Act I

The rain in Chicago did not fall so much as it accused. It came down in sheets that seemed personally offended by the idea of shelter.

Tom Rafferty sat in the waiting room of PermaLife Medical and tried to remember what dying felt like. He could not. That was the first problem.

He had died on November fourteenth, nineteen forty six, in a warehouse on the South Side that the Army had classified as a training exercise. What he remembered of the death was the sound, a rifle shot or possibly a firecracker, and then the cold. The particular cold that only comes after blood leaves your body.

Then he was warm again. Sitting in this chair. In a suit he did not remember buying. A manila folder in his lap containing his military discharge papers with a smudge where the discharge date should be, as if the government could not decide whether he had ever been gone in the first place.

The door opened. A woman in a white coat stepped out, not looking at him as she spoke to someone inside. She saw him then.

Mr. Rafferty. Dr. Voss will see you now.

Act II

Dr. Eleanor Voss office was the kind of place where even the furniture was expensive. A leather chair that probably cost more than Tom father car. A desk with a nameplate that said nothing useful.

Tom, she said, using his first name the way a bartender uses a customers name, familiar but not friendly. I understand you have concerns.

My discharge papers say I died last November. But I am sitting here. So either the papers are wrong or I am a ghost, and I know which one I prefer.

Voss did not blink. She opened a drawer and produced another folder, thick with stamps and seals. PermaLife has a contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Your consciousness was preserved after biological termination. This is standard procedure for classified service members.

Classified service. That is what they told the undertaker too. He flipped through the folder. Every page had his name, his service number, his signature on lines he did not remember signing. How many times, Doctor?

Excuse me?

How many times have I come back? I can feel the gaps in my memory. Like pages torn from a ledger.

Voss consulted a clipboard. Three prior restoration events. This is your fourth cycle.

Four. The number sat in his chest like a stone. He had served seventeen years, three in uniform, fourteen in whatever this was, this endless war that did not exist on any newspaper front page.

Act III

He did not sleep that night. He sat in his apartment, third floor walk up, the kind of building where the radiator sang opera at three in the morning, and thought about the contract.

The Auditor arrived at noon the next day. He was a tall man with a briefcase and a voice that sounded like it had been trained in a mirror.

Mr. Rafferty. We are aware of your distress. But the contract is clear. Upon restoration, service obligation continues for the duration of active hostilities.

There is no active hostility.

The hostilities are active. They just do not appear in the Times.

Tom stood up. I want to be discharged. I want you to leave me dead.

The Auditors expression did not change. Discharge eligibility requires four completed cycles. You are currently at cycle four of four. However, the Secretary of Defense has amended the regulation. The cycle requirement is now five.

Five?

Effective immediately. Your current actions, consulting counsel, filing complaints, discussing your status with unauthorized personnel, are being logged as operational performance. Which, under the amended regulation, will count toward your cycle completion.

Tom felt his hands shaking. Not from fear. From something worse, the realization that even his rebellion was being measured and weighed and filed.

You can do this.

We already did. And you are sitting here doing it, which means we are doing it very well, actually. Your initiative is being commended.

Act IV

The commendation arrived on a Thursday. A medal. Bronze star. Citation, for extraordinary perseverance in the face of biological termination and renewed commitment to national service.

Tom placed it on his mantel next to the photograph of his mother. The medal caught the afternoon light and threw it back at him, bright and meaningless.

That night, the phone rang. A voice he did not recognize, speaking in a voice so flat it might have been read from a teleprompter.

Mr. Rafferty. Cycle five commences tomorrow at eight in the morning. Please be prepared for extraction at your residence.

What if I do not.

Mr. Rafferty, the contract stipulates that refusal of extraction is itself considered operational performance and will be logged accordingly. You will comply.

The line went dead.

Tom stood at the window, watching the Chicago rain start again. He thought about walking out the back door, getting on a train, disappearing into some Midwestern town where no one knew his name or his service number or the four gaps in his memory where four deaths should have been permanent.

But he knew how that story ended. It always ended the same way. The Auditor had the contract. Voss had the medical records. The government had him.

He picked up the Bronze Star and set it back down. Tomorrow he would die again. And tomorrow after that, he would come back. And the cycle would continue, logged and measured and commended, until some bureaucrat somewhere decided he had served enough.

The rain fell harder. Tom Rafferty sat in his chair and waited for morning.