Did you know the mind continues to function after death? That long past the end of any signals we can measure, well after the bonesaws of this world would lid the eyes and called the time, there are still synapses firing in the deepest recesses of the brain?

I didn’t. As Banks’s round tore into me, shredding sterine, cotton, skin, and flesh as if they were nothing more than mist in the air, and as it re-emerged from the back of my shoulder, taking with it a fist-sized plug of muscle, fat, and shattered bone, and as my body screamed in shock at the trauma it had just received, I realized something: all the bonesaws had it wrong. It’s not the brain that calls it quits. It’s the mind (or the soul, the spirit, the human essence, whatever the hell you want to call it) that finally bags it, when it realizes its body is still, and it has no way to express itself. Or maybe they all had it right, and we’ve just moved the target on them. If you, like me, consider life to be a way of influencing one’s surroundings, of interacting with them in such a way that those surroundings take a different form, then maybe we’ve just gone and redefined what death is. Maybe, a week ago, a person in my current condition would have been declared fully and correctly dead, but now, with the advent of the Haggarty, I was only almost so.

And the part of me that clung to life was twisted in a cosmic blur.

It played back Banks’s shot, for one. His finger on the trigger (four-point-six pounds of pressure) picked out in the exquisite detail afforded by my heightened senses, twitching as his hatred grew (four-point seven…four point eight…) The subtle tilt to the set of his shoulders as they shifted to absorb the kick. The lick of flame at the base of the muzzle as the (five-point oh…we have liftoff) powder in the round ignited. The distortion as the rush of air, and the hazy, invisible waves of heat, billowed out ahead of the slug, which hurtled, spinning, from the chamber, slowed enough in the playback it could be seen by naked eye.

The pain as it slammed into me, tearing lethal holes in my ventricle. The cold, clinical detachment as my mind refused to feel this pain, knowing there was nothing it could do for me now. The widening of Bergman’s eyes, the slacking of his rifle’s cover, the disbelief that Banks had actually gone through with it. The subtle change in Ramsay’s holo, telling him that it was time, that this was the moment he could strike, when their attention was diverted, and he’d catch Bergman by surprise if only he moved now now NOW! The apathetic vacuum of Ramsay’s eyes as he slowly rolled his head to see.

The nervous smirk on Banks’s face, satisfied the job was done. There, his fairy sent, forming its first coherent words. Let’s see you rank your way out of that.

A second shot from Banks’s rifle. Heard, not seen, as I’d lost all control of my eyes the moment my head slammed into steel. But I felt nothing as it sounded, not even the vague idea that something else had moved a limb, so I paid it no attention.

My life, flashing before my eyes.

My schooling. Form after form of skating by, placating lecturers and outsmarting tests enough to be labeled ‘special,’ and ‘gifted,’ earning myself advanced placement and being something of a sideshow to my mates as a result. Finding friends among them anyways, and using them as insulation against the few that were so intimidated, so insecure, that they’d lash out with their fists whenever their pea-brains couldn’t cope. Packing my bags for university a year ahead of everyone else, leaving all I knew behind and diving, alone, into that unknown.

Graduation. The moment I got to stand up in front of all the lunkheads, jocks and sorority chicks that had written me off as an upstart pipsqueak for the past four years and collect the hot degree for up-and-comers in this world, the one that would elevate me above them all of them professionally, financially, and, eventually, socially. The moment that was going to validate all the hours I had spent staring at screens instead of partying or playing ball, and make up for all the times I’d been ribbed on as a result. Remembering the sea of faces, panning back and forth across the expanse that filled the auditorium, and not recognizing one.

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The night of drunken debauchery at D’Antonio’s later on that year, after the so-called Real World had salted away six months’ worth of naivety from my once-auspicious heart. Britt and I had been darting for shots, taking advantage of being two of the not-so-many people in the city with no reason to leave on a Tuesday night and our relationship with the barkeep to scratch out some extra elbow room and get good and smashed on budget vodka, when the guys from my Cybernetics program sidled in and sat down in the next booth over. We got to chatting, and after a round or two they secreted us in on this underground movement they were freelancing with, and sent us a couple of business cards.

That Halloween party at the Belfry, when the only girl I ever been with that I thought might have been ‘the one’ had walked out on me in her pert little Empress costume, leaving me to explain for the rest of the night why I was dressed as a Roman slave. My heart had broken that night in ways that never fully healed, and left me the snake-bit wreck those guys at the bar had preyed on a few weeks later.

My years serving in the Coalition, rising through the ranks of its ever-changing political landscape, sneaking into gaps that opened when this faction shifted stance or that coordinator got promoted, until I earned my current post. Reflecting on each move I’d made, from dinners with the diamondhead for general merriment and subtle glad-handing to out-and-out sabotage of a project that was competing with mine for a pool of funds, and on those I’d planned to make, and how both had led me here.

My father, who I only knew from frames, gone chasing ore in the mines of the Chinese countryside after the Tungsten revolution hit, leaving my mom to raise my sister and I without so much as a postcard home. Vague memories of tobacco smoke were all I really had of him. My sister, who looked out for me as best she could while Mom was working double shifts. One night stood out from the rest, when she had stayed home from a dance she’d been looking forward to for weeks because I was puking my guts out and running a fever. The whole experience was something of a fugue, but I remember splitting a bowl of soup – tomato, the only kind she knew how to make back then – and she gave me the bigger half, even though she knew I probably wouldn’t keep it down. I haven’t talked to her in years, I thought sadly to myself. I began to wonder why.

That one pickup basketball game I’d played in when I was thirteen, when three of the regulars had been out of town and they’d been scraping for replacements. Why the hell did I see that? Sure, I’d made the winning shot, banking one home from the just inside the arc to take the game by the needed four, but still…none of those guys turned into friends, and I never played with them again. Hardly a momentous occasion.

The earliest memory I could recall, of playing at hols with a couple of kids from the family that lived a few doors down. I barely remembered what they played – a platformer of some kind, with lots of magic and swordplay, and a complex level-up system that made as little sense now as it did back then – but the amazement that I felt at seeing them so immersed in the game, that feeling that they could queue up one of those bad boys whenever they liked and be in the past, the future, a different world altogether, or in a completely different body with a new fantastic set of skills, stayed with me. I’d think back to that day for the rest of my years, and every time I did I’d know that that was how I wanted to spend them.

A million others, which, when taken together, made up the story of my life. Decades of twists, turns, foibles and vicissitudes that made me who I was, and led me, ultimately, to this end. How many crossroads had there been? How many chances to turn left instead of right, press on instead of giving up, maybe talk to this person or that as I passed them on the street, instead of lowering my chin and acting like they didn’t exist? How many opportunities to put myself on a different path, one that didn’t lead to…this?

Tick……tick………tiiiiiick…

The atomic in my fairy slowed. It would offer no other response. Some things, apparently, even cybers didn’t know.