Rude Awakening

Ichiro jerked back to consciousness, screaming. He tumbled headlong off the examination table, instinctively holding his face in both hands. When he realized half of his face wasn't missing, and nothing else hurt beside where he'd just hit the concrete floor, he scrambled up, his pulse and breath racing.

Amelia stood over him a few feet away, the smoking barrel of the shotgun still pointed at where he'd been sitting on the table. He watched as she casually racked the spent cartridge clear and loaded another in. Ichiro scrambled backwards on his hands until his back hit the side of the examination table.

"You, you stay away from me! Wha-what the hell did you just do to me?!" He said.

"Ichiro, chill out. You're fine."

Ichiro kept trying to back away, his back sliding along the side of the table until he found empty space behind him. His eyes never left the gun, which Amelia now rested casually on her shoulder. He reached back for purchase to pull further backwards when it handed in something warm and wet. His arm slipped out from underneath him, and he dropped into a pool of blood splattered around the backside of the exam table. When he realized what it was, he screamed again.

Amelia turned and looked at the gun on her shoulder, then back at him. She opened her mouth to say something probably sarcastic, then seemed to think better of it. She set it on the desk beside her and walked forward, offering her hand.

"Come on. Take my hand."

"I felt it! You, you killed me!" Ichiro sputtered.

Amelia grimaced.

"Yeah, sorry about that. There's really no avoiding that part."

"There's no avoiding the part where you blew my head off?!"

Amelia shrugged.

"Not for the purposes of what I was trying to demonstrate, no. You wouldn't have understood if I'd tried to explain. In such cases, a tactile experience is preferable," She said. She shook her hand. "C'mon. take my hand."

Ichiro looked at her hand like it was a snake. Amelia sighed.

"Itchy. I won't do it again. I promise. Now please take my hand?" 

Itchiro's eyes darted back and forth between her, the gun on the table, and her outstretched fingers for several long moments before taking her hand. Amelia pulled him to his feet, then pointed behind him.

"Through that door is a shower and a fresh change of clothes. Go clean yourself up. I'll explain everything once you're done."

Ichiro turned and looked at the door. Had that always been there?  He turned and nodded numbly at her before gingerly stepping over the mess on the floor and into the bathroom. When he emerged a short time later wearing the school uniform Amelia had left out for him, he returned to a different room. This one was not an exam room but some sort of personal office, with a large metal desk in the center. Every wall of the room was covered floor to ceiling in overstuffed bookshelves, and numerous piles of books sat scattered around the floor, some precariously piled almost as tall as he was. Amelia was hunched over the desk, the entire surface of which was covered with loose papers. She was scribbling something onto one of them with the sharpened-down nub of a number two pencil. She glanced up at him.

"Good. You're clean. Have a seat."

Ichiro took a seat in one of the wooden chairs set in front of the desk, gingerly relocating the books piled in it on the floor beside him. Amelia finished whatever she was writing and lifted the sheet up from the desk to examine it. After a moment, she crumpled it into a ball and pitched it toward the overflowing wastebasket in the corner. It bounced off the pile of other wadded balls of paper inside and rolled to a stop a short distance away. Amelia steepled her fingers and looked over them at him.

"Feeling any better?" She asked.

"I guess?"

"You have questions. To save time, I'll tell you that I already know what you're going to ask and cut to the part where I give you answers. First, yes, you died. Buckshot does wonders when it comes to spreading living tissue across distant surfaces. The pain you felt was real as well. How are you alive? Well, the same answer as last time, except this time with more detail. You see, there used to be this... well, "crackpot hypothesis" that one never experiences one's own death until there exists no other realities in which one remains alive, given all other variables and constants that have resulted in the event of one's death. In short, if there is a way you can survive, you will experience being okay rather than dying. Now, that conveniently excludes the other part of the hypothesis, which says that you DO in fact die in all of those timelines for everyone else but yourself. You experience a timeline where you persist. They do not. There are a million dead Ichigos splattered across a million concrete sidewalks being scraped off the pavement by a million puking EMTs as we speak."

Amelia shifted and leaned back in her seat.

"What I have done is make it impossible for you to truly die, by guaranteeing that there is never a reality where you can't survive death. And I did that  with nanomachines. Hold out your hand, Ichigo."

Ichigo looked at her warily.

"What are you going to do with it?"

"I'm going to give you a small cut on the back of your hand. It'll be over in a moment," She said.

Ichigo sized her up for a long moment, then hesitantly rested his hand in hers.

"Thank you." She said lightly, pulling a serrated steak knife from under the desk. Before Ichigo could get more than "NO! WA-!" out of his mouth, Amelia slammed the steak knife through the back of his hand, pinning it to the desktop.

Ichigo howled, and Amelia pulled the knife free.

"Ichigo, look at your hand. No, not at me. Your hand. No, stop flailing it around. Ichigo! Look at it!"

Ichigo pulled his hand up into his eyeline, and stopped short when he watched the last of the wound through his hand close up when the two silvery edges of the wound sealed together into skin. And then, a second or two later, the pain utterly vanished. He stared at it, wide-eyed, gingerly flexing and unflexing the fingers.

"What-? I-?" 

"Inside your body are a million billion atomic scale self-replicating nanomachines that immediately and perfectly repair traumatic injuries. Lose a limb, and it'll grow back in a minute or so. Have your head blown off by a shotgun, or hand stabbed through with a knife? Even less. In essence, you cannot receive an injury severe enough to kill you before these bots keep you from dying, and given consciousness doesn't return in injuries that would normally instantly kill you until after the damage is repaired, you generally don't have to worry about even feeling the thing that killed you. Hence why you didn't feel your head explode. An accurate shot is instant lights out with nary a tickle, speaking from direct experience." Amelia said.

"But if my head is blown entirely off, why wouldn't I just stay dead once it put my head back together? I'm not that smart, but even I know that's not how that works."

Amelia shrugged.

"No idea. The answer is that either there really is a soul in the human body after all and that soul lingers around long enough to re-enter the body once it's put back together, or consciousness is substantially more complex than we understand and is naturally emergent from the exact structure of living tissue, meaning restoring the structure perfectly naturally restores living function.  I'm currently trying to figure that out. Unfortunately, there's literally no one else alive  who can begin to comprehend the work I'm doing, so it's all a lot of stumbling around in the dark, really."

"So, for all you know, you could have just blown my head off, and I could've stayed dead. What then? 'Oops, guess Ichigo's dead. Better grab the mop?'"

Amelia shook her head.

"No, that only happened the first few hundred times I tried it. By now, after a few thousand test cases and a lot of tweaking, it's about as close to solved science as anything else in physics these days."

"...Hundreds of times?" 

"Are you dead now?"

"I don't... think... so?"

"Then I'm not sure what you're upset about," Amelia said, pulling papers out of a stack and looking at them one at a time.

Ichigo stared at her incredulously.

"What am I upset abou-" He started. She cut him off, giving him a weary look over the rim of her glasses.

"Ichigo, I've had this exact conversation 742 times already. If it's all the same to you, I'd rather just skip to the part where you ask what happens next."

Ichigo closed his eyes, and took a long, deep breath. 

"Okay..." He said, opening them. "What happens next?"

"I'm glad you asked!" Amelia said brightly as she hopped up from her chair. "Follow me!"