Her pop-pop used to say there was a beginning, once, but we’re all born into someone else’s story, and most of us die long before ours can truly be said to have ended…
Gianna Bianti has died three times (because stasio very much is death, just without the commitment—there’s no soul that departs for greener pastures; revival is just a matter of developing the technology to do so) the fourth time she is born, she knows something has gone wrong.
Because coming up from stasio is a much longer, much more painful process than going under. Freezing someone is easy, and once humanity mastered gene splicing, preventing tissue damage was as simple as tweaking woodfrog DNA to be compatible with that of a mammal and grafting it to the to shiver reflex. Frequent flyers will occasionally lose the odd extremity, a finger or toe—rarely an eye, but it does happen—but a run of starfish will fix you right up—
But thawing—
They can’t restart your heart until your circulatory system won’t be pumping slush, but even after, it’s agonizing; the first ten days they have to keep you pumped so full of fentaphine you have to do a mandatory stint in rehab before you can sign up for your next haul.
She should not be in this much pain.
