Free Extensis Vitae by Gregory Mattix

had been performed there. Cutting edge for its time, anyway. An old colleague of his was an executive with Extensis Vitae , and Father reached out to him and requested access to the facility. The request was granted, as the corporation’s only interest was in using an already hardened site to build the Colony—they cared little for what research the military had performed there.”
    “So eventually, my father went to the site, and, according to him, he found an area that was sealed off behind a vault door. He talked the foreman into having his men use a plasma cutter to get through the vault door, and inside was a laboratory where the military had conducted their research on cloning, cryonics, nanoaugmentation, and even more radical stuff. The place had been abandoned for years, but everything was just as they had left it—as though they had just left for the weekend. He said it appeared that the scientists would have been able to get right back to work again as soon as they returned. He must have greased a few palms, because he managed to recover a couple of the cryogenic vats, some storage drives containing research data, and other miscellaneous equipment. Somehow, he managed to get it all trucked out of there and stored in the basement of his office building. I’m not sure how much he played around with the equipment back then, but it sat down there until our admission to Colony 12 was approved.”
    “As a physician, he was allowed a lot of latitude to bring what equipment he needed, so he had some of the old military equipment brought down here. Over the years, he had tinkered with the idea of continuing the military research and even experimenting with a neural transfer, but he was called away on the expedition to Colony 13. I was fortunate that he left detailed enough notes so that after he was gone, I was able to perform the procedure he had set up. And voilà —here you sit!”
    Reznik was trying to process all the information. The part about the underground research facility and cryogenics seemed to ring a bell, but the details were foggy.
    “So how did I get from my old body into this one? Where did it come from? And what happened to my old body?”
    “I’m sorry. Your old body was damaged beyond repair. The military had you cryogenically frozen. I don’t know if the intent was to repair your old body when medical tech had caught up or not, but they suddenly started making some huge breakthroughs in cloning technology. It was all Special Access stuff—super secret, since cloning was officially banned by the United Nations.”
    There was a long silence as Reznik combed through the fragments of the past that he could remember. His memory was getting much better, but he still could not recall anything more than bits and pieces of the details of his participation in the DARPA project. She was watching him intently, and he shook his head in frustration. “It isn’t coming back to me yet… It’s still a jumbled blur. I remember getting put into one of those cryo-vats and then seeing a face through the window, but that’s about it.”
    “Give it some more time,” she said. “Most of your memory has been filling in, right?” At his nod she reached over and squeezed his hand. Their eyes met and she smiled that sad smile of hers again. “I saw you, you know—the real you. I was just a little girl at the time.”
    Reznik’s eyes went wide. “You saw me in the cryochamber?”
    She nodded. “I wasn’t supposed to. Father had taken me to the office one day and he got called out to a meeting or something, so I was left behind with Nancy—his secretary—to watch me. She went down to the basement to get supplies and I snuck down after her. Not knowing that I had followed her down there, she went back up while I poked around like the curious little girl I was. I remember seeing a mouse run under a large tarp in the back of the room. I went to follow it and pulled up the tarp. When I did, it slid down and I