A clandestine hospital. All twelve patients are heavily intubated. Six are screaming. Four are quiet. Two have flatlined.

"Frontal leucotomy?"

"Note the lack of screaming."

"What do we need with vegetables?"

"It's a step beyond what we had gotten this far. Besides, think about it. Hook up a few catethers, and this state can be maintained indefinitely."

"Again, we don't need vegetables. And we certainly don't need the overhead - you know how expensive each of these setups are. The Only Light guys keep trying to get our resource allocation cut."

"That's the point. Work for us, or set up a trust fund in our favor - you die, we put you under, keep you out of Hell until the end of the Millennium, all for a low monthly fee. I bet that even believing parents or significant others would pay up."

"Centuries versus an eternity. Although... I suppose it'd help us study aging past 100 in a nonbeliever if the body is intact."

"Yes, centuries versus an eternity, but people who are grieving don't make that sort of math. Besides - we might come up with something else later on. And most bodies would be intact. The body just stops working, the soul goes. Except, at this point keeping the heart beating and the brain cycling is easy work, if we can afford it."

"How about the fact that these people are, you know, lobotomized? You don't get better from that. Even if we win... they'd be still drool factories."

"Who knows? Maybe fifty years down the line someone'll work out how to regrow brain tissue. Besides, it beats being in Hell. We just put it in clinical terms to stop customers from freaking out. They look peaceful, look, they even wiggle a bit. Enough myostimulation and I bet I can get one to say ma-ma."

"Hmm. The financial model checks out... Okay, you convinced me. If nothing else, once we're a financial asset rather than a liability, The Only Light meatheads can't ask that we turn the lights off."

"Plus, there's a political angle." A third figure. One of the lobotomized patients wiggles.

"What's that, Foreman?"

"This will make the project self-sufficient. Once it is, we can grant rent exemptions on a loyalty basis. It looks better than cryo. May I suggest a next step?"

"Sure."

"Any way we can disconnect the lobe without destroying it? Give us an on off switch for the suffering?"

"... Oh. Loyalty basis. Including the loyalty of their family and friends."

"You catch on. Keep up the good work, both of you."

"They had it a lot easier in the old Age. What I wouldn't give for one embryonic stem cell line."

"We got Glorified cell lines."

"They don't take."

"How's the pig tests coming?"

"That cyberpunk Lord of the Rings adaptation that's coming up? The mecha-boar closeup shots are real, they're using our test subject. It was cheaper than CGI, and they paid up for the photo op."

The thing in the pen had three metal hoofs and squealed like an air raid siren. It was reasonably happy, given that it was drugged out of its mind. "Doesn't do much for psych tests, though. Pigs don't exactly have souls. We can't figure out what's going on there."

"So we're calling that done?"

"Pretty much. We're just keeping the pig around to check for longterm nerve damage at the interface points."

"Taste tests?"

"No go. We can't suppress the vomit reflex. The interesting thing is that it trips with the drool cases, too, unless we flat out fry the whole brain."

"Vegetarian zombies. Great. Frankenstein would be proud. How many brains did you scoop out?"

"Just the two that stopped paying up. Look, every program has got dead ends. We're in the black, we're getting there with the portable controller, this is good training for army medics, The Only Light guys are leaving us alone, the psalties haven't got a clue..."

"Yeah, that's the thing, actually. They do now. One of the decoy boats got raided."

"Dammit. So they know we're on a ship."

"Yeah. Besides, look." He held up a white hair. Admittedly, this sort of life aged one prematurely - if it wasn't the stress or the sleep deprivation, the amphetamines tended to do it - but this one wasn't the result of any particular crunch session or shock. "Huh. How old are you again?"

"Fifty-one-fifty." That was in weeks. Less than a year to go for Herbert.

She whistled. "Rotate out? You can quit, you know. Nobody would think less of you."

"I... No, dammit! What if I break my oath? I know too much. Besides, we're so close!"

"... Banging a fist on the workbench won't help. Herbert? I know you got the boss hat for the semester, but take a break, that's an order. No coffee, no pills, just... raid the hard drive, binge on Doctor Who or something, just stop for a bit."

"Thank you, Megan."

"Get up!"

"Wh-wha? raid? what?"

"Get up!"

"Brack, what's going on?"

Brackish Okun looked considerably older than his 85 years. No surprises there: aging surgery was the easiest way for Tree Of Life scientists to not get treated like kids in the wider world. The crow's feet under his eyes however were genuine, from sleepless nights and stimulants.

"Milton. It's Quinn."

"Yeah. Look, we may have to let that one go. Don't feel bad. You were up eighteen hours. Botching a lobo is-"

"She's awake."

"That's a problem. We got overnight guests touring the facility. Don't need any screamers."

"No, she's awake. Sat up. Started talking. Well, wanted a hit of crack."

Dr. Milton Isaacs got up in one fluid movement, grabbed a pair of glasses, and followed his boyfriend to the chop shop. On the way, he looked up the patient file on the stenopad.

Quinn Morrighan Storm, birth name unknown. Signed up for a tour of duty with Tunnel Of Love, earned enough chits for sex reassignment surgery, dropped out due to a drug problem. Spent decades alternating between meth-fiend homelessness and software work with various groups, including Transfer On Line on their Omega project. The AI guys donated enough loyalty chits to push her past the threshold for neuro-retirement, and she had ticked the experimental box. Had a trainee do the leucotomy right before the big one-oh-oh, he botched it. Quinn hit the last birthday while recuperating towards the next attempt, started screaming out the Hell-pain once revived by the metabolic extension controller. Put her under kinetically, that is, catether stand to the head, due to, well, the trainees freaking out. Extent of brain damage unknown. "Fantastic brain if she could be persuaded to stop frying it every two hours. Well, before the head trauma anyway. D&A poster child, really. At least we got some work out of her."

"And she's _awake_?"

"Mostly. Asked for stimulants. Over and over. Told me to fuck off when I said no, so it wasn't just a semantic residue loop. And she's not screaming about the fire."

"Typical. Centuries of work and we hit the jackpot by blind luck. Who knows?"

"To be fair, we hit this winning lottery ticket because we kept buying 'em... Anyway, just the logistics AI guys. They asked. It was their chits after all."

Quinn was sitting up in the spartan hospital cot, still heavily intubated. Right eye droopy, a few red strands of hair and wires poking out of the head bandage, left hand dangling uselessly.

"... At least a soda. Please. Please."

Brak and Milton stopped talking and almost dropped their stenopads. Milton called in an igor on the intercom, and a few seconds later, a small soda bottle had been delivered through the pneumatic tube normally used for samples and medication.

"Can you hold it?"

Quinn nodded and opened her right hand and got the soda in a weak grasp. She squeezed, and spilled half of it on her bed. Milton quickly cleaned it up before it reached any electrodes.

"How do you feel?"

"I... I don't. Numb. It's like there's nothing in my hand. I can't feel the blankets, either."

Milton helped Quinn drink. "You haven't used your stomach in days. You're probably going to-"

Quinn let the soda bottle drop, heaved a little, and froze for a second, then slowly cleaned her mouth on her hand. To the doctors' surprise, she bit her finger hard enough to draw blood. "Doesn't hurt. Doesn't feel like anything. Hungry."

"...We blew out your ability to feel pain. And other things, it looks like it. But you're conscious."

"This - This is a m - major breakthrough!" The "M" word didn't get thrown around much in TOL circles. "You're... you're all there!"

"Huh. I think so. Can I have a coke? No, other coke."

The rehab had been hard. Quinn's left arm had to be pretty much replaced, when all was said and done, so that her attenuated neural impulses could move it. A faint sequence of beeps in her ear told her the state of the myoelectrical systems keeping her body and brain ticking. She'd taken to hum to it. Today's exercise was handwriting. She'd been managing it, more or less. So she wrote in her own made-up alphabet, just because it came a little easier.

''I am not among the living, and so I cannot die. But neither am I dead. Too long I've been starving to death and haven't died. I feel nothing. Not the wind on my face, nor the spray of the sea...nor the warmth of a woman's flesh. You best start believing in ghost stories, Omega. You're in one!''

"So, it actually worked. You realize we won't be able to keep it to ourselves for long."

The facility head used to be Only Light, and still wore some militaria to go with it - technically, he still had a rank. It smoothed things down with the meatheads, so few of the researchers begrudged it.

"We've gotten lucky. Eventually we will be able to replicate the process reliably, but I wouldn't bet on it."

"Right. Now, given Who we are against, we have to assume Murphy's Law is in full effect, so let's disseminate the technique."

"I disagree. We can use this to leverage all sort of stuff from the other TOL branches."

"I disagree with that. Information wants to be free. Let's say that everybody involved drops their helmets and gets zapped by lightning tomorrow - we want people to keep working."

"All right, I concede, two to one on the record?"

The nominal boss of the facility nodded. "Do we have a procedure?"

"Sort of. The electronics are easy. Pacemaker, limbic stimulator to prevent seizures and Hell nightmares, and a ventricular assist just in case. And an immunosuppressant dispenser to prevent rejection for all this stuff. Heart and brain stimulators duplicated, just in case. We don't have enough lithium for batteries, so we're using a NiCad and she has to charge it every day, lasts three in an emergency."

"The surgical part is harder. We've got systems installation down to an art by now, what we can't replicate reliably is removing the concept of pain in the subject without making too much brain puree. Quinn has lost her sense of touch and her ability to feel pleasure, as well as a lot of reflexes. Can't get tired, either."

"Bet the Only Light army guys will love that. I suppose that we have to keep trying, develop a procedure that's reliable."

"I agree."

"I disagree. That's a lot of people we're brain-frying enough that their soul would decouple. It's not what they're paying for, at least."

"So we do it on a discount or even free-to-try basis. It's actually better than being lobotomized if it works."

"And Hell if it doesn't. But you've a point, this workgroup is all about long term gains. Okay, three to none on the record?"

"Record approved and... there, sent to the databank for dissemination. What do you two plan to do?"

"I'm going to get my wing to focus on making the Metabolic Extension Controller smaller."

"I'm going to get started on formalizing a procedure. Guess we're back to doing animal testing for a while."

"Excellent. I'm going to carefully leak some of this to the various notables. Christians, too."

"What?"

"Why?"

"It'll get out eventually, so I'm going to embellish this enough that they'll think it's a propaganda op from our side. We'll need a better poster child than a meth addict, although that is handy in our test subject. Meeting adjourned?"

The two TOL medics nodded in acknowledgement.

"Meeting adjourned. Ave Humanitas!"

"Live long and prosper!"

"Vigilo Confido!"

Each saluted in a different way, and went off to their respective tasks.

Sarsour had not been in San Angeles an hour before he was engaged by a neighbor curious to know what he thought of the most recent rumors.

"I did not know we even had people of the Other Light within our borders," the neighbor said. "But I did hear some crazy stories."

"TOL is spreading quickly," Sarsour said, unwilling, of course, to reveal that he was in Pacifica for the express purpose of ministering to them as his mentor Abdullah Smith once had to him. "Tell me what you heard."

"If possible," the man said, "there is a faction within TOL that is even more radical than their mainstream. They believe that if they can somehow keep their agents' bodies ticking with electronics and prostheses, they can create a super mongrel race of automatic people on their side who would feel no fear, no pain, and be able to live past one hundred. Imagine if they are right."

"They are wrong," Sarsour said. "Simply wrong."

"How can you say that?"

"It only stands to reason, friend. It is permitted to man once to die, and then the judgement."

Not a dozen kilometers away, Quinn felt the launch's hull hit the beach. She took a hit, hid the last few wires in her hair, locked her wheelchair, stood up, and made a few baby steps towards the ramp.