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South California, 1991.
It was her heart that chased Laura into the cold.
The first heart attack was a shock. She jogged every day, took nutritional supplements, vitamins and other hopeful anti ageing treatments.
She, and her husband Stephen, moved away from southern California to the North. Away from harsh dry heat, towards the easier climates the doctors said would be better; they took angina and worry with them.
The second attack caught her as she looked out over San Francisco Bay.
A Third was only a matter of time. Doctors talked of a bypass, but their eyes were empty of promise. The young do not lie well to the old.
Laura had seen her own heart that week, pictured on the hospital scanner. It looked like something that'd gone rotten in thefridge from being left past date.
A week later, she and Stephen signed contracts with the Ryley Life Extension Foundation. Riley specialised in cryogenic preservation...hope for the future.
A month later, Laura managed to croak "see you later" to Stephen before her heart went grey and still...and that was the end of sixty four years.
And it'd been one hell of a life. She'd seen Vietnam, the war that drove America crazy, saw it were her own eyes. She saw the first steps offworld as Apollo jetted into the night sky. She saw a severed city put back together with sledgehammers, and the wall crashing down. She saw William Burroughs, and Nelson Mandela, and Richard Nixon, and The Beatles, and Elvis Presley and Mother Theresa. There was history in Larua's head; hard history, hard lived and hard loved. All Larua wanted was to keep seeing history.
Her contract with Riley was for a neuro job. Neurological suspension.
Riley, ever the optomists, ever so gently hacked off Laura's head, wrapped it in protective fabrics, dropped it in a steel canister filled with liquid nitrogen. The canister was frozen at -186 degrees centigrade, and racked up with everyone else's head in Riley's storage facility.
Stephen, her husband, died in Kuala Lumpur in 1994, way too far from Riley. He died hard, fists clenched, eyes shining with anger. An endless future with his beautiful life had been denied him, he died there with hate and a sadness to big for words to capture.
*******************
5072, New City of San Francisco.
Six weeks ago Reclamation got to Laura's canister.
They drained out the liquid nitrogen whilst looking at their watches to see if it was time for lunch, and put Laura's head into a provenance field before leaving to go to the Chinese.
Stuffed full, they came back to find that Laura was who the ancient suspension contract said she was, so they got to work growing a new body for her.
Riley had always been optimists you see, they had known even back in 1991 that nanotechnology and cloning was bound to happen one day, either that or we'd all be destroyed in a mushroom cloud... So Riley had offered all it's customers special option.
Customers could choose what the new body they would have when they were recreated. You could have the body of a twenty year old. You wanted the body of anyone famous ? No problem said Riley, it'll all be possible in the future. After all the founders of Riley knew they'd be long dead when the time came to fulfill the wishes.
So, the Reclamation team fired a neurological probe into Larua's shrivelled head. but it fell into a wet, ice damaged slush, damaged by the process of freezing and thawing. The nano repaiir infection was injected into the head. Working at the level of single molecules they wokred away in Laura's head assembling hat was needed.
They hunted down the cellular information from what remained of Larua's brain, and then got to work, patching Laura's brain cells back together cell by cell. Whilst they did that the Reclamation team went for coffee.
They came back, and fired the neuro probe again. This time it collected the phyiscal template memory of Laura, took a decent assessment of it, filled the gaps,and fed the information into a bacterial tank. Microscopic robots worked away in a liquid mixture of water, soil and chemicals to build what was still the most complex machine in the world.
The bacterial tank has a job that, even in this age, most don't believe possible. From little more than water and jelly, build an entire human body to exact specifications from little more than the sloppy mess of a millenia old head and computer data.
At 4 that afternoon Reclamation stopped drinking and playing Fifa 5072, and came back to the lab where Laura's new body was ready. Slightly intoxicated they detached the hoses from the tank, called up the Reclamation counsellor, and headed home.
With a hiss and a flood of murky water, the tank opened. Laura, naked and drenched wet, came to, alone, with dirt under her nails, in a stiff body that felt like she were 20. In a grubby room without windows and single light overhead. Laura was left and went into mild shock, until 10 minutes later the counsellor turned up. He gave her the usual revivals bathrobe and said,
"Hello, I'm Michael. How are you feeling Laura ?"
Her first words, after so long were,
"Where's my husband ?"
Michael looked at her, then at the datapad he held,
"Your husban died three years after you, in an unrecoverable location. He didn't make it."
Laura's new stomach fell away. She asked Michael how long she'd been in cryogenic suspension. He did the worst possible thing. He told her. He pointed to a door and told her she would be picked up. He told her it was double parked so she'd better get moving. Laura clung to that word, 'double parked', it meant that something familiar was still here. It never occured to her that this all meant going outside.
Everything would be ordinary, there'd be an ordinary car with ordinary people outside on the ordinary street. How much could things change ? Her first life had seen massive changes, they'd gone from four digit phone numbers to the internet, wooden planes to the space shuttle.
She stepped. People bustled past, not all were human, Overhead flying cars whined and buzzed, incomprehensible music blasted out over loudspeakers, the sky....the sky was red. The sun....wasn't there. Strange faces looked at her chattering in a language she didn't recognise...
The journey to the hostel was one she didn't register. On arrival she was led through a maze of wooden bunks full of people sleeping. At her bunk she stared at the carity clothes left out for her, still bearing the smell of the last owner.
Laura had been revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. Fosited upon a future already full of problems left by a past that couldn't have cared less.
Laura could have told the future what it was like to meet Che Guevara in an old Cuban schoolhouse. She could have told them about the last Queen, and Albert Einstein, and a million other true stories. The future didn't want to know. It honoured the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back with favourable interest, gave them a place in the hostels.
Hid them away, an unspoken contract. Everyone else in the hostels is the same. They're all damaged by what they knew and they've seen this new world. It burned out something in them. At night there are screams, and tears, every night. Larua's tears mixed with them.
During the day the revivals are thrown out onto the street. Laura sticks to sitting crouched in alleyways, where most of the future is out of sight.
She talks, to anyone who will listen.
She tells of how she was revived, tells in a quiet, cold yet terrible detail. She had, has, a photographer's eye. She's made a documentary in her head.
She tells stories of the past.
Great, rich, warm stories of Stephen Hawking mapping the universe from a wheelchair, of dancing with children in South Africa's dust, and walking through the Moscow snows with Mikhail Gorbachev....John Keendy playing grab-ass in the White House, Nelson Mandela walking through crowd lined streets in Johannesburg, a kid walking in front of a Chinse tank...
The stories that make us great.
Laura will live for another two centuries, but her story, her history is over.
~~Belldandy~~
It was her heart that chased Laura into the cold.
The first heart attack was a shock. She jogged every day, took nutritional supplements, vitamins and other hopeful anti ageing treatments.
She, and her husband Stephen, moved away from southern California to the North. Away from harsh dry heat, towards the easier climates the doctors said would be better; they took angina and worry with them.
The second attack caught her as she looked out over San Francisco Bay.
A Third was only a matter of time. Doctors talked of a bypass, but their eyes were empty of promise. The young do not lie well to the old.
Laura had seen her own heart that week, pictured on the hospital scanner. It looked like something that'd gone rotten in thefridge from being left past date.
A week later, she and Stephen signed contracts with the Ryley Life Extension Foundation. Riley specialised in cryogenic preservation...hope for the future.
A month later, Laura managed to croak "see you later" to Stephen before her heart went grey and still...and that was the end of sixty four years.
And it'd been one hell of a life. She'd seen Vietnam, the war that drove America crazy, saw it were her own eyes. She saw the first steps offworld as Apollo jetted into the night sky. She saw a severed city put back together with sledgehammers, and the wall crashing down. She saw William Burroughs, and Nelson Mandela, and Richard Nixon, and The Beatles, and Elvis Presley and Mother Theresa. There was history in Larua's head; hard history, hard lived and hard loved. All Larua wanted was to keep seeing history.
Her contract with Riley was for a neuro job. Neurological suspension.
Riley, ever the optomists, ever so gently hacked off Laura's head, wrapped it in protective fabrics, dropped it in a steel canister filled with liquid nitrogen. The canister was frozen at -186 degrees centigrade, and racked up with everyone else's head in Riley's storage facility.
Stephen, her husband, died in Kuala Lumpur in 1994, way too far from Riley. He died hard, fists clenched, eyes shining with anger. An endless future with his beautiful life had been denied him, he died there with hate and a sadness to big for words to capture.
*******************
5072, New City of San Francisco.
Six weeks ago Reclamation got to Laura's canister.
They drained out the liquid nitrogen whilst looking at their watches to see if it was time for lunch, and put Laura's head into a provenance field before leaving to go to the Chinese.
Stuffed full, they came back to find that Laura was who the ancient suspension contract said she was, so they got to work growing a new body for her.
Riley had always been optimists you see, they had known even back in 1991 that nanotechnology and cloning was bound to happen one day, either that or we'd all be destroyed in a mushroom cloud... So Riley had offered all it's customers special option.
Customers could choose what the new body they would have when they were recreated. You could have the body of a twenty year old. You wanted the body of anyone famous ? No problem said Riley, it'll all be possible in the future. After all the founders of Riley knew they'd be long dead when the time came to fulfill the wishes.
So, the Reclamation team fired a neurological probe into Larua's shrivelled head. but it fell into a wet, ice damaged slush, damaged by the process of freezing and thawing. The nano repaiir infection was injected into the head. Working at the level of single molecules they wokred away in Laura's head assembling hat was needed.
They hunted down the cellular information from what remained of Larua's brain, and then got to work, patching Laura's brain cells back together cell by cell. Whilst they did that the Reclamation team went for coffee.
They came back, and fired the neuro probe again. This time it collected the phyiscal template memory of Laura, took a decent assessment of it, filled the gaps,and fed the information into a bacterial tank. Microscopic robots worked away in a liquid mixture of water, soil and chemicals to build what was still the most complex machine in the world.
The bacterial tank has a job that, even in this age, most don't believe possible. From little more than water and jelly, build an entire human body to exact specifications from little more than the sloppy mess of a millenia old head and computer data.
At 4 that afternoon Reclamation stopped drinking and playing Fifa 5072, and came back to the lab where Laura's new body was ready. Slightly intoxicated they detached the hoses from the tank, called up the Reclamation counsellor, and headed home.
With a hiss and a flood of murky water, the tank opened. Laura, naked and drenched wet, came to, alone, with dirt under her nails, in a stiff body that felt like she were 20. In a grubby room without windows and single light overhead. Laura was left and went into mild shock, until 10 minutes later the counsellor turned up. He gave her the usual revivals bathrobe and said,
"Hello, I'm Michael. How are you feeling Laura ?"
Her first words, after so long were,
"Where's my husband ?"
Michael looked at her, then at the datapad he held,
"Your husban died three years after you, in an unrecoverable location. He didn't make it."
Laura's new stomach fell away. She asked Michael how long she'd been in cryogenic suspension. He did the worst possible thing. He told her. He pointed to a door and told her she would be picked up. He told her it was double parked so she'd better get moving. Laura clung to that word, 'double parked', it meant that something familiar was still here. It never occured to her that this all meant going outside.
Everything would be ordinary, there'd be an ordinary car with ordinary people outside on the ordinary street. How much could things change ? Her first life had seen massive changes, they'd gone from four digit phone numbers to the internet, wooden planes to the space shuttle.
She stepped. People bustled past, not all were human, Overhead flying cars whined and buzzed, incomprehensible music blasted out over loudspeakers, the sky....the sky was red. The sun....wasn't there. Strange faces looked at her chattering in a language she didn't recognise...
The journey to the hostel was one she didn't register. On arrival she was led through a maze of wooden bunks full of people sleeping. At her bunk she stared at the carity clothes left out for her, still bearing the smell of the last owner.
Laura had been revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. Fosited upon a future already full of problems left by a past that couldn't have cared less.
Laura could have told the future what it was like to meet Che Guevara in an old Cuban schoolhouse. She could have told them about the last Queen, and Albert Einstein, and a million other true stories. The future didn't want to know. It honoured the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back with favourable interest, gave them a place in the hostels.
Hid them away, an unspoken contract. Everyone else in the hostels is the same. They're all damaged by what they knew and they've seen this new world. It burned out something in them. At night there are screams, and tears, every night. Larua's tears mixed with them.
During the day the revivals are thrown out onto the street. Laura sticks to sitting crouched in alleyways, where most of the future is out of sight.
She talks, to anyone who will listen.
She tells of how she was revived, tells in a quiet, cold yet terrible detail. She had, has, a photographer's eye. She's made a documentary in her head.
She tells stories of the past.
Great, rich, warm stories of Stephen Hawking mapping the universe from a wheelchair, of dancing with children in South Africa's dust, and walking through the Moscow snows with Mikhail Gorbachev....John Keendy playing grab-ass in the White House, Nelson Mandela walking through crowd lined streets in Johannesburg, a kid walking in front of a Chinse tank...
The stories that make us great.
Laura will live for another two centuries, but her story, her history is over.
~~Belldandy~~
Interesting tale.
South California, 1991.
It was her heart that chased Laura into the cold.
The first heart attack was a shock. She jogged every day, took nutritional supplements, vitamins and other hopeful anti ageing treatments.
She, and her husband Stephen, moved away from southern California to the North. Away from harsh dry heat, towards the easier climates the doctors said would be better; they took angina and worry with them.
The second attack caught her as she looked out over San Francisco Bay.
A Third was only a matter of time. Doctors talked of a bypass, but their eyes were empty of promise. The young do not lie well to the old.
Laura had seen her own heart that week, pictured on the hospital scanner. It looked like something that'd gone rotten in thefridge from being left past date.
A week later, she and Stephen signed contracts with the Ryley Life Extension Foundation. Riley specialised in cryogenic preservation...hope for the future.
A month later, Laura managed to croak "see you later" to Stephen before her heart went grey and still...and that was the end of sixty four years.
And it'd been one hell of a life. She'd seen Vietnam, the war that drove America crazy, saw it were her own eyes. She saw the first steps offworld as Apollo jetted into the night sky. She saw a severed city put back together with sledgehammers, and the wall crashing down. She saw William Burroughs, and Nelson Mandela, and Richard Nixon, and The Beatles, and Elvis Presley and Mother Theresa. There was history in Larua's head; hard history, hard lived and hard loved. All Larua wanted was to keep seeing history.
Her contract with Riley was for a neuro job. Neurological suspension.
Riley, ever the optomists, ever so gently hacked off Laura's head, wrapped it in protective fabrics, dropped it in a steel canister filled with liquid nitrogen. The canister was frozen at -186 degrees centigrade, and racked up with everyone else's head in Riley's storage facility.
Stephen, her husband, died in Kuala Lumpur in 1994, way too far from Riley. He died hard, fists clenched, eyes shining with anger. An endless future with his beautiful life had been denied him, he died there with hate and a sadness to big for words to capture.
*******************
5072, New City of San Francisco.
Six weeks ago Reclamation got to Laura's canister.
They drained out the liquid nitrogen whilst looking at their watches to see if it was time for lunch, and put Laura's head into a provenance field before leaving to go to the Chinese.
Stuffed full, they came back to find that Laura was who the ancient suspension contract said she was, so they got to work growing a new body for her.
Riley had always been optimists you see, they had known even back in 1991 that nanotechnology and cloning was bound to happen one day, either that or we'd all be destroyed in a mushroom cloud... So Riley had offered all it's customers special option.
Customers could choose what the new body they would have when they were recreated. You could have the body of a twenty year old. You wanted the body of anyone famous ? No problem said Riley, it'll all be possible in the future. After all the founders of Riley knew they'd be long dead when the time came to fulfill the wishes.
So, the Reclamation team fired a neurological probe into Larua's shrivelled head. but it fell into a wet, ice damaged slush, damaged by the process of freezing and thawing. The nano repaiir infection was injected into the head. Working at the level of single molecules they wokred away in Laura's head assembling hat was needed.
They hunted down the cellular information from what remained of Larua's brain, and then got to work, patching Laura's brain cells back together cell by cell. Whilst they did that the Reclamation team went for coffee.
They came back, and fired the neuro probe again. This time it collected the phyiscal template memory of Laura, took a decent assessment of it, filled the gaps,and fed the information into a bacterial tank. Microscopic robots worked away in a liquid mixture of water, soil and chemicals to build what was still the most complex machine in the world.
The bacterial tank has a job that, even in this age, most don't believe possible. From little more than water and jelly, build an entire human body to exact specifications from little more than the sloppy mess of a millenia old head and computer data.
At 4 that afternoon Reclamation stopped drinking and playing Fifa 5072, and came back to the lab where Laura's new body was ready. Slightly intoxicated they detached the hoses from the tank, called up the Reclamation counsellor, and headed home.
With a hiss and a flood of murky water, the tank opened. Laura, naked and drenched wet, came to, alone, with dirt under her nails, in a stiff body that felt like she were 20. In a grubby room without windows and single light overhead. Laura was left and went into mild shock, until 10 minutes later the counsellor turned up. He gave her the usual revivals bathrobe and said,
"Hello, I'm Michael. How are you feeling Laura ?"
Her first words, after so long were,
"Where's my husband ?"
Michael looked at her, then at the datapad he held,
"Your husban died three years after you, in an unrecoverable location. He didn't make it."
Laura's new stomach fell away. She asked Michael how long she'd been in cryogenic suspension. He did the worst possible thing. He told her. He pointed to a door and told her she would be picked up. He told her it was double parked so she'd better get moving. Laura clung to that word, 'double parked', it meant that something familiar was still here. It never occured to her that this all meant going outside.
Everything would be ordinary, there'd be an ordinary car with ordinary people outside on the ordinary street. How much could things change ? Her first life had seen massive changes, they'd gone from four digit phone numbers to the internet, wooden planes to the space shuttle.
She stepped. People bustled past, not all were human, Overhead flying cars whined and buzzed, incomprehensible music blasted out over loudspeakers, the sky....the sky was red. The sun....wasn't there. Strange faces looked at her chattering in a language she didn't recognise...
The journey to the hostel was one she didn't register. On arrival she was led through a maze of wooden bunks full of people sleeping. At her bunk she stared at the carity clothes left out for her, still bearing the smell of the last owner.
Laura had been revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. Fosited upon a future already full of problems left by a past that couldn't have cared less.
Laura could have told the future what it was like to meet Che Guevara in an old Cuban schoolhouse. She could have told them about the last Queen, and Albert Einstein, and a million other true stories. The future didn't want to know. It honoured the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back with favourable interest, gave them a place in the hostels.
Hid them away, an unspoken contract. Everyone else in the hostels is the same. They're all damaged by what they knew and they've seen this new world. It burned out something in them. At night there are screams, and tears, every night. Larua's tears mixed with them.
During the day the revivals are thrown out onto the street. Laura sticks to sitting crouched in alleyways, where most of the future is out of sight.
She talks, to anyone who will listen.
She tells of how she was revived, tells in a quiet, cold yet terrible detail. She had, has, a photographer's eye. She's made a documentary in her head.
She tells stories of the past.
Great, rich, warm stories of Stephen Hawking mapping the universe from a wheelchair, of dancing with children in South Africa's dust, and walking through the Moscow snows with Mikhail Gorbachev....John Keendy playing grab-ass in the White House, Nelson Mandela walking through crowd lined streets in Johannesburg, a kid walking in front of a Chinse tank...
The stories that make us great.
Laura will live for another two centuries, but her story, her history is over.
~~Belldandy~~
It was her heart that chased Laura into the cold.
The first heart attack was a shock. She jogged every day, took nutritional supplements, vitamins and other hopeful anti ageing treatments.
She, and her husband Stephen, moved away from southern California to the North. Away from harsh dry heat, towards the easier climates the doctors said would be better; they took angina and worry with them.
The second attack caught her as she looked out over San Francisco Bay.
A Third was only a matter of time. Doctors talked of a bypass, but their eyes were empty of promise. The young do not lie well to the old.
Laura had seen her own heart that week, pictured on the hospital scanner. It looked like something that'd gone rotten in thefridge from being left past date.
A week later, she and Stephen signed contracts with the Ryley Life Extension Foundation. Riley specialised in cryogenic preservation...hope for the future.
A month later, Laura managed to croak "see you later" to Stephen before her heart went grey and still...and that was the end of sixty four years.
And it'd been one hell of a life. She'd seen Vietnam, the war that drove America crazy, saw it were her own eyes. She saw the first steps offworld as Apollo jetted into the night sky. She saw a severed city put back together with sledgehammers, and the wall crashing down. She saw William Burroughs, and Nelson Mandela, and Richard Nixon, and The Beatles, and Elvis Presley and Mother Theresa. There was history in Larua's head; hard history, hard lived and hard loved. All Larua wanted was to keep seeing history.
Her contract with Riley was for a neuro job. Neurological suspension.
Riley, ever the optomists, ever so gently hacked off Laura's head, wrapped it in protective fabrics, dropped it in a steel canister filled with liquid nitrogen. The canister was frozen at -186 degrees centigrade, and racked up with everyone else's head in Riley's storage facility.
Stephen, her husband, died in Kuala Lumpur in 1994, way too far from Riley. He died hard, fists clenched, eyes shining with anger. An endless future with his beautiful life had been denied him, he died there with hate and a sadness to big for words to capture.
*******************
5072, New City of San Francisco.
Six weeks ago Reclamation got to Laura's canister.
They drained out the liquid nitrogen whilst looking at their watches to see if it was time for lunch, and put Laura's head into a provenance field before leaving to go to the Chinese.
Stuffed full, they came back to find that Laura was who the ancient suspension contract said she was, so they got to work growing a new body for her.
Riley had always been optimists you see, they had known even back in 1991 that nanotechnology and cloning was bound to happen one day, either that or we'd all be destroyed in a mushroom cloud... So Riley had offered all it's customers special option.
Customers could choose what the new body they would have when they were recreated. You could have the body of a twenty year old. You wanted the body of anyone famous ? No problem said Riley, it'll all be possible in the future. After all the founders of Riley knew they'd be long dead when the time came to fulfill the wishes.
So, the Reclamation team fired a neurological probe into Larua's shrivelled head. but it fell into a wet, ice damaged slush, damaged by the process of freezing and thawing. The nano repaiir infection was injected into the head. Working at the level of single molecules they wokred away in Laura's head assembling hat was needed.
They hunted down the cellular information from what remained of Larua's brain, and then got to work, patching Laura's brain cells back together cell by cell. Whilst they did that the Reclamation team went for coffee.
They came back, and fired the neuro probe again. This time it collected the phyiscal template memory of Laura, took a decent assessment of it, filled the gaps,and fed the information into a bacterial tank. Microscopic robots worked away in a liquid mixture of water, soil and chemicals to build what was still the most complex machine in the world.
The bacterial tank has a job that, even in this age, most don't believe possible. From little more than water and jelly, build an entire human body to exact specifications from little more than the sloppy mess of a millenia old head and computer data.
At 4 that afternoon Reclamation stopped drinking and playing Fifa 5072, and came back to the lab where Laura's new body was ready. Slightly intoxicated they detached the hoses from the tank, called up the Reclamation counsellor, and headed home.
With a hiss and a flood of murky water, the tank opened. Laura, naked and drenched wet, came to, alone, with dirt under her nails, in a stiff body that felt like she were 20. In a grubby room without windows and single light overhead. Laura was left and went into mild shock, until 10 minutes later the counsellor turned up. He gave her the usual revivals bathrobe and said,
"Hello, I'm Michael. How are you feeling Laura ?"
Her first words, after so long were,
"Where's my husband ?"
Michael looked at her, then at the datapad he held,
"Your husban died three years after you, in an unrecoverable location. He didn't make it."
Laura's new stomach fell away. She asked Michael how long she'd been in cryogenic suspension. He did the worst possible thing. He told her. He pointed to a door and told her she would be picked up. He told her it was double parked so she'd better get moving. Laura clung to that word, 'double parked', it meant that something familiar was still here. It never occured to her that this all meant going outside.
Everything would be ordinary, there'd be an ordinary car with ordinary people outside on the ordinary street. How much could things change ? Her first life had seen massive changes, they'd gone from four digit phone numbers to the internet, wooden planes to the space shuttle.
She stepped. People bustled past, not all were human, Overhead flying cars whined and buzzed, incomprehensible music blasted out over loudspeakers, the sky....the sky was red. The sun....wasn't there. Strange faces looked at her chattering in a language she didn't recognise...
The journey to the hostel was one she didn't register. On arrival she was led through a maze of wooden bunks full of people sleeping. At her bunk she stared at the carity clothes left out for her, still bearing the smell of the last owner.
Laura had been revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. Fosited upon a future already full of problems left by a past that couldn't have cared less.
Laura could have told the future what it was like to meet Che Guevara in an old Cuban schoolhouse. She could have told them about the last Queen, and Albert Einstein, and a million other true stories. The future didn't want to know. It honoured the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back with favourable interest, gave them a place in the hostels.
Hid them away, an unspoken contract. Everyone else in the hostels is the same. They're all damaged by what they knew and they've seen this new world. It burned out something in them. At night there are screams, and tears, every night. Larua's tears mixed with them.
During the day the revivals are thrown out onto the street. Laura sticks to sitting crouched in alleyways, where most of the future is out of sight.
She talks, to anyone who will listen.
She tells of how she was revived, tells in a quiet, cold yet terrible detail. She had, has, a photographer's eye. She's made a documentary in her head.
She tells stories of the past.
Great, rich, warm stories of Stephen Hawking mapping the universe from a wheelchair, of dancing with children in South Africa's dust, and walking through the Moscow snows with Mikhail Gorbachev....John Keendy playing grab-ass in the White House, Nelson Mandela walking through crowd lined streets in Johannesburg, a kid walking in front of a Chinse tank...
The stories that make us great.
Laura will live for another two centuries, but her story, her history is over.
~~Belldandy~~