When Mark logged back into the game, his character appeared to be supervising repairs to his ships.

“What have I been doing?” he asked EVE.

“You’ve spent the past four days supervising the upgrades and repairs to the ship. The transactions have all cleared, Goro’s paid you.”

“Good,” Mark thought. “It’s time to fix some things outside the ship. Is the communication system repaired?”

“Yes.”

“And I’m assuming that I got a decent planet map for Scillies 6a?”

“Affirmative,” she replied.

Mark walked to the bridge of the Void Terror and told EVE to put him through to broadcast across the entire ship.

“Attention. All Marine NCOs and enlisted personnel report to the cargo hold. No open carry of weapons are allowed, but arm yourself in more subdued fashion. Take no chances. Battle buddies must be present at all times, even during leave.”

Mark walked to the cargo hold area. Personnel were equipping Vibroblade knives and electric knuckledusters. They also wore tactical helmets with rebreather masks to keep out the methane smell. Mark approved. The dead had been placed in a liquid gel suspension locker. The earlier tech used cryogenic freezing, but that caused severe damage during the thawing process that required nanobot supervision to prevent the brain from turning to sludge. The liquid gel preserved the bodies without any destruction to the organs. It was also used to transport large amounts of nonessential personnel aboard ships, such as transporting colonists to new planets.

Each locker could be removed and reassembled like a morgue’s cabinet, making it easy to transport people

“Each Marine, grab a suspension locker and follow me out. We’re getting our crew back.”

The procession left the ship into the market. Mark looked around as they walked. Jumper planets might have a version of the law in the area, and nominally they all followed the colony rules, but it never hurt to keep a watchful eye on the area.

Mark rented a land transport hovercraft, hulking gravity ships that could transport heavy loads, a futuristic version of the heavy duty pickup trucks that hauling companies used. The Marines loaded up the transport with the bodies of the fallen. He took a small group of three Marines for an honor guards with him. By military law, the honor guard couldn’t drive a ship, since they needed their hands free to engage any possible ambush. They drove the bulky transport from the ship docking bay.

Mark surveyed the area as he drove towards his destination. Scillies 6a looked similar to many other jumper planets Mark had been on. There were stores for tech, weapons, food, sex shops, clothing shops, tattoo parlors, bars, but no schools or playgrounds. You didn’t start a family on a jumper planet, and only a sadist would bring a family to one. Everything was meant to be ephemeral, no connections necessary. In Mark’s earlier career, he scanned lists of people wanted by the IIO and hit various jumper planets. Even when people tried to disguise themselves, EVE could instantly catalogue the changes and identify the personnel. Mark had a high arrest record, earning him a steady stream of cryptos in the real World, even if it was really beneath someone commanding a military ship.

They made a few stops along the way picking up an odd assortment of electronics, a large glass container, radio transponders, waste filtration systems used for fishes, a black blanket, and other gear. The honor guard didn’t ask any questions, because good Marines know it’s not theirs to question why. Mark was glad for that, as the explanation would be a bit difficult.

They arrived at their destination, the rebirther facility, thirty minutes later. The Rebirther facility is a gigantic warehouse filled with embryonic stem cells and raw protein. Every person can scan and digitize their memories and personalities for several thousand credits at the facilities, as well as submit a DNA sample to perform a recombinant birth. Assuming that person or someone they know can afford ten million credits.

There were a lot of limitations to the facilities, outside from the extraordinary high costs. For one, you had to prove death. Legal disputes could easily arrive if two people with the exact same DNA and memories tried to prove who legally owned their assets. That was the reason that shooting someone out into space was considered the worst punishment, as it meant there was no way to recover their bodies and regrow them.

Two, you couldn’t transfer into a new body easily. Yes you could do it, but the human brain grew adapted to the host body. Despite the ancient mind/body dualism that pervaded many religions and philosophies, it turned out the two were combined. Putting an old mind into a new body wouldn’t automatically turn someone into a super soldier. Far from it, they’d usually be unable to walk since the nervous system connections would be wired for the wrong body. It took months of rehab to get back into functional conditions, years to gain athleticism.

The Methuselahs, the very rich who performed this operation every two decades or so, chose to return to an earlier version of themselves, and used DNA splicing techniques to fix themselves into a better body while they were alive. So there were superrich, super smart, super good-looking people running around, but the process took several cycles to really nail down the exact DNA alchemy necessary to produce that result.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Three, you returned to the memories you had when you had your brain scanned. You could get another scan done, if you had a set of intact brains, to return the memories back to the person, minus their death as that was too traumatic an experience, but you could also lose dozens of years of your life or find yourself completely unprepared for the modern World if your backup was too long ago.

Four, if you didn’t see a geneticists after your resurrection and had to get resurrected again, there’s a chance for transcription errors to occur. Copies of copies lose fidelity. So you could be resurrected only to discover you have cancer or dementia if you didn’t get a clean genetic bill of health from the doctor before you did it again.

Still, despite all those drawbacks, it was a medical miracle. Mark and his honor guard spent the next four hours unloading each of the heads of his deceased crew, scanning them, and then letting the machine rebuild them from the ground up using 3d printing with raw proteins. The process would take at least eight hours, and Mark left one special cranium nearby while the others were being rebuilt.

He sent the honor guard off with the instructions to return in six hours to return all their containers and to come back to collect him and their nearly revived teammates with enough vehicles to seat them all. They saluted and went back to take their break.

Mark pulled out the one container he had reserved for himself and look at the austere man’s head he held, the person who had tried to take over his ship. The first man Mark had ever killed. He supposed that he should feel some remorse, regret, or concern about having done that to the man, but he just felt a coldness inside when he looked at the man’s face, frozen in perpetual shock.

Mark digitized the man’s memories and began restoring the man, but with some specific modifications. This normally wasn’t possible, but Mark’s high skill in computer operations and programming allowed him to do some new tricks. The modified layout build the man’s head and throat, but modified the throat to have two sets of mini-lungs that would supply enough oxygen to think and breath, for a head without a body to support. There was a single set of waste membranes at the bottom of the throat to allow excretion of toxins.

While the body was being regenerated, he modified his glass container to have a simple transponder that he could turn on and off with a button, large enough to hold the throat/head combination along with embryonic fluid and a filtration system to remove waste. It wasn’t going to win any engineering awards, but the crude device would certainly work well enough for his purposes.

Sadly, even with someone’s digitized brain, you couldn’t easily do anything with it. The brain is a very messy organism, storing sight, sound, memory, and other parts in different places. With enough time, money, effort, people, a facility capable of that work, and a judge-ordered subpoena for that sort of testimony, you could eventually find the exact things you were looking for. Problem was by the time you were through with all that, the information you needed would fade from urgency. That sort of deep forensic work was usually only done when serial killers were executed and they needed to make sure they accounted for all of the victims. Since a recovered body could be resurrected, serial killers didn’t like to give those to the police, since it meant their victims would outlive their killer.

After Mark finished the final touches to his case, he waited for the new head/throat combination to be finished. It only took a few minutes before the eyes opened up, and the throat expanded with its new mini-lungs taking their first breath.

“Where am I?” the man asked.

Mark walked into his field of view. “You ever heard of the Oracle Project?”

The man just looked back at Mark with an angry scowl. “Where am I?” he repeated.

“Oh, this place? It’s a rebirther facility. And it’s just the two of us. And you don’t look very good.” He held the glass contraption he’d created and allowed the man to see his reflection in it. The man went white when he saw his inhumanely modified form in the reflection.

“So, the Oracle Project, you ever heard of it?” Mark repeated.

The man looked too stunned to give an answer.

“It’s okay if you haven’t. It was a top secret military project. Except my great granddaddy worked on it, and the stories of that passed through the family. We’re all military, hell, I’m practically military royalty.” As far as the game history went, that was true.

“Back during the AI wars, humans had a big problem. AIs could beat the crap out of any regular human. Hell, even the smartest humans. So my great granddad came up with an idea. The brain is remarkably plastic, it can change dramatically based on needs. So there was the case of this C-level college student, got drunk with some friends and dived off a mountain cliff, straight into a rock. Paralyzed him. Completely paralyzed from the neck down.

But instead of continuing on his C-level path, he became a genius. His work formed the basis of interplanetary travel that we all use. My great granddad, Abhay, he decided that if we did the same thing to humans, we might be able to sort of force breed human super soldiers. The name of that project was the ‘Oracle Project.’

Well, you can guess what happened. Most people went crazy, but a few did become super geniuses. Hooked up with the latest information, they could start to outperform the AIs, eventually leading to us winning the war against the machines and shutting them down. The Oracle Project was abandoned, some of those Oracles made the very facility you’re sitting in right now in order to be able to restore themselves back.

So this is all hush-hush stuff. Top secret and all that. But the way I see it, you got two choices. Option one, you can tell me everything I want to know about who set us up, how they did it, and how they knew where we were. If you do a great job, I’ll turn you into an Oracle. It might not take, but at least you have a shot at being useful and maybe getting a body back at some point in your life.

Option two, you don’t tell me what you know, and I lock you in this little box with no light, sound, or stimuli and wait until you crack. Then I keep you as a trophy until my one hundredth rebirth and shoot you with a rocket to celebrate the occasion. Your choice how this goes down.”