fic: Just Another Revival
Title: Just Another Revival
Author: slacker_d
Crossover: Transmetropolitan/Glee
Pairing/Characters: Rachel/Quinn, Spider Jerusalem
Rating: R
Summary: What does the future hold for Rachel Berry?
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Word Count: ~2,100
Spoilers: Vol. 2: Lust for Life for Transmet, none really for glee
Warnings: Character deaths
A/N: If you're not familiar with the comic, there's a brief summary underneath the cut. And here is the Wikipedia link if you're interested.
2nd A/N: Because I can't begin to visually describe this future world as well as Darick Robertson (the illustrator) can draw it, there are 3 pictures from the comic in this story, so if it feels like it's loading slower, that's why.
3rd A/N: Unbeta’ed, so all mistakes are mine.
Transmetroplolitan takes place in the 23rd century where the future is faster and full of more technology than ever. People can have phones in their head, take anti cancer pills so they can smoke all they want and have shoes that walk on water. Spider Jerusalem is a reporter for the newspaper, The Word. He's not a fan of humanity. He has made it his goal to expose the hypocrisies of his society. The following is an article he wrote trying to expose what he feels is one of the failing in his culture.
And now the fic...
19 September, 2237
Just Another Revival
by Spider Jerusalem
No one was surprised that Rachel Berry died of a heart attack. Apparently she was somewhat high strung and intense. Known for all that focus and energy, people always assumed it would be a heart attack that took her. What surprised people was that it wasn't the first, which happened at sixty-three, but her second that happened four years later. Four years of trying to live stress free and enjoy what retirement had to offer.
Rachel died in northern California. She and her wife, Quinn, after Rachel's second heart attack moved from their penthouse in New York City to California. The climate was more consistent and easier to take than the harsh winters of New York.
The second heart attack didn't take her right away, but Rachel could see in the doctor's eyes that she wouldn't be recovering. Examining her heart on a hospital scanner, told her the same thing.
So the next day, she and Quinn signed contracts with Nealman Extended Life Foundation.
A mere eleven days after signing, Rachel managed to squeak out a, "I love you." to Quinn just as her heart stopped. And that was sixty-seven years done with.
But those were some pretty amazing sixty-seven years. As an actress and performer, she traveled the globe, seeing the dozens of cultures that populated the world; cultures we have taken and bastardized for our own amusement. She experienced natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis and saw how these tragedies brought humanity together.
She saw the beginning of the new millennium, she saw the slow fall of western civilization that led to the Revolution. She was there when the entire structure of government and power changed and took the shape we're familiar with now. She saw Barack Obama, U2, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mother Theresa.
There was history in Rachel's head, hard history, hard lived and loved. And all Rachel wanted was to keep seeing history.
Her contract was for a neuro job. Neurological suspension. The busy optimists at Nealman ever so gently hacked off Rachel's head, wrapped it in fairly crude protective fabrics, and dropped it into a steal can full of liquid nitrogen, like throwing a coin into a wishing well.
Rachel's head was frozen at -186 degrees C, and racked up with everyone else they were tossing down at the time.
Quinn died in a fiery plane crash a year later. She died alone and scared, clenching the arm rests so hard here knuckles were white, praying to a God she wasn't even sure she still believe in. She sent out a quiet apology to Rachel, knowing that an endless future with her beautiful wife had been stolen from her. The plane then slammed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing its passengers as it scattered them across several miles. Because of that, Nealman was unable to do anything, especially since her remains were not recovered for several months.
Approximately two months ago, Reclamation got to Rachel's can.
They drained out the liquid nitrogen while looking at their watches, and got Rachel's head into a provenance filed before hauling ass down to the African for lunch.
Stuffed full of matoke, they came back to find out that Rachel was who the ancient suspension contract said she was. So they got to work growing her the body the contract said she wanted.
Nealman were busy optimists, after all, they knew nanotechnology and free cloning had to happen sometimes, (either that or we'd all go up in a mushroom cloud or whatever the Ragnarok du jour was) so they offered special options to their clients.
Awake in a new world with the body of a twenty year old. Hell, any twenty year old. Request your youth back, or pin a picture of the look you want to your contract, whatever. Nealman wouldn't have to deal with your crazed demands, after all. You want the head of John Wayne, the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the cock of a Brahma bull and testicles like basketballs? Sure. In the future, everything will be possible.
All these years later, then, City Reclamation fired a minor into her, to excavate a physical template memory. But it just fell into a wet ice damaged mess; damaged from the imperfect business of freezing, damaged from the uneven process of thawing.
So they started in with the repair infection. A thousand regiments of robots, each the size of a molecule, all stamped into Rachel's brain. At that size, it's not a problem to move individual atoms around like building blocks, assembling what you need from what's available. Scouts hunted down the cellular information structure in Rachel's brain, and then sent the grunts off to work, patching Rachel's brain back together cell by cell.
Reclamation had time for a coffee.
Refiring the miner, they nailed Rachel's physical template memory, took a decent trace off it, and plugged the numbers into the quicktank. Bacterial-level robots in a mixture of water and soil started building the most complex machine in the world.
Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticaed camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly.
Build an eye.
At three in the afternoon, Rita finally managed to spit some skeleton saliva into the wetlock of the boss's private drinks cabinet. Rita used to be a cat burglar. Civil servant wasn't much of a career change.
So Reclamatioin broke open some cherry vodka while Rachel was growing in a bottle of dirty water.
By the time Rachel's new body was ready, Rita had managed to get Laura drunk and was giving her one in the toilets, and Manuel was taking a piss into Rachel's empty suspension can, marveling at how the urine crackled as it struck the residue.
The wobbling remainder of Reclamation wrestled out the transfer hoses, linked Rachel's shattered old head up with the newly-minted disease-free twenty-five year old Rachel, and piped her mind over. And that was that. They put a call in to the Reclamation counselor, heaved Rita, Laura and gave her a crack upside the head, and hauled it down to the bar for the night.
And that was Rachel's second birth done with.
Five minutes later, the nanotech life support system riding Rachel's new bloodstream released all its locks and allowed her to wake up. She came to, alone and wet, scraps of mud under her fingernails, in a stiff body that felt like a glove too small, in a grubby room without windows.
Rachel had already gone into mild shock when the counselor turned up, ten minutes later.
The counselor had recently been left by his wife, and had more important things on his mind. Like, where the hell else was he going to find a woman prepared to do all the horrible things in bed that he required to get it up? He was immediately impressed by Rachel. Young, slim body, slightly glassy look in the eyes, mildly concussed expression, what could be shit under her nails. Very good.
He gave her the usual Revivals bathrobe, quietly relieved that it'd been washed this time.
"Hello," he said. "I'm James. How are you feeling, Rachel?"
And horribly, crushingly, blasting out all hope of sexingly, the first words out of her mouth were, "Where's my wife?"
So fuck that, James thought. Just another Revival. Shouldering on a cold heavy professional cloak, he eyed the pad and, and with a relished edge of steel in his voice, said, "Your wife died a year after you, in an uncoverable location. She didn't make it into suspension."
Rachel's stomach fell away.
Rachel asked how long she'd been in cryogenic suspension. He did the worst thing possible under the circumstances.
He told her.
Shaking and feeling more alone than she ever thought possible, Rachel stood and wrapped the cheap white robe around her. She followed James out the door and into a hallway.
"There's transport waiting for you," the counselor told her, not caring if she was listening or not. "That'll take you to a Revivals Hostel. It's double parked, so get a move on."
"Double parked." She clung to that. It meant something, after all; cars, driving, roads, something dully normal. Something real at last. It didn't occur to her that it meant she'd have to go out onto the street.
The ride down in the elevator was ordinary. There'd be an ordinary car or bus waiting for her on the ordinary street. How much could things really change? Oh, it'd be weird, sure, she expected that. But she coped well enough with the massive changes she saw in her own first lifetime.
She was very wrong.
She ended up suffering from shock again, this time dropping to the dirty cracked sidewalk, cringing inside as she visibly shook and twitched on the outside.
She barely registered the journey to the Hostel.
Everyone was at dinner when she got there. No one thought to feed her. She was led through a maze of beds that smelt sharply of the people who slept in them.
Looking at her new charity donated clothes, still bearing the ammonia spoor of the man who wore them last, Rachel's shocked brain started to a new understanding. She wasn’t wanted here. She was revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. She'd been foisted upon a future already busy enough with its own problem by a past that couldn't have cared less.
She could have told the future what it'd been like to hear Hilary Clinton speak or hear Madonna sing. She could have told them about walking down the streets of New York City and experiencing culture after culture over only a dozen blocks of a city. She could have told them that and a million other true stories besides.
But the future didn't want to know.
It honored the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back (even adjusted the sums in their favor against revaluation and inflation), gave them the Hostels. Put them away with a new, unspoken contract: Don't bother us. We're not interested.
Everyone else in the Hostel has been damaged in the same way Rachel has. Sooner or later, they took an unfiltered look at the outside world, and it burned out something important in them.
There were fights in the Hostel, and the alleyways surrounding. The hospitals were used to it. Gashes and blunt force trauma inflicted by blunt butter knives - the closest things to weapons made available in plenty in the Hostel's canteens
There were tears and screams in the night, every night.
Some of them were Rachel's.
The Revivals are thrown out of the Hostels during daylight hours, on to the streets. Many Revivals go into light catatonia on the streets. The tougher ones traditionally round them up and drag them back home at mealtimes.
Rachel sticks to the alleyways, where the light and noise of the City is screened out a little. And she talks, to anyone who will listen. She tells of how she was Revived; tells it in cold, quiet, terrible detail. She has an artist's eye. She's made a documentary of her new life, up in her chilled head.
And she tells stories of the past.
She talks about how all she ever wanted to do was sing and how amazing that experience was, how much joy it brought her. And how now, she can't even muster the energy to remember any songs. The need to sing has disappeared.
She tells great rich warm human stories of how her singing allowed her to see so much of the world, a world that no longer exists. She talks about growing up under the threat of war and terrorism; how it feels to lose friends to the cause and how the war finally ended. She talks about a divided nation splintering, only to slowly heal itself out of necessity. She tells the story of a little thing called global warming and how a planet came together to eliminate it.
The stories that make us great.
Rachel will live for maybe another century, but her story's over.
Because you wouldn't have it any other way.
Author: slacker_d
Crossover: Transmetropolitan/Glee
Pairing/Characters: Rachel/Quinn, Spider Jerusalem
Rating: R
Summary: What does the future hold for Rachel Berry?
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Word Count: ~2,100
Spoilers: Vol. 2: Lust for Life for Transmet, none really for glee
Warnings: Character deaths
A/N: If you're not familiar with the comic, there's a brief summary underneath the cut. And here is the Wikipedia link if you're interested.
2nd A/N: Because I can't begin to visually describe this future world as well as Darick Robertson (the illustrator) can draw it, there are 3 pictures from the comic in this story, so if it feels like it's loading slower, that's why.
3rd A/N: Unbeta’ed, so all mistakes are mine.
Transmetroplolitan takes place in the 23rd century where the future is faster and full of more technology than ever. People can have phones in their head, take anti cancer pills so they can smoke all they want and have shoes that walk on water. Spider Jerusalem is a reporter for the newspaper, The Word. He's not a fan of humanity. He has made it his goal to expose the hypocrisies of his society. The following is an article he wrote trying to expose what he feels is one of the failing in his culture.
And now the fic...
19 September, 2237
Just Another Revival
by Spider Jerusalem
No one was surprised that Rachel Berry died of a heart attack. Apparently she was somewhat high strung and intense. Known for all that focus and energy, people always assumed it would be a heart attack that took her. What surprised people was that it wasn't the first, which happened at sixty-three, but her second that happened four years later. Four years of trying to live stress free and enjoy what retirement had to offer.
Rachel died in northern California. She and her wife, Quinn, after Rachel's second heart attack moved from their penthouse in New York City to California. The climate was more consistent and easier to take than the harsh winters of New York.
The second heart attack didn't take her right away, but Rachel could see in the doctor's eyes that she wouldn't be recovering. Examining her heart on a hospital scanner, told her the same thing.
So the next day, she and Quinn signed contracts with Nealman Extended Life Foundation.
A mere eleven days after signing, Rachel managed to squeak out a, "I love you." to Quinn just as her heart stopped. And that was sixty-seven years done with.
But those were some pretty amazing sixty-seven years. As an actress and performer, she traveled the globe, seeing the dozens of cultures that populated the world; cultures we have taken and bastardized for our own amusement. She experienced natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis and saw how these tragedies brought humanity together.
She saw the beginning of the new millennium, she saw the slow fall of western civilization that led to the Revolution. She was there when the entire structure of government and power changed and took the shape we're familiar with now. She saw Barack Obama, U2, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mother Theresa.
There was history in Rachel's head, hard history, hard lived and loved. And all Rachel wanted was to keep seeing history.
Her contract was for a neuro job. Neurological suspension. The busy optimists at Nealman ever so gently hacked off Rachel's head, wrapped it in fairly crude protective fabrics, and dropped it into a steal can full of liquid nitrogen, like throwing a coin into a wishing well.
Rachel's head was frozen at -186 degrees C, and racked up with everyone else they were tossing down at the time.
Quinn died in a fiery plane crash a year later. She died alone and scared, clenching the arm rests so hard here knuckles were white, praying to a God she wasn't even sure she still believe in. She sent out a quiet apology to Rachel, knowing that an endless future with her beautiful wife had been stolen from her. The plane then slammed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing its passengers as it scattered them across several miles. Because of that, Nealman was unable to do anything, especially since her remains were not recovered for several months.
Approximately two months ago, Reclamation got to Rachel's can.
They drained out the liquid nitrogen while looking at their watches, and got Rachel's head into a provenance filed before hauling ass down to the African for lunch.
Stuffed full of matoke, they came back to find out that Rachel was who the ancient suspension contract said she was. So they got to work growing her the body the contract said she wanted.
Nealman were busy optimists, after all, they knew nanotechnology and free cloning had to happen sometimes, (either that or we'd all go up in a mushroom cloud or whatever the Ragnarok du jour was) so they offered special options to their clients.
Awake in a new world with the body of a twenty year old. Hell, any twenty year old. Request your youth back, or pin a picture of the look you want to your contract, whatever. Nealman wouldn't have to deal with your crazed demands, after all. You want the head of John Wayne, the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the cock of a Brahma bull and testicles like basketballs? Sure. In the future, everything will be possible.
All these years later, then, City Reclamation fired a minor into her, to excavate a physical template memory. But it just fell into a wet ice damaged mess; damaged from the imperfect business of freezing, damaged from the uneven process of thawing.
So they started in with the repair infection. A thousand regiments of robots, each the size of a molecule, all stamped into Rachel's brain. At that size, it's not a problem to move individual atoms around like building blocks, assembling what you need from what's available. Scouts hunted down the cellular information structure in Rachel's brain, and then sent the grunts off to work, patching Rachel's brain back together cell by cell.
Reclamation had time for a coffee.
Refiring the miner, they nailed Rachel's physical template memory, took a decent trace off it, and plugged the numbers into the quicktank. Bacterial-level robots in a mixture of water and soil started building the most complex machine in the world.
Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticaed camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly.
Build an eye.
At three in the afternoon, Rita finally managed to spit some skeleton saliva into the wetlock of the boss's private drinks cabinet. Rita used to be a cat burglar. Civil servant wasn't much of a career change.
So Reclamatioin broke open some cherry vodka while Rachel was growing in a bottle of dirty water.
By the time Rachel's new body was ready, Rita had managed to get Laura drunk and was giving her one in the toilets, and Manuel was taking a piss into Rachel's empty suspension can, marveling at how the urine crackled as it struck the residue.
The wobbling remainder of Reclamation wrestled out the transfer hoses, linked Rachel's shattered old head up with the newly-minted disease-free twenty-five year old Rachel, and piped her mind over. And that was that. They put a call in to the Reclamation counselor, heaved Rita, Laura and gave her a crack upside the head, and hauled it down to the bar for the night.
And that was Rachel's second birth done with.
Five minutes later, the nanotech life support system riding Rachel's new bloodstream released all its locks and allowed her to wake up. She came to, alone and wet, scraps of mud under her fingernails, in a stiff body that felt like a glove too small, in a grubby room without windows.
Rachel had already gone into mild shock when the counselor turned up, ten minutes later.
The counselor had recently been left by his wife, and had more important things on his mind. Like, where the hell else was he going to find a woman prepared to do all the horrible things in bed that he required to get it up? He was immediately impressed by Rachel. Young, slim body, slightly glassy look in the eyes, mildly concussed expression, what could be shit under her nails. Very good.
He gave her the usual Revivals bathrobe, quietly relieved that it'd been washed this time.
"Hello," he said. "I'm James. How are you feeling, Rachel?"
And horribly, crushingly, blasting out all hope of sexingly, the first words out of her mouth were, "Where's my wife?"
So fuck that, James thought. Just another Revival. Shouldering on a cold heavy professional cloak, he eyed the pad and, and with a relished edge of steel in his voice, said, "Your wife died a year after you, in an uncoverable location. She didn't make it into suspension."
Rachel's stomach fell away.
Rachel asked how long she'd been in cryogenic suspension. He did the worst thing possible under the circumstances.
He told her.
Shaking and feeling more alone than she ever thought possible, Rachel stood and wrapped the cheap white robe around her. She followed James out the door and into a hallway.
"There's transport waiting for you," the counselor told her, not caring if she was listening or not. "That'll take you to a Revivals Hostel. It's double parked, so get a move on."
"Double parked." She clung to that. It meant something, after all; cars, driving, roads, something dully normal. Something real at last. It didn't occur to her that it meant she'd have to go out onto the street.
The ride down in the elevator was ordinary. There'd be an ordinary car or bus waiting for her on the ordinary street. How much could things really change? Oh, it'd be weird, sure, she expected that. But she coped well enough with the massive changes she saw in her own first lifetime.
She was very wrong.
She ended up suffering from shock again, this time dropping to the dirty cracked sidewalk, cringing inside as she visibly shook and twitched on the outside.
She barely registered the journey to the Hostel.
Everyone was at dinner when she got there. No one thought to feed her. She was led through a maze of beds that smelt sharply of the people who slept in them.
Looking at her new charity donated clothes, still bearing the ammonia spoor of the man who wore them last, Rachel's shocked brain started to a new understanding. She wasn’t wanted here. She was revived out of a sense of begrudged duty. She'd been foisted upon a future already busy enough with its own problem by a past that couldn't have cared less.
She could have told the future what it'd been like to hear Hilary Clinton speak or hear Madonna sing. She could have told them about walking down the streets of New York City and experiencing culture after culture over only a dozen blocks of a city. She could have told them that and a million other true stories besides.
But the future didn't want to know.
It honored the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back (even adjusted the sums in their favor against revaluation and inflation), gave them the Hostels. Put them away with a new, unspoken contract: Don't bother us. We're not interested.
Everyone else in the Hostel has been damaged in the same way Rachel has. Sooner or later, they took an unfiltered look at the outside world, and it burned out something important in them.
There were fights in the Hostel, and the alleyways surrounding. The hospitals were used to it. Gashes and blunt force trauma inflicted by blunt butter knives - the closest things to weapons made available in plenty in the Hostel's canteens
There were tears and screams in the night, every night.
Some of them were Rachel's.
The Revivals are thrown out of the Hostels during daylight hours, on to the streets. Many Revivals go into light catatonia on the streets. The tougher ones traditionally round them up and drag them back home at mealtimes.
Rachel sticks to the alleyways, where the light and noise of the City is screened out a little. And she talks, to anyone who will listen. She tells of how she was Revived; tells it in cold, quiet, terrible detail. She has an artist's eye. She's made a documentary of her new life, up in her chilled head.
And she tells stories of the past.
She talks about how all she ever wanted to do was sing and how amazing that experience was, how much joy it brought her. And how now, she can't even muster the energy to remember any songs. The need to sing has disappeared.
She tells great rich warm human stories of how her singing allowed her to see so much of the world, a world that no longer exists. She talks about growing up under the threat of war and terrorism; how it feels to lose friends to the cause and how the war finally ended. She talks about a divided nation splintering, only to slowly heal itself out of necessity. She tells the story of a little thing called global warming and how a planet came together to eliminate it.
The stories that make us great.
Rachel will live for maybe another century, but her story's over.
Because you wouldn't have it any other way.