Revival Game

1 AM October 26, 2227
A scientist with her blonde hair pulled tight in a bun hunches over a computer, rapidly switching her view between the computer in front of her and the gurney on her left, the man on it taking slow, steady breaths.

“Park! Park! Official Park! Son of a Bitch get in here now!”

“Dr Sinclair?” a tall young man enters the room holding a steaming mug and sporting a mildly irritated expression “What’s the problem this time Jen?”

“No problem this time, Park. I just called you to-”

The women’s next words are cut off by a light groan from the gurney. The papery blue sheets rustle slightly. Official park drops his mug and it shatters on the laminate beneath them, sending hot liquid cascading across the cold floor.

“Holy shit! Holy shit! You did it?! Holy shit!” He looks from her to the table and back again.

“Yes Mr Park, I did it. I successfully Revived your brother back from the dead.”























Ch 1




Bzzt Bzzt Bzzt I groan and roll over to silence my alarm. The time reads 5:30 am, I groan again and throw off the covers. I hate early mornings, whoever decided the day needs to start before the sun is up should be viciously murdered.

“Hey, Lex! Do you have coffee started yet?”

“Fuck off Hayden.” Alexis Lamprey was a thirty-year-old lawyer and my messy roommate. Most people would feel bad about waking their roommates before the sun was up but Lex had to be at the office at six and if she wasn’t up by now she was going to be late for the umpteenth time this month. It was a wonder she even had a job at this point.

“Fine, I’ll make some,” I call back, “But you owe me breakfast on Saturday.”

Rolling myself off the bed and onto the floor, I scavenge for clean pants. Laundry day isn’t until Thursday so I have to smell-test a few pairs before settling on a pair of black slacks without any stains. I put on the slacks and an ancient band-tee. Odd combination, I know but you’d be surprised what lab assistants get away with. In my defence, the white coat will cover it up anyway.

“Lex, your ass better be out of bed by the time I leave this room or else you’re in for a hell of a wake-up call!”

“I’m up, I’m up! Jeez…”

I start the coffee. When I first moved in, I insisted on buying a nice, elegant, espresso maker. I used it for less than a week before I caved and bought a large-pot automated brewer.

“Hayden! Hayden! Have you opened a screen yet today?! Shit, Hayden have you seen the news?!” Lex bolts into the room in her robe with a mad case of bedhead and a wild look in her eyes. Seeing that I haven’t stopped, she tears the bag of grounds out of my hand “Jesus, Hayden just forget the coffee, open your screen!”

I sigh and wave my hand in front of my face, the thin silver band on my wrist reading my lenses and materialising an invisible screen only I can see. I read the headline and stop breathing. Death! Not so permanent anymore! Dr Jennifer Sinclair has just conquered death, bringing a man long since dead back to the land of the living and in perfect health! I close my screen and shove a fist through my hair. She did it! I turn to Lex.

“I-”

“Say no more kid, you need to head into the lab, I expect your mentor is going to need her assistant”



Cameras and microphones are shoved into my face the second I step out of my car onto company property.

“Mr Connors! Have you seen the news?”
“Mr Connors, what was your initial thought when you found out?”
“Mr Connors, how are you and Dr Sinclair planning on moving forward with this recent development.”
“How do you believe this latest development will affect your internship with Dr Sinclair”
“Mr Connors, do you really have no comment”
“Mr Conners-”

The questions are abruptly cut off by a large man stepping in front of me.

“Mr Conners will not be answering any questions at this time, he and Dr Sinclair have much to discuss and need no further distractions. There will be a press conference later this afternoon and they can answer your questions then. For now, I must remind you this laboratory is private property and I will need you all to leave until further notice.”

The man escorts me through the dissipating crowd and to the front doors where I scan my security card and my left thumb on various scanners. Once I pass through a thorough security inspection, I turn to the man behind me.

“Thanks, Martin. I was like a doe in headlights out there.”

“It’s Official Park to you Mr Conners and don’t worry about it, I was just doing my job.”

“Cold as usual, Martin”, a feminine voice calls from down the hall “Good to see you Hayden”
I turn to see Dr Sinclair making her way towards me, hair twisted into its usual bun, oversized lab coat covered in even more coffee stains than usual.

“Good morning Dr Sinclair, is it true what they’re saying on the news? Did you finally do it? Even more importantly, did you seriously do it without me?!”, I ask her, scandalised that she would finish it without me.

“ Yes, it’s true. I didn’t want to finish it without you but I just happened to be in the lab because you know me, ever the workaholic, and I realised what we’ve been missing.”

She goes into more of an explanation as we start our rather tiresome walk to the lab.

“What was it? Did we have to up the Adrenaline and Serotonin dosages? I thought that might be it, I thought it might help to up the hormonal nervous response as well as electrically stimulate the nervous system with the minor pulses.”

“Well that too, Mr Connors but I realised there was another aspect we’d been forgetting. We were focusing entirely on the physiological aspect of bringing a person back from the dead. We rebuilt his muscle mass, we re-threaded his entire cardiovascular network, we rewired his nervous system piece by piece. The thing we forgot about was will.”

“What? Will? What do you mean by that? How do you rebuild will?”

“What I mean, Hayden, is motivation, emotion. The high hormonal levels did help with that but hundreds of scientists have done study after study trying to recreate human emotion and come up empty. You can’t falsify emotion.” She makes a strange face at that last part that I can’t decipher and suddenly it clicks, stopping me dead in my tracks. My eyes fixate on the cold tile below me as I struggle to portray my thoughts.

“You couldn’t falsify or create emotion or a necessary driving will so you would have had to borrow it from some other source. Something or someone outside the patient….How?”

“I first stimulated the prefrontal cortex with a pulse that hit the parietal lobe precisely 240 milliseconds later. I may not have the ability to simulate emotions but I can simulate sympathy and empathy. As I stimulated the patient’s sympathy and empathy centres, I played several audio clips of this patient’s family member. Did you know there have been several cases of comatose patients waking up in response to the sounds of their grieving loved ones? I’ve simply taken a slightly more severe approach to the same concept.”

We take the rest of the tedious walk in silence as I ponder the implications of that. The huge fluorescent bulbs across the ceiling suddenly seemed too dull. The wide hallways feel a touch thinner than they should. If it’s the sound of a grieving loved one that rouses someone from a coma, what type of distress would a person have to be in to make the sounds needed to rouse their loved one from the dead? I give my head a slight shake to clear it. There’s no way Doc would do something so drastic, even for a cause like this one.

Dr Jennifer Sinclair became a world-renowned geneticist and electrosurgeon first at age 36 when she discovered how to slow ageing to a near stop then again at age 65 when she invented a way to perfectly rebuild old and damaged cells in a matter of minutes using nanotechnology. She brought life expectancy from the nineties to the multi-hundreds. Many expected her to sell her cures for billions, name the price for life and people will pay it, but she didn’t. She started fundraiser after fundraiser to get her technology into every hospital in the world, saving tens of billions of lives. A person who cares about humanity that much would never hurt someone on purpose, I reassure myself. The hallways don’t feel quite as claustrophobic for the rest of the walk to the lab.

As we reach the secured metal doors that open into the lab, Dr Sinclair turns to me again,
“Just so you’re aware ahead of time, the patient is conscious but still in a state of shock. He is still working on processing having come back to life. That’s another way you’ll be invaluable to me. You have a Master’s Degree in Psychology, correct?”

“Working on a Doctorate but yeah. Do you want me to do sessions with him? I’m not licensed, I’ve just been working on that doctorate because it goes hand in hand with several of my other majors. My thesis is on the effects of prolonged life expectancy on the human psyche.”

“What if you edited your thesis just the slightest bit, and turned it into something no one has ever seen before? How about ‘The effects of a second life on the human psyche ’? You could write your thesis on our very own Patient Zero and your experiences in helping him recuperate after his Revival.”

“Actually, if it’s alright with you, I’d like to do all three of my theses on Patient Zero. Having helped bring him this far, I’ve nearly completed my BioMed Research Thesis. Aiding with his physical recuperation will help build my PsychSci Nursing thesis. If I aid in his Psychological recuperation, I can finish my Psychology thesis.”

“So will you do it, Mr Connors?”

“Yes Doc, of course, I will.”

With that, she opens the doors and I am completely unprepared for what I see