Free Extensis Vitae by Gregory Mattix Page A

saw a large metal and glass tube with a frozen man inside it. I screamed and ran. Nancy tried to calm me down, and when Father returned, I thought he would yell at me, but he didn’t. He explained that the man had gone to sleep because he was hurt badly and he was waiting for a smart doctor to come along who could make him as good as new when he came back out.”
    “Well, I definitely feel as good as new, that’s for sure.” Realizing she still held his hand—not that he was complaining—he squeezed hers. “Where did this body come from?”
    “That, I’m not too sure about. My father doesn’t share all of his secrets. I would assume he either recovered it from the same site where he found you, or he got it through his connections in the medical field. Black market, maybe. All I know is that high-quality genetically engineered clones are VERY expensive, and your body had all the military tech already built in.”
    “Why did they abandon us in that lab? I think I remember others that were frozen, as well—what happened to them?”
    “I’m not sure about that part—you’d have to ask my father about the rest. It’s likely that the military ran out of funding and the program was shut down sometime prior to the bankrupting of the central government. From the state that he found the facility in, I think it’s pretty clear that they had shuttered it with the hope and expectation that they were going to get funding restored in the near future. As for the rest of your question, Father told me that the life support backup power systems had failed on the other cryochambers, and yours was close to failing when he found you. When they announced the impending impact event and Father made arrangements for us to join the Colony, he knew he wouldn’t be able to smuggle in the cryochamber with your body inside. You were in pretty bad shape, and there weren’t enough time or resources to try to fix you up, so he was forced to make a hasty neural transfer.”
    “Neural transfer? What is that?” he asked.
    “I don’t know a whole lot about the field, but a very simplistic explanation is that your brain activity essentially boils down to electrical impulses firing through neurons. The goal was to translate brain activity into ones and zeros—basically in order to copy the essence of a unique person into computer code. There was a very advanced area of neurology research that experimented with translating that into applications such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and cloning. The military and corporations performed extensive research in the field for a decade or two prior to the Cataclysm.”
    “How is that even possible?” he wondered aloud. When she was about to reply, he waved her off. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter, since, like you said, here I sit. I am glad that your father has such a brilliant daughter to be able to pick up all the pieces and put me together again, or else I would have still been on ice—literally.” She blushed prettily at the compliment.
    “I’m happy that everything seems to have worked out pretty well in that regard,” she replied.
    They were both quiet for a while as Reznik reflected on everything that she had told him. “It’s just weird not really being me,” he finally said. He studied his left hand—the one that had been amputated from his real body—and slowly flexed it.
    “Are you not happy with this body? I’m sorry that the choice was taken away from you by us putting you in this one…” She trailed off.
    “No, it’s fine,” Reznik said with a quick smile. “That was kind of the point of joining the DARPA program—I had pretty much given up on my old body. I didn’t know if I would come out of there looking like the bionic man, or if I would even come out of there at all.”

Chapter 7

    T hey spent the rest of the day together, waiting for Reznik’s late afternoon appointment with the administrator. Myrna showed him blueprints and schematics of