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Excerpt from Ingo Swann´s Star Fire
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Original Message
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COLLEGE PARK, MARYLAND
At noon on August 21 the maintenance schedule for Neomort 25-A called for electronic stimulation of the nervous system as well as mechanical and manual massage of its muscles. The nude body had been detached from the wire leads connecting it to the majority of the computer attendant systems. The reclining pedestal stood at nearly a ninety-degree angle. The facial skin had drawn somewhat taut and was ivory pale, nearly luminescent. Its strong lips, slightly parted, were darkly etched against its beatific inner light, the close-fitting respirator hugging its chest, forcing the air in and out of the mouth as well as through the nasal passages. The long, flowing hair of the former rock star had been close-cropped around the skull. ´Really!´ commented Dr Edgar Crathe, attendant in charge of Neomort 25-A, ´he looks like an extraterrestrial in suspended animation, almost as if he were waiting to reach a new universe to come to life.´ His admiration for the cadaver, somewhat beyond medical interest, was obvious. Crathe was of utmost importance to Neomort 25-A, and the consciousness hovering near was very careful to monitor the body, keeping i.t respectably dead in Crathe´s presence. But it also had probed deeply into the man´s inner nature. All the neomorts residing in the bioemporium were naked except for their costumes of wires, monitors, respirators, and electronic analysers. Most looked desiccated, their overall biophysical character declining. These were scheduled for dismemberment and autopsy. But others were healthy, almost robust, and with their futuristic appurtenances, appeared like androids or robots awaiting commands to move and function. Because the temperature of the cubicles was kept at a constant 96°, the attendants dressed in swimsuits, often very brief, except when dissecting or dismembering to acquire parts of bodies for experimental transplants to others. Female attendants were likely to appear in pink Schiaparelli bikinis, whereas the males seemed to prefer, as a group, the sheer white stretch nylon favoured by long-distance swimmers. All were deeply tanned from the ultraviolet bursts. Neomort 25-A had observed that Crathe was unbalanced psychologically in several directions, but especially in his intense sadistic and emotional love for dead male bodies. Crathe, of course, kept this part of his emotional spectrum carefully suppressed, never molesting the experimental models in the bioemporium, going instead to certain mortuaries in the Washington area known in the necrophiliac underground to accept payment for allowing intimacies with the newly dead before embalming. As usual, when upkeep of the neomort was taking place, the actions were overseen by Dr Karin Tomachek, chief researcher of the bioemporium. Tomachek, an immigrant from Poland, had, in fact, founded the bioemporium concept and single-handedly gathered together the vast funds necessary for its fruition at Trans-American. She frowned at Crathe´s open admiration for Neomort 25-A. ´You know we are not supposed to personalise the specimens,´ she said, occupying herself with applying electrodes to various parts of the legs, electrodes that administered low-voltage currents that vivified the body´s nervous system.
Dr Edgar Crathe pursed his lips in disdain at Tomachek´s turned back and made a vulgar motion with his hand. Yet he could not completely conceal his emotional attraction to this special cadaver. Crathe, a tall young man with dark, curling hair, was also an anatomical genius who had excelled in his premedical and internship work. Tomachek appreciated this talent in him, preferring to ignore his sexual and necrophiliac attraction for male corpses. If such tendencies existed in herself, she suppressed them well, and when they arose in members of her staff, most of whom had some unacknowledged motivation for working with the dead, she merely lectured them and pretended not to see open demonstrations when they occurred. Any staff member caught in some sort of perverted liaison with a specimen was summarily dismissed. She busied herself, assisted by Crathe when necessary, first with the peripheral parts of the central nervous system, gently stimulating the motor fibres going out from the systems to .muscles and glands. To accomplish this stimulation, she applied the electrodes to the skin in close proximity to the nerve trunks. This she did all over the body, asking Crathe to lift it first on one side and then on the other so she could tend to the shoulders, hack, buttocks, and calves. Then she turned her attention to the sensory fibres coming into the central nervous system from peripheral sense organs and repeated the procedure. She monitored her electronic manipulations on chart recorders mounted near the body for that purpose. Surveying the masses of paper feeding out, she shook her head finally, her voice somewhat tremulous with amazement. ´I can´t understand how this specimen is not declining and cutting off those nerve sectors we would normally expect to fail. The spinal nerves, the spinal cord, the brain stem, and even the cerebellum and cerebrum seem in excellent condition.´ ´Well, perhaps because there was hardly any damage to the body when it died,´ Crathe volunteered. ´Perhaps, perhaps. Well, at any rate, the computers say the specimen is in perfect working order. I´ll leave you to execute the manual massages alone. Be sure you manipulate all the muscles and joints by hand. We will take a neuronal decrease count this afternoon.´
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