Part 1 of the Katabasis Chronicles can be found here.
“So he's not an AI,” Tiaa whispered to themself, eyes locked on Vitalik's unseeing but human gaze.
It had been nearly 100 years since anyone from the public had seen Vitalik Buterin. By now it had become normalized in some circles to believe that Vitalik, and definitely Satoshi, were artificial intelligences from the future who handed humans the secret knowledge necessary for cryptocurrencies. It was a bizarre theory for older generations, but crazier things had been revealed over the last century as hacks into the old nation states’ intelligence archives became common. Like the floodgate of secrets unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent opening of Stasi archives, layers of context and contradictions were continually being revealed as the prior millennium's world order collapsed to its current fragmented, recombined form.
In the pod to the left of Vitalik was none other than the Doge herself, Kabosu the Shiba Inu from what used to be Japan. Her face had been used for so long as the branding of the once memecoin, now blue chip for some network states’ treasury reserves, that it was surreal to see it on an actual dog. Kabosu's signature quizzical expression was softened in her slumber between death and rebirth. As one of the industry's rising star quantum cryptographers, Tiaa coming face to face with such historical icons would feel like a dream even if they weren't the placid visages of cryo-corpses.
The scroll began to unfurl in their Argos. It seemed to rustle impatiently in harmony with the sigil's pulsations, drawing Tiaa closer to Vitalik's pod. Reminded that they had a mission to complete, Tiaa peered past the sigil glowing on Vitalik's forehead, and the scroll vying for attention in their visual field, straight into Vitalik's eyes. He remained fixated on some other plane of existence.
The scroll unrolled itself completely, revealing the message within. The letters, enormous green sans-serif in Tiaa's digital overlay, were in an unfamiliar language.
"mi pinxe lo crino tcati"
Tiaa stepped within breathing distance of the pod, as if proximity to Vitalik would somehow unscramble the strange text. Their breath misted the chitin-glass of the pod, the letters projected directly in front of their eyes remaining clear yet inscrutable.
Suddenly, transposed over the scroll's mysterious message, a transaction request clamored for Tiaa's attention. It felt ominous for the Argos, usually capturing a continuous thrum of ambient signals and information, to be so quiet – yet dominated by urgent messages. Tiaa was unused to such sparse and unsettling stimulation. With both their Argos and environment eerily hushed, their mind convulsed with unanswerable questions.
Skin crawling, Tiaa accepted the request. It blared across the Argos in the historical JSON format usually confined to such vintage manuscripts as "websites" and textbooks.
{
"Operation": “activate_pod”,
"Pod ID": 1248,
"Cognate": 8482545,
}“Holy shit, will this open the pod and release Vitalik?” they thought. Pieter had mentioned that Eleusis had already unfrozen plenty of people before so surely nothing could go wrong with one more person being reanimated.
It had been a crazy day, and surely it was about to get crazier.
Plus, it was clear Vitalik's intervention was somehow required to complete the sigil’s request. Maybe "mi pinxe lo crino tcati" was a normal thing for people to say in the distant past?
Tiaa prepared to fulfill the directive set out in the JSON message. By "activating_pod," they would unfreeze the creator of Ethereum, still one of the most well-known and used blockchains in the year 2140.
Hand trembling, Tiaa began to write out a shaky T to sign the transaction and release Vitalik into the future that awaited him.
A loud CRASH clanged from deep within the pods where Pieter had been splayed in his ketamine haze. Startled by the sudden noise, Tiaa screwed up their signature and the Argos took it as a decline. The message was gone.
“Frag,” they muttered to themself. Tiaa peered between the pods and saw cryogenic fluid gushing onto the already slick floor. This would surely trigger a response from security.
They needed to get Vitalik out ASAP.
Tiaa did their best to recollect the string of numbers in the JSON message and sign the message. Pieter groaned in the distance, more loudly – or closer?
The stress was getting to Tiaa, their breath shallow as they tapped out each character, second guessing whether it was what they had just seen. The memory was evaporating rapidly. Although far from confident the JSON's numbers or variables were the same, they completed the message recreation and signed it.
Pieter's groans, trailed by the tinkle of chitin-glass and an especially concerning series of thuds, burned in Tiaa's ears. Surely the flashing lights of security would bear down on them at any moment.
The hiss of a valve's release broke the fraught silence between Pieter's sonic emissions. Vitalik still wasn’t moving. Panicking, Tiaa tapped the glass separating them and the infuriatingly still figure, hoping to rouse him like antagonizing fish in an aquarium.
The sound of a pod creaking open came from Tiaa's left, a bitter smelling vapor unfurling from its maw like dry ice. Kabosu!
The gelatinous amniotic liquid in which Kabosu had been suspended for almost 800 dog-years oozed onto the concrete floor as the pod’s exit-portal eased open wider and wider. Her body, following some primal muscular instinct even in its catatonia, folded into the fetal position to pass into her second birth.
As the exit-portal snapped into place, it activated the pod’s ejection ramp. Out gushed Kabosu, plopping at the base of the ramp and sliding toward Tiaa’s silver boots.
Tiaa danced backwards as Kabosu’s placental goo spread around them. The acrid odor issuing from the pod and dog was overpowering, both metallic and organic at once. Not a smell of decay but the manipulation and overcoming of it, like the diesel fuel of early driving-vehicles or the pollutant-absorbing mushrooms Tiaa’s synthetic biology society grew at uni. The artificial smell of defeating, or at least postponing, death.
“What the frag,” Tiaa whispered, taking off their Argos and examining it as if that would somehow reveal a clue to what happened. It’s supposed to be “kill your heroes” not “find out they exist and bring them back to life at the same time.”
And the more important question… why did their signature release Kabosu instead of Vitalik? Very surreal, much confuse.
Now was not the time for pondering. Pieter’s plodding footsteps were getting closer by the moment and he would be more cognizant of reality each one of those moments as the ketamine dissipated out of his neural pathways.
Tiaa wracked their brain to understand the sequence of events that had unfolded over the past few minutes. They must have recreated the message incorrectly, as they feared. They signed the Pod ID variable as 1249 instead of 1248, the pod Vitalik was in. With the error detected, Tiaa may as well try again with recreating the message correctly. They drew up the message as quickly as their fingers could move, signing it dramatically.
“Third time’s the charm,” they reassured themself.
Finally, the valve’s hiss, the creak of metal on chitin-glass, the plume of malodorous vapor that signaled Vitalik’s imminent release. His narrow frame contorted, folding up in preparation for rebirth.
Tiaa leapt over the huddled mass of Kabosu just as Vitalik’s exit-portal locked and the ejection ramp slid out. Like a tear rolling out of an eye socket, he discharged into Tiaa’s arms, dousing them in cold life-preserving slime.
Vitalik's face, so smooth and translucently pale from decades of floating in cryo-proteins and neominerals, was cradled in their left arm and gazed up beatifically at them. In their right hand nestled his bony knees and skeletally thin legs. For a moment they sat like this in hushed awe, Pietà of the Pods. Mary Magdalene standing before the empty tomb.
How fragile was the nearly lifeless body of this man who Tiaa had half-believed barely an hour earlier to be a folktale or an AI. How very human he was, his head lolling to the side, blonde hair coated in goo, and yet not so human either.
Tenderly, Tiaa felt around his neck for a pulse and found the slightest heartbeat. Vitalik’s left arm, splayed across Tiaa’s knees, twitched slightly. The long delicate fingers opened and closed. Imperceptibly to the naked eye, his fingernails started growing again. All of Vitalik’s cells, suspended in animation for almost a century, were reviving. His chest, swathed in a lurid rainbow unicorn t-shirt, rose and fell gently as it once again filled with air and his nostrils flared as somewhere deep in his returning consciousness registered the unpleasant smell engulfing them.
Tiaa realized they were sobbing, their mind trying to process this strange combination of holding a newborn and a corpse, yet neither. Tears pooled in the bottom of their Argos.
Tiaa’s reverie was broken by another resounding CRASH! followed by a yowl that reverberated at an unbelievable decibel as it clattered across the massive hangar of pods.
“TIAAA!” Pieter had nearly made it through the glass labyrinth to the mythological creatures at its core. Vitalik trembled at the noise, his face contorting in distress and hand closing around Tiaa’s. He stared them straight in the eyes. Starting with a deep growl and furrowed eyebrows as if he was angry, he let out a sharp BARK.
The cacophony finally set off the decibel-activated alarms of the sonically sealed hangar.
“What the hell is going on in there?” a man’s voice yelled – through loudspeakers? Through Tiaa’s Argos? Directly into their brain? It was impossible to tell but Tiaa was consumed by a singular instinctual directive: run.
They laid the fearful but still limp Vitalik as gently as they could on his ejection ramp and twisted around in a full circle, seeking the exits in a blind panic. Deep within the rows of pods they could barely see the soft lights of the door they passed through and took off sprinting in that direction, leaping over Kabosu’s placental puddle.
Where was Kabosu?
Tiaa had been so fixated on Vitalik, they forgot to check on the dog’s reanimation process. It must have worked, but Tiaa wouldn’t be free, or possibly even alive, to find out what happened if they stayed there for another instant.
Nearby, in the direction of the crashes, boots scuffled across concrete and they knew security was close to bearing down on Pieter. Tiaa felt like Orpheus – can’t look back, can’t pause and help or they're both doomed.
As Tiaa took off through the pods, cutting a hard right between the ones holding CURTIS YARVIN and ELIZABETH HOLMES, a horrifying thought dawned on them – what if they also needed Pieter to pass back through the identity-gated door?
Tiaa covered their face with their arms, in the sliver of a chance they hadn’t already been detected by surveillance, and burst through the door into the dark and silent hallway. The alarm must have triggered the exit to unlock automatically in an emergency.
The alarm’s wail, and a brief desperate scream filled the hallway as the door opened and closed behind Tiaa. Safe on the other side, the corridor was as utterly quiet as the hangar had been when they first entered. The drama unfolding behind the impenetrable walls was sealed away, the two liminal spaces – domains of the living and the almost-living – no longer spilling over into one another.
In a practiced maneuver, Tiaa quickly disabled their Argos. Sliding it into their pocket, they sped down the dark hall, hunching forward so their long dark hair obscured their face. Who knows what surveillance was picking up, but at least the Argos wasn’t actively tracking itself. Tiaa had to get out of here, fast, before an aberration was detected.
Right, left, right, left mixed together as Tiaa ran, their brain a fog of primal fear. Propelled only by the desire to escape, they couldn't even try to retrace the path where Pieter had led them. Eventually it was impossible to keep going and Tiaa had to stop, gasping against a doorframe.
They pushed their sweaty hair out of their face and surveyed the scene. They were clearly lost. This dingy corner of the complex, far from the shiny visitor and investor-friendly corridor that Tiaa had walked down with Pieter, seemed to radiate an ominous energy. The sterile tiles and concrete of the main area had given way to an endless warren of whitewashed walls, punctuated by steel doors with small square windows. All were gray.
Tiaa crouched and frantically ran under each of the windows. Soon it became apparent they were not alone, as first distressed whispers and farther, full on manic screams issued from within.
"Don't let them freeze me!"
"You'll never come back whole!"
“Where is Japan?!”
"I AM THE HOLE!"
"I was… I will be… I was… I will be… I was… I will be… I was… I will be… I was… I will be…"
The Raave invitation was not kidding that their exclusive party was being held in the same building as where Eleusis cryogenic experimentations happen. It must’ve saved them a lot of satoshis to not have to transport the pod where the man who was being unfrozen too far.
Panic surged like fire in Tiaa’s veins. They couldn’t fathom the horrors happening behind the doors whizzing past, adrenaline narrowing their perceptions to only immediate needs. Seconds felt like hours of intense fear. There was no time to breathe, no time to think. Just run.
Finally, Tiaa felt the faint thump of bass throbbing through the floor. Their sprint slowed to a jog as the familiar rumbling beeps of biotechno caressed their ears, more loudly with every step that carried them away from the terrifying sights, smells and implications of the lab. It was impossible to tell how much time had elapsed among the cryo-corpses, suspended in their pods and in the Bardo, neither dead nor fully alive. Time ran differently in there.
Tiaa shuddered to think of what was happening to Vitalik now – and Pieter. Pieter! He had inadvertently sacrificed himself for them, whether or not the agonized wail they heard as the door whisked shut had anything to do with him. Was he now enduring the fate of whatever was going on within the bowels of the laboratory?
Before Tiaa had time to delve into morbid inquiries, the doors to the rave stood before them. Waiting for the doors to slide open, Tiaa stole a final glance into the hushed corridor, half hoping Pieter would round the corner lunging for her, golden-retriever mullet flopping on his sweaty forehead. The emptiness was its own reproachful response.
Tiaa turned back to the doors only to find them impassive as before. They tried waving their hand around in front of them as if casting a spell, waiting for the familiar motion sensor activation. Nothing.
Tiaa cursed, re-enabling their Argos and sliding it back on. They could almost feel their pineal gland stirring to the signal inside their head, immediately settling into its thrall. The doors swished open with a sigh of relief, welcoming an identified entity.
Inside, the rave was a miasma of chaos. The room had not cleared out at all, but seemed to be heaving with even more bodies – maybe an hour or two had passed. All the attention was on one body though: The First Public Reanimation. No longer prone and trembling, the revived man’s pallid form stood writhing on his plinth beneath a wreath of lasers, his wiry ropes of muscles moving beneath the skin like eels in a river.
Tiaa realized it was a disturbing imitation of, or attempt at dancing, like ancient footage of David Byrne they had seen in a mediacast on past centuries’ cultural artifacts. It was unclear if he was still gaining control of his extremities, had not fully established the reconnection between mind and body, or was simply accessing a consciousness that had always been awkward. Although their Argos was still unable to pick up any signal from the man’s identification vectors, the Raave organizers had set up an overlay screen that continually wrote out in an elaborate script, “Happy 163rd Re-Birthday, Bryan Johnson!”
True to the legend of one of the prior century’s first longevity pioneers, he didn’t look a day older than when he was cryo-frozen at 63 – and back then he didn’t look a day over 40. Or at least how 40 used to look before Longzempic became standard in medicine cabinets, and “blood babies” on the darknet. Rumor was that his son, the genre-defining “blood boy,” and the grandson who kept them both in their prime before the mainstream public thought such age-defying possible, were set to be the next reanimations.
Giant digital balloons with Bryan’s face on it, the Eleusis and Raave logos, “163”, and “h∞”, the universal symbol for longevity supporters and de-facto Bryan Johnson worshippers, decorated the stage. Puffs of sequins, confetti and firecracker bursts drifted in the air around his flailing form. Two security guards flanked Bryan, scornfully monitoring the undulating dance floor.
Suddenly, the crowd parted as a girl thrashed toward the plinth. She gripped its side with her long black nails, the stainless steel surgically implanted kind. Using her boot as a lever, she flung herself onto the plinth with surprising strength for such a tiny person. Her long red curls whipped behind her as she landed on top of Bryan, her face colliding with his neck. Those standing directly below the plinth would later testify that she was smiling as her teeth sunk into his skin, the characteristic fangs tattoo of adrenochrome junkies stretching grotesquely across her delicate, angular face.
The security guards moved at lighting speed, pulling the girl off Bryan and tossing her into the crowd. She was borne up on a wave of hands like a crowdsurfer, then disappeared.
It was too late though, as the force of the girl leaping onto Bryan knocked him off the plinth and he flew into a column, collapsing in a heap. Death may be a curable disease, according to his acolytes, but physics has the final say.
Chaos turned to utter pandemonium, giving Tiaa their chance to get swallowed by the crowd and dart through undetected. They disabled their Argos again, pocketing it as they slipped out a side door and out into the streets of Brussels.
The wet cobblestones of Brussels gleamed under flickering neon lights, each step a sharp slap of boots on stone. A drizzle fell, misting the air as Tiaa sprinted through the narrow streets, water droplets collecting on their mycelial leather jacket. They passed the Grand Place in a blur, the towering Gothic spires looming above, bathed in the glow of holograms. Neon light leaked from holographic billboards, casting strange hues across the centuries-old architecture, the heart of the city beating with both history and cyberpunk grit. The sweet scent of waffles mixed with the sharp tang of piss, the distant hiss of fry oil cutting through the misty air.
Breathing hard, they darted past tourists huddled near Mannekin Pis, barely noticing the statue under the dim glow of streetlights. The air thickened with smog as Tiaa plunged deeper into the city’s underbelly, an eclectic mix of the rigid old-world and the rapidly moving new one being born. Advertisements looking for new citizens and workers for the various network states and seasteads starting throughout the old European Union and elsewhere.
“Vote with your feet!”
“Leave the old world and its ways behind!”
“Housing pods available for those ready to work!”
“Protect your children. Live with other traditional families!”
“Take your body to its full genetic potential!”
“Never live near undesirables again!”
“We shall conquer death together!”
Turning a corner, they pushed forward, pulse steadily increasing. Most people were inside the bars watching the block countdown to the end of Bitcoin’s inflation schedule. The sparse crowds made it easier for Tiaa to pass unnoticed as one of the few not wearing their Argos. Suddenly, barely visible through the haze of drizzle and smog, a small, nondescript Japanese-style tea house appeared, its dull sign barely illuminated by a faded, pulsing red light.
Without hesitation, they slipped inside, the doorbell chiming softly as they entered. The warmth of the tea house hit them immediately, a stark contrast to the cold, wet streets outside. The dimly lit interior felt like a refuge. The scent of tea leaves steeped the silent air.
"Green tea," they murmured, the words barely audible but enough to set the aging proprietor, presumably the owner, into motion. A steaming pot of green tea appeared on a tray, delicate ceramic cups placed beside it. Tiaa took a seat in the far corner even though no one else was there, trying to slow their pulse. They took one of the cups and poured the tea in slowly, the smell already offering them its comfort. Since childhood, they could always count on green tea to calm them down.
“What did I get myself into?” they thought as their fight or flight mode slowly turned off in their brain. The bobbing of the maneki-neko cat figurine’s paw that welcomed guests at the entrance helped calm their mind even as they tried to think through the last few hours. Their curiosity this time may have actually gotten them into serious trouble with the authorities.
Moments passed in silence as they thought about how their friends would react to this, only the soft clink of the teacup breaking the quiet. Then, a rustling by the door caught their attention. A small, familiar form padded softly into the tea house — it was Kabosu-san! Her fur was damp from the drizzle with clumps of the cryogenic fluid stuck in between, but her eyes gleamed with a calm curiosity in the lantern light.
Stunned, Tiaa watched as the dog slowly approached, cautious but drawn to them. Their eyes met. Their brain began to feel as if it was being tickled from the electricity of their neurons firing in every direction. A sense of timeless familiarity coursed through their body, as if they were meeting an old friend.
Without a word, Tiaa poured a little tea into the saucer and slid it gently onto the floor. Kabosu sniffed, hesitated, then lapped at the tea. A flicker of trust passed between them. The sound of drizzle outside, the snoring of the old tea shop owner, the sound of Kabosu’s tongue drinking green tea.
For now, Tiaa felt safe.
The room melted away as he sank deeper into the void, the edges of reality blurring into an indistinct haze. His body felt distant, almost irrelevant, as if it were dissolving into the air around him. Sounds of boots became distorted echoes, distant and hollow, while his thoughts spiraled into a labyrinth of disconnection. A crash. Time lost all meaning—moments stretched into eternities, then snapped back to nothing. He was adrift, floating through a space that was neither here nor there, caught in the surreal limbo of the K-hole, where reality had no anchor.
Pieter felt a distant push and pull while surfing the waves of consciousness. A loud metallic sound reverberated in his brain. The gulping sound of thick liquid beneath him, a sudden sense of doom, Tiaa’s face and half shaved head. He wanted to scream but had no breath. He wanted to move his limbs but had no feeling in his physical body. The sound of boots dissipated into the distance. His boss Dr. Amin pushed him into the abyss.
