Resurrection Magic (GLAVGVST)

 For my lovely Purple.

Having recently finally graduated in the humanities, I find myself experiencing a curious atavistic upswell of my old STEMbrained interests kicking in. Along with trying to figure out how to make Minecraft datapacks (despite the fact that I don't actually play much MC at all and never have—it's more of a hubris thing than anything else) I've been dusting off my old physics education a bit. You may have read my previous brief ramblings on the subject of just how sophisticated the modern basic sciences have gotten and how much wonder and terror can be mined from that. 

Resurrection magic is only 20 years away, and has been for the past 40 years. We made some pretty big strides back in the 9940s, when Radical doctors demonstrated the first reioplasmic transfusion in a human corpse. 

Paul Klee, Forgetful Angel

Reioplasma, by the way, is cognate to "reification" and refers to a kind of ethereal insubstance that gives things their thingness. It inheres to matter and is the basis of how spells can discriminate between objects. Like, if a hypothetical spell says it affects "[Sum] apples," then how the spell knows what an apple is and what the boundary between the apple and the air and the ground is and so forth is, in complicated and jargonful-to-explain ways, by detecting the reioplasma inherent to each apple which by nature of being a part of an apple has some essential nature of appleness. It composes part (but not all) of the subtle body and some (but not all) of the soul, which is to the subtle body as the brain is to the flesh body and which is to the brain as one lobe is to another. It is theorized to have a fundamental but non-obvious role in magic. 

The lead model of reioplasmic spellcraft is the tofu stew model, which supposes units of magical potential like MD — incidentally in-universe Hexen wizards are able to measure [Sum] and [Dice] in a lab, but they do not believe there are literal actual dice rolling, just that the energy-packets of magical juice are quantized and have some number of discrete equiprobable energy levels, with harmful resonances (mishaps and dooms) occurring when multiple packets attempt to occupy the same energy-level—are like cubes of tofu in a flavorful soup, mostly flavorless themselves but taking on the flavor of the broth. 

Extending the metaphor, the sub-field of poson geuodynamics postulates a set of discrete energetic "flavors" that reioplasma can take on. Work in this area led to tofu stew's main competitor, the so-called "meatball stew" model, which argues that the spell itself has its own inherent flavor and poson numbers, but also "soaks up" the properties of the reioplasmic medium it "swims" in. 

To be entirely clear, magic does not have a flavor in the same way that quarks do not actually have a color, though since the advent of geuodynamics there has been a measured increase in reported levels of taste synesthesia. 

One of the properties that reioplasma is ubacadretic or yinyang polarity—whether it is charged with positive or negative energy. Positive and negative energy are not themselves reioplasma, they are energy or current carried by alephons and tavons, which is why healing and maiming magic often requires a touch. People have a charge that roughly corresponds to their general health, but cannot fully capture an accurate picture of their wellness. Measuring it is the basis of a lot of modern medical machinery. Sometimes the charge does not correspond to observed healthiness and it is a job for the doctors to explain why. The inability of polarity scans to detect cancer is also one of their major shortcomings.

Giving someone positive energy is a good way to make them feel better, usually, though it's also a big-time cancer risk. That's how most quick healing stuff works, while more sophisticated interventions begin to look more and more like magically-assisted surgery. When someone dies, their soul detaches from their bodies, meat and starlight, and fucks off. Both begin to rot—in the reioplasmic body, this causes a polarity inversion, switching the body's inherent state from positive to negative. The negative energy is partially vented as miasmas, but the subtle body remains mostly coterminous with the flesh body and rots in parallel. 

This is why you can't heal a corpse. If you try to pump positive energy into the body it will accelerate the rotting process. If you pump negative energy into the body then, yeah, it might very well get back up, but certainly not as a living being. It has gone sinister, in the chiral sense. 

All this is to explain a little bit of the background for what it meant for the world when Wz. Daw Vana , Dr. U Radman, and the ironically-named Dr. Aslan Bellicose demonstrated their ability to siphon out, sterilize, and completely replace the subtle body of late forge-monk and Radical combinist revolutionary leader Cibu Reza, for whom the Reza CRR is named, just minutes after his untimely death from liver failure. A firm believer in the march of progress, he had volunteered his own body for the purpose upon hearing of the promising work of Vana and Radman, a wizard-doctor duo who had made pioneering strides in energetic healing while working with the countless casualties of the recently-ended Solar War, and who now wanted to conquer the final frontier of pharmakon: death itself. Bellicose, an Orthoxi defector and elder statesman of medicine, was brought onto the team as a supervisor. 

Using their process, the three were able to keep Reza's body in a postmortem state of positive charge via regular reioplasmic cycling, and in doing so make it a viable target for positive-energy-based curative magic. While this already shocked the medical world, they went a step further and, using the data gathered from their work on Reza, were able to improve their technique to a point that they were able to keep Reza's body charged indefinitely. 

It is, to this day, the first and oldest body entombed in the Vault of the Revolutionary Dreamers is drunk old Cibu Reza, awaiting the day that they crack the reioplasmic adhesion problem. Many others followed, kept in a state of eternal perfect preservation by the regular application of positive energy (and you don't even need to worry about cancer if they're dead!). It has since grown to a massive complex in the foothills of U Mag Mor City, patrolled by armed guards, contracted spirits, bioergs, trained teratofauna, and so-forth, containing all the bodies of great revolutionaries of past, present, and future. U.M.M. herself has taken to holding plenary sessions of the People's Rada within the building's atrium, claiming that she's getting accustomed to the building in preparation for her stay, something which makes everyone very uncomfortable.

What's the reioplasmic adhesion problem? Well, it's the darndest thing: they can't get the souls to stick back onto the subtle body. It's weird, considering that they do it all the time when people are born, but the eggheads haven't had any luck artificially inducing it.

Well, it's no sweat. Sure, it's taking a bit longer than expected, but they'll figure it out in the next ten years, tops.