Three Cases of Runic Restoration

I have personally interviewed three men restored by full-body runic array. All three were Human, all three were employed in occupations where violent death was treated less as an extraordinary event than as an inconvenient occupational hazard, and all three had been restored at the expense of criminal organisations possessing more money than legal restraint. Two had undergone the procedure once. The third had undergone it twice. This is a small sample, and I say so at the outset because I am about to describe a pattern which I cannot yet defend statistically but which I have found increasingly difficult to dismiss.

The first man, whom I shall call Marek, had been killed by a pistol shot which entered beneath the left ribs, crossed the heart, and lodged near the spine. His employers recovered the body within an hour, packed it in ice, and transported it to a runecarver whose identity Marek either did not know or declined to provide. He remembered none of the procedure. His last clear memory was of falling; his next was of waking face-down on a table with what he described as “the worst ache of my life” extending across nearly the entirety of his back. The runic work covered the expected posterior surfaces, densely packed enough that from a distance the pattern resembled dark lace laid beneath the skin.

Physiologically, Marek was an excellent outcome. His heart was sound and his neurological examination revealed nothing remarkable. He retained fluent literacy, professional knowledge, personal memories, facial recognition, and fine motor skill. Events from childhood he could describe in detail, and he identified former associates correctly from photographs. Had I examined him without knowing his history, I would have found nothing to suggest that he had once been dead.

His wife disagreed. They had separated approximately eight months after his restoration, and when I asked Marek why, he said, “She decided I wasn’t me.” He smiled while saying it. There was no bitterness in the smile and no sadness either, only something close to indulgence, as though her conclusion were an eccentricity he had grown tired of accommodating.

Before his death, by both their accounts, they had been married for eleven years and were unusually close. Marek remembered this perfectly well. He remembered courting her, and his account of the marriage took in their wedding, vacations, arguments, illnesses, private jokes, the birth and death of an infant son, and the small apartment in which they had first lived.

I asked whether he still loved her. He considered the question longer than I expected before answering, “I remember loving her.” That distinction has remained with me. When I asked whether he missed her he said occasionally, and when I asked what he missed he named her cooking, her conversation, and the fact that she knew where he kept things. These are perfectly legitimate qualities in a spouse. They are not generally the first ones offered by a widower whose wife is still alive.

Marek himself did not believe anything important had changed. He felt calmer, he said, and more practical, less “caught up in things.” He had ceased drinking heavily, no longer lost his temper, and no longer feared death. He regarded all of these as improvements, and perhaps some were. His employer certainly thought so. Marek had become, by all accounts, extraordinarily reliable after restoration: he followed instructions precisely, did not panic, did not become emotionally entangled in disputes, and no longer displayed the occasional bursts of conscience which had previously complicated his work.

I asked whether killing had become easier, and he said it had. Asked whether this troubled him, he answered, “It used to.” There are replies which are the more unsettling for being given without menace.

Marek was not cruel, and I consider the point important. He did not enjoy suffering or torment people unnecessarily. He simply seemed to have lost some internal mechanism by which the suffering of another person became emotionally urgent to him. He recognised such suffering, understood it, and could predict it; he could even behave compassionately when he considered compassion appropriate. What he appeared unable to do was feel compelled by it.

The second man, Jorren, had been killed during an ambush in which he sustained multiple gunshot wounds and severe abdominal injury. Restoration occurred approximately fourteen hours later, and his recovery was technically successful but psychologically more obvious than Marek’s.

Jorren’s memories remained extensive, though less emotionally continuous. He described his childhood as if summarising a biography, and events which ought, by his own admission, to have been painful could be narrated with perfect factual detail and almost no visible reaction. His brother had died when Jorren was sixteen. Before restoration, according to acquaintances, he rarely discussed the event because doing so upset him; afterwards he could recount the entire death clinically, including the position of the body, the weather, and the words spoken by their mother.

I asked whether the memory still hurt, and he said no. When I asked whether he wished that it did, the question angered him, which was one of the few strong emotional responses I observed in him. He accused me of wanting him to suffer merely to satisfy some sentimental standard of personhood. I told him I wanted nothing of the kind, whereupon he asked a better question than mine.

“If I remember loving him, and I know what I would do for him if he were here, what exactly are you saying is missing?”

I had no satisfactory answer, and that is the difficulty. The restored are not generally empty. They retain preference, humour, irritation, ambition, appetite, loyalty, curiosity, and sometimes affection. What appears diminished is harder to isolate. Emotion as a whole survives; what suffers is something closer to emotional weight. Memories remain but cease to pull upon the individual, and relationships remain understood without anchoring him in the same fashion. Moral prohibitions survive intact as propositions while exerting no comparable pressure upon behaviour.

Jorren remained loyal to his employer and protective of his younger sister. He enjoyed card games, disliked dogs, collected mechanical watches, and became visibly embarrassed when I asked about a woman with whom he was romantically involved. He was not a machine. Yet his sister, whom I interviewed separately, told me that after his restoration he would still come when she called, still lend money, still threaten anyone who frightened her, and still remember her birthday. Then she said, “But he doesn’t worry anymore.” I asked what she meant. She said, “He used to worry when I was sad.” That sentence is less precise than I would prefer, and it may also be more accurate than anything I have written.

The third man was called Varek, and he had been restored twice. His first death occurred at thirty-two, when his throat was cut deeply enough to sever both major vessels on one side. The body was recovered quickly, and the first array was applied conventionally across the posterior half of the body. He returned, by his own account, “different, but useful,” a phrase which alone would have justified the interview.

His second death occurred eleven years later when he was shot twice in the chest and once through the abdomen during what appears to have been an internal dispute within his own organisation. The body again remained sufficiently intact, and a second runecarver completed an anterior array. When I met him, nearly every large continuous surface of skin bore some portion of one pattern or the other, and the visual effect was remarkable. The older posterior array had softened somewhat with age; the newer anterior pattern remained sharply defined, dense across the chest and abdomen and extending along the fronts of the limbs with extraordinary geometric discipline.

Varek did not object to examination and seemed amused by my discomfort. “You want to know if I’m still in here,” he said. I told him I was attempting to determine what changes followed repeated restoration.

“Same question.”

He was not wrong. His cognition was excellent, possibly exceptional: intact memory, rapid reasoning, extraordinary situational awareness, and the unnerving observational skill common among men who have survived occupations in which missing a detail is fatal. He could recall names, dates, conversations, routes, debts, and betrayals across decades.

He also appeared to possess almost no fear, and this was not bravado. During examination I deliberately startled him twice while testing reflexive response. His body reacted; his mind appeared not to. He described danger as something requiring calculation rather than something he experienced emotionally. Pain remained unpleasant to him. Death did not. I asked how he felt about having no third restoration available, and he shrugged. When I reminded him that the next death would be final, he said, “They all were when they happened.” This was technically true and profoundly unhelpful.

More concerning was his description of other people. Varek remembered liking them and loving some of them, and he remembered grief; all three states he could describe with sophistication. Yet when I asked whom he currently loved, he paused for nearly a minute before naming a woman who had died before his first restoration. I asked why her rather than any living person.

“I still remember what she felt like before I started losing things.”

I asked what things. He tapped the runes on his chest.

“That.”

I asked him to be more specific. He became irritated, and then, after several moments, he said something I have never forgotten.

“The first time, everything came back except the part that cared what it meant.”

I did not interrupt. “The second time,” he continued, “less came back.” I asked what remained missing after the second. He laughed.

“How would I know? The part that would miss it?”

This may have been rehearsed. He was an intelligent man and knew perfectly well what effect the statement would produce, which does not make it false.

His employer considered him invaluable, and Varek was exceptionally loyal. That may seem to contradict everything above, though I do not believe it does. There was nothing affectionate in his loyalty; it was structural. He had chosen an allegiance before his deaths, remembered choosing it, understood the reasons for it, and continued to behave according to that decision with almost mathematical consistency. He described betrayal as “incorrect.” Not shameful, not wicked: incorrect. A promise, once made, became part of the architecture of his behaviour, which made him extraordinarily dependable and, I suspect, extraordinarily dangerous. A man motivated by anger may eventually calm down, and one motivated by fear may retreat; greed can be outbid. Varek simply continued doing what he had decided he was supposed to do.

I asked whether he had ever considered leaving his employer. He said yes. I asked why he had not.

“I said I wouldn’t.”

That was the whole answer. The temptation is to call such a person soulless, and I resist the word. I do not know what a soul is, where it resides, whether it participates in cognition, or whether runic restoration retrieves it imperfectly, damages it, replaces it, or has nothing whatsoever to do with it. What I can say is that something appears to diminish.

The first restoration often leaves a person recognisably himself but altered in emotional proportion. Attachments weaken. Grief may become memory without pain, and conscience principle without compulsion. After the second, the changes appear more severe. This rests upon very few cases, but the reports are disturbingly consistent: the individual remembers being a person more completely than he seems able to continue being that person. I realise how imprecise that sounds. It is difficult to describe an absence when the organ responsible for noticing the absence may itself be affected.

There is an additional complication, which is that not every loss is experienced as loss by the restored. Marek considered himself improved. Jorren considered himself unfairly judged by people who preferred him wounded by old grief, and Varek seemed to regard his condition with something between amusement and resignation. The suffering, in many cases, belongs more clearly to those around them. A wife realises that her husband remembers their marriage but no longer inhabits it emotionally, and a sister discovers that her brother will protect her without worrying about her. A friend tells a familiar joke, receives the familiar laugh, and finds something in the response practised rather than shared.

None of these observations can be measured with calipers, which does not make them imaginary. Modern medicine has become so enamoured of measurable function that we sometimes forget how much of a person consists of qualities we cannot quantify. Memory is measurable, and so are reaction time, language, and cardiac output. Love is inconvenient, as are remorse, tenderness, and the irrational distress produced by another person’s distress. Yet remove enough of these inconvenient things and the resulting individual may remain intelligent, articulate, skilled, and perfectly capable of explaining that nothing essential has been lost. Perhaps this is why criminal organisations value restored enforcers. They pay for the return of expertise and loyalty, and if a little mercy fails to survive the transaction, no accountant complains.

I once asked Varek whether, given the choice, he would undergo either restoration again. He answered the first immediately.

“No.”

I asked about the second. He thought for some time, then said, “The man who came back the first time would have said yes.” I asked what the man before the first death would have said. That took longer. Eventually he replied, “He would have been afraid to die.” There is very little I can add to that.

The theological interpretation practically writes itself: some portion of the soul fails to return, and each subsequent restoration retrieves less of it. I cannot endorse this scientifically, nor can I dismiss it merely because theologians arrived there first. There are moments when stubborn materialism becomes no more rigorous than superstition.

Something is being lost. Whether that something is a soul, a particular structure of consciousness, an irrecoverable aspect of neural organisation, or some phenomenon for which we presently lack even the proper vocabulary remains unknown. But I no longer believe the question can be reduced to whether the restored man remembers his own name. All three of these men remembered who they had been. The more troubling question was how much of them still cared.