PROLOGUE

He lies in a hospital bed, bandaged to the nines and attached to the latest instruments of artificial life. Images flicker before him, and fluttery lines on a monitor vouch for brain activity, but few would call it thinking. In his fractured world, he doesn’t hear the beep of machines nor feel the stab of needles. He doesn’t remember instructing his driver to stay ahead of the Friday-night traffic before it peaked. He doesn’t recall the rise in the road that hid the jam ahead, doesn’t recall his driver’s cursing when the car reached the crest, the scream of the brakes, the veering off, the tumbling.

The police have measured tire marks, a coroner examined the driver’s body, and chemists have parsed the dead man’s blood. They found a routine case of too much velocity and not enough time and redirected to more opaque disasters.

Visitors to the hospital are where the murk sets in. Men Charlie Cantling hired for the corporation—and a few women—arrive, look grim, and muse aloud about his chances and in silence about their jobs. They’d love to redo the pyramid of who reports to whom, each with a different design, but ancient arrangements leave them neutered and send them to lunch with headhunters. Real power resides with Cantling’s children, who arrive with a minimum of tears and some aptitude for scheming. With Charlie likely dying, they’ll need cold blood for decisions to come, and over the years, with their father’s help, they’ve acquired it. Some have seen the family lawyer, who advises inaction and waiting for further advice. Some, whom Cantling would call ungrateful, have lawyers of their own.

When he’s little changed day to day, the flow of visitors thins, for this protracted dying is somewhere between nuisance and tragedy, and doctors still can’t restore the dead. Then the surprises begin. His bones mend, his limbs and organs start to function, he has moments of near lucidity. The doctors admit he has chances, but early progress is crucial, and his may have been too slow. He’s in his late sixties, and his health was good, but setbacks or stagnation are still major risks. The most reasonable hope is he’ll stabilize, neither paralyzed nor mobile, not numb and not alert, sometimes sensible, often not, born to command and commanding nothing.

In his lucid moments, the doctors warn him: because of drugs and trauma, you can’t trust what you think you know, can’t tell the real from the imagined. About his brain’s wilder renderings—wingless flying, jumps in time, cameos of the dead—he agrees. One scene from the present is too coherent to shrug off and so vivid that in druggy variation it repeats again and again. He’s on his back in his hospital bed and half-awake. Suddenly, there’s a pillow on his face, a strangely heavy heap of fluff pressing on nose and mouth. He fights. The weight feels huge, relentless. He struggles to breathe but sucks in fabric and stuffing. He’s suffocating. His hands rip at forearms above him. He won’t let these bastards win. He writhes and swings his head, finds a pocket of air—and breathes and steels himself for further struggle.

The weight lifts. “Tough old guy,” whispers a voice he can’t identify. “The man’s mind doesn’t work, but his body keeps fighting. We’ll have to find another way.” “It would be the right thing,” someone whispers, “for him.” “Yeah,” the first voice whispers, “for him and everybody else.”

As his strength returns and his drug-induced delirium subsides, he notifies the authorities and calls for guards and cameras. He exults and he rages. Phantoms or not, the whisperers have lost. Their chances have died, and he hasn’t.

It takes him weeks to fully recognize his mistake.