Chapter Text
Act 1: Ad Vitam Aeternam
Chapter 1: To Cross the Abyss
Quarantine Chamber, Thanatica Labs
1 September 2165, 00:00:00
You were never content being a mere Bachelor of Medicine. A thanatologist with such bare qualifications would never survive the twenty-second century. So you dove into neuroscience. Robotics. Artificial intelligence. Combining all its best parts, you mastered the intricacies of aritficial neural networks... and what if you copied organic ones? Instead of a mere training of numbers and images to answer prompts, you use the magnificence of the human brain to its fullest capacity?
It had worked on animals. From tiny worms to rodents to fish to primates.
So, it should work on humans, too, should it not?
You have the funds.
You have the resolve.
The Kains demanded you test it on one of them, but the Plague changed that - they could not do this themselves. They may be visionaries; they may be your loyal, if unethical, beneficiary, but their mysticism blinds them to the complex, rigorous standards of medical practice.
And so, you become your own test subject.
You scan your brain, and have the computer, and yourself, and your laboratory partners, make a model out of it. Like a sketch that serves as a base for your code-shaped paintbrush strokes.
It was a breakthrough...
At least until you got infected.
You enter a race against time, against your own sickly, infected body - a race to preserve the sum of your being in a robotic shell made by Thanatica's best roboticists.
In the isolation ward, virtual-reality gloves snugly wrapped around your cracked skin, you deftly control the delicate instruments of Death's defeat. With the robotic hands - rooms away, with all the healthy scientists - made in your image, you copy the last neurons from your brain scan - a scan that luckily had not been tarnished too much by the sickness ravaging your cells, a scan that would hopefully make Dr. Dankovsky continue living, unburdened by the traces and trauma of the plague, even after his, your, body will surely perish for that very reason...
When your eyes dry with no tears to soothe them no matter how many times you blink, you acutely become aware that time, your time, is always running out. But in the sterile silence of your quarantine, broken only by a single caretaker in a protective - impersonal - hazmat suit, time seems to stretch for eternity.
Stretching like an abyss, the Judge says...
An abyss of nothingness, punctuated by daily tinctures and antibiotics and painkillers from the only man you trust with the innermost parts of you.
An abyss of disquiet, broken only by the ear-grating heaves of your ragged breaths into an oxygen mask.
An abyss this copy of yourself - you yourself? - may cross. Death should not veto your decision to research, to break boundaries-
One of those heavy, ragged breaths interrupts the sound of click-clacking on your keyboard.
But this time, when the oxygen mask continues the metaphorical bridge across, you had found yourself looking up at it. Said bridge is just beyond your reach - it'd be a hair's breadth closer, maybe, if gravity were fairer on you - but all the grasping you did on the merciless void cannot stop your fall.