The Awakening
Elliot Crane had always been a realist. A healthy thirty-six-year-old with a clean bill of health, he never imagined he’d be standing inside a hospital morgue, staring at his own body.
He should be dead. He was supposed to be dead.
The last thing he remembered was signing the paperwork—a noble act. His heart, liver, kidneys, even his corneas—he was giving everything away. They called it an “enhanced organ donation program,” a cutting-edge medical initiative that promised to change lives.
It had changed his.
But he was still here.
The Hunt for Himself
Panicked and confused, Elliot did the only thing he could: he tracked down his recipients.
- His heart now beat inside an investment banker, Robert Vale, whose life had been saved by the transplant.
- His liver belonged to a woman named Sofia Ramirez, an artist who had been at death’s door.
- His corneas—his very eyes—had been given to a blind man who could now see.
Yet, none of them were the same.
Each of his recipients exhibited behaviors they shouldn’t have. Robert, the banker, had developed a newfound love for sketching—something Elliot had always enjoyed. Sofia, once a delicate, soft-spoken woman, now had Elliot’s old, deep-seated fear of water. The man who received Elliot’s eyes? He looked at Elliot with recognition.
They didn’t just have his organs. They had pieces of him.
A Consciousness Experiment Gone Wrong
Elliot wasn’t the first. He was just the first to notice.
The truth was hidden deep in the fine print of the contract he had signed. This wasn’t just an organ donation program—it was an experimental consciousness transfer. The goal? To redistribute pieces of a person’s mind along with their organs. A way to cheat death by scattering oneself across multiple bodies.
But something had gone wrong. Elliot hadn’t transferred—he had duplicated.
The researchers hadn’t anticipated that instead of dying, he would persist. His original self, intact and alive, while fragments of his identity infiltrated others.
The Final Revelation
Elliot had a choice:
- Destroy the experiment before it spread. If they perfected this technology, they could control human consciousness—implant any personality into any body. Governments, corporations, the military—everyone would want it.
- Find out who orchestrated this and why. If his mind could be split… could it also be merged? Could he reclaim his scattered self?
But before he could decide, his phone buzzed with a single message:
“Stop searching, Elliot. You are prototype #3.”
