Plot summary
THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY
“What a caterpillar calls death, we call a butterfly.”
Doug Daulby, an experimental neurosurgeon, and Kate Remington, a therapist specializing in multiple-personality disorder, are tricked into consulting at a spooky clinic in one of the dictatorships in middle Europe.
Once there, they find that a shadowy cabal of billionaires and politicians have set up a lavishly-funded laboratory to push the expanding limits of tissue and organ regeneration.
(Already, in the real world, researchers have used bio-engineering technology to produce skin, bones, and many body organs including beating hearts, eyes, and livers. The U.S. military and DARPA ( Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) are supporting some of this work. See the links to some articles on this research in the column at the right side of this page.)
The objective at this rogue lab: to enable the sponsors to come back into “healthy, horny 21-year old bodies with all our accumulated savvy.”
The status when they arrive: partial success, as the work products, termed “Vehicles,” are physically ideal, but are mentally empty automatons.
The need: to find a way to transfer the human core— consciousness, personality, memories, education, savvy (“Animating Essence” in the jargon of the Clinic)— from the aging donors to their new Vehicles. To accomplish that is the reason Daulby and Remington have been lured there, with no way out.
The unexpected happens: the Vehicles suddenly begin acting out in violent ways, suggesting that unknown external entities have inhabited them.
Then their situation gets worse: Kate and Doug find their murdered family members have secretly been regenerated at the Clinic, and they are faced with the choice: either cooperate, and have them back; or resist, and see them used as experimental subjects.
