Lazarus Rising

1.1 Lazarus Rising. Part 1 - Rise

'Did I request thee, Maker from my Clay.

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee.

From Darkness to promote me?'

Excerpt from Paradise Lost- as it appeared on the first edition of Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818.

Millie Montefont was Old World, her body contained no augmentations. No micro's were stitched into her cerebral core, no coms links chattered in her eardrum, no scroller's were fitted into her pupils, no biomechanical aids allowed her to walk faster or lift heavier than her limbs naturally allowed. Her only concession to the modern age, one that she had accepted bitterly as it reminded her of her advancing years, were her hip replacements. But she consoled herself with the fact they were not augs, just direct replacements of what she already had -what God had already graced her with. She had not one aug in her, she was proud of that and would be until the day she died.

Which would be today.

Millie turned her narrow face from her vantage point, high up in her aero, and looked out across the city. Above, the dark clouds angrily twisted their rolling fingers into each other and shook out a series of squally dirty black showers into the stygian gloom. The twinkling lights of other aero's traversing the sky over the city dipped in and out of the billowing clouds across the near horizon. Below the stark, mottled buildings of the cityscape stood out like a corrupted modern facsimile of Victorian England. A metropolis crammed with the rearing angular blocks of corporate headquarters, bleak residential towers and black stoned industrial plants, their surfaces painted glossy black with the sheen of incessant rain. Piercing the industrial complexes like rotten teeth, tall chimneys, black as broken charcoal, rose up, coughing up irregular giant gas flares which lit the sky up in splays of blood flecked lightning.

She watched impassively as her driver curved round the slew of crumbling Riser tenement blocks and headed for a single thin white pinnacle that crawled out high above the others, a thin sapling growing from the dead earth of the city.

As they closed she could get a better view of their destination. Each of the lofty walls of the tower was graced with a series of majestically carved, marble faces whose eyes, ever watchful over the city, flicked irresolutely across the bleak rain-swept landscape. Sensing the incoming aero, they turned to watch their approach.

As the vehicle dropped toward the opening roof, the veil of water slipped apart like a ripped wound to reveal a sun of corroded dirty rust slowly being boiled into extinction by blooms of toxic mist. For an instant the roofs of the city were flooded in an eerie rubicund light that slithered over the warehouses and crawled down the grimy alleyways. Then as the scar closed and the sunlight drifted into nothingness, the inert flashing of the neon signs and booming multiplay hoardings extolling the virtue of life on Mars, crept back into the stunted shadows.

Inside the Montefont Foundation Building the driver settled the aero into a thin line of other vehicles and waited a moment for the clam roof to close above them to cut off the willowy rain. Under the glow of the soft lights he pulled the door up and extended a white gloved hand and eased Millie from her seat.

'Thank you, Milton.' She pulled her shift around her shoulders against the chill of the late afternoon air and laid her thin hand gently on her chauffeur's arm as they walked together across the aero park.

Unnoticed, two metro security officers emerged from the walls where they'd been standing in their chameleon suits watching the pair and shadowed them across the floor, their snub nosed rifles hanging casually over their shoulders. Having discretely cleared Millie and her driver they stepped back against the wall and disappeared from view.