Chapter 2: How to Resurrect a Wolverine
Even before Billy had us rolling again, I got to work.
It had been the first real chance I'd had to look at Logan, and once I'd cut away his blood-stained clothing I could see the true extent of his injuries.
The worst of it was the wound on the right side of his chest – a huge one passing completely through him. Ordinarily, Logan would be able to survive not only such an appalling wound, but to heal it in minutes – hours at most, but in his immediately premortem state he wouldn't have been able to recover, not without massive intervention.
Even then, I had no idea whether or not it would be possible to bring him back, but I was going to give it my best try. The remainder of his wounds, though fatal to normal mortals, weren't something I couldn't deal with, not as long as the patient's brain could be fixed and rebooted. Given the lack of serious head injuries there was still hope, as any brain damage I found would have been caused by the processes that had occurred after death itself.
After more than an hour without oxygen an ordinary human brain would not only be stone dead but utterly unrepairable, and to give him any chance at all I would have to go in.
Breathing a quick prayer, I laid my hands upon his head and closed my eyes to allow my consciousness to enter it. In my mind's eye I could see the remaining structures of the man's brain, hypoxia damaged certainly, but still repairable at the sub-cellular level.
Quickly, I restored the physical damage, hoping that I'd been in time to preserve the even more complicated electrical patterns that were the essence of Logan's mind. Some of them were purely automatic functions that I could restore, but without his now-lost memories and conscious functions, my patient would never again be anything more than just a living corpse.
An hour-plus was more than twice the furthest I'd ever tried before to reach back in time, but if I could copy the electrical state of his brain, all trillion trillion bits of it as it existed at a moment or two before death into the brain tissue I had just repaired, I might be able to resurrect the mind as well as the body in which it had existed. That depended upon how accurate the time-shifted copy would be and where the inevitable pattern losses occurred, and it would be days before I'd know how much of him we'd gotten back.
As thoroughly as I could, I restored all the low level patterns, and then blanking all but a single part of my mind I reached back timeward to drag a twin of each and every electrical impulse in his brain ahead to the same physical cell and location as it now existed an hour ahead.
A bright yellow flash surged through my own brain, and it was done - sometimes a little quantum entanglement can be a good thing!
The rest of it was routine stuff: repair everything needed for the next couple of hours and then kick-start the heart to get the oxygen circulating. A second mental flash soon took place and, like it had been shocked, Logan's body jolted and, after a brief seizure, it came back to life – heart function and respiration shaky, but working.
And that, for the time being, was that. Don't ask me how the whole resurrection process works: I don't have a clue because that's just something my gift does, and I couldn't explain it if I tried.
I dropped into a deep post-resurrection sleep and, after an hour or so, I had recovered enough to repair the rest of his body functions and the remainder of his wounds, placing neural blocks where they were needed deep in his now-functional brain to keep Logan deep in his coma and stable until we got home.
As distasteful as it was, my other 'patient' also needed tending, so I had Billy stop so we could move the X-24's remains into a body bag, trussing it as tight and securely as we could before we did.
That done, Billy pulled back onto the road, and I resumed my nap…