Hard Reset

What happens when death stops being the end?

Kevin Sorbo belongs to someone else. Not in the way that employees belong to companies or soldiers belong to their country. In the most literal and legally binding sense of the word. He was bought. Acquired. A line item in a transaction he knew nothing about until it was long since done and the ink was dry and the life he thought was his had already been handed to someone else to do with as they saw fit.

He does what they tell him to do. He goes where they send him. And when things go wrong, as things in his particular line of work have a way of going wrong, he wakes up and does it again.

The problem is not the dying. A man can make his peace with dying. The problem is what comes after. The problem is what the coming back costs. Not in any way the people who own him would recognize or measure or care about. But in ways that Kevin is beginning to understand with a clarity that gets harder to ignore every time he opens his eyes in that tank.

There is one thing left in his life that is real. One thing that exists outside the machinery of what he has become. One thing that nobody has managed to take from him yet.

Yet.

Some doors don't open from the inside. Some contracts don't have exit clauses. And some men keep moving forward not because they believe it leads anywhere but because forward is the only direction that has ever been available to them.

The only question worth asking is how much of a man is left when everything that made him one is slowly being taken away.