The silence in the Link Room was more violent than the screaming alarms had been. It was a heavy, suffocating weight that pressed down on the medical team as the emergency lights flickered to life, bathing the room in a sickly, rhythmic red.
Grace Augustine didn't wait for the backup generators. She was on top of Mark's link-bed before the smoke had even cleared from the fried console, her hands buried in the front of his flight suit.
"He's in V-fib! Get the paddles! Now!" she roared, her voice cracking with a raw, desperate fury.
The First Minute:
The crash cart slammed into the side of the bed. Lyle, who had been standing guard outside, burst in, his face pale as he watched the man who had saved him in the Shadow Basin lying like a broken doll on the gel-mat.
"Charging to 200!" the lead medic shouted. "Clear!"
Mark's human body jolted, his chest heaving upward as the current surged through him. His limbs flopped back down onto the bed with a sickening wet thud. Grace stared at the monitor, her breath hitching in her throat.
[NO SIGNAL]
The flat, unwavering line of the EKG mocked them. It was a digital horizon with no end.
The Great Migration:
While the doctors fought for the flesh, the System was fighting for the soul. Within the microseconds of the initial cardiac arrest, the System recognized the total collapse of the human "hardware." It didn't panic; it calculated.
Mark's mind was a frantic storm of fading memories—the smell of rain in Oxford, the roar of the Samson's engines, the yellow eyes of the Thanator. He felt himself slipping into a cold, dark sea.
[CRITICAL ASSET VULNERABILITY: MARK_TURNER.EXE]
[INITIATING MEMORY ENCAPSULATION...]
[MIGRATING NEURAL PATHWAYS TO SECONDARY HOST...]
The System acted as a high-speed conduit. It wrapped Mark's consciousness in a protective digital sheath, pulling his memories, his personality, and his very essence out of the dying human brain. It was a brutal, forced evacuation. Mark felt a sensation of being stretched across light-years, his thoughts compressed into a stream of pure information that hurtled down the scorched fiber-optic cables of the link-bed toward the Avatar vault.
The Final Attempt:
Ten minutes passed. In the world of emergency medicine, ten minutes is an eternity. It is the boundary where the brain begins to dissolve.
"Grace, his core temp is dropping too fast," the medic whispered. "The seizure... it cooked his neural pathways. There's no activity. We're chasing a ghost."
"Shut up and charge it again!" Grace screamed. She began manual compressions, the rhythmic thud-crack of ribs a grim percussion. "Come on, Mark! Breathe!"
They pushed three rounds of epinephrine. They shocked him six times. Outside the observation glass, Colonel Quaritch stood motionless. He wasn't looking at the dying human. He was looking at the Avatar tank thirty feet away.
"Doctor," Quaritch's voice came over the intercom, cold and final. "Call it."
Grace stopped. Her hair was matted with sweat. She looked at the monitor.
[00:00:00]
[HEART RATE: 0]
[BRAIN ACTIVITY: NULL]
"Time of death... 14:22."
Dormancy:
As the team covered the human body with a white sheet, a silent revolution was occurring in the darkness of the Avatar's skull. The migration was complete. The "Mark" data-packet had been successfully nested deep within the Avatar's superior, carbon-reinforced neural network.
However, the strain of the transfer had been immense. The System knew the Avatar's body wasn't ready to wake up yet—the human mind needed to be "stitched" into the Na'vi brain fibers, or he would wake up insane.
[MIGRATION SUCCESSFUL]
[HOST CARRIER: DORMANT]
[RESUMING BACKGROUND SYNCHRONIZATION...]
The cyan progress bar, now invisible to the world, appeared in the dark void of Mark's sleeping mind.
[58%... 59%...]
The Final Dismissal:
The nurses began the grim, rhythmic task of disconnecting the monitors, their movements hushed as they prepared the body for the morgue. Grace stood by the foot of the bed, her shoulders slumped, staring at the white sheet as it was pulled over Mark's face.
The silence was broken by the sharp, metallic clack of boots. Colonel Quaritch stepped into the room, followed closely by Parker Selfridge. The Administrator looked more annoyed than saddened, checking his watch as if the tragedy were a scheduled meeting that had run over time.
"A hell of a mess, Grace," Selfridge said, gesturing vaguely at the scorched link-bed and the corpse. "Equipment loss alone is going to be a nightmare to explain to the board. Not to mention the loss of a primary specialist."
"He was a human being, Parker," Grace snapped, her voice trembling with suppressed rage. "Not a line item. We need to organize a transport. We'll take him to the edge of the forest—near the Obe'way groves he was studying. He deserves a proper burial."
Quaritch let out a dry, humorless grunt. "A burial? Doctor, we're in the middle of a high-threat escalation. I'm not risking a flight crew and a security detail to go play undertaker in a hot zone."
"It's a basic matter of respect, Colonel!" Grace shouted, stepping toward him. "The man died in the service of this program."
"He died because he couldn't handle the hardware," Quaritch countered, his eyes cold. "He's a casualty of the job. We bag him, tag him, and he goes into the incinerator with the rest of the bio-waste. Standard protocol for off-world fatalities."
"And the Avatar?" one of the younger scientists, Norm Spellman, asked tentatively. "We can't just... incinerate that too. It's a multi-million dollar asset. Maybe we can salvage the neural tissue?"
Selfridge rubbed his temples. "It's a paperweight now, Norm. Without the driver, it's just a ten-foot slab of blue meat taking up a very expensive tank. The link-room is fried, the neural bridge is gone, and the host is dead. We don't have the budget to maintain a 'shell' indefinitely."
"Give it twenty-four hours," Grace pleaded, her eyes darting toward the vault where the blue body sat in its silent suspension. "Let us run a full diagnostic. If there's any residual brain activity, we might be able to—"
"There isn't," Quaritch cut her off. "I saw the flatline myself. Selfridge is right. I'm not wasting juice on a dead project. Tomorrow morning, we drain the tank and we scrap the whole lot. Focus on the pilots who are actually still breathing, Doctor. That's an order."
As the men turned to leave, dismissing Mark Turner's life and legacy as an administrative error, they didn't notice the flickering screen of the primary link-console. In the deep, silent dark of the Avatar's mind, the void was no longer empty.
[SYNC STATUS: 61.4%]
[SENSORY INPUTS: OFFLINE]
[OBJECTIVE: MAINTAIN STEALTH UNTIL THRESHOLD REACHED]
Mark was in there. He could hear their voices like echoes from the bottom of a well—the cold dismissal of Quaritch, the bureaucratic coldness of Selfridge, and Grace's breaking voice. He wanted to scream, to lash out, to make the blue hand twitch and wrap around the Colonel's throat.
But the System held him back, pinning his consciousness down in a protective, dormant embrace.
Wait, the Shadow whispered in the back of his mind. Wait until we are strong enough to stand.