"We're going live in fifteen seconds!"
Donald Mandigan clenched the microphone tightly in his left hand, hoping that the beads of sweat on his forehead wouldn't be visible on camera. This was either going to be the big break that turned him into a television superstar, or he was going to look like a complete ass in front of the entire world.
Please, please, please don't let me look like a complete ass in front of the entire world, he prayed.
"Live in five…four…three…"
Donald took a deep breath. As the floor manager pointed to him, he addressed the camera.
"Death. Once upon a time, it was thought to be the end of our worldly existence, at least in our current body. But has this changed?"
Donald gestured to a steel door in the hallway behind him. "Behind this very door, scientists are taking out their felt-tipped red pens and rewriting God's plan. And here, on live television, you are about to witness it for yourself. I'm Donald Mandigan. What you are about to see may disturb you. It may offend you. It may even terrify you. Because tonight you will witness the very first resurrection of a human corpse, or at least the first one since that popular Jewish carpenter a couple of millennia ago."
Please, please, please, please, please don't let me look like an ass, he silently begged.
"Is what you will see tonight wrong? Is it evil? Is it perhaps even the beginning of the end? I suppose that's only for the man upstairs to decide."
Donald paused for a moment of reverent silence, then continued. "The corpse in question is Stanley Dabernath. An ordinary man, taken from this world far too early in a tragic accident several weeks ago."
"And…we're clear," said the floor manager. "Back in eight minutes."
Donald wiped the perspiration from his forehead and forced himself to relax. The show had now switched to a pre-recorded retrospective of the life of Mr. Dabernath, from his normal childhood in Illinois to his sleaze-bucket years as a failed film distributor in Florida.
"If this show ends and there's still a motionless body on that table, I'm going to kick every butt in this place."
"Don't worry about it," said the cameraman. "If the guy doesn't come back to life, we'll just tie some strings to him and make him dance around."
"Real funny." Donald ran his hand over his forehead again. "Look at me, I'm sweating like a pig. I never sweat like a pig."
Missy, the makeup girl who had refused to sleep with Donald on seven different occasions but caved in on three others, hurried over to touch him up.
Donald couldn't believe he was doing this. The ratings were probably going to be killer, far beyond any of the other Bizarre Reality specials he'd hosted, but the risk was incredible. There was a damn good chance that he'd spend the next hour of his life trying to convince the viewing audience that the motionless dead body on the table wasn't the biggest dud in the history of television.
Quite honestly, Donald didn't know why they hadn't just prerecorded the resurrection and told everybody it was live. After all, they were in an underground bunker in New Mexico, whose location had been kept secret to avoid the protestors. There'd been thousands of them gathered outside the network headquarters for the past week, and in fact seventeen of them had been badly injured when things got out of hand yesterday morning.
In the most recent poll, twenty-six percent of the American public was morally opposed to the resurrection, while twenty-three percent were in favor. Fifty-one percent thought the whole thing was bullshit.
Donald stood there for a few minutes, sweating and wondering what hilarious jokes the talk show hosts would crack at his expense if this was, in fact, bullshit.
"Did you all watch the show last night with Donald Mandigan? We didn't get to see a body come back to life, but we did get to see something die: his career!"
"We're back in five…four…three…"
At the floor manager's cue, Donald addressed the camera again. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, let's go beyond the steel door." He warned the audience again about the possibility of being disturbed, offended, and/or terrified, and then opened the door and walked inside the small room, followed by the cameraman.
The cadaver of Stanley Dabernath rested on a gurney, dressed only in a pair of white boxer shorts. Considering the amazing talent of contemporary mortuary workers, Donald felt they could've made the poor guy look a little less hideous, but at the same time the visible decomposition would make the return to life all that much more impressive. The cadaver's left foot was in a white plastic cast. Two scientists in white jackets stood around the gurney, and a dozen or so tubes were hooked up to the corpse.
"Welcome, Donald," said the lead scientist, reading off a cue card. "So glad you could join us."
"The pleasure is all mine. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Richard Brant, head of Project Second Chance. Mr. Brant, how do you respond to those who feel that this is unnatural, that man should not be trying to conquer death?"
"I understand their concern," he admitted. "However, I believe that if the Good Lord has given us the creativity, persistence, and desire to bring a human being back from the dead, we'd be turning our back on His gifts if we didn't pursue it. As you know, Congress did not uphold the attempted ban on our project, and I feel that the possible benefits of our research simply cannot be overstated."
"Let's talk about another question that I'm sure is on the minds of our viewing audience. Why Stanley Dabernath? With all due respect to Mr. Dabernath and his estate, he's not in the best physical shape at the moment, and I think viewers at home can consider themselves fortunate that they aren't here to experience the scent. Why wouldn't you use, for lack of a better term, a fresher specimen?"
"That's an excellent question," said Brant. "Of course, the body has been refrigerated for these past two months or else it would look substantially worse than what you see before you. However, while the science involved is too complicated to get into in this forum, suffice it to say that a certain amount of decomposition is required for our chemicals to work properly."
"And what exactly are these chemicals?"
Brant chuckled. "Oh, no. You're not getting that information out of me until we get the patent."
Donald returned his attention to the camera. "We're only moments away from the attempted resurrection of the corpse you see here before you," he said, perfectly aware that the actual resurrection was at least three commercial breaks away. "Please stay with us as we bring you this historic and controversial moment, live."
As the show went to commercial, Donald looked over the body. There was no doubt that it was dead. He'd touched the body-the leg-before the broadcast and it was either a real corpse or the most realistic artificial one ever created. And having spent some time in morgues for his special on medical malpractice, Donald wasn't sure it was possible to fake that good ol' dead body smell.
The next segment was a pair of prerecorded interviews, one with a New York pastor expressing his outrage at this blasphemy, and one with a college professor and award-winning author who felt that this was the dawn of a glorious new world. After another commercial break, they went to a series of grammatically questionable comments by normal people on the street. After another set of commercials and a segment on the protestors, the show returned live to the resurrection room.
"Let's talk about what exactly is going to happen," Donald said.
"Though again the science involved is very complicated, the procedure is relatively simple." Brant patted the top of a large black cylinder, which held the other end of the tubes that were in the corpse. "This machine will deliver the chemicals in the proper doses into the subject. That should take exactly three minutes and eight seconds. From then, we'll expect the corpse to return to life within several minutes."
"And if this works, what condition will the specimen be in, mentally and physically?"
"To be completely honest, we really don't know."
"Let's say it doesn't work. Could you then just hook another dead body up to the machine?"
"Ah, that would certainly be convenient, wouldn't it?" said Brant with a smile. "Alas, it's not quite that simple. Someday in the future we'd like to be able to just slap another body in the machine and return them to life, but for now, Mr. Dabernath is our only hope."
"So let's say that nothing happens tonight. Where does that leave Project Second Chance?"
"Well, first of all, it leaves us looking rather foolish on national television, as well as yourself, if I may be so bold."
Stick to the cue cards, funny guy, thought Donald.
"Beyond that," said Brant, "I don't care to speculate."
"Fair enough. Now, does the thumbs-up sign that the other scientist is giving you mean that we're ready to begin?"
"It does indeed, Donald. So I'm going to have to ask you and your camera crew to leave."
Donald blinked. What the hell?
"I'm only kidding. Just thought I'd add a touch of humor to an extremely weighty moment in human history."
"Ah, well, I'm sure millions of viewers out there found it highly amusing."
Brant walked over to the machine and placed his hand on the lever. "And so we begin," he said. After a dramatic pause, he pulled it.
There was a loud hissing sound, several multi-colored lights began to flash, and a motor began to whirr as the machine started pumping chemicals into the cadaver. Donald felt a tingle of excitement that did a bit to offset his horrible stomach cramp.
What if this worked? What if this body really did come back to life? He'd get to witness it firsthand, see this miracle of human accomplishment with his own eyes.
For a brief moment, all thoughts of his career vanished as he stared at the corpse, watching its closed eyes.
Then he remembered that he was on live television and supposed to be saying something. "Now, can we expect to see any signs of change at this point in the process?"
Brant shook his head. "Nothing until the chemicals have been fully infused into the body."
Donald watched the corpse anyway. The cameraman remained focused on it as well, and Donald knew that the television viewing audience was seeing a clock counting down the time remaining until this stage was complete.
For the next two minutes, Donald explained what was going on for the benefit of those viewers who were just tuning in.
"We're at three minutes," announced the other scientist.
Donald silently counted down the final eight seconds, and then the machine stopped.
The corpse lay still.
"I need to remind you, nobody knows exactly what's going to happen, or how long it will take," Donald said into his microphone. "It could be seconds, it could be minutes. But whatever you do, do not take your eyes off the screen."
Donald was sweating so profusely that it was dripping off his nose, but that didn't matter. The camera wasn't on him.
He took his eyes off the corpse for just a moment and looked at Richard Brant. The guy was so excited he was practically twitching. Donald wondered if he'd cackle and shout "It's alive…it's alive!" if this worked.
When it worked. He needed to stay optimistic.
"One minute," announced the time-keeping scientist.
"We've just passed the one-minute mark," Donald said. "As you can see, there are no external signs of life, but again, we don't know how long this is going to take."
The second minute passed with no change in the corpse's activity, as did the third. By the fourth minute, Donald was becoming a bit antsy, and by the fifth, the stomach cramp had far overtaken the tingle of excitement. The sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh minutes consisted of increasing degrees of being pissed off.
"I would like to stress once again that nobody knows how long this is going to take," said Donald, who felt that he probably had flop-sweat dripping from his teeth by this point. "This type of human accomplishment has never been accomplished by humans before, and so we have to be patient. Mr. Brant, at what point would we consider Project Second Chance a failure?"
"There are never failures in science, only opportunities to learn from our mistakes."
"Okay, so, at what point do you decide that tonight's experiment is an opportunity to learn from your mistake?"
"Obviously we're going to continue to monitor the cadaver for as long as it takes."
"I understand that, but let's pretend that eventually we need to go to a commercial break…"
The time-keeper scientist pointed to the corpse's hand. "We've got movement in the index finger of the left hand."
Donald's frustration vanished. "Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll look closely, you'll see that we do indeed have a tremor in the corpse's finger. In fact…yes, it looks like the middle finger is twitching as well. My God, this is incredible. Approximately twelve minutes into the procedure, two of the corpse's fingers are showing unmistakable movement."
And then, without warning, the corpse sat up, screaming.