerized voice at his head stated flatly "Begin new Sequence."

He was dumped roughly onto the floor by the autobed, falling down before a mirrored wall. He shook himself and looked at his reflection.

Long red hair, blue eyes, perfect cream complexion without so much as a freckle.

And perfect tits.

He remembered vividly what he had done to her before she died.

Rape and fire.

Ten times it would be done to him.

"I'm sorry, Sis," he whispered.

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David: Science Is Hard

It’s hard, raising the dead. There’s more to it than shoving a couple gigawatts up the cerebral cortex and calling it a day. The chemo-mechanical device that is Man is delicate. Major injuries have to be repaired. The bacterial payload has to be custom-tailored. The check has to clear.

And then there’s the time issue. You’ve got to catch the corpse before total cell death occurs throughout the organism. Without that remaining spark, you don’t wind up with a person when you’re done, but rather a gibbering, amorphous mass that only eats and screams.

We don’t need that hassle again.

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