Chapter One
The One Where Jeb Says "Oh No" A Bunch
[SYSTEM ONLINE.]
Oh no. No no no no.
"You're supposed to be dead!"
And I was. She was right. I was.
I gasped, suddenly aware of how much I wasn't breathing. My heart still seemed to be beating of its own accord; the breathing was the only real issue.
"Shit, shit, shit, fuck what am I going to do?"
I forced my eyes open as… whoever the woman was continued panicking. Without my glasses I couldn't see much, but wherever I was smelled like preservative and had a white-tiled ceiling. And the panicking voice was coming from a white-coated blur.
I determined that I was probably in a morgue.
I coughed. I was lying in some sort of metal box-tray, maybe the kind they store dead people in at the morgue. Having never been to a morgue, I couldn't say.
I levered myself upright - a basic process which had not changed while I was dead, thankfully.
"Fuck dammit I'm going to be in so much trouble."
"Where is this?" I said, rather politely for a recent ex-corpse.
"Oh shit you talk!" She skittered away from my tray.
"Yes, I do."
"Dead people don't talk!"
"Not usually," I admitted, "but apparently I do."
"Right. Yeah." She covered her face with her hands. "Ohhhh fuck." She shoved her hands in the pockets of her lab coat.
[CORRUPTION DETECTED IN VISUAL CORTEX. RUN CORRECTION PROGRAM Y/N?]
"Yes. Shit. Y?"
[RUNNING CORRECTION PROGRAM.]
"Are you okay?" said the woman in the lab coat. "You were dead ten minutes ago. Are… do you have any other problems?"
"I'm not usually crazy," I said. Nominally, this was true. But given the last time I'd been alive I had been chatting with an artificial intelligence that ran off of a small chip located inside my brain, perhaps there was a little more crazy in me than I liked to think about.
"Okay, that's great, but maybe - maybe that's not true anymore?"
My vision cleared, and the morgue popped into 120% clarity, all the blur vanishing, objects popping into clear life around me.
"Augh!"
"Oh my god. Oh my - are you okay? Do I need to call a doctor?"
"I am a doctor." I blinked. I would have thought that Gladys would stop talking to me once I died. Apparently this was wrong - while it wasn't her in my head, something was in there.
"So am I," she admitted. I could see every freckle and acne scar on her face; if I concentrated, every striation in her green irises.
Suddenly she was limned in a gentle blue, and I yelped.
[BONNIE PARKER, M.D. MORE INFORMATION Y/N?]
"No! N. That's great, please stop."
Bonnie, if that was her name, eyed me suspiciously. "Are you sure you're all right?"
"Yeah, I think I am," I said. "Just, um. Nothing."
'Voices in my head'. Voice, really. A Voice and a command prompt.
Oh, no. No no no no.
Gladys had been one thing. But I had participated in the alpha trial of the Voice, and suddenly a horrible possibility presented itself: I had been resurrected to serve as some sort of puppet, guided by a new, improved Voice.
"You're sure you're not, uh, hearing anything?" She looked at me critically.
"No." I'd just stopped being dead. This put me at a severe disadvantage in the conversation.
"How about now?"
[HELLO.]
"Gah! I - I am not answering that question."
She looked at me again, the sort of searching gaze that needed to be leveled over glasses by a disapproving superior. Well, I was mostly naked and lying down where she was wearing clothes and standing, so she did have one up on me there.
"Are you sure." There was no question in her tone, only forceful statement.
[HELLO JEB USER. STATUS: ONLINE.]
"Stop that," I said.
"Well, you're not talking to me," she observed.
"Can I have some pants?"
"I think I have scrubs here somewhere," Bonnie said absently. Her expression went sharp. "You're sure? Are you just not telling me because you're afraid I'll think you're insane?"
I looked at her with as much incredulity as I could muster wearing not much other than a sheet and a toe tag.
"Ten minutes ago you were dead," she said by way of amendment. "Hearing voices, compared to that - not much."
"True," I said. "And yes. Yes, there is something in my head and it won't shut up."
[JEB USER IDENTIFIED. INPUT?]
"Shut up!"
"Right," she said. "You don't have to speak aloud. You can just, um. Think at it."
I stared at her.
Things had gotten strange while I was dead.
Please, please shut the fuck up, I thought.
[INPUT ACCEPTED.]
Especially with the caps lock jesus damn!
[Input accepted.]
"That better?" she said.
"Just give me some pants," I said, defeated.
"Fine," she said. "And then we'll talk. Oh."
I heard a click as she pressed a button on something - how long had I been dead and why were we still using buttons in the future?
Hello? said a calm, reasonable voice.
Well, it was a start.
Who the fuck are you and why are you in my head.
I was swept under by sensory input - cold water and the scent of burnt hair and the shriek of a modem.
"Gah!"
As with Gladys - Gladys, Gladys, who was she? - the outer world seemed far away, but I heard the yelp of surprise through the fog.
Please don't do that. Do you have a name? In English?
"He doesn't have a designation," said Bonnie from the other side, "but I call him Caiaphas."
That's… fucking… great.
Perhaps I had always had a cynical side, and just never noticed it - no, no, I definitely remembered being a cynical asshole before I died. Maybe not this bad, though.
Hello, said that cold voice, my name is - click - Andrei.
Well, maybe it was picking a name I disliked less than Caiaphas, but who knew?
Either way, my chances of finding out what the hell was going on lay more with Bonnie than with something I didn't exactly know how to operate (that happened to be inside my head). So attempts at ingratiating itself aside, the thing in my head was going to have to wake.
I fought my way up to the surface. "Do you have pants?" My tongue felt thick, my whole vocal apparatus somewhat, well, dead.
"Yes." She thrust a messily-folded set of scrubs at me; I say set, but the only scrub part was the pants. The shirt, I wasn't sure.
It turned into a band t-shirt, for a band I didn't recognize. Archie and the Jaybirds, tour two thousand…
"Oh no."
A passel of questions formed in my mind:
Where am I? When am I?
What the fuck happened while I was dead?
And others. Lots of others.
"I can explain!" Bonnie said, raising her hands in a warding gesture. "Put the pants on, at least, and I'll make coffee and I'll explain."
She clicked off to somewhere behind me - heels in a morgue? - and I set to forcing myself out of the cold, holy shit cold, metal tray.
That achieved, I stood barefoot on the tile. And promptly almost fell over.
Being dead had not done a damn thing for my balance.
Catching myself on the wall (also tiled, damn - had the whole morgue been designed to be easily hosed out? Eugh), I took a deep breath. Upright. Stay upright. Stay standing and all else follows.
I heard a clicking and a gentle burble. Coffee. Right.
Pants hadn't changed much while I was, ah, living-impaired, and I managed not to fall over while putting them on. Small steps.
The band shirt went on without difficulty, though it didn't really fit me at all. Clothes were clothes, and anything was better than naked.
I smelled coffee, and tottered out after it.
Bonnie was standing at a small folding table, crouched in front of a familiar-looking coffee-maker. It had been brand new the year I left the School, and I was hardly surprised to see this one looking worn, like someone had used it as a soccer ball the entire time I was dead.
"Chairs are in the office," she said, patting the side of the coffee-maker affectionately.
"Uh, mugs?"
"Yeah." She produced a mismatched pair from seemingly nowhere. "You get the chipped one. It's clean."
They were both chipped to shit, but I took the worst of the two and set the other down on the table.
She took it up almost immediately, clutching it in her hands with an absent force that surprised me.
"You were a John Doe," she began. "For, um. Quite a while. No space to bury you so they chucked you in the cold storage. No living relatives that we could locate, I guess, so you just, uh, sat there. Until I came along."
"What did you do to me?" Usually I would have been angry at someone fiddling around with me while I wasn't conscious without my consent, but whatever she'd done had apparently brought me back from the dead, so that, at least, was fine by me.
"I was going to test something on you, but you already had a chip in there," she said, and the coffee-maker chirped. She poured out coffee for herself and went back to absently clutching the mug - sooner or later it was going to crack and her lab coat was going to be a nice shade of coffee stain.
I poured coffee for myself. "Yeah, that was there before I died."
"I could tell that. The scar had to be at least two years old, probably more. I had to look to be sure I wasn't just seeing a shadow on the scan." She sipped her coffee. "I shoved a computer up to your skull and threw Caiaphas in, just to see if he'd fit without making your head explode. He did. That was a year ago."
Oh no. I'd woken up in a morgue - bad - hearing voices - worse - and the only human I'd seen so far was friendly enough but would've made an excellent heir to Victor Frankenstein.
"Today your entire bank switched itself on and off about nine times, so I came out to check and… The problem was coming from your box, so I opened you up and uh. There you were."
"How long was I dead?" I rasped, and took a big swig of coffee. Huh. Coffee wasn't bad in the future - was it really the future, though, if I had no way of getting back to the 'present' I had died in what felt like just ten minutes ago?
"A long time," she muttered. "Oh, I didn't even ask - did you want cream, sugar, anything?" She looked slightly guilty, as if she were entertaining a guest rather than answering questions put to her by a recent ex-corpse.
"I'm fine." Truthfully I didn't even notice the coffee much. It was a kind of accessory to the hellish weirdness surrounding me. And compared to some of the glorified piss-water I had drunk in my years using it to stave off sleep, it was sweetest ambrosia.
"Right, right." She ran one hand through her hair. "So. Honestly you should still be dead. I didn't program anything into Caiaphas on the scale of allowing him to bring back the dead. If I had I would've tried for a grant or something. But I was just fucking around so I thought well, he's been in here longer than I've been alive, no one will notice if I mess with him a little."
"Bonnie - how old are you?" I took a swallow of coffee, hoping to force away the panic seeping out of my stomach - all I did was marinate it in bitterness.
"Thirty-two next week," she said.
"Have I really been dead that long?"
"I don't think so," she admitted. "I don't think that data even made it into our system - wait, why not check your toe tag?"
I had beaten her to the punch and was already balancing on one leg like a nearsighted stork (well, not nearsighted anymore, thanks to Caiaphas/Andrei), peering at the little slip of paper banded to my big toe.
No answers there - my own name was hardly visible, and that only because I was looking for it.
"Not a damn thing," I said, and put my foot back on the ground before making myself look like even more of an idiot standing there like the world's dumbest bird.
"Worth a try," she said. "You've been in the system since before it existed. I'm sorry."
Wait. Duh.
"What year is it?"
She told me, and I took a huge gulp of coffee. Still didn't burn away the truth.
My friends were either old men, or long dead (in our profession, dead was more likely - one week the bulletin board had boasted installments of the adventures of Reilly The Indestructible Lab Tech, who had, after all, survived an infection of god-knew-what with only one amputation).
Val was probably still alive - she'd been better at keeping out of harm's way than I ever had. But she'd be, what, in her seventies by now?
And Max - if she were still alive (please, please let all that hard work not have been for nothing), she'd be in her forties. Old enough to have grown children of her own.
I dropped the coffee cup - evidently I couldn't manage holding things, standing, and thinking about what had happened while I was dead.
"Why don't we go outside," she said kindly, and patted me on the back - Jesus, she was young enough to almost be my granddaughter. If I'd skipped the doctorate and sown wild oats instead, anyway.
"Sounds great," I said, as she looped a friendly arm around my shoulders.
She led us out into the daylight, and I followed, staggering.
We came up from the cool basement into a little alley with a view across a street; I knew I had never been there before but it still felt familiar.
It was bright out there, and warm, and I could smell the ocean. A fragment of memory drifted through my head - sitting on the beach with someone I loved - and was gone.
It could have been worse. I could have woken up fifty years after, or a hundred, long after everyone I knew had died. But I was awake now, when there was still a chance to make amends, however small it was. And there was still sunlight.
At least the sun was still there.
(And the atmosphere, and the sea, and pants, and shirts, and the ground. And a lot of other things. But the sky was clear and blue above me and that was all that mattered. I'd gone missing in time but the sky hadn't changed.)
There were no cars, and the street was quiet.
"What happened?" I whispered. I wanted to say it, but somehow the no cars was like a hard punch to the Adam's apple. Minus the convulsive coughing.
"A helluva lot," she mused.
A man in a business suit was watching us from across the street. And I knew him. I could've sworn I knew him.
It felt like Bonnie was holding me up, like my legs were quietly resigning responsibility for keeping me upright. Like they were deciding that resurrection really wasn't for them and they were going to be dead again.
"Bonnie?" I asked, looking back at the staring man - I knew his tie, I'd given it to someone as a shitty Christmas present. Neon and plaid, a combination only a thrift store could love. The only place I could afford to buy… his… present…
"Yeah, dead man?"
"What can you tell me about Itex?"
We were back inside before I could react - resultantly, Bonnie ended up dragging me by the shoulders part of the way before I got my feet under me.
"They kind of run the world," she said, shutting the door behind us. The room smelled like coffee, which was a little more pleasant than preservative, but somehow less familiar to me. Which was sad, really, that I knew the smell of preservative better than the smell of coffee. "And it's not a secret or anything, I just don't want anyone to see me telling a gangling idiot that in broad daylight outside a morgue. People would get ideas."
Well, no one had ever called me gangling before. 'Tall' yes, though I was only just over average height and had slumped most of my life to make up for it.
What she'd said knocked that train of thought clean off the rails, and I stammered to a halt where I was, the cold air suddenly very noticeable on my ankles. Hmm I wonder if she has shoes I thought.
(Probably not in my size you huge-footed lummox)
Itex Cogilium Steve Marian Gladys Jonathan FUCK
This time I did fall over - clunk, down on the tile, which was not even as forgiving as it looked.
"Were you brain-damaged before you died?" she asked, kneeling down beside where I sprawled in disbelieving horror.
"Not that I recall," I said, mouth running mostly on autopilot as my brain churned through various horrible scenarios. "Do you happen to know of a Marian Janssen?"
"Of course I do."
"Her brother Steve?"
"Everyone knows Steve. Oh. Except you, the whole dead thing, yeah." She sighed. "Wheelchair, talks like a robot, yeah?"
"Shit fuck hell damn." I launched myself upright, more by sheer force of will than actually using my muscles (fuck, didn't know I could do that) and swayed back and forth. "I need shoes."
"What are you going to do?" she said, her eyes on me old and knowing, like she was holding a secret somewhere in her head. "I know you were dead ten minutes ago and, and maybe now you feel like you should go save the world, but no one can - I mean, even a zombie can't. Max couldn't and now look where we are. So…" She shrugged. "I think the shoes are kind of immaterial."
"Max is still alive?" The long muscles of my legs had gone tense of their own accord, as if prepared to throw me, lunging and barefoot, for the door.
"As far as anyone knows," she said warily. "Look, I've told you what I know. You tell me what the fuck."
I looked at her. She'd brought me back from the dead. Seen me both naked and dead. Had made me coffee and explained what had happened while I was non compos alive-is. Gave me clothes and fresh air. Did not kill me again when I came back to life in her morgue.
I owed her the truth.
"She's my daughter."
Her eyes widened. "Jesus, how old are you?" she blurted. "There's no fucking… oh. Shit. Oh my god." She frowned. "How did you wind up as a John Doe in Virginia?"
There's nothing like witnessing a revelatory train of thought from the other side. It bears similarities to a psychotic break.
"It's kind of a long story," I said.
(Note: Although this is a long-belated sequel to another fanfiction by the name of After Dark, very little depends on you having read that story first.)