When I first decided that "Shifting Images" needed a facelift, I really didn't know what I was getting into. I still don't, in all honesty. It's a fickle thing, difficult to plan out and visualize. If I were to guess the primary hang-up, it would be that Images began as a pure fantasy, one that I didn't intend to post and so one to which I didn't apply my usual filter. Add to that the sheer magnitude of the project (the original was the longest thing I've ever written, and this version is shaping up to be longer), and...well, call it stage fright.

Still, I'm gonna give it a go. I just hope that you can be patient with me. I mentioned in the last update to "Paved with Good Intentions" that I've been having a lot of personal issues lately, and they've made it difficult to write in general, much less write projects that intimidate me.

As mentioned, the first chapter was a prologue. This is where things really start.

Verse One.

14th of August, 2007

There was no gradual process. For him, there was no process at all.

He simply...began.

Later, much later, he would liken this moment to how a computer must feel when it is turned on for the first time. No memory of the immediate past, no memory of anything past that critical point when the switch is flicked and the monitor blinks, and all that matters is the work ahead. Only, he would say in following the metaphor, this is a new computer with an old hard drive, cleaned but not formatted. Memories of the distant past remained stationed like guards in the back of a room, doing their best to look inconspicuous but only drawing attention to themselves for the effort.

He reached, in much the way he always reached—with his mind—and tried to grasp those memories. Some part of him thought that it shouldn't work. A flicker of his past humanity told him that thoughts didn't work that way. Memories didn't work that way. And yet, when he reached, he found them. They played out behind his eyelids; his life, his triumphs, his mistakes—oh, God, his mistakes—like a documentary. No. No, no, too painful. Go away. Damn you all, go away!

And for a wonder, they did.

A single command, just like always, and they disappeared.

He opened his eyes.

At first, he didn't know what it was that he saw (or rather, he did know what he saw, but couldn't make sense of it), and that was wrong. He knew everything there was to know about his existence; he knew every mile, every foot, every inch, every molecule of the world in which he lived (inasmuch as one could call it a world, and could call what he did in it living). He knew because it was so easy to know. Reach, grasp, know. It was as easy as pulling forward, pulling and dissecting and inspecting, and he had done it for years. He had done it for so long that knowledge itself felt meaningless now, and so even though he was confused and somewhat troubled by his lack of knowledge of the particular place he found himself, he was also strangely exhilarated.

Something new.

By the grace of God, this was something new!

He sat up, slowly realizing that he was lying on a bed. That was strange. He didn't remember lying down. Why would he bother? He didn't need to sleep, so why would he be…? He looked down, lifting up one arm to glance at the not-so-comfortable surface where he sat, but then his focus was drawn to the arm itself.

It was bare.

More than that…it was longer than it should have been. Thicker. Bigger. He flexed the muscles of this alien appendage, mesmerized, and found something else that was new. He realized suddenly, as his eyes drifted up the arm and to the fist clenched atop it, that as he unfurled his fingers one by one, he actually felt the difference. And when he curled them back into a fist, he felt that, too.

On impulse, he brought that fist slamming down onto the mattress.

It didn't hurt. Of course it didn't. But…impact. An impact. Holy hell, there was…there was…!

Staring, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, he brought his other hand, still new to him but clearly the twin of the other, and pinched his skin between two fingers. He felt true, honest pain for the first time in ten years. He flinched, surprised and hypnotized and…and suddenly euphoric. He felt the muscles of his face pull his lips into a grin, and it felt right. Yes…yes, this was it…this was what he…what he…

What he'd missed.

What could a god possibly want? In a world where any and every aspect of reality could be bent to one's will…what could there be to desire? He had been such a thing. Such a…such a creature, in a world that was his own, a reality that was bent to his mind and tied to his whim. Yes, he had been a god. A false god, true, but a god nonetheless. And what could he have missed? What possibly could there have been? He had asked himself this question, had pored over this mystery for the better part of so many years, after the thrill of omnipotence had begun to wane.

And now he knew.

What he had been missing…was this.

This intangible, unmistakable, irreplaceable sense of self. This sharp, hard, vibrant realness that permeated through him and sang in his nerves. He pinched his arm again, felt the twitch of pain, and looked around himself, still grinning. Oh, yes, he had been a god. But neither he nor his father (his genius father) had ever been able to recreate this.

He swung his new legs out from under the sheet that covered his lower half, and spent a good amount of time studying them. They were not his own…and yet, just the same, they felt like his own. He touched them, ran his new hands over his new skin, reveling in the sensation of touch. Yes…this was right. The grin widened on his new face, this face that he could feel, and he stood up.

He began to walk, and laughed when he realized that he didn't remember how. He stumbled, caught himself on the bed, and tried again. Remembering took longer than he had thought it might, but so ingrained was the ability that he managed to recall it after only a few tries. And so he walked, surveying this room, this new room. The walls were white, and the one to his right was dominated by a huge mirror. When he saw it, he stopped.

Thunderstruck.

He was not looking at himself. This was not his body. And yet…somehow it was. He was tall, about five-foot-eleven. His form was lean, not muscular but not unhealthy; his skin was a slightly pale pink, and his face was sharp. Bright, light blue eyes watched him from the shadow of thick, light brown bangs. He lifted one of his new hands again, and wiped those bangs to the side. They fell back into place.

He thought that he looked familiar. But not in the way that he should have; the way that one's reflection is supposed to be familiar. That confused him, mostly because he couldn't remember the person he did recognize in his alien reflection. Why was it not himself? That was absolutely ridiculous! Who else would he look like, if not himself?

He continued to stare, dropping his hand to his side again, and frowned. His eyes drifted down the body in which he found himself, like some new outfit that he had been dressed in while he'd been…sleeping? Was that what…? No. No, it was deeper than sleep. More like…a coma, he thought suddenly. Yes. That fit better. A coma.

And now? Had he finally regained consciousness, after so many years? Had he woken up from a long sleep, and would he find now that the entire world had changed? His blue eyes—those, at least, he remembered from his old self—widened as he continued to take in the image being projected to him. This…foreign image of a man he'd never seen.

Had he…truly awoken?

Was he…really conscious?

By God, was that why…why…?

He couldn't finish the thought. His mind reeled, and he stumbled back a step in sheer shock. He fell back onto the bed with a grunt. He kept thinking, Oh God, oh God, oh God, wondering in some distant, detached way if he dared to believe it. What if he was wrong? What if he wasn't…and…and…

Oh, God.

That was the only coherent thought he could conjure, and even that wasn't particularly clear. It was the fevered mantra of a man ready to faint. It was a good thing he was already sitting down, or his new legs would have given out and he would have ended up on the floor.

Oh, God.

And then a door opened, from just behind him, and he turned. Two men entered the white room, one taking excited, almost jerking little steps and the other long, purposeful, confident strides. The excited one was dressed in clean and pressed but simple slacks, and a white coat over a powder blue button-down shirt. He looked like a doctor or a scientist. Or both.

The other, the strider, was swathed in pristine, meticulous black cloth, a midnight-shadow suit and a navy blue shirt cut in half by a stripe of black tie so that it looked like the fangs of some indigo serpent. He wore gleaming black leather shoes that clicked curtly on the hard floor as regularly as a perfectly calibrated clock.

He looked like a government operative.

It was this second that caught his attention; caught it, held it, strangled it. And as he looked at the face, angular and sharp and eerily familiar in several more ways than one; as he stared into clear, vibrant, almost angrily bright cobalt eyes, he began to understand. His banished memories returned, and he began to comprehend. To realize. And the mouth on his new face gaped open.

God…

Verse Two.

It was perhaps the clearest mark of his character that he seemed almost entirely disinterested as he strode into the hospital room where his own personal miracle was just beginning to wake up.

When Seto Kaiba had begun recruiting a specialized, hand-chosen, team of individuals to begin the project that would later come to be known as "Neo-Lazarus" (not by him, no, never by him; Kaiba-shachou wouldn't have bothered with such a nickname, or any nickname for that matter), almost all of them had thought that the young, prodigious head of the Kaiba Corporation had finally cracked under the obscene amount of pressure he placed on himself, and lost his mind. The only reason half of them had accepted the proposal at all was the equally obscene amount of money he'd offered for it.

Doctor Morris Jay had walked into the board room of the international headquarters of the Kaiba Electronic Gaming Corporation almost six months ago, with no idea of what was happening. The call had been discreet, secretive, and details hadn't been given. But Jay had been living in Domino City long enough to know that when Seto Kaiba asked to see you, the only real option was to accept the invitation.

As Jay understood it, the story went like this: Kaiba Gozaburo—founder of the corporation born in Japan as 海馬株式会社 (Kaiba Kabushiki-gaisha)—had had a son, named Noa. And Gozaburo, like any number of wealthy men, had held high hopes for the boy. Noa had not disappointed. A born genius, the young Kaiba heir had quickly risen up to his rather demanding father's expectations; indeed, he had thrived on them. It was a given, people said, that Kaiba Noa would take his father's place, and that the corporation that bore their name would rise far past its already astronomical heights in his hands.

Dylan O'Hara had interrupted the story at this point to ask why Seto, born a year before Noa, had not been the designated heir from the start. Would not a man like Gozaburo have placed his bets on his firstborn?

"Noa was Gozaburo's biological son," Roland Ackerman, Seto's personal assistant, told them. "Master Kaiba was adopted." O'Hara had looked around, chagrined, at the rest of the team, who knew this already. "That is the crux of why you are here today. When Noa was just a month or so into his tenth year, he was involved in…well, what was technically a fatal vehicle accident."

"Technically?" Jay repeated, frowning.

"Indeed. Gozaburo was nothing if not…dedicated. We do not know why he began work on the project, but by the time young Noa died, Gozaburo had completed something he called P/M printing. As Master Kaiba has explained it to me, this program was used not unlike what one might use to back up one's work on any personal computer system. Except this process was created specifically for the human mind."

"P/M" stood for personality/memory, the primary functions of the human brain that Gozaburo's program somehow, miraculously, was able to replicate in raw data. Through this process (and various others that made far less sense), he had managed to save his son's brain—his son's essence—in a personal supercomputer. Aside from this print, Gozaburo had loaded one other program into the system: a virtual copy of the earth of 1997, with every minute detail injected into it, from the precise position of every continent to the color of the British Prime Minister's facial hair. Thus, Noa woke from his death to his own personal planet; a playground of such immense proportions that it had driven the boy genius insane.

On hearing this explanation, which doubtlessly had come from Seto and not from Roland Ackerman, Jay couldn't help but draw a comparison to the science fiction mythology of the Wachowski brothers, and he wondered if Gozaburo hadn't been the Architect to his child's Neo. Noa had been given complete, godly control over his personal Matrix. Over the course of two or three years, Roland told them, he had learned enough to toy with his virtual reality to the point that it was unrecognizable. Anything Noa did not like, he could change. Why? Because he instinctively knew how. Noa's control over the supercomputer his father had built bordered on the technopathic.

That supercomputer was the hallmark of the Kaiba family's genius: father and son.

King and heir.

"And what does Kaiba-shachou plan to do, exactly?" Kim Ueda asked.

"Some time ago," Roland answered, "Master Kaiba and Young Master Mokuba were…uploaded, I suppose you could say, into this computer system, through the relatively new pod technology which I'm sure you all know about."

The gateway to virtual reality. Seto Kaiba's pods were the way in. They were the key. Jay had seen one of the devices Kaiba-Corp had developed, and it was nothing short of amazing. What seemed like a simple chair outfitted with headphones and a visor, actually seemed to separate the mind from the body. A hypnosis machine. And Jay couldn't help but say, "They were jacked in."

Roland Ackerman chuckled. "Yes, I suppose you could put it that way. In any case, in making his escape, Master Kaiba destroyed both programs on his stepfather's system. Relatively recently, however, he discovered that Noa had known there was a chance for his own destruction, and created a back-up of a back-up, just in case."

"So…Noa Kaiba's mind still exists?"

"Yes."

"And what does this have to do with us?" Jay asked.

"You all," Roland said, sweeping a hand over the gathered individuals, "have been selected by Master Kaiba to conduct a project. Completely in-house. That is to say you are sworn to secrecy. Part of the reason he has paid you all so handsomely for this task is to ensure that secrecy."

Roland frowned somberly.

"…You are going to help Master Kaiba bring his stepbrother back to life."

Verse Three.

Impossible. It was impossible.

And yet…here it was. Morris Jay was looking at him: living proof that the current head of the Kaiba family was ten times the genius his predecessor had ever been. The Kaiba legacy had been upheld, and the sweetest irony of it all was that the one thing above all else that he didn't want was for the public to know it.

Seto Kaiba had resurrected the dead.

Noa stared at his stepbrother blankly, as if he were simply looking for something specific, something tangible, on which to focus his vision (if not his mind). But as Jay watched, comprehension dawned in those light blue eyes, and in a manner of a few seconds, true understanding set in his face.

"Seto," he said.

There was no slur, no hint of tiredness or dizziness or any sort of debilitating sign, as if he'd only gone to the hospital to get a flu shot; as if he'd only been out for a few hours rather than several years. The voice was deep; not quite as deep as the man who could have passed for his twin, but still deep enough to surprise its owner. Noa instinctively touched his thin, deft fingers to his neck.

Could pass for twins, Jay thought again. And that was one of the oddest things about Noa Kaiba. Seto had developed, with the assistance of Kim Ueda, an in-house aging program, and they had scanned the most recent photograph of their subject into it (taken on the young Kaiba's ninth birthday). Seto had said that if he was going to build a body for his stepbrother, then they may as well ensure that it would look right; that meant a body of the proper age, and that any and, indeed, every detail would be essential for success. The man Jay saw now was the product of that part of the project; Noa Kaiba's nineteen-year-old body was nearly identical to Seto's twenty-year-old one, and yet Seto had stressed that there was not a single drop of blood shared between them.

It was because of that realization that Jay became conscious of the fact that he was seeing far more of that nineteen-year-old body than he should have been, indeed than he would ever want to. Noa likely hadn't yet noticed, or simply didn't care right now, that he was nude. Seto glided over to the chair on the opposite end of the bed where Noa sat and tossed him a set of clothes. Noa caught them and began to dress himself thoughtlessly, showing no sense of modesty or embarrassment or…anything except slack-jawed amazement.

"Noa," Seto finally said, in response to his stepbrother. He went back to his previous spot, and stood there rigidly, arms crossed over his chest and looking only vaguely interested in where he was and what he was doing. A man whose death warrant had been signed almost a decade ago was standing up, getting dressed, talking and breathing and thinking, and Seto Kaiba may as well have been in line at the bank.

Noa either didn't notice this, or had decided not to comment on it.

Jay had a feeling that it was the latter. He knew, if Roland Ackerman's account of events was true, that Seto had no particular loyalty to his adoptive sibling. Their first meeting had been…less than agreeable, and one of the most frequently asked questions amongst the team as they had been working was why Seto had done it in the first place. Seto himself would never answer.

Looking at him now, Jay wondered if it wasn't just to see if it could be done. Because now the deed was done, the project finished, a resounding success. The challenge was over. The thrill of it was gone. And so Seto had lost interest. That seemed the most logical answer to both Jay and Ueda, who had spent the most time alongside the young CEO. "There's a…spark of life in him when he's working on machinery," Kim had told the rest of them once. "Like…like he's finally awake after sleepwalking for God knows how long. I think he lives for the challenge. He lives for the chance to figure out the solutions to things. Mathematics, technology, psychology…the man's never quite as vibrant as when he's working something out."

That seemed true.

Jay wondered if Noa wasn't much the same way; wondered if the reason Noa looked so amazed was because he finally had something he didn't understand, finally had a problem to puzzle out again: how this could be possible.

It seemed that Seto speaking his stepbrother's name was what finally made it real for the biological son of Kaiba Gozaburo; what finally made it true. He took an unconscious step toward Seto, one hand outstretched as if reaching for him, and Jay was positive that he saw Seto's body stiffen in preparation to ward off attack.

"I…" Noa tried to speak. "I'm…this is…am I…?"

"Well," Jay said with a grin, "We can tell O'Hara he doesn't have to worry. His vocal chords are working just fine. Legs and arms, too. Everything…looks perfect."

"More importantly," Seto murmured, and Jay figured that he wasn't speaking to him or the sandy-haired man in front of him, "he remembers the proper motions to produce speech. Not coherent speech, apparently, but nonetheless…"

It was almost like Seto had expected more of his latest project. Like he blamed Noa himself for being unable to process the sudden tidal wave of sensory information bombarding his newly activated mind. The beginnings of a very familiar sneer were touching his thin lips, and not for the first time, Morris Jay thought that it was no surprise that Seto Kaiba was single.

Noa blinked several times, looking around his room, running a hand over the crumpled sheet at the foot of his bed. He looked back at Seto, and Jay could almost see his brain working. And he said, after a moment's thought,

"I'm alive. Aren't I?"

Seto raised an eyebrow, and the sneer was gone, replaced by his usual smirk. It was perhaps his less-than-praising way of saying, Well done. You figured it out. He gave the barest hint of a nod. Noa's hand dropped back to his side, as if he no longer had the strength to lift it.

The look of dawning euphoria, the expression of almost religious rapture, on Noa's face as the answer sank in nearly made Jay cry. This, he thought, made everything worth it. He almost gave Seto back the money he'd been paid. This was enough. Seeing such sublime happiness was all the compensation he would ever need for the six months he'd spent working for the Kaiba family.

Seto didn't seem affected in the slightest.

He looked bored.

"You're alive," Jay felt compelled to repeat, and Noa looked at him as if first realizing another person was there. "…Again." Noa's grin somehow widened further, and a breathless, disbelieving laugh escaped his lips. He lowered his head, one hand covering the face that looked so much like Seto's, and Jay thought he might start crying.

Instead, though, he looked up again. Sharply, as if he'd just remembered something. Confusion clouded his eyes again, and a frown, half-disbelief and half-suspicion, crossed his face. Jay thought that the first logical question for Noa to ask would be how. Jay had had a hand in it, and even he wasn't sure of the answer to that.

But it wasn't.

"…Why?" he asked instead.

Seto smirked again. Jay thought that he wouldn't answer; that he would just turn away and exit the room, that his answer would be silence, just like it was whenever anyone else asked him that. But the smirk also seemed to say that Noa should know the answer to that question already. And just as Seto did begin to turn toward the door (he never enjoyed explaining his motives to anybody; the word "why" seemed to offend him), it seemed that Noa did know.

But Seto answered anyway, with what was perhaps the most confusing thing Morris Jay had ever heard from him. He turned his head slightly to glance over his shoulder as he reached out to open the door and exit into the hallway, and he said,

"Mokuba wanted you."

END.

This section of the story revisits a theme first presented in "Back from the Dead." When I first started figuring that one out, one thing I knew I wanted to do was portray Noa Kaiba's rebirth into the world in a realistic fashion. I wanted to work it into the plot, instead of just tossing him in and calling it done. I may or may not have done a decent job of that on the physical side of things; being my own worst critic, I'm of the opinion that I botched it entirely. But either way, one thing I forgot to consider was how his psychological rebirth would pan out. I forgot the real hang-ups in what bringing him back into the Kaiba family would be.

With the original story, I skipped ahead, and wrote Noa as though he had been a part of the gang for months, if not years, already. In this version, I'm starting from the beginning, to truly explain how he went from the character in the anime to the character in Images, which is still my eventual goal. I have a better understanding of that now, and intend to put it on display here. This is the first stepping stone of that.

The first thing that's changed fundamentally from when I first wrote Noa in BftD is that this time, he's an adult. Instead of bringing him back as a boy Mokuba's age (as he is shown in the anime), I decided that Seto would bring him back as the man he would have become if he'd physically aged during his time in virtual reality. That's part of the reason that he's so distant. Seto has a soft spot for children, for the innocent and the downtrodden, if you will; but when it comes to fellow adults, he has little if any sympathy. I surmised that this would be especially true of someone who tried to kill him (and more importantly, someone who tried to kill Mokuba).

This relationship will be a rocky one.