After Life (Power Reads Book 2) Read online

  AFTER LIFE

  © 2013 Dean Crawford

  Published: 21st November 2013

  ASIN:B00GUFIC2C

  Publisher: Fictum Ltd

  The right of Dean Crawford to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  Dean Crawford Books

  Also by Dean Crawford:

  The Warner & Lopez Series

  The Nemesis Origin

  The Fusion Cage

  The Atlantia Series

  Survivor, Retaliator

  Aggressor, Endeavour, Defiance

  The Ethan Warner Series

  Covenant, Immortal, Apocalypse

  The Chimera Secret, The Eternity Project

  Independent novels

  Eden, After Life,

  Revolution, Soul Seekers

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  “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”

  Leonardo da Vinci

  They say that you see a bright tunnel of light, just before the end.

  They say that there is nothing to be afraid of, that when it comes it fills your world and changes everything. That all of the emotions that you once felt just slip away like an old skin. Scoured of all life’s labours, what remains is nothing more than light, like starlight, bright and yet as ephemeral and distant as the edge of the universe.

  That’s what dying was like.

  But now, of course, death is no longer the end.

  The soft, warm and welcoming tunnel of light still emerges from the darkness of oblivion, swelling around you in a warm and comforting blanket, but then it vanishes in a blur of sharp colours, geometric whorls and spirals that bury deep into your core. Some people even say that at the last moment, just before the tunnel of light faded away they saw people waiting for them, people that they felt certain they knew. Then, all of a sudden you feel as though you’re flying faster than light itself. Memories long forgotten race through the field of your awareness: these days, your life flashes in front of your eyes after you die.

  Sentience comes slowly. It’s as though the brain has to recalibrate itself to view the world through different eyes. There are new sensations. I wouldn’t call them physical feelings as such, just an awareness of objects and their proximity hovering like ghosts in a new and unusual world. Not that they matter all that much, of course, because if I wanted to I could walk right through them.

  First thing I did was look at my hands. I’d spent the last twenty six years of my life with crippling arthritis that had reduced my fingers to bony digits covered with thin, almost translucent skin. I was a decrepit bag of bones that you could barely call alive at all. Now my hands looked perfect, which was exactly how they should have looked. I didn’t pay this much money for anything less than perfection. Sure, it was weird to be able to see right through them to the projection platform beneath my feet but hell, with me feeling no pain for the first time in nearly three decades I could deal with that.

  I guess I wish that it had happened sooner. My death, I mean. Hard not to when I could have saved myself two decades of daily pain and humiliation and just ended it all. Look at me now, compared to how I was then. I was ninety four years old, hadn’t been able to get out of my bed on my own for over a decade, could barely see past the end of my own bloated nose and spent much of my time dribbling my dinners down my chest. Now I look and feel like a teenager again, full of spirit and verve. I’m a Holosap, and man am I glad that my life ended because that’s when it really got going.

  Trust me, this is worth it. It’s the best thing you’ll ever do with your afterlife.

  Marvin Rockefeller III

  For and on behalf of Re–Volution Ltd

  1

  Whitehall, London

  United Kingdom

  There was no time to waste.

  He ran through the darkened and rain soaked streets, street lights illuminating his path in pools of sparkling light that danced erratically like distant lightning storms as the city’s power supply surged and fluttered. Patches of mist drifted in cold banks to obscure the lights of the financial district way off to the east that flickered like a distant galaxy of dying stars. His footfalls echoed down the winding streets in percussion to the hymn of terror coming from the wider city as a million souls cried out in fear.

  He could see them flocking across the Thames to the south, thousands of flaming torches streaming across the remaining bridges above the cold water, a last bastion of civilisation besieged by a cruel darkness beyond. Elsewhere in the black and bitter water, refugees from the darkness tried to swim to safety, their torches extinguished as the current and icy waters drew them to their deaths. Further to the south the sky glowed a fiery red as the country beyond was consumed by an inferno wrought by the hellish devices of man. But he barely cast a glance at the turmoil of flame as he ran, his tired old lungs throbbing painfully in his chest.

  There was a far greater threat than The Falling bearing down upon the city.

  He reached the end of Whitehall and staggered to the ornate gated doorway of an imposing Georgian building guarded by two uniformed soldiers. He stumbled to a halt before them, his chest heaving as he rested his hands on his knees.

  One of the soldiers stepped forward, his gloved hands gripping his rifle cautiously. A tall black man bearing the insignia of an Army lieutenant, he moved to the old man’s side.

  ‘Professor Anderson? Are you all right sir?’

  Anderson lifted his head, his face sheened with sweat. ‘I will be, Lieutenant Connelly, just as soon as you open those doors.’

  ‘Is it happening, sir?’

  The old man nodded, managed to stand upright again. ‘It’s happening.’

  Connelly turned to his colleague, Private Watkins, and nodded. The soldier whirled and removed a glove to swipe his hand across a sensor screen set into the wall. The gates clicked and Watkins pushed through them. Lieutenant Connelly took the old man’s arm and guided him through the doors as outside the shouts and shrieks rose in volume from the Thames nearby. The gates and then the doors thumped closed behind them with a boom that echoed through the building as Watkins locked them once again.

  ‘Where to?’ Lieutenant Connelly asked.

  Anderson waved the two soldiers to follow him through the building. There were no lights on, but the windows glowed with the flickering light of countless torches burning nearby as survivors flooded into the city. Every now and again, in the distance, Anderson heard a deep boom rumble out in the night as another bridge was blasted into pieces by the Royal Engineers.

  ‘How long do we have?’ he asked Lieutenant Connelly, ‘until the city is sealed off?’

  Connelly shrugged as he followed Anderson down an ornate staircase that led toward the building’s expansive basement.

  ‘Maybe an hour,’ he replied. ‘Once the main access routes are secured they’ll start sealing up the sewers, the tube stations, places like that. Why?’

  Anderson did not reply as he reached the basement level, their way now illuminated by strips of glowing blue fluorescent tubing. A series of transparent doors made from bullet proof plastic stood between them and a further, larger steel door. One by one, Anderson accessed the different sections. Each was pressurised to a different degree, offering three levels of protection against atmospheric contaminants from entering whatever lay beyond.

  Lieutenant Connelly hesitated as Anderson reached the steel door. ‘Private Watkins and my own security clearance is not sufficient for us to be down here, prof
essor. Perhaps we should return to our sentry posts and let you perform your duties alone.’

  Anderson hefted the door’s seal and replied over his shoulder as he did so. ‘The city is under siege and extreme circumstances require extreme responses,’ he said. ‘Consider yourselves cleared by me. If I do not do now what I have to, there will be more to worry about than The Falling.’

  As if in reply, from the building above came the faint clatter of machine gun fire from nearby Westminster.

  ‘They’re securing the bridge,’ Connelly said in a leaden tone, ‘cutting the survivors off.’

  ‘Then we must hurry,’ Anderson insisted.

  He spun the steel wheel and a hiss of pressurised air escaped from whatever was concealed within. Connelly and Watkins hefted their weapons onto their shoulders and helped him push the door open. A glow from the room reached out to bathe the three men in a ray of ultra–violet light that seemed somehow alien.

  Within lay a remarkable sight that, even after years spent labouring within the very same room, never failed to take Anderson’s breath away.

  A series of eighteen supercomputers, linked in parallel, lined one wall of the large basement, which was intersected vertically by thick concrete stanchions that supported the vast weight of the building above. The computers’ glossy black faces blinked with tiny coloured lights as they hummed in digital harmony. Anderson moved through the forest of stanchions to a central area in the basement that had been cleared to make space for a large, angular platform of matt black plastic and rubber walkways that rose a couple of feet off the basement floor. Thick cables snaked their way from the platform up the walls as though a gigantic, angular black spider were nesting in the centre of the basement, while to their right stood a computer terminal where several monitors flashed information and streams of binary code.

  In the centre of the platform, standing alone with hands clasped calmly before him stood a figure staring down at Anderson and the two soldiers.

  ‘Good evening, professor.’

  The voice was monotone and tainted with a faint warble, as though it were being heard from underwater through a stream of bubbles.

  ‘Good evening, Adam,’ Anderson replied.

  Lieutenant Connelly and Private Watkins remained rooted to the spot and stared up at the projection. ‘What the hell is that?’

  Adam stood six feet tall, his body lightly muscular and athletic, his shoulders broad and his scalp hairless. In fact, there appeared to be no hair on his body at all. His hands were covering his crotch, but it quickly became obvious as he turned to watch Anderson that he possessed no genitalia. His face was smooth, perfectly symmetrical, his movements as fluid as warm running oil. But what was most remarkable about Adam was that he glowed with a soft, electric–blue light touched with a faint aurora of green and that the back of the basement was clearly visible through him. Adam’s body was translucent.

  Anderson barely looked up at the soldiers as he replied, his fingers racing across a keyboard at the terminal that was merely a clear plastic sheet onto which the shape of keys were being projected by beams of light.

  ‘Adam,’ he replied, ‘is a Holonomic Entity.’

  Lieutenant Connelly cautiously approached the platform, his eyes fixed upon those of Adam. Adam returned the gaze with equal curiosity. His eyes glowed with a strange light, a distant star of awareness gleaming within them.

  ‘Is it, alive?’ Watkins asked.

  Anderson nodded as he typed furiously. ‘Adam is fully self aware, which is what is going to make this so very difficult for me to do.’

  ‘What is happening, professor?’ Adam asked as he turned to watch Anderson, a frown appearing on his impossibly symmetrical features.

  Anderson tapped a few glowing keys and then hit a final one, hard. He stood up from the terminal and turned to Adam.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said, his face torn with something that looked to be genuine grief. ‘I have made a terrible mistake. I am erasing you from the system, Adam.’

  The holographic man stared back at Anderson for several moments before replying.

  ‘Where will I go?’ he asked.

  There was something uncomfortably child–like about the question, unrestrained curiosity thinly veiling a fear of the unknown.

  Anderson hesitated for a moment. ‘Somewhere nice,’ he replied, ‘somewhere better.’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ Lieutenant Connelly snapped. ‘I’m guessing you can’t just turn all of this stuff off without orders.’

  Anderson shook his head. ‘Believe me, this experiment must be destroyed while it still can be.’

  ‘I’m not going to stand here and let you shut this down without confirming it with my superior officer.’

  ‘Your superior officer,’ Anderson explained, ‘will know nothing about this.’

  ‘Then explain it to me, right now.’

  ‘There’s no time!’

  Lieutenant Connelly pulled his rifle into his shoulder and aimed it at Anderson. ‘Make time,’ he growled.

  Anderson glanced at the entrance to the basement as though he were being watched and spoke quickly.

  ‘This is the cure for The Falling,’ he said.

  ‘A cure?’ Watkins gasped. ‘There’s a cure?’

  ‘There is no cure,’ Connelly insisted.

  ‘Precisely,’ Anderson agreed. ‘There is no biological cure for The Falling, which means the only way to evade infection is to become invulnerable to the disease. Adam here represents my attempt to create a human being that is not physical in its presence, but digital. I applied an electrical charge to a human brain and then scanned it down to a level so tiny that I could see the interactions between individual neurons. I then digitised the scan and uploaded it into a computer program which mimics neuronal processes. Adam is the result.’

  The soldier glanced sideways at Adam. ‘He’s alive because you scanned a dead person’s brain?’

  Anderson clenched his fists by his side. ‘Kind of. We must hurry.’

  ‘Hurry where? And what were you doing on that computer?’

  ‘Saving humanity,’ Anderson shot back, ‘and covering its arse at the same time.’ Anderson looked up at Adam. ‘I truly am sorry, my friend.’

  Adam’s frown mutated into concern. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘How the hell can he do that?’ Watkins asked. ‘See? Hear?’

  ‘Twisted light,’ Anderson snapped, ‘microphones and vocal resonance amplifiers. We don’t have time for this!’

  Lieutenant Connelly looked around him at the laboratory, and then his eyes settled on a small holograph sitting on a table beside Anderson’s computer terminal, an image of a young girl of maybe six or seven years old smiling happily. Beneath it in glowing script was a poem of some kind.

  Yes, thou shalt know, spite of thy past Distress,

  And all those Ills which thou so long hast mourn’d

  Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,

  Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.

  William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 1697

  Lieutenant Connelly lowered his rifle. ‘You lost your daughter to The Falling,’ he recalled. ‘You’re going to end this, after all that you lost, all that you sacrificed?’

  Anderson hesitated, looking at the image of his daughter, but it was Adam’s voice that replied.

  ‘Don’t do this, professor,’ he pleaded. ‘I don’t want to die.’

  Lieutenant Connelly looked up at the humanoid form looking down at them and heard Professor Anderson’s reply as though it came from another world.

  ‘You never lived, Adam. You’re not like us.’ Anderson hesitated. ‘You’re not like me. You’re the birth, Adam, but the end must come with Eve.’

  Anderson sensed the two soldiers look up once again at Adam, and wasn’t sure whether he imagined or heard the gasp of realisation from them both.

  ‘You scanned your own brain,’ Lieutenant Connelly whispered. ‘Adam is you.’

 
; As Anderson watched, Adam’s glowing form began to sparkle and shimmer as though it were breaking down before their very eyes.

  ‘He’s me,’ Anderson whispered in reply, ‘but he’s not me.’

  And then he whispered words that barely reached Lieutenant Connelly’s ears.

  ‘Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turned…’

  The holonomic entity’s voice became pleading. ‘Father, don’t do this.’

  Anderson whispered again and was about to reply to Adam when the glass doors to the basement exploded in a shower of sparkling crystals that crashed through the basement in a lethal cloud of shrapnel. Anderson spun away from the horrendous blast, saw Private Watkins and Lieutenant Connelly scythed down by the debris as their weapons flew from their grasp. Anderson felt the shockwave hit him and hurl him backwards against the computer terminal with a thud that echoed through his skull and blurred his vision.

  Heavily armed troops in black fatigues and face masks poured into the basement, spreading out as the huge computers sparked and shuddered as their damaged circuits fried and melted. Anderson turned his head, his ears still ringing, and saw Adam watching him with a strange, confused expression painted on his features. Gradually, as Anderson watched, Adam’s face began to melt away in a drifting vortex of light particles as though a gentle breeze were gusting through the basement and blowing him away one atom at a time.

  A galaxy of tiny, bright lights, like falling stars spilled away from his body and his face, and as he tumbled into a collapsing cloud of binary code Anderson heard Adam’s voice cry out in an increasingly distorted wail of pain, his face stricken with fear.

  ‘Why, father?’

  Adam’s countenance vanished as his body tumbled into a seething torrent of light that ran like water across the projection platform and vanished from sight as his cry echoed and faded into digital oblivion. Anderson leaned back against the terminal, exhausted, and was still staring at the platform when the troops surrounded him, their rifles all pointed at his head.